Brain

New research from King's College London suggests one in 13 young people in the UK have had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) before reaching age 18. The first UK-based study of its kind, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, found 31% of young people had a traumatic experience during childhood, and those who were exposed to trauma were twice as likely as their peers to have a range of mental health disorders.

Relatively little is known about the extent of trauma and its effects on mental health in young people. The researchers looked at participants in the E-Risk Study, funded by the Medical Research Council, which includes 2,232 children born in England and Wales in 1994-1995.

Trauma exposure and PTSD were assessed at age 18 by structured interviews. One in four young people exposed to trauma met the criteria for PTSD. People with PTSD suffer from a range of symptoms including: re-living traumatic events through distressing memories or nightmares; avoidance of anything reminding them of their trauma; feelings of guilt, isolation or detachment; and irritability, impulsivity or difficulty concentrating.

Concerningly, only a minority of young people who had developed PTSD received help from health professionals - one in three talked to their GP about their mental health in the last year, and one in five saw a mental health professional. Therefore, only a small proportion of young people with PTSD in the study could have received effective treatments. A substantial proportion of young people with PTSD do not recover without treatment and symptoms can last many years.

Senior researcher Professor Andrea Danese from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) says: 'Our findings should serve as a wake-up call - childhood trauma is a public health concern yet trauma-related disorders often go unnoticed. Young people with PTSD are falling through the gaps in care and there is a pressing need for better access to mental health services. Child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) need to make more resources available to address the needs of traumatised young people.'

In his clinical role Professor Danese is a Consultant Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist at the National & Specialist CAMHS Trauma, Anxiety, and Depression Clinic at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust.

Young people in the study who developed PTSD had high rates of a range of other mental health disorders - three in four had another mental health condition at age 18. They were also at high risk of harm to themselves - half had self-harmed and one in five attempted suicide since age 12. One in four were also not in education, employment, or training (NEET) at age 18, and half experienced social isolation or loneliness.

Lead researcher Dr Stephanie Lewis, MRC Clinical Research Training Fellow at the IoPPN, says: 'Young people who have been exposed to trauma often have complex problems, which become increasingly difficult to assess and treat. Providing effective treatments early on could prevent mental health problems continuing into adulthood. We encourage parents and carers to seek support from health professionals if their children are exposed to trauma and are suffering from distressing psychological symptoms.'

Young people in the study were exposed to a wide range of traumas, from directly experiencing assault, injury or sexual violation to 'network trauma' - a traumatic event affecting someone the young person knew, which they learned about but did not directly witness. The risk of developing PTSD was greatest after a direct interpersonal assault or threat, with sexual assault being particularly high risk - 74% of young people experiencing sexual assault developed PTSD.

Dr Rachael Panizzo, who leads on mental health at the Medical Research Council - part funders of the study - says: 'Better identification of young people at risk of developing PTSD is needed as intervening early to treat mental health conditions can help minimise the wide range of negative impacts on young people's lives. This study highlights a gap in treatment for young people with PTSD and takes steps to improve our understanding of which individuals might be most susceptible.'

LOS ANGELES (EMBARGOED UNTIL FEB. 20, 2019, AT 2:00 P.M. EST) -- A new study has identified a drug that potentially could make a common type of immunotherapy for cancer even more effective. The study in laboratory mice found that the drug dasatinib, which is FDA-approved to treat certain types of leukemia, greatly enhances responses to a form of immunotherapy that is used against a wide range of other cancers.

"If our findings are confirmed in clinical trials, it means that by combining both types of drugs, we may be able to better shrink or even eliminate tumors in bladder, breast, colon, melanoma and sarcoma cancers," said corresponding author Dan Theodorescu, MD, PhD, director of Cedars-Sinai Cancer. The study was published today in Science Advances.

Immunotherapies are designed to help patients' own immune systems fight various cancers. The study focused on one class of immunotherapy called checkpoint inhibitors, which involve a protein called PD-1. This protein acts as an off switch to keep immune cells known as T-cells from attacking normal cells in the body when they come in contact with another similarly named protein, PD-L1. Normal cells have PD-L1, which tells the T-cells not to attack them. Cancer cells, however, have especially large amounts of PD-L1, which serves to deceive T-cells into thinking the cancer cells are normal.

This deception by the cancer cells allows them to dodge the immune system and to invade and flourish. Anti-PD-1 therapies disrupt the cancer cells' signals, allowing the T-cells to attack cancer.

"While many patients show durable responses to anti-PD-1 therapies, a significant number remain unresponsive or have recurrences, highlighting an urgent need to better understand and improve these therapies," Theodorescu said.

To attack this problem, the researchers searched for genes in mouse cancer cells that potentially could be inhibited--in conjunction with anti-PD-1 therapies--and make these therapies more effective. They identified a gene called DDR2 as the best candidate. DDR2 helps tumors invade healthy tissue by coaxing cancer cells to spread and grow. The researchers found that by depleting DDR2 with the drug dasatinib, they were able to increase the sensitivity of the cancer cells to anti-PD-1 therapy by combining the two, which is significantly more effective than using each drug on its own, Theodorescu said.

"Novel, next-generation immunotherapy approaches for cancer highlight the importance of laboratory discoveries such as these," said Robert Figlin, MD, professor of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and director of the Division of Hematology Oncology. "They can be tested rapidly in the clinic, across multiple disease types, to offer patients results that immunotherapy by itself may not be able to optimally accomplish."

Male flies kept awake do not die earlier than those allowed to sleep, leading researchers to question whether sleep, in flies at least, is essential for staying alive.

The team behind the research, from Imperial College London, suggest that for flies sleep may not perform a vital biological function in the way that food does.

While we know the biological underpinnings of food - we need to take in calories in order to fuel our cells - the same is not true for sleep. Sleep deprivation is known to cause severe problems with cognition, memory, attention and reflexes, for example, but it is not clear whether lack of sleep alone actually causes animals to die.

Previous experiments have shown that some animals die when deprived of sleep, but the studies are unclear about exactly why this is. The researchers behind the new study suggest that the way the experiments were run could mean the animals died of stress due to the methods of keeping them awake.

Now, in experiments with several thousand fruit flies, the researchers have shown that male flies denied sleep do not die earlier than those who have regular sleep. Their results, published today in Science Advances, show that female flies die on average three days earlier out of a 40-50-day average lifespan.

In an initial study monitoring average sleep duration of flies, the team found some individuals that naturally slept for as little as 5-15 minutes per day, compared to a normal range of several hours a day.

Dr Giorgio Gilestro, from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial, said: One of the reasons sleep is considered essential for life is that all animals sleep, so we were surprised to find some flies that needed so little. We wanted to find out if this was just a peculiarity for a lucky few flies, or whether it was something any fly could do."

To keep the flies awake, the researchers kept each fly in a tube linked to an automatic monitoring system. If the system detected no movement for 20 seconds, then the tube rotated, waking the fly up.

This system allowed the team to experiment with hundreds of flies at once, giving them a better understanding of the average response to sleep deprivation. They found that male flies did not die younger when starved of sleep, and female flies died on average only slightly younger.

The flies could still have been snatching some sleep, building up micro-sleeps in the 20 seconds before the tube turned, or even sleepwalking, but they would be unlikely to get much quality sleep this way.

While the current study was in flies, the team speculate that if sleep is not essential for life in the same way food is, then it is possible that their results could apply across the animal kingdom, including in humans.

Dr Gilestro said: "For food, we have calories that are 'vital' to keep us alive and calories that are 'useful' to help us function well. It might be that sleep is only 'useful': it would still be difficult for us to function without it, but not necessarily fatal."

The researchers say that while male flies did not die earlier without sleep under lab conditions, in the wild lack of sleep would cause knock-on effects that would put them at greater risk from predators or competition.

Dr Gilestro added: "Lack of sleep could make it hard for them to function properly and safely, just as a lack of sleep might cause a sleep-deprived human to crash their car.

"It's not that there are no consequences to not sleeping - in fact we will be investigating the effects on mental performance in flies in future experiments - but our study has made us question whether sleep deprivation alone causes death."

During their experiments, the team also found that even while sleep deprived, the flies followed 'normal' patterns of activity. Flies are usually more active at dawn and dusk, and even when they hadn't had any sleep for many days in a row, this was still the case.

The researchers say this shows that the flies are not building up a 'sleep debt'--they do not necessarily get sleepier the longer they stay awake, but keep to relatively normal patterns of activity. This suggests the pressure to sleep is controlled more strongly by the time or day than by the amount of sleep taken.

This was further shown when flies that had been deprived were allowed to sleep again. They slept a little longer for a day or two but returned to normal patterns quickly, instead of immediately catching up on all the sleep they had lost with one extremely long sleep.

1. Despite rising prevalence of heart disease in China, primary preventive treatment rates remain low

Abstract: http://annals.org/aim/article/doi/10.7326/M18-1932

Editorial: http://annals.org/aim/article/doi/10.7326/M18-3301

URLs go live when the embargo lifts

About one in 10 middle-aged adults in China are at high risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD), yet use of risk reduction therapies is strikingly low. Findings from a Chinese national screening project are published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

CVD accounted for 40 percent of all deaths in China in 2015 and this burden is expected to increase because of the aging of the Chinese population and an increase in the prevalence of risk factors, such as hypertension, diabetes, and smoking. Identifying and modifying risk factors for persons at high risk for CVD would have a considerable impact on population health, but nationwide information is lacking about the prevalence and treatment of high CVD risk.

Researchers from the National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases in China investigated the prevalence, features, and treatment of high CVD risk among 1.7 million persons from the China PEACE Million Persons Project, which is a government-funded, community-based, national project of CVD screening and management conducted in the mainland of China. Among nearly 1.7 million participants aged 35-75 years, 9.5 percent had a high risk for CVD. Of those with high CVD risk, only 0.6 percent and 2.4 percent reported using statins and aspirin, respectively. According to the authors, these findings indicate that an immense opportunity exists for risk mitigation in Chinese population.

The authors of an accompanying editorial from Tulane University, CVD prevalence estimates reported in the study very likely underrepresent the true burden of illness due to CVD in China. They suggest that this study is an important call-to-action for highly populated middle- and low-income countries where the CVD risk factor profile is worsening faster than the current health sector can respond to it. There appears to be an urgent need for diagnosis and medical treatment of CVD.

Media contact: For an embargoed PDF, please contact Lauren Evans at laevans@acponline.org. To interview the lead author, Jiapeng Lu, MD, PhD, can be contacted directly at jiapeng.lu@fwoxford.org.

2. Zoster recombinant vaccine provides better value and better protection against shingles

Abstract: http://annals.org/aim/article/doi/10.7326/M18-2347

Editorial: http://annals.org/aim/article/doi/10.7326/M19-0141

URLs go live when the embargo lifts

Vaccination with the new recombinant zoster vaccine (RZV) provides greater protection against shingles and is cost-effective compared with zoster vaccine live (ZVL) or no vaccination. Findings from a cost-effectiveness study are published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

The U.S. Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recently developed recommendations for use of the new RZV for prevention of the herpes zoster virus in adults. The newer vaccine has shown higher efficacy than ZVL in clinical trials.

Researchers from the University of Michigan and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) developed a simulation model using U.S. epidemiologic, clinical, and cost data to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of vaccination with RZV compared with ZVL and no vaccination. They also looked at the cost-effectiveness of vaccination with RZV for persons who had previously received ZVL, and whether RZV should be preferentially recommended over ZVL from an economic perspective. The researchers found that vaccination with RZV was cost-effective compared with ZVL under a wide range of conditions and yielded greater projected health benefits at lower costs under most conditions among persons aged 60 and older, and also was the preferred strategy for those aged 50 to 59, in more than 95 percent of simulations. These research findings were reported to ACIP and subsequently RZV was recommended and included in its most recent Recommended Immunization Schedule for Adults.

Media contact: For an embargoed PDF, please contact Lauren Evans at laevans@acponline.org. To interview the lead author, Lisa A. Prosser, PhD, please contact Beata Mostafavi at bmostafa@med.umich.edu.

3. Clinicians should consider using PCSK9 inhibitors to lower cholesterol in patients with statin-associated autoimmune myopathy

Editorial: http://annals.org/aim/article/doi/10.7326/L18-0705

URLs go live when the embargo lifts

Clinicians should consider using PCSK9 inhibitors to lower cholesterol in patients with statin-associated autoimmune myopathy. Findings from a case report are published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

Beyond its toxic effect, statin use has been associated with a rare, but potentially severe and disabling, type of muscle disease known as statin-associated autoimmune myopathy. Its distinguishing feature are the persistence after withdrawal of statins and its association with antibodies against 3-hydroxy-3methylglutaryl coenzyme A reductase (HMGCR). Management usually requires steroids and other immunosuppressive therapies. Other cholesterol-lowering medications and dietary supplements can cause or worsen this myopathy, which makes decreasing cholesterol levels very challenging in these patients. Treatment with PCSK9 monoclonal antibodies is a relatively new way to decrease cholesterol levels and cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in high-risk patients.

Researchers from University Hospital Principe de Asturias, Madrid, Spain, treated two male patients with hypercholesterolemia and severe, diffuse coronary artery disease who received prolonged treatment with a statin and developed an insidious and necrotizing autoimmune myopathy. Both patients were treated with steroids, immunosuppressive drugs, and intravenous immunoglobulins and all myopathy manifestations gradually resolved. Because the patients still needed cholesterol treatment, they were given evolocumab, a monoclonal antibody against PCSK9. Their LDL cholesterol levels decreased 55 percent in one patient and 56.4 percent in the other and neither had a recurrence of myopathy. According to the researchers, its specific mechanism of action and these findings suggest that clinicians should consider using PCSK9 inhibitors in patients who develop statin-associated autoimmune myopathy and need treatment to decrease their cholesterol levels because of their high risk for coronary artery disease.

Media contact: For an embargoed PDF, please contact Lauren Evans at laevans@acponline.org. To interview the lead author, Dr. Juan de Dios García-Díaz, please contact at juandedios.garcia@uah.es.

Also New in this issue:

Are Requirements to Deposit Data in Research Repositories Compatible With the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation?

Deborah Mascalzoni, PhD; Heidi Beate Bentzen, LLM; Isabelle Budin-Ljøsne, PhD; Lee Andrew Bygrave, LLD; Jessica Bell, PhD; Edward S. Dove, PhD; Christian Fuchsberger, PhD; Kristian Hveem, MD, PhD; Michaela Th. Mayrhofer, PhD; Viviana Meraviglia, PhD; David R. O'Brien, JD; Cristian Pattaro, PhD; Peter P. Pramstaller, MD; Vojin Rakic, PhD; Alessandra Rossini, PhD; Mahsa Shabani, PhD; Dan Jerker B. Svantesson, PhD; Marta Tomasi, PhD; Lars Ursin, PhD; Matthias Wjst, MD; and Jane Kaye, DPhil

Ideas and Opinions

Abstract: http://annals.org/aim/article/doi/10.7326/M18-2854

Balancing Protection and Free Movement of Personal Data: The New European Union General Data Protection Regulation

Heidi Beate Bentzen, LLM, and Njål Høstmælingen, LLM

Ideas and Opinions

Abstract: http://annals.org/aim/article/doi/10.7326/M18-2782

In two back-to-back symposia at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., on Sunday, Feb. 17 at 1:30 and 3:30 PM respectively, a cross-disciplinary cohort of scientists will present the first comprehensive investigations of how humans interacted with plant and animal species in different cultures worldwide through time. By compiling and comparing detailed data from pre-industrial and modern societies, the researchers are sketching a picture of humans' roles and impacts in sustainable and unsustainable socio-ecological systems.

"Almost all food webs that have been compiled and studied have been put together without including humans," says Jennifer Dunne (Santa Fe Institute), an ecologist and complex systems scientist who is leading the project with archaeologist Stefani Crabtree (Santa Fe Institute and Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity). "It takes a lot of time and effort to put these kinds of detailed data together. So even though ecologists have been studying food webs for decades, we're only now in a position where we can start to rigorously compare human roles and impacts across different systems to understand sustainability in new kinds of ways," says Dunne.

What do we learn when we do include humans?

As part of her presentation during the second symposium, Dunne will reveal initial results from a comparison of food webs that explicitly include humans across several socioecological systems. Three are pre-industrial systems -- the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, the Pueblo U.S. Southwest, and the Western Desert of Australia, and one is modern -- the Tagus Estuary of Portugal. Given the diversity of cultures, ecologies, climates, and time periods represented in the data, Dunne suggests that we can start to learn "something more general about human roles in, and impacts on, ecosystems" by comparing these systems. For example, humans are often super-generalists compared to other predators -- they feed on a huge variety of different species.

In some systems, humans as super-generalist predators can fit into ecosystems without causing extinctions or major environmental degradation. For example, according to Dunne's pioneering analysis published in Scientific Reports in 2016, the Sanak Island (Alaska) Aleut fed on a whopping 122 of 513 taxa in the nearshore marine ecosystem. However, like other predators, they switched from their favorite prey -- sea lions -- to shellfish, kelp, or whatever was readily available when the weather did not allow them to hunt in open water. "Prey-switching is very stabilizing for food webs," Dunne explains, "because it allows prey taxa populations to recover from exploitation, as the predator's focus shifts to other prey that are easier to forage or hunt given current conditions." That, plus limited use of hunting technology and other factors helped to minimize potential negative impacts of humans on the Sanak ecosystem -- during approximately 7,000 years of human habitation, there is no evidence for any long-term local extinctions.

Humans also stabilized the desert ecosystem of Western Australia, where Crabtree and Rebecca Bliege Bird (Pennsylvania State University) are examining how the Martu Aboriginal foragers are embedded in their surrounding ecosystems. According to Crabtree, Martu Aboriginal foragers stabilized their ecosystem by providing several ecosystem services such as lighting small brush fires to expose the burrows of small prey. The scorched patches left on the landscape served as natural fire breaks against larger, more devastating wildfires. When the Martu were removed from their homeland in the mid-20th century, wildfires increased dramatically in size, and several small mammals, like the Rufous Hare-wallaby, went extinct.

Bird will present a newly published network analysis for the Aboriginal foragers during the first symposium, following Andrew Dugmore (University of Edinburgh) and George Hambrecht's (University of Maryland) presentation of how Norse people in Iceland and Greenland used governance to mitigate anthropogenic degradation of the ecosystem.

Just as humans can have a stabilizing effect on their ecosystems, they can also play a destructive role. In the first symposium, archaeologist Jennifer Kahn (College of William and Mary) will present her ongoing historical analysis of the French Polynesian islands, including two cases where human interactions with their surroundings led to markedly different outcomes -- both for the ecosystems and the societies embedded within them.

Crabtree, in the second symposium, will present her analysis of the 700-year trajectory of the Ancestral Pueblo people in the Southwest U.S., and the extent to which human interactions with the ecosystem eventually led them to depopulate the region.

Iain McKechnie (University of Victoria and Hakai Institute) will then present anthropological and archaeological data that illustrates the resilience of the indigenous peoples of the North American Northwest Coast as they interacted with both marine and terrestrial species.

In the final talk, Dunne will cross-compare these and other systems and synthesize what we know, so far, about humanity's roles across ecosystems and time periods. In addition to presenting new results about human roles in food webs, she will also discuss new work that moves beyond feeding interactions to consider the myriad ways that humans interact with biodiversity in both simple and complex ways, for example by using species for medicine, shelter, tools, clothing, fuel, ritual purposes, and trade.

"Understanding ecosystems with humans as part of them is essential," Crabtree says. "We're not going anywhere. We are here to stay. We are going to keep impacting ecosystems, and we need to understand the ways that our impacts can lead to more sustainable and resilient systems."

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Even Georgia O'Keeffe noticed the pin-sized blisters bubbling on the surface of her paintings. For decades, conservationists and scholars assumed these tiny protrusions were grains of sand, kicked up from the New Mexico desert where O'Keeffe lived and worked. But as the protrusions began to grow, spread and eventually flake off, people shifted from curious to concerned.

A multidisciplinary team from Northwestern University and the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico has now diagnosed the strange paint disease: The micron-sized protrusions are metal soaps, resulting from a chemical reaction between the metal ions and fatty acids commonly used as binder in paints.

Inspired by the research, the team developed a novel, hand-held tool that can easily and effortlessly map and monitor works of art. The tool enables researchers to carefully watch the protrusions in order to better understand what conditions make the protrusions grow, shrink or erupt.

"The free fatty acids within the paint's binding media are reacting with lead and zinc pigments," said Marc Walton, a research professor of materials science and engineering in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering, who co-led the study. "These metal soaps started to aggregate, push the surface of the painting up and form something that looks like acne."

"If we can easily measure, characterize and document these soap protrusions over and over again with little cost to the museum, then we can watch them as they develop," said Oliver Cossairt, an associate professor of computer science in McCormick, who led the technology development. "That could help conservators diagnose the health and prescribe treatment possibilities for damaged works of art."

Walton, co-director of the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts, a collaboration between Northwestern and the Art Institute of Chicago, will discuss the research findings and technology at a Feb. 16 press briefing at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

The briefing, "Art Conservation Leverages Advanced Scientific Knowhow," will be held at 9 a.m. EST in Balcony A of the Marriott Wardman Park.

Cossairt will present the research at a scientific session the next day. His talk, "Diagnosing a Paint Disease with Computer Science: The Case of Georgia O'Keeffe," is part of the session "Medicine, Computer Science and Art: Learning Through Technology" (8 to 9:30 a.m. EST on Feb. 17, room 2, Marriott Wardman Park).

The AAAS scientific session is organized by Francesca Casadio, the Grainger Executive Director of Conservation and Science at the Art Institute and co-director of the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts.

Dangerous disease

Nearly all of Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings have some degree of damage from metal soap formation. While some of the cases of "acne" are in early stages of development and can only be viewed with ultraviolet imaging, others are more advanced and can be seen with the naked eye. Conservators have restored some of the paintings where the damage is more pronounced, but the protrusions continue to return.

"The rate of deterioration is one of the most important questions of the study," said Dale Kronkright, head of conservation at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. "There seems to be some correlation between the number of times the paintings have traveled to public exhibitions and the size and maturity of the surface disruption. The more times the paintings have traveled, the more likely it will be that the protrusions are larger and more numerous."

Walton and his team in the Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts are studying how quickly the process can advance by inducing metal soap deterioration in surrogate paintings. They also have decades of detailed information from the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, which documents the different environments that various pieces have experienced while traveling and on display.

"After we understand what sort of environmental conditions they have been in, what sort of relative humidity, what sort of temperatures, whether they have been in direct sunlight, then we can prescribe a particular environment with particular conditions that will allow the art work to survive over a very long period of time," Walton said.

These findings can also be applied more widely beyond O'Keeffe's masterpieces. Soap protrusions are damaging oil paintings from across all time periods.

"If we can solve this problem, we're preserving our cultural heritage for generations to come," Walton said.

From science fiction to non-fiction

Cossairt likens his hand-held tool to a Star Trek "tricorder." Fans of the show will remember watching their favorite characters use the pocket-sized device to scout unfamiliar areas, examine inanimate objects and diagnose disease.

Instead of assessing a human (or alien's) health, the tool developed in Cossairt's laboratory can help diagnose the health of a painting. It uses the LCD display and camera already available on smartphones and tablets. With a simple wave across the surface of a painting, the app quickly digest's the work's precise, 3D surface structure, or metrology. It can then subtract the work's color to help researchers identify any deviations in surface shape that do not come from brush strokes or canvas texture.

"It's like the 'tricorder' of measurement tools," Cossairt said. "It can give you extremely accurate measurements but is also something you can just pull out of your pocket."

The app uses the light source from a mobile device -- either the LED flash or LCD display -- to reflect light off the painting's surface and capture those reflections with the camera. The image is then processed by custom algorithms developed at Northwestern by Aggelos Katsaggelos to extract surface shape information.

"We collect a lot of data in an efficient, successful way, but then the data needs to be processed," said Katsaggelos, the Joseph Cummings Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at McCormick. "The technology uses machine learning to distinguish whether texture is a soap protrusion or something benign like a brush stroke. Then, for the protrusions, we extract statistics -- the density, size and shape."

Compare this hand-held device to the large, cumbersome equipment that is currently needed to map a painting's metrology. The primary technique, called reflectance transformation imaging, requires a large dome of several light sources and an expensive setup. Few museums can invest in purchasing and maintaining such instruments.

"We're trying to make it much simpler, much less expensive and more readily available to lower the barrier to usage," Cossairt said.

The research is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Ten years into the future. That's about how far UC Santa Barbara electrical and computer engineering professor John Bowers and his research team are reaching with the recent development of their mode-locked quantum dot lasers on silicon. It's technology that not only can massively increase the data transmission capacity of data centers, telecommunications companies and network hardware products to come, but do so with high stability, low noise and the energy efficiency of silicon photonics.

"The level of data traffic in the world is going up very, very fast," said Bowers, co-author of a paper on the new technology in the journal Optica. Generally speaking, he explained, the transmission and data capacity of state-of-the-art telecommunications infrastructure must double roughly every two years to sustain high levels of performance. That means that even now, technology companies such as Intel and Cisco have to set their sights on the hardware of 2024 and beyond to stay competitive.

Enter the Bowers Group's high-channel-count, 20 gigahertz, passively mode-locked quantum dot laser, directly grown -- for the first time, to the group's knowledge -- on a silicon substrate. With a proven 4.1 terabit-per-second transmission capacity, it leaps an estimated full decade ahead from today's best commercial standard for data transmission, which is currently reaching for 400 gigabits per second on Ethernet.

The technology is the latest high-performance candidate in an established technique called wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM), which transmits numerous parallel signals over a single optical fiber using different wavelengths (colors). It has made possible the streaming and rapid data transfer we have come to rely on for our communications, entertainment and commerce.

The Bowers Group's new technology takes advantage of several advances in telecommunications, photonics and materials with its quantum dot laser -- a tiny, micron-sized light source -- that can emit a broad range of light wavelengths over which data can be transmitted.

"We want more coherent wavelengths generated in one cheap light source," said Songtao Liu, a postdoctoral researcher in the Bowers Group and lead author of the paper. "Quantum dots can offer you wide gain spectrum, and that's why we can achieve a lot of channels." Their quantum dot laser produces 64 channels, spaced at 20 GHz, and can be utilized as a transmitter to boost the system capacity.

The laser is passively 'mode-locked' -- a technique that generates coherent optical 'combs' with fixed-channel spacing -- to prevent noise from wavelength competition in the laser cavity and stabilize data transmission.

This technology represents a significant advance in the field of silicon electronic and photonic integrated circuits, in which the primary goal is to create components that use light (photons) and waveguides -- unparalleled for data capacity and transmission speed as well as energy efficiency -- alongside and even instead of electrons and wires. Silicon is a good material for the quality of light it can guide and preserve, and for the ease and low cost of its large-scale manufacture. However, it's not so good for generating light.

"If you want to generate light efficiently, you want a direct band-gap semiconductor," said Liu, referring to the ideal electronic structural property for light-emitting solids. "Silicon is an indirect band-gap semiconductor." The Bowers Group's quantum dot laser, grown on silicon molecule-by-molecule at UC Santa Barbara's nanofabrication facilities, is a structure that takes advantage of the electronic properties of several semiconductor materials for performance and function (including their direct band-gaps), in addition to silicon's own well-known optical and manufacturing benefits.

This quantum dot laser, and components like it, are expected to become the norm in telecommunications and data processing, as technology companies seek ways to improve their data capacity and transmission speeds.

"Data centers are now buying large amounts of silicon photonic transceivers," Bowers pointed out. "And it went from nothing two years ago."

Since Bowers a decade ago demonstrated the world's first hybrid silicon laser (an effort in conjunction with Intel), the silicon photonics world has continued to create higher efficiency, higher performance technology while maintaining as small a footprint as possible, with an eye on mass production. The quantum dot laser on silicon, Bowers and Liu say, is state-of-the-art technology that delivers the superior performance that will be sought for future devices.

"We're shooting far out there," said Bowers, who holds the Fred Kavli Chair in Nanotechnology, "which is what university research should be doing."

Researchers at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Imperial College London and the University of Tokyo have demonstrated that physical coordination is more beneficial in larger groups.

The researchers used robotic interfaces to test coordination in groups of two, three and four partners, and found that performance was improving with every additional group member.

The researchers believe the findings can clarify how a group of people can work together, for example to move and maneuver a large table together. This may also lead to improving the outcomes of physical rehabilitation by training patients in groups.

Scientists from Imperial College London, CNRS in France and ATR in Japan previously revealed the haptic communication in pairs in a task similar to partner dancing, and showed how performance at a physical task is improved and learned better when practicing with a partner, see https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/177982/robots-help-people-improve-physical-tasks/.

The new study, published today in eLife, extends this finding to trios and quartets by clarifying haptic communication in groups critical to society.

Dr Atsushi Takagi, lead author of the study who resides at the Institute of Innovative Research at Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), said: "We were shocked by how well and fast partners learned to coordinate as a group through touch. Imagine trying to move a banquet table at a crowded wedding venue. With verbal communication, it's immensely challenging to coordinate with others to ensure the table doesn't bump against something, and the more people there are, the longer it takes to reach verbal consensus. With touch, coordination emerges in a matter of seconds, and the time taken to reach consensus is the same, irrespective of group size."

Professor Etienne Burdet of Imperial College, the senior author of this study, added: "We expected that the performance would deteriorate with the noisy force of each additional group member. However the performance improved with each group member, as each individual connects to a virtual collective hand which is the average of all partners' hands, so that the noise decreases with the number of partners".

The researchers found that the key to physical coordination was the ability to infer the group's goal through touch. The same coordination mechanism was used in a previous study by Takagi and colleagues to design a "human-like" robot partner that coordinated with a human partner.

In the new study, the researchers conducted computer simulations of the task to test what information was shared within the group through touch. Takagi believes that a deeper understanding of the coordination mechanism will yield an algorithm for a group of robots to carry out physical tasks together.

The research was carried out in partnership with Imperial College London in the UK, and the University of Tokyo in Japan.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A phthalate found in many plastic and personal care products may decrease fertility in female mice, a new study found.

Researchers at the University of Illinois found that giving female mice oral doses of the phthalate DiNP for 10 days disrupted their reproductive cycles, decreasing their ability to become pregnant for up to nine months afterward.

The findings, reported recently in the journal Toxicological Sciences, add to a growing body of research that links phthalates, also called plasticizers, with various reproductive abnormalities and other health problems in rodents.

Phthalates, which are added to plastic and vinyl to make them softer, flexible and more durable, are found in many types of consumer goods, including food and beverage packaging, vinyl flooring, medical devices and cosmetics.

Research studies have reported a variety of health risks associated with the phthalates that the mice in the study consumed, DiNP and DEHP. These studies include a 2015 study in mice by U. of I. scientist Jodi Flaws' research group, which found that DEHP disrupted hormone signaling and the growth and functioning of the ovaries. That study was published in the journal Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology.

However, much of the previous research on phthalates used very high dosages that don't reflect real-world exposure levels and the potential effects on female reproduction, said graduate student Katie (Catheryne) Chiang, a co-author of the current study with Flaws.

To investigate these phthalates' effects on female fertility, female mice were fed corn oil solutions containing environmentally relevant concentrations of DEHP or DiNP ranging from 20 micrograms to 200 milligrams per kilogram of body weight.

Such doses are comparable to the levels of exposure that people may experience during their daily living and work activities, Chiang said.

After the 10-day dosing period ended, the phthalate-treated female mice and their counterparts in the control group were paired with untreated male partners twice for breeding.

"At three months post-dosing, a third of the females that were treated with the lowest doses of DEHP and DiNP were unable to conceive after mating, while 95 percent of the females in the control group became pregnant," Chiang said.

"The thing that was really concerning was that these females' fertility was impaired long after their exposure to the chemicals stopped," said Flaws, a professor of comparative biosciences at Illinois.

As in Flaws' 2015 study, the findings suggested that steroid hormone production and signaling were disrupted. At three months and nine months post-dosing, the DiNP-treated females' estrous cycles differed from those of the control group.

The proestrus stage, when the ovarian follicles grow rapidly and fertility increases, was shorter. However, the latter stages of the cycle, the metestrus and diestrus stages - during which the ovaries produce progesterone and the uterine lining forms - were longer.

In examining the mice immediately after the 10-day dosing period, the researchers also found that the treated females' uteruses weighed significantly less than those of the females in the control group.

However, they found no such differences at the three-month and nine-month intervals.

Among the females treated with the lowest doses of DEHP or DiNP, there was a significant reduction in the number that became pregnant and produced pups compared with the control group.

Chiang and Flaws hypothesized that dysregulation of the mice's steroidal hormones made their uterine linings less receptive to embryo implantation. There's a narrow window of time when the endometrial lining of the uterus is receptive to implantation and a female's sex steroid hormones must be well regulated for it to occur, according to the study.

Or, perhaps phthalate exposure accelerated the end of the female mice's reproductive lifespans, reducing their chances of becoming pregnant, the researchers said. Other studies have reported that phthalate exposure in humans through cosmetics and personal care products can trigger reproductive aging, causing women to enter menopause several years early.

While the findings of the U. of I. study are yet to be replicated in humans, Chiang and Flaws said they warrant further investigation, particularly into DEHP's and DiNP's potential effects on the ovaries and the production of sex steroid hormones.

"These chemicals' half-lives in the body are relatively short," Flaws said. "They tend to be broken down quickly and the metabolites excreted in urine within a couple of days. It's troubling that these effects were continuing several months later."

Widespread adoption by dairy farmers of injecting manure into the soil instead of spreading it on the surface could be crucial to restoring Chesapeake Bay water quality, according to researchers who compared phosphorus runoff from fields treated by both methods. However, they predict it will be difficult to persuade farmers to change practices.

In a four-year study, overland and subsurface flows from 12 hydrologically isolated research plots at Penn State's Russell E. Larson Agricultural Research Center were measured and sampled for all phosphorus constituents and total solids during and after precipitation events. During that period, from January 2013 to May 2017, the plots were planted with summer crops of corn and winter cover crops of cereal rye. Half the plots received broadcast manure applications, while the others had manure injected into the soil.

Researchers evaluated loads of total phosphorus, dissolved phosphorus, particulate phosphorus and total solids against flow volumes to learn how phosphorus and sediment losses differed between plots. Shallow-disk injection of manure was found to be more effective than broadcasting manure in promoting dilution of dissolved phosphorus and to a lesser extent, total phosphorus. The broadcast manure plots experienced more runoff of particulate phosphorus than did the injection plots.

Importantly for no-till advocates, no difference was detected between application methods for total solids in the runoff -- meaning manure injection, with its slight disturbance of the soil surface, did not cause sedimentation. No-till practitioners, who constitute slightly more than half of the dairy farmers in Pennsylvania, have been slow to adopt manure injection due to concerns about the practice causing sedimentation and muddying streams.

However, the precision and accuracy of the study, recently published in Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, was constrained by hydrologic variability, conceded Jack Watson, professor of soil science and soil physics, Penn State. His research group in the College of Agricultural Sciences conducted the study. Watson pointed out that the findings demonstrate that, even at a small scale, the effectiveness of a practice in accomplishing water quality benefits varies.

"This has been the case with previous phosphorus-mitigation field studies, as well," he said. "Even studies done with carefully constructed research plots like ours, which allow us to collect, measure, test and contrast runoff, are confounded by hydrologic variability."

But despite the variability, the findings showed that manure injection decreased the overall phosphorus losses, according to lead researcher Melissa Miller, a master's degree student in soil science when she conducted the study.

"When we looked at the total phosphorus losses from the plots, we were able to see a strong trend," she said. "It was revealed in both overland and subsurface flows following rain events."

That variability, however, complicates efforts to convince dairy farmers they should convert to manure injection, noted research team member Heather Gall, assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering. She suggested that the practice, widely adopted, could help states comply with total maximum daily load stream regulations set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to protect the Chesapeake Bay from nutrient pollution and associated algal blooms and dead zones.

"When we make recommendations to farmers about what they can do to improve runoff quality, we want to be able to tell them how well it will work," she said. "But how much manure injection will reduce the amount of phosphorus loss on a particular farm can depend on site characteristics, such as what kind of soil it has, what kind of crops are growing and the slope of the landscape. And so, we might not be able to tell a farmer definitively what to expect in terms of load-reduction benefits, making it difficult to make a compelling case that an investment in shallow-disc manure injection equipment will be worthwhile."

Watson explained that manure injection equipment is expensive and that it takes longer and requires more fuel for farmers to apply manure to their fields using injection than broadcasting or spreading it. For shallow-disc manure injection to be broadly implemented in the Chesapeake Bay drainage, he said, it will require substantial financial support from government or other off-farm sources. But it needs to be done, Watson believes.

"In the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions, we have a lot of dairy animals concentrated in a small area. We have all this manure that has to be gotten rid of and all the nutrients that go with it have to be disposed of on a small amount of land. It must be done in a way that will protect the Chesapeake Bay," he said.

And even if the phosphorus reductions are uncertain due to site variability, Watson added, there are the additional benefits from manure injection, such as reducing ammonia volatilization and reducing odor emissions, which have significant value as well.

Remote recording devices used to 'eavesdrop' on a reintroduced population of one of New Zealand's rarest birds have been heralded as a breakthrough for conservation.

Scientists from international conservation charity ZSL (Zoological Society of London), Imperial College London and conservationists from the Rotokare Scenic Reserve Trust used acoustic monitoring devices to listen in on the 'conversations' of New Zealand's endemic hihi bird, allowing them to assess the success of the reintroduction without impacting the group.

For the first time ZSL scientists were able to use the calls of a species as a proxy for their movement. A happy hihi call sounds like two marbles clanging together in what is known as the 'stitch' call. Scientists saw the calls change from an initial random distribution to a more settled home range - marking the hihi reintroduction and the new method a success.

The study, published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution today (5 February 2019) was carried out in the Rotokare Scenic Reserve in the Taranaki region of North Island, where 40 juvenile birds were released in April 2017. The first time hihi have been seen in the region since their regional extinction over 130 years ago.

Once found across northern New Zealand, the hihi or stichbird (Notiomystis cincta) are now classed as locally extinct across most of their former range, due to habitat loss and fragmentation and the spread of non-native invasive mammal predators. There are only a few thousand adults left in highly protected reserves.

Dr John Ewen, Senior Research Fellow at ZSL's Institute of Zoology said: "Hihi are an important native species, who play a crucial role in pollinating indigenous plant species and need a pristine environment in which to thrive. Reintroduction, or translocation, is considered the most effective conservation action we can take to save the hihi bird in New Zealand, but as with other reintroduction programmes for other species around the world, we've found it can be challenging to accurately monitor their success.

"Physically monitoring animals in the field or fitting them with radio-trackers can be invasive, expensive and more importantly can influence the behaviour or survival of released individuals, which could drastically influence our understanding and outcome of the reintroduction.

"Using acoustic recording devices enabled us to remotely monitor the birds we released, giving us a true understanding of how they settled post-reintroduction - this has really exciting implications for the reintroduction programmes of many other difficult to monitor Endangered species globally."

Oliver Metcalf, now a PhD Candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University, was inspired to use the technology for his masters studies at ZSL's Institute of Zoology and Imperial College London: "By recording and listening to the hihi calls, we were able to figure out how the birds were using the area they'd been reintroduced to. Using the calls, we found the birds moved from an initial exploration phase around the habitat, to a settlement phase - meaning the birds had established their own territories, or in other words - a sure sign of a happy hihi."

Simon Collins, Sanctuary Manager for Rotokare Scenic Reserve Trust said: "Hihi actually means 'first ray of sunshine' and in Maori culture the birds are associated with health - essentially, they're an age-old indicator of a healthy forest, and not only are they important to protect, but have proved to be a unique and ideal model to study the effectiveness of this new technique, which has huge potential for reintroduction programmes for other species."

ZSL has played a major part in the hihi's recovery since 2004 - helping to expand the population from one, to seven new populations across their former range in Northern New Zealand. ZSL works closely alongside Rotokare Scenic Reserve Trust to support the establishment of this most recent reintroduction effort.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - It's about time for the annual mass migration of honeybees to California, and new research is helping lower the chances the pollinators and their offspring will die while they're visiting the West Coast.

Each winter, professional beekeepers from around the nation stack hive upon hive on trucks destined for the Golden State, where February coaxes forward the sweet-smelling, pink and white blossoms of the Central Valley's almond trees.

Almond growers rent upwards of 1.5 million colonies of honeybees a year, at a cost of around $300 million. Without the bees, there would be no almonds, and there are nowhere near enough native bees to take up the task of pollinating the trees responsible for more than 80 percent of the world's almonds. The trouble was, bees and larvae were dying while in California, and nobody was sure exactly why. The problem started in adults only, and beekeepers were most worried about loss of queens.

Then in 2014, about 80,000 colonies - about 5 percent of bees brought in for pollination - experienced adult bee deaths or a dead and deformed brood. Some entire colonies died.

With support from the Almond Board of California, an industry service agency, bee expert Reed Johnson of The Ohio State University took up the task of figuring out what was happening. Results from his earlier research had shown that some insecticides thought safe for bees were impacting larvae. Building on that, Johnson undertook a new study, newly published in the journal Insects, that details how combinations of insecticides and fungicides typically deemed individually "safe" for honeybees turn into lethal cocktails when mixed.

Johnson, an associate professor of entomology, and his study co-authors were able to identify the chemicals commonly used in the almond groves during bloom because of California's robust and detailed system for tracking pesticide applications. Then, in a laboratory in Ohio, they tested combinations of these chemicals on honeybees and larvae.

In the most extreme cases, combinations decreased the survival of larvae by more than 60 percent when compared to a control group of larvae unexposed to fungicides and insecticides.

"Fungicides, often needed for crop protection, are routinely used during almond bloom, but in many cases growers were also adding insecticides to the mix. Our research shows that some combinations are deadly to the bees, and the simplest thing is to just take the insecticide out of the equation during almond bloom," he said.

"It just doesn't make any sense to use an insecticide when you have 80 percent of the nation's honeybees sitting there exposed to it."

The recommendation is already catching on and has been promoted through a wide array of presentations by almond industry leaders, beekeepers and other experts and has been included in the Almond Board's honeybee management practices. Many almond growers are rethinking their previous practices and are backing off insecticide use during almond bloom, Johnson said.

That's good news for bees, and doesn't appear to be harming the crops either, he said, because there are better opportunities to control problematic insects when almonds are not in bloom.

"I was surprised - even the experts in California were surprised - that they were using insecticides during pollination," Johnson said.

While these products were considered "bee-safe," that was based on tests with adult bees that hadn't looked into the impact they had on larvae.

"I think it was a situation where it wasn't disallowed. The products were thought to be bee-safe and you've got to spray a fungicide during bloom anyway, so why not put an insecticide in the tank, too?"

Insecticides are fairly inexpensive, but the process of spraying is labor-intensive, so growers choosing to double up may have been looking to maximize their investment, he said.

"The thing is, growers were using these insecticides to control a damaging insect - the peach twig borer - during this period, but they have other opportunities to do that before the bees enter the almond orchards or after they are gone," Johnson said.

This research could open the door to more study of fungicide and pesticide use on other bee-dependent crops, including pumpkins and cucumbers, Johnson said.

The Greenland ice sheet melted a little more easily in the past than it does today because of geological changes, and most of Greenland's ice can be saved from melting if warming is controlled, says a team of Penn State researchers.

"There is geologic data that suggests the ice sheet was more sensitive to warming and temperature variations in the past million years, and not so much in the more recent past," said David Pollard, research professor in the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Penn State.

Too much warming will cause Greenland to lose most or all of its ice over the coming centuries, but most research indicates that the threshold warmth for complete ice loss has not been reached yet.

Paleoclimatic records indicate that most of Greenland was ice-free within the last 1.1 million years even though temperatures then were not much warmer than conditions today. To explain this, the researchers point to there being more heat beneath the ice sheet in the past than today.

Data show that when the Iceland hot spot -- the heat source that feeds volcanoes on Iceland -- passed under north-central Greenland 80 to 35 million years ago, it left molten rock deep underground but did not break through the upper mantle and crust to form volcanoes as it had in the west and east. The Earth's climate then was too warm for Greenland to have an ice sheet, but once it cooled the ice sheet formed, growing and shrinking successive with ice ages.

"The idea is that the loading and unloading, flexing and unflexing from ice ages tapped into slightly melted rock that was left deep under Greenland by the Iceland hot spot and brought that melt up," said Richard Alley, Evan Pugh University Professor of Geosciences at Penn State.

Changes to the ice sheet allowed the molten rock to move closer to the Earth's surface, even to the base of the ice. The hotter bed melted more ice from below, lubricating the ice sheet so it was thinner and easier to melt from above.

The melted rock wants to come up, according to Alley. As the ice sheet grows and shrinks, it essentially shakes the melt, drawing it up in pulses.

"The first shakes usually do the most moving," Alley said.

The effect would have been largest when the first big ice sheet grew and then shrank, he added. More recent changes to the ice sheet also affect geothermal fluxes, but not as much as they had in the past.

"The hypothesis does not change the reality that if we make it hot, Greenland's ice melts, and no one will like that," Alley said. "It does not even really tell us whether geology just at this moment is making it harder or easier for the ice to melt. The ability of the ice to melt got easier in the past and is sort of bumpily getting harder, and we do not know where on the bumps we are."

Pollard tested the team's hypothesis using a numerical, three-dimensional ice-sheet model. The researchers report their results in the Journal of Geophysical Research in January.

"The Greenland ice sheet is very likely to melt a lot and retreat, and contribute to sea level in the next few centuries," Pollard said. "This study is part of the puzzle of figuring out how much it will melt and retreat. We are using past geologic data to validate the models that are being used for the future."

If Greenland's ice sheet were to completely melt today, global sea levels would rise nearly 23 feet and flood coastal areas. Parts of cities like New York would be underwater. The team says future studies should integrate geologic and geophysical data as well as glaciological, atmospheric, oceanic and paleoclimatic information to better project how much and how fast the ice sheet will melt and its effect on sea-level rise.

"If you had a better idea of how much and how fast sea level rises from warming, you could make wiser decisions," Alley said. "This research is a piece of the effort to provide policymakers and planners with the background information that will allow them to make good decisions."

Sexual assault victims wearing the hijab or niqab are viewed more positively when testifying in court than uncovered women reveals a study.

Lead author, Weyam Fahmy of Memorial University, said that: "Our findings raise an interesting question about how trial fairness may be impacted by the greater levels of credibility afforded to victims who wear Muslim garments while testifying.

"Any decisions on policies or recommendations on the presence of the Muslim garments in court must be undergirded by a robust body of empirical data."

The study by Lancaster University in the UK and Memorial University of Newfoundland aimed to investigate the importance of being able to see the face to judge credibility among witnesses, along with the importance of religious garments.

Contrary to expectations, they found that "positive biases" are created when women testify in court with either their hair covered (the hijab) or their face and hair covered (the niqab).

Dr Kirk Luther of Lancaster University in the UK stated that "The effect of Muslim Garment on victim credibility ratings was significant; the victim was perceived as more credible when she wore a niqab or hijab compared to when she did not wear either of these garments."

The study involved four videos featuring an actress which were shown to participants; two videos where the woman wore either a niqab or hijab, a third where she wore a balaclava and the fourth where her face and hair were uncovered.

In all four videos, the woman wore a black long-sleeved dress.

In each video, a woman was filmed on the witness stand providing her testimony about a sexual assault she allegedly experienced. The script used in the video was taken from an anonymous transcript of an actual court case where a woman was allegedly sexually assaulted. The victim and event script remained the same in all four videos.

The highest rating for credibility was given to the women wearing the niqab, followed by the hijab, then the balaclava and lastly the women with no face or head covering who was judged the least credible.

Researchers say there are at least three plausible explanations for this bias:

The religious garments may signal that the wearer is more honest because of a positive view of religion

The Muslim garment may dispel the common rape myth that the sexual assault victim was "asking for it" because it represents sexually conservative attitudes that are thought to disapprove of pre-marital or casual sexual encounters

Muslim women, especially those who don a niqab or hijab, are often viewed as oppressed and are therefore can be seen as being more vulnerable to sexual abuse

Meagan McCardle of Memorial University noted: "Contrary to our prediction, participants rated victims wearing a Muslim garment as more credible than those who did not wear a Muslim garment. Also contrary to our prediction was the finding that covering the face fully did not have a significant effect on credibility ratings."

Professor Brent Snook concluded, "Our findings lead to the provisional conclusion that whether or not a sexual assault victim chooses to cover her face while testifying in court does not seem to have any effect on credibility ratings."