Brain

Workplace resilience programmes, designed to bolster mental health and wellbeing, and encourage employees to seek help when issues arise, might not make any difference, suggests research published online in Occupational & Environmental Medicine.

These programmes are becoming increasingly popular in the belief that they are not only good for employee mental health, but also for employers' overheads, despite relatively little sound evaluation of their effectiveness, say the researchers.

In a bid to address this, they compared the impact of a resilience-based programme, called SPEAR (358 participants), with standard training (349) in 707 new military recruits.

SPEAR has been specifically developed for the UK Royal Air Force (RAF) and focuses on key activities: participating in Social networks; capitalising on Personal strengths and weaknesses; managing Emotions; enhancing Awareness of psychological symptoms; and learning techniques to promote Resilience.

The researchers wanted to know if SPEAR improved recruits' mental health and wellbeing as well as their attitudes to mental illness during the initial stages of their military career. They also wanted to know if SPEAR affected perceptions of leadership, unit cohesion, and willingness to seek help for mental health and alcohol issues.

The recruits didn't know which group they had been assigned to, but all of them were formally assessed for post-traumatic stress disorder, common mental health symptoms, hazardous drinking, homesickness, and mental health stigmatisation before their training began.

These assessments were then repeated after the programmes had completed (9 weeks), and 3 months later.

After they had finished their training, the recruits were asked to rate it, and to give their impressions of their leaders and the cohesiveness of their unit. Their feedback was sought again after 3 months.

Some 44 recruits left the service before the 9 weeks were up. And of the remainder, 655 completed their assessments afterwards, and 481 did so 3 months later.

There was no evidence that SPEAR made any difference to recruits' mental health and wellbeing: their attitudes to mental illness and willingness to seek help for mental health or alcohol problems: or their perceptions of military leaders and their unit's cohesion, when compared with standard training.

Alcohol consumption patterns remained unchanged despite the SPEAR programme including a component focusing specifically on substance and alcohol misuse. The SPEAR recruits also seemed to feel more stigmatised after they had completed their training, the responses indicated.

There were no significant differences in how either group rated the impact of their training: they rated their leaders and unit cohesion highly.

Effective leadership is known to be supportive of mental health, while cohesion is associated with openness and less mental health stigmatisation, so this might explain why SPEAR seemed to have little impact, suggest the researchers.

But they point out: "Many organisations search for a 'silver bullet' intervention that can be used to improve the mental health and wellbeing of their employees when time might be better spent refining leadership and building strong cohesion."

And any new resilience programme should be properly evaluated, they say, emphasising that their findings provide "a cautionary example of why [this] is important."

This is an observational study, and as such, can't establish cause. But the researchers nevertheless conclude: "Although the current study found no benefit for a specific intervention, this is an important finding as a great deal of time and expenditure is spent implementing such interventions without establishing whether they are effective or not.

"Doing no harm is not a reasonable defence of an ineffective intervention as time spent in delivery effectively reduces the time available for engaging in more meaningful activity."

When it comes to self-assessment, new U of T research suggests that maybe we do have a pretty good handle on our own personalities after all.

"It's widely assumed that people have rose-coloured glasses on when they consider their own personality," says Brian Connelly, an associate professor in U of T Scarborough's Department of Management.

"We found that isn't necessarily the case, that on average people don't show any trend in rating themselves more favourably than they're rated by their peers."

Self-report questionnaires are the most commonly used personality assessment. But there are longstanding concerns that the results are biased, particularly that people may rate themselves more favourably, known as self-enhancement.

For this research, Connelly and his colleagues did a large-scale meta-analysis of 160 independent studies to see whether self-enhancement exists in personality assessments.

They found strong support that self-reporting is indeed accurate, and those findings held across the big five personality traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism). One trait that did show some evidence of self-enhancement was a specific aspect of openness, however Connelly notes the effect was small.

In other words, a good majority of the time our perception of our own personality matches that of our peers.

"We make personality judgements of ourselves and others all the time, and a popular notion is that self-reports are more positively biased ... but we find little support for that in the literature," he says.

As for why people generally don't self-enhance, Connelly says it may come down to there being strong incentives to be clued in to what other people think of us. This is especially true given that personality has been shown to be a strong predictor of success in life.

"People are generally attuned to the impressions they convey," says Connelly, pointing to past research showing how distressing it can be when someone close sees you differently that you see yourself. 

"Some people may stray toward self-enhancement, or in the opposite direction with self-effacement, but there are social costs associated with both that makes the general trend for people to be accurate."

Having a good handle on self- and peer-perception of personality is important in understanding how people function, says Connelly. While much of his research deals with how people function at work and in school, he says these perceptions can help us better navigate all social situations.

The one important exception in their findings involves self-perception versus the perception of strangers.

"There's only a small pool of studies that look at this effect," says Connelly, who is an expert on how organizations can best use personality measures to address workplace challenges.

"It suggests that people are much more critical of those they're unacquainted with," he says, adding that the effect didn't hold with co-workers, only those who are complete strangers.

Connelly says self-enhancement does happen in self-reporting, but that it can be explained by individual differences. In other words, it's the exception rather than the rule. The same can be said for those who do self-effacement, which is to rate themselves more modestly.

Connelly plans to explore what accounts for individual differences in self-enhancement, particularly the things that people tend to overestimate about their behaviour at work.

"It's important to know if self-enhancers perform worse on the job or have more trouble in school," he says.

"It could be they don't internalize negative information about themselves or even totally forget about it altogether, both of which could have negative outcomes."

BOSTON - Already affecting more than five million Americans older than 65, Alzheimer's disease is on the rise and expected to impact more than 13 million people by 2050. Over the last three decades, researchers have relied on neuroimaging - brain scans such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or positron emission tomography (PET) - to study Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. Yet these studies have so far failed to deliver consistent findings, leaving scientists with no clear path to finding treatments or cures.

In a study published today in the journal BRAIN, neuroscientists led by Michael D. Fox, MD, PhD, of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) used data from the human brain connectome - a publicly available "wiring diagram" of the human brain based on data from thousands of healthy human volunteers - to reassess the findings from neuroimaging studies of patients with Alzheimer's disease.

"In neuroimaging, a common assumption is that studies of specific diseases or symptoms should all implicate a specific brain region," said Fox, director of the Laboratory for Brain Network Imaging and Modulation at BIDMC and an associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. "However, cognitive functions, neuropsychiatric symptoms and diseases may better map to brain networks rather than single brain regions. So we tested the hypothesis that these inconsistent neuroimaging findings are part of one connected brain network."

Fox and colleagues, including corresponding author, R. Ryan Darby, MD, PhD, formerly a fellow in Fox's lab at BIDMC and now at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, analyzed results from 26 neuroimaging studies of Alzheimer's disease. The studies investigated abnormalities in structure, metabolism or circulation of the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease; however, the findings were seemingly inconsistent, with studies locating abnormalities in disparate brain regions. No single brain region consistently demonstrated neuroimaging abnormalities. However, when Fox's team mapped these various neuroimaging abnormalities to the human connectome - the wiring diagram of the human brain - a different picture emerged.

"When we applied this approach to our 26 studies, we found that 100 percent of studies reported neuroimaging abnormalities that were part of the same connected brain network - both within and across imaging modalities," Fox reported. "These results may help reconcile inconsistent neuroimaging findings as well as improve our ability to link brain symptoms or diseases to neuroanatomy."

Fox and colleagues have previously used the network mapping technique - pioneered by Fox and others - to reveal which parts of the brain are responsible for a number of symptoms, conditions, behavior and even consciousness. Now the method could pave the way to a deeper understanding of Alzheimer's and other brain diseases.

The findings also suggest a unique solution to the "reproducibility crisis" in the field of neuroscience. Reproducibility - the potential for different investigators to run the study again and obtain the same results - is one of the main tenants of the scientific method and critical for translating research findings into treatments. In this study, Fox and colleagues use the human connectome to change the way reproducibility is measured.

"This is a new way to combine results across many different studies to determine the brain circuit most tightly associated with a given symptom or disease," Fox said. "By shifting our focus from specific brain regions to networks, we show that seemingly inconsistent neuroimaging findings are in fact reproducible."

Astronomers have captured one of the most detailed views of a young star taken to date, and revealed an unexpected companion in orbit around it.

While observing the young star, astronomers led by Dr John Ilee from the University of Leeds discovered it was not in fact one star, but two.

The main object, referred to as MM 1a, is a young massive star surrounded by a rotating disc of gas and dust that was the focus of the scientists' original investigation.

A faint object, MM 1b, was detected just beyond the disc in orbit around MM 1a. The team believe this is one of the first examples of a "fragmented" disc to be detected around a massive young star.

"Stars form within large clouds of gas and dust in interstellar space," said Dr Ilee, from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Leeds.

"When these clouds collapse under gravity, they begin to rotate faster, forming a disc around them. In low mass stars like our Sun, it is in these discs that planets can form."

"In this case, the star and disc we have observed is so massive that, rather than witnessing a planet forming in the disc, we are seeing another star being born."

By measuring the amount of radiation emitted by the dust, and subtle shifts in the frequency of light emitted by the gas, the researchers were able to calculate the mass of MM 1a and MM 1b.

Their work, published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, found MM 1a weighs 40 times the mass of our Sun. The smaller orbiting star MM 1b was calculated to weigh less than half the mass of our Sun.

"Many older massive stars are found with nearby companions," added Dr Ilee. "But binary stars are often very equal in mass, and so likely formed together as siblings. Finding a young binary system with a mass ratio of 80:1 is very unusual, and suggests an entirely different formation process for both objects."

The favoured formation process for MM 1b occurs in the outer regions of cold, massive discs. These "gravitationally unstable" discs are unable to hold themselves up against the pull of their own gravity, collapsing into one - or more - fragments.

Dr Duncan Forgan, a co-author from the Centre for Exoplanet Science at the University of St Andrews, added: "I've spent most of my career simulating this process to form giant planets around stars like our Sun. To actually see it forming something as large as a star is really exciting."

The researchers note that newly-discovered young star MM 1b could also be surrounded by its own circumstellar disc, which may have the potential to form planets of its own - but it will need to be quick.

Dr Ilee added: "Stars as massive as MM 1a only live for around a million years before exploding as powerful supernovae, so while MM 1b may have the potential to form its own planetary system in the future, it won't be around for long."

The astronomers made this surprising discovery by using a unique new instrument situated high in the Chilean desert - the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA).

Using the 66 individual dishes of ALMA together in a process called interferometry, the astronomers were able to simulate the power of a single telescope nearly 4km across, allowing them to image the material surrounding the young stars for the first time.

The team have been granted additional observing time with ALMA to further
characterise these exciting stellar systems in 2019. The upcoming observations will simulate a telescope that is 16km across - comparable to the area inside of
the ring-road surrounding Leeds.

What if, instead of turning up the thermostat, you could warm up with high-tech, flexible patches sewn into your clothes - while significantly reducing your electric bill and carbon footprint?

Engineers at Rutgers and Oregon State University have found a cost-effective way to make thin, durable heating patches by using intense pulses of light to fuse tiny silver wires with polyester. Their heating performance is nearly 70 percent higher than similar patches created by other researchers, according to a Rutgers-led study in Scientific Reports.

They are inexpensive, can be powered by coin batteries and are able to generate heat where the human body needs it since they can be sewed on as patches.

"This is important in the built environment, where we waste lots of energy by heating buildings - instead of selectively heating the human body," said senior author Rajiv Malhotra, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. The department is in the School of Engineering.

It is estimated that 47 percent of global energy is used for indoor heating, and 42 percent of that energy is wasted to heat empty space and objects instead of people, the study notes. Solving the global energy crisis - a major contributor to global warming - would require a sharp reduction in energy for indoor heating.

Personal thermal management, which focuses on heating the human body as needed, is an emerging potential solution. Such patches may also someday help warm anyone who works or plays outdoors.

The Rutgers and Oregon State engineers created highly efficient, flexible, durable and inexpensive heating patches by using "intense pulsed-light sintering" to fuse silver nanowires - thousands of times thinner than a human hair - to polyester fibers, using pulses of high-energy light. The process takes 300 millionths of a second, according to the study funded by the National Science Foundation and Walmart U.S. Manufacturing Innovation Fund.

When compared with the current state of the art in thermal patches, the Rutgers and Oregon State creation generates more heat per patch area and is more durable after bending, washing and exposure to humidity and high temperature.

Next steps include seeing if this method can be used to create other smart fabrics, including patch-based sensors and circuits. The engineers also want to determine how many patches would be needed and where they should be placed on people to keep them comfortable while reducing indoor energy consumption.

Argonne researchers have demonstrated a new technique’s viability for membranes.

Whether it's tap water or a cup of coffee, almost everything we drink passes through some kind of filter. The ability to transform liquids this way is essential to daily life, yet it often rests on relatively delicate membranes that can quickly clog or degrade.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory are designing ways to treat membranes so they can filter liquids better and resist degradation from industrial processing chemicals and biofoulants. Argonne’s patented sequential infiltration synthesis (SIS) technique can fundamentally alter a membrane from within, allowing for much greater control over its chemical makeup and pore size.

SIS has shown promise for semiconductor manufacturing, optical coatings and sponges that clean oil spills. Now, for the first time, Argonne researchers have demonstrated the technique's viability for membranes.

First conceived in 2010 by Argonne researchers, SIS is a cousin of atomic layer deposition, or ALD. Both techniques use chemical vapors to alter the interface of a material such as a membrane.

"But there is one important shortcoming of ALD for this application," said Seth Darling, director of the Institute for Molecular Engineering at Argonne and the Advanced Materials for Energy-Water Systems Energy Frontier Research Center. "As you coat pores in a membrane with a technique like ALD, you're constricting them."

That's because ALD basically adds layers on top of the membrane, which slowly decreases the pore diameters — much the way you would restrict air flow through a vent in the wall if you kept painting over it. SIS, on the other hand, grows material inside the membrane structure itself, changing its chemistry without significantly affecting the pore shape.

"SIS can achieve many of the things that ALD can achieve in terms of engineering the interface," Darling said, "but with minimal pore constriction."

Nearly all commercial membranes are made of polymers — large molecules formed from repeating chains of smaller molecules. SIS makes use of the space between those molecules, penetrating the surface of the membrane and diffusing into it with an inorganic material. In their proof of concept, Darling and colleagues used SIS to plant the "seeds" for aluminum oxide and grew it within polyethersulfone (PES) ultrafiltration (UF) membranes, making them more resilient without compromising filtration ability. The results were published online on September 24 in JOM, the journal of The Minerals, Metals and Materials Society.

The SIS technique enables a range of improvements to membranes: the ability to prevent foulants from attaching to the surface, for example, or resistance to solvents that might be needed in an industrial setting but would dissolve conventional membrane materials.

The ability to engineer membranes this way can help cut costs at water treatment plants or in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries by reducing the downtime and cost associated with replacing spent membranes.

Darling and coworkers used SIS to create Oleo Sponge, which captures oil from water. In that case, a metal oxide grown within the sponge's surface serves as a grafting site for oil-loving molecules.

"You can imagine a similar strategy with membranes," he said, "Where you graft on molecules to lend some selectivity or other properties that you're looking for."

Dec 10, 2018 - Aurora, Ore. - Hazelnuts are poised to be the "it" nut for 2019, and new research suggests that adding hazelnuts to your daily diet could bode well for long-term health.

The new study, administered by the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University and published in the December 2018 issue of The Journal of Nutrition , found that older adults who added hazelnuts to their diet for 16 weeks significantly improved their levels of two key micronutrients. Results showed increased blood concentrations of magnesium and elevated urinary levels of a breakdown product of alpha tocopherol, commonly known as vitamin E.

Older adults are at increased risk of various chronic diseases where inadequate levels of vitamins and minerals may play a significant role, including cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease, liver disease and cancer. Tree nuts, including hazelnuts, contain a wide variety of vitamins and minerals, and are an excellent source of vitamin E and good source of magnesium, two "shortfall nutrients" that are lacking in the typical American diet.

Study Details

Researchers stated the objective of the study was to determine whether daily hazelnut consumption by healthy older adults for 16 weeks improves biomarkers of micronutrient status, especially vitamin E and magnesium. Participants (n = 32 including 22 women; mean ± SD age: 63 ± 6 y) consumed hazelnuts (?57 g/d) for 16 weeks. Blood and urine samples and anthropomorphic measures were taken at the start and end of the intervention to determine plasma concentrations of α-tocopherol and serum concentrations of magnesium, lipids, glucose, insulin, and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein along with urinary vitamin E metabolites; several other micronutrients were measured by a lymphocyte proliferation assay. There were 3 primary endpoints, calculated as the mean changes in measurements between baseline and the end of the 16 week intervention for 1) plasma α-tocopherol, 2) urinary α-carboxyethyl hydroxychromanol (α-CEHC; an α-tocopherol metabolite), and 3) serum magnesium.

Hazelnuts: The indulgent health nut

A one-ounce serving (28.35 g) of raw hazelnuts contains 27 percent (4 mg) of your daily value (15 mg) of vitamin E . Vitamin E is a shortfall micronutrient, as identified by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2015-2020 , which frequently is consumed at levels less than the Estimated Average Requirement of 15 mg/day.

These new findings complement existing knowledge about the role of nuts in heart health. In 2003, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a qualified health claim related to nuts that states: "Scientific evidence suggests but does not prove that eating 1.5 ounces per day of most nuts, such as hazelnuts, as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease." U.S Dietary Guidelines recommend that the majority of your fat intake be unsaturated. One serving of raw hazelnuts (28.35 grams, or about 21 hazelnuts) has 6 grams of monounsaturated fat and only 1 gram of saturated fat.

This discovery also builds upon a growing body of scientific evidence on the benefits of nuts for older adults (average age 63 + 6 years). In 2013, observational researchers at Harvard University looked at how eating nuts may help reduce the risk of mortality, finding that those who ate nuts daily, such as hazelnuts, saw health benefits nearly double. The benefits were seen in both men and women, independent of other predictors for mortality. The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine , are based on approximately three decades of follow-up among 76,464 women in the Nurses' Health Study (1980-2010) and 42,498 men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study (1986-2010), including examination of food questionnaire data.

Compared to people who didn't eat nuts, people who ate nuts saw benefits that increased along with the number of servings of nuts they ate. Those who ate nuts seven times a week had nearly twice the benefit compared to those who ate nuts once a week; once a week nut eaters had a small, but still significant benefit. This observational study is an important addition to the body of research on nuts and heart health; however, given its observational nature, it's not possible to conclude cause and effect between nut consumption and mortality.

Hazelnuts 365: A tasty way to get your daily dose of nuts

Oregon hazelnuts are a delicious way to get seven servings of nuts per week. Because they are so versatile, these crunchy Pacific Northwest gems upgrade the flavor and nutrition of salads, entrees, desserts and snacks. A one-ounce serving of hazelnuts equals approximately 21 nuts.

A 2017 consumer survey, funded by the Oregon Hazelnut Marketing Board, found that 47 percent of people found hazelnuts to be "very healthy," which was nearly twice the number from the previous year. The survey also found people don't view hazelnuts as being as expensive as some other nuts. Food manufacturers have taken note and hazelnuts are gradually starting to appear in more commercially available products, according to the survey, growing from 63 products in 2013 to 93 in 2015, when data was last available.

Oregon boasts an ideal climate for producing the world's highest quality hazelnuts and it's in this special corner of the world where temperate ocean, mountain and river climates meet with rich volcanic soils to create prime hazelnut-growing country. Ninety-nine percent of U.S. hazelnuts are grown in Oregon across 72,000 acres. The 2018 harvest has officially come to an end, and early reports indicate a yield of 46,000 to 48,000 tons, an increase of 44-50 percent over last year's 32,000 tons.

"This harvest season was a great success thanks to perfect weather conditions, new acreage, dedicated farmers and the hazelnut industry work force," said Meredith Nagely, manager of the Oregon Hazelnut Marketing Board. "Consumers can expect to see an increase in hazelnuts available at retailers and on menus."

Tenacious goal pursuit and flexible goal adjustment have been shown to help maintain psychological well-being despite age related challenges and losses. A recent study demonstrates that tenacity and flexibility are beneficial for out-of-home mobility as well.

Older people who persistently strive for their goals, but at the same time are able to adjust their goals to better correspond to current circumstances, move across a larger life-space than do their less tenacious and flexible peers. Furthermore, tenacious and flexible older persons better perceive their possibilities to participate in outdoor activities. This was observed in a study conducted at the University of Jyväskylä.

"Almost all of us have some personal goals, which guide our behavior and everyday life," says doctoral student Sini Siltanen. "Older people have goals as well, even though they are not discussed that often."

Tenacious persons have larger life-space

The study results highlighted the role of tenacity: those who persistently strived for their own goals had larger life-space, even in spite of poor flexibility.

"Our results indicate that persistency and the ability to adjust can function as personal resources for maintaining out-of-home mobility and participation in later life," Siltanen says. "Moreover, it seems that while flexibility is especially important for maintaining autonomy, tenacity may be what gets older people out the door."

The results remained consistent even when differences in older persons' physical and cognitive abilities were taken into account. The challenges related to an individual's own living environment and housing did not affect the results either.

"Getting out of the house and going outside increases their opportunities for physical activity, independency, and participation in valued activities," Siltanen points out. "That means maintaining one's life-space and autonomy in outdoor mobility in old age is essential for retaining quality of life."

A new study by MIT researchers finds that the growing practice of compiling massive, anonymized datasets about people's movement patterns is a double-edged sword: While it can provide deep insights into human behavior for research, it could also put people's private data at risk.

Companies, researchers, and other entities are beginning to collect, store, and process anonymized data that contains "location stamps" (geographical coordinates and time stamps) of users. Data can be grabbed from mobile phone records, credit card transactions, public transportation smart cards, Twitter accounts, and mobile apps. Merging those datasets could provide rich information about how humans travel, for instance, to optimize transportation and urban planning, among other things.

But with big data come big privacy issues: Location stamps are extremely specific to individuals and can be used for nefarious purposes. Recent research has shown that, given only a few randomly selected points in mobility datasets, someone could identify and learn sensitive information about individuals. With merged mobility datasets, this becomes even easier: An agent could potentially match users trajectories in anonymized data from one dataset, with deanonymized data in another, to unmask the anonymized data.

In a paper published today in IEEE Transactions on Big Data, the MIT researchers show how this can happen in the first-ever analysis of so-called user "matchability" in two large-scale datasets from Singapore, one from a mobile network operator and one from a local transportation system.

The researchers use a statistical model that tracks location stamps of users in both datasets and provides a probability that data points in both sets come from the same person. In experiments, the researchers found the model could match around 17 percent of individuals in one week's worth of data, and more than 55 percent of individuals after one month of collected data. The work demonstrates an efficient, scalable way to match mobility trajectories in datasets, which can be a boon for research. But, the researchers warn, such processes can increase the possibility of deanonymizing real user data.

"As researchers, we believe that working with large-scale datasets can allow discovering unprecedented insights about human society and mobility, allowing us to plan cities better. Nevertheless, it is important to show if identification is possible, so people can be aware of potential risks of sharing mobility data," says Daniel Kondor, a postdoc in the Future Urban Mobility Group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology.

"In publishing the results -- and, in particular, the consequences of deanonymizing data -- we felt a bit like 'white hat' or 'ethical' hackers," adds co-author Carlo Ratti, a professor of the practice in MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning and director of MIT's Senseable City Lab. "We felt that it was important to warn people about these new possibilities [of data merging] and [to consider] how we might regulate it."

Eliminating false positives

To understand how matching location stamps and potential deanonymization works, consider this scenario: "I was at Sentosa Island in Singapore two days ago, came to the Dubai airport yesterday, and am on Jumeirah Beach in Dubai today. It's highly unlikely another person's trajectory looks exactly the same. In short, if someone has my anonymized credit card information, and perhaps my open location data from Twitter, they could then deanonymize my credit card data," Ratti says.

Similar models exist to evaluate deanonymization in data. But those use computationally intensive approaches for re-identification, meaning to merge anonymous data with public data to identify specific individuals. These models have only worked on limited datasets. The MIT researchers instead used a simpler statistical approach -- measuring the probability of false positives -- to efficiently predict matchability among scores of users in massive datasets.

In their work, the researchers compiled two anonymized "low-density" datasets -- a few records per day -- about mobile phone use and personal transportation in Singapore, recorded over one week in 2011. The mobile data came from a large mobile network operator and comprised timestamps and geographic coordinates in more than 485 million records from over 2 million users. The transportation data contained over 70 million records with timestamps for individuals moving through the city.

The probability that a given user has records in both datasets will increase along with the size of the merged datasets, but so will the probability of false positives. The researchers' model selects a user from one dataset and finds a user from the other dataset with a high number of matching location stamps. Simply put, as the number of matching points increases, the probability of a false-positive match decreases. After matching a certain number of points along a trajectory, the model rules out the possibility of the match being a false positive.

Focusing on typical users, they estimated a matchability success rate of 17 percent over a week of compiled data, and about 55 percent for four weeks. That estimate jumps to about 95 percent with data compiled over 11 weeks.

The researchers also estimated how much activity is needed to match most users over a week. Looking at users with between 30 and 49 personal transportation records, and around 1,000 mobile records, they estimated more than 90 percent success with a week of compiled data. Additionally, by combining the two datasets with GPS traces -- regularly collected actively and passively by smartphone apps -- the researchers estimated they could match 95 percent of individual trajectories, using less than one week of data.

Better privacy

With their study, the researchers hope to increase public awareness and promote tighter regulations for sharing consumer data. "All data with location stamps (which is most of today's collected data) is potentially very sensitive and we should all make more informed decisions on who we share it with," Ratti says. "We need to keep thinking about the challenges in processing large-scale data, about individuals, and the right way to provide adequate guarantees to preserve privacy."

To that end, Ratti, Kondor, and other researchers have been working extensively on the ethical and moral issues of big data. In 2013, the Senseable City Lab at MIT launched an initiative called "Engaging Data," which involves leaders from government, privacy rights groups, academia, and business, who study how mobility data can and should be used by today's data-collecting firms.

"The world today is awash with big data," Kondor says. "In 2015, mankind produced as much information as was created in all previous years of human civilization. Although data means a better knowledge of the urban environment, currently much of this wealth of information is held by just a few companies and public institutions that know a lot about us, while we know so little about them. We need to take care to avoid data monopolies and misuse."

Astronomers have discovered a distant planet with an abundance of helium in its atmosphere, which has swollen to resemble an inflated balloon.

An international team of researchers, including Jessica Spake and Dr David Sing from the University of Exeter, have detected the inert gas escaping from the atmosphere of the exoplanet HAT-P-11b - found 124 light years from Earth and in the Cygnus constellation.

The remarkable breakthrough was led by researchers from the University of Geneva, who observed the exoplanet using the spectrograph called Carmenes, installed on the 4-metre telescope at Calar Alto, Spain.

For the first time, the data revealed the speed of helium atoms in the upper atmosphere of the exoplanet, which is equivalent in size to Neptune. The helium is in an extended cloud that is escaping from the planet, just as a helium balloon might escape from a person's hand.

The research team believe that the ground-breaking study could open up new understandings of the extreme atmospheric conditions found around the hottest exoplanets.

The research is published in the leading journal, Science, on December 6 2018.

Jessica Spake, part of Exeter's Physics and Astronomy department said: "This is a really exciting discovery, particularly as helium was only detected in exoplanet atmospheres for the first time earlier this year. The observations show helium being blasted away from the planet by radiation from its host star. Hopefully we can use this new study to learn what types of planets have large envelopes of hydrogen and helium, and how long they can hold the gases in their atmospheres."

Helium was first detected as an unknown yellow spectral line signature in sunlight in 1868. Devon-based astronomer Norman Lockyer was the first to propose this line was due to a new element, and named it after the Greek Titan of the Sun, Helios. It has since been discovered to be one of the main constituents of the planets Jupiter and Saturn in our Solar System.

It is also the second most common element in the universe and was long- predicted to be one of the most readily-detectable gases on giant exoplanets. However, it was only successfully found in an exoplanet atmosphere earlier this year, in a pioneering study also led by Jessica Spake.

For this new study, the research team used the spectrograph, Carmenes, to pull apart the star's light into its component colours, like a rainbow, to reveal the presence of helium. The 'rainbow' data, called a spectrum, also tells us the position and speed of helium atoms in the upper atmosphere of HAT-P-11b, which is 20 times closer to its star than the Earth is from the Sun.

Romain Allart, PhD student at the University of Geneva and first author of the study said: "We suspected that this proximity with the star could impact the atmosphere of this exoplanet. The new observations are so precise that the exoplanet atmosphere is undoubtly inflated by the stellar radiation and escapes to space."

These new observations are supported by a state-of-the-art computer simulation, led by Vincent Bourrier, co-author of the study and member of the European project FOUR ACES, used to track the trajectory of helium atoms.

Vincent Bourrier explained: "Helium is blown away from the day side of the planet to its night side at over 10,000 km an hour. Because it is such a light gas, it escapes easily from the attraction of the planet and forms an extended cloud all around it."

It is this phenomenon that makes HAT-P-11b so inflated, like a helium balloon.

The first detection of helium earlier this year, led by University of Exeter researchers, opened a new window to observe the extreme atmospheric conditions reigning in the hottest exoplanets. These new observations from Carmenes demonstrate that such studies, long thought feasible only from space, can be achieved with greater precision from ground-based telescopes equipped with the right kind of instruments.

The visual inspection of a suspicious skin lesion using the naked eye alone is not enough to ensure the accurate diagnosis of skin cancer, a group of experts have concluded following a largescale systematic review of research.

The review is published today (Dec 6th) in The Cochrane Library as part of a Special Collection of Cochrane Systematic Reviews bringing together a large body of research on the accuracy of tests used to diagnose skin cancer. The suite of eleven reviews was led by Dr Jac Dinnes at the University of Birmingham and supported by the Cochrane Skin Group and a team of over 30 researchers and expert advisors. The work was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).

The reviews summarise research evidence assessing the accuracy of different diagnostic tests to support clinical and policy related decision making in the diagnosis of all types of skin cancer.

Dr Jac Dinnes, of the University of Birmingham's Institute of Applied Health Research, said: "Early and accurate detection of all skin cancer types is essential to manage the disease and to improve survival rates in melanoma, especially given the rate of skin cancer world-wide is rising.

"The visual nature of skin cancer means that it can be detected and treated in many different ways and by a number of different types of specialists, therefore the aim of these reviews is to provide the world's best evidence for how this endemic type of cancer should be identified and treated.

"We have found that careful consideration should be given of the technologies that could be used to make sure that skin cancers are not missed, at the same time ensuring that inappropriate referrals for specialist assessment and inappropriate excision of benign skin lesions are kept to a minimum."

There are three main forms of skin cancer. Melanoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC), are high-risk skin cancers with the potential to spread and cause death.

A basal cell carcinoma (BCC) rarely spreads, usually remaining localised with potential to infiltrate and damage surrounding tissue.

Key findings of the Special Collection were:

Visual inspection using the naked eye alone is not good enough and melanomas may be missed.

Smartphone applications used by people with concerns about new or changing moles or other skin lesions have a high chance of missing melanomas.

When used by specialists, dermoscopy - a technique using a handheld device to zoom in on a mole and the underlying skin - is better at diagnosing melanoma than visual inspection alone, and may also help in the diagnosis of BCCs.

Dermoscopy might also help GPs to correctly identify people with suspicious lesions who need to be seen by a specialist.

Dermoscopy is already widely used by dermatologists to diagnose melanoma but its use in primary care has not been widely evaluated therefore more specific research is needed.

Checklists to help interpret dermoscopy might improve the accuracy of diagnosis for practitioners with less expertise and training.

Teledermatology - remote specialist assessment of skin lesions using dermoscopic images and photographs - is likely to be a good way of helping GPs to decide which skin lesions need to be seen by a skin specialist but future research needs to be better designed.

Artificial intelligence techniques, such as computer-assisted diagnosis (CAD), can identify more melanomas than doctors using dermoscopy images. However, CAD systems also produce far more false positive diagnoses than dermoscopy and could lead to considerable increases in unnecessary surgery.

Further research is needed on the use of specialist tests such as reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM) - a non-invasive imaging technique, which allows a clinician to do a 'virtual biopsy' of the skin and obtain diagnostic clues while minimising unnecessary skin biopsies. RCM is not currently widely used in the UK but the evidence suggests that RCM may be better than dermoscopy for the diagnosis of melanoma in lesions that are difficult to diagnose.

Other tests such as using high frequency ultrasound have some promise, particularly for the diagnosis of BCCs, but the evidence base is small and more work is needed.

Cochrane Skin Group founder Professor Hywel Williams, of the Centre of Evidence-Based Dermatology at the University of Nottingham, said: "Completing this broad suite of detailed reviews was a real marathon.

"Apart from a few exceptions, I was surprised by how poor the overall study designs were, especially in terms of accurately documenting where on the clinical pathway patients were tested.

"Although some useful conclusions have emerged, for example, on the role of dermoscopy, the greatest value of the research is to serve as a yardstick for designing future studies evaluating skin cancer diagnosis techniques on patients who are typically seen in GP and specialist settings."

The research team said that future studies evaluating diagnostic skin cancer tests should recruit patients with suspicious skin lesions at the point on the clinical pathway where the test under evaluation will be used in practice.

Further research is also needed to evaluate whether checklists to assist diagnosis by visual inspection alone can improve accuracy and to identify how much accuracy varies according to the level of expertise of the clinician carrying out the assessment.

Well-designed studies of dermoscopy in primary care are needed, and the best ways of delivering dermoscopy training need to be identified.

The reviews have been shared with The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) to inform a potential update of the NICE Melanoma guideline, which was last updated in 2015.

ANAHEIM, Calif. (December 4, 2018) -- A quarter of chronic opioid users in Idaho were at risk for overdose from unsafe combinations of prescriptions for controlled substances in 2017, according to research presented at the ASHP (American Society for Health-System Pharmacists) 53rd Midyear Clinical Meeting and Exhibition. Forty-four percent of the dangerous overlapping prescriptions were written by more than one prescriber.

"Patients with chronic pain are often under the care of several different physicians to manage their different disease states," said Catherine Oliphant, Pharm.D., a professor of pharmacy practice at Idaho State University and faculty advisor for the study led by student pharmacist James Berain. "This co-management can lead to patients receiving unintentional prescription combinations that put them at higher risk for an opioid overdose."

Given that 56 percent of the dangerous combinations were intentionally written by the same prescriber, the results also suggest that continued education on appropriate opioid prescribing is warranted, Oliphant said.

Researchers from Idaho State University examined all prescriptions of controlled substances for 301,975 patients that were reported to the Idaho Prescription Drug Monitoring Program (PDMP) in 2017. Anyone who dispenses these drugs, including pharmacists as well as some physicians and other clinicians, is required to report the action to a PDMP. PDMPs are now available in every state and the District of Columbia. Physicians and other prescribers can then access the records before writing new prescriptions to ensure patient safety, though review of the PDMP is not required.

In the Idaho study, a third of the patients receiving a controlled substance were identified as chronic users, meaning they have taken the drugs for more than 90 days without a break of at least seven days. Nearly a quarter of those chronic users were also prescribed a benzodiazepine or other central nervous system (CNS) depressants -- combinations the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns against because of potential overdose.

Pharmacists are in a prime position to intervene when identifying patients who are placed on both opioids and benzodiazepines or other CNS depressants, Oliphant said. Pharmacists can facilitate communication between prescribers, educate patients and prescribers on the risks of the dangerous drug combinations, and prescribe an opioid-reversal agent such as naloxone.

Environmental damage caused by human activity can reduce the number of plant and animal species dramatically. At the same time, only very little is known about how biodiversity recovers after the ecosystem has stopped being polluted and has been cleaned up. As was common in the mid-1900s, Lake Constance, one of the largest freshwater lakes in Europe, suffered from eutrophication, or nutrient contamination caused by agricultural and waste water run-off. A study by the universities in Konstanz and Glasgow (Scotland, UK) has now revealed that one European whitefish species expanded its genetic variation through hybridization with other whitefish species during the period of eutrophication. The study, led by the Konstanz-based biologist Dr Jasminca Behrmann Godel along with her colleague Dr Kathryn R. Elmer from the University of Glasgow, was published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. This genetic mixture contributed to an expansion in biodiversity once the ecosystem recovered.

The diminished water quality in Lake Constance due to elevated nutrient contamination (eutrophication) destroyed the natural habitats and led to the extinction of two of the five whitefish species that had only existed in this lake as well as to the hybridization of the three remaining species. This had an impact on commercial fisheries in the lake. In the 1980s, concerted efforts to reduce eutrophication quickly re-established Lake Constance's original state.

Biologists examined the functional phenotypical and genomic variation of the European whitefish (gangfisch: Coregonus lavaretus macrophthalamus) in order to demonstrate that its biodiversity expanded within a short period of time after the ecosystem had recovered from nutrient contamination. In less than ten generations, the European whitefish developed a wide variation in the number of gill rakers - which are used to filter plankton from the water - thus rendering it able to occupy a broader ecological niche than before eutrophication. This is one of the fastest evolutionary rates ever recorded in the animal kingdom.

The study presumes that this rapid niche expansion was made possible by genetic variation that developed as a result of hybridization during the period of eutrophication. "This new diversity in European whitefish is variation within a species that does not replace the loss of biodiversity resulting from eutrophication", says Dr Jasminca Behrmann-Godel.

The results demonstrate that functional variation can quickly recover once an ecosystem has been restored. The researchers think this potential could be dependent upon genetic architecture, the ecological context and evolutionary history.

Students given extra points if they met "The 8-hour Challenge" -- averaging eight hours of sleep for five nights during final exams week -- did better than those who snubbed (or flubbed) the incentive, according to Baylor University research.

"Better sleep helped rather than harmed final exam performance, which is contrary to most college students' perceptions that they have to sacrifice either studying or sleeping. And you don't have to be an 'A' student or have detailed education on sleep for this to work," said Michael Scullin, Ph.D., director of Baylor's Sleep Neuroscience and Cognition Laboratory and assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience in Baylor's College of Arts & Sciences.

While students who successfully met the sleep challenge received extra points, the "mini-incentive" was not included in the analysis of how well they performed on the finals, stressed Elise King, assistant professor of interior design in Baylor's Robbins College of Health and Human Sciences.

"They didn't just perform well because they received extra points," she said. "Students know that sacrificing sleep to complete school work is not a healthy choice, but they assume they don't have a choice, often remarking that there aren't enough hours in the day for coursework, extracurriculars, jobs, etc.
"

This removes that excuse."

Research participants included undergraduate interior design students and students in upper-level psychology and neuroscience classes. While the psychology classes emphasized education about sleep, the interior design students did not receive any formal training in sleep. Those who opted to take the challenge wore wristband sleep-monitoring devices for five days to ensure accurate study results.

"The students didn't need the extra credit to perform better, and they weren't really better students from the get-go," Scullin said. "If you statistically correct for whether a student was an A, B, C, or D student before their final exam, sleeping 8 hours was associated with a four-point grade boost -- even prior to applying extra credit."

The collaborative interior design study -- "The 8-Hour Challenge: Incentivizing Sleep During End-of-Term Assessments -- was published in the Journal of Interior Design. Scullin's study of psychology students -- "The 8-Hour Sleep Challenge During Final Exams Week" -- was published in Teaching of Psychology.

Poor sleep is common during finals as students cut back on sleep, deal with more stress, use more caffeine and are exposed to more bright light, all of which may disrupt sleep. Fewer than 10 percent of undergraduates maintain the recommended average of 8 hours a night or even the recommended minimum of 7 hours, previous research shows.

But with incentives, "we can potentially completely reverse the proportion of students meeting minimum sleep recommendations -- 7 hours a night -- from fewer than 15 percent up to 90 percent," Scullin said. "Half of students can even meet optimal sleep recommendations of 8 to 9 hours."

* PSYCHOLOGY STUDENTS

In the study of psychology students, 34 students in two undergraduate courses could earn extra credit if they averaged 8 hours of sleep during final exams week or at least improved upon their sleep from earlier in the semester.

The 24 who opted to take the challenge averaged 8.5 hours of sleep, with 17 meeting the goal. On the final exam, students who slept more than 8 hours nightly performed better than those who opted out or slept less than 7.9 hours. (The incentive was 8 points -- the equivalent of 1 percent of a student's overall class grade.)

"It's worth noting that one student who had a D-plus grade before the final but slept more than 8 hours a week during finals week, remarked that it was the 'first time my brain worked while taking an exam,'" Scullin said.

* INTERIOR DESIGN STUDENTS

In the interior design study challenge, students earned credit (10 points on a 200-point project) if they averaged 8 or more hours a night but received no grade change if they averaged 7 to 7.9 hours a night.

Of the 27 students enrolled in the program, 22 attempted the challenge. Compared with a group of 22 students who did not try for the extra points, very few (9 percent) averaged 8 hours or even 7 hours (14 percent).

The 8 hour challenge increased the percentage of 8? and 7?hour sleepers to 59 percent and 86 percent respectively. Students who took part in the challenge slept an average of 98 minutes more per night compared to students who were not offered the incentive but were monitored.

"Critically, the additional sleep did not come at a cost to project performance," King said. "Students who showed more consistent sleep performed better than those who had less consistent sleep. And students who achieved the challenge performed as well or better than those who did not take the challenge."

In a study of sleep and creativity done in 2017, King and Scullin found that interior design students with highly variable sleep habits -- cycling between "all-nighters" and "catch-up" nights -- had decreased cognition in attention and creativity, especially with major projects. Design students customarily complete finals projects rather than final exams.

"Whether or not they 'pull an all-nighter,' when students cut their sleep, the effects are obvious," King said. "They have trouble paying attention during class, and they aren't as productive during studio time."

She noted that there is a cultural acceptability -- at least in design professions -- related to sleep deprivation, thanks in part to the notion of the "tortured artist" who finds inspiration in the wee hours.

"Some fields might find it unprofessional, but for many years, in design, sacrificing sleep was viewed as a rite of passage. That's something we're trying to change," King said. "Even during stressful deadline weeks, students can maintain healthy sleep habits."

"To be successful at the challenge, students need to manage their time better during the day. Getting more sleep at night then allows them to be more efficient the next day," Scullin said. "By training students in their first year of college, if not earlier, that they can sleep well during finals week without sacrificing performance, we may help to resolve the 'global sleep epidemic' that plagues students in America and abroad."

Note: These presentations at the American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting are abstracts #93 and #1626. Abstract #93 is titled Checkpoint Blockade Therapy May Sensitize Aggressive and Indolent Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma to Subsequent Therapy. The study will be presented in the Pacific Ballroom at the Marriott Marquis San Diego in California, at 1 pm EST. Abstract #1626 is titled Checkpoint Blockade Therapy May Sensitize Hodgkin Lymphoma to Subsequent Therapy. The poster will be presented in Hall GH at the San Diego Convention Center at 9:15 pm EST.

New drugs that harness the body's immune system to destroy cancer cells appear to increase the effectiveness of later drug therapies for non-Hodgkin and Hodgkin lymphoma patients, new research suggests. This happens, scientists say, even for repeat drug therapies whose initial attempts failed to stop or reverse the disease.

Researchers at NYU School of Medicine and its Perlmutter Cancer Center who led the pair of new studies, both presented Dec. 1 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology in San Diego, say their findings are the first multicenter data to show that even when "second-line" immunotherapy fails to control the disease, it likely "sensitizes" lymphoma patients to better respond to future use of drugs that did not work very well the first time. Few treatment options exist, researchers say, for relapsing non-Hodgkin lymphoma patients.

Both studies involved a review of the medical records of men and women treated between 2012 and 2018 at 17 medical centers in the United States and Canada, all of whom failed to have a lasting response to initial therapy, including stem cell transplantations and/or standard chemotherapy with or without brentuximab vedotin (marketed as Adcentris), a drug that primes the immune system and aids chemotherapy. Subsequent therapy with so-called checkpoint-blockade inhibitors, such as ipilimumab (Yervoy) and nivolumab (Opdivo), were also not successful in controlling cancer spread. When effective, such drugs work by turning off inhibitory switches, or "checkpoints," on immune T cell surfaces, which are known to prevent the immune system from identifying and attacking tumor cells.

However, in 59 patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, 30 responded to additional chemotherapy or other drug treatment after having received checkpoint inhibitors. Of the 29 patients still alive and receiving therapy, 16 have not seen any cancer spread.

In 112 patients with Hodgkin lymphoma who received checkpoint blockade therapy, 81 needed some form of follow-up drug treatment. Sixty-six remain alive, and 30 have not experienced any worsening of their disease.

"These are very high success rates for post-checkpoint blockade therapy, especially in patients for whom several drug therapies have failed, including the same or similar drugs used again after checkpoint therapy," says senior study investigator and hematologist-oncologist Catherine Diefenbach, MD.

Diefenbach, an assistant professor at NYU Langone and clinical director of lymphoma program services at its Perlmutter Cancer Center, cautioned that prospective clinical trials, in which patients are closely monitored from the start of their therapy over long periods of time, are needed before researchers can conclude whether or not checkpoint blockade therapy was responsible for the greater effectiveness of subsequent treatments.

"What our current study strongly suggests, however, is that the benefits of checkpoint blockade therapy are not limited to their initial ability to stop the disease," says lead study investigator Nicole Carreau, MD, a postdoctoral hematology and oncology fellow at NYU Langone and Perlmutter.

Both kinds of lymphoma are cancers of immune cells that help the body fight off infections and other diseases, says Carreau. Non-Hodgkin lymphoma is more common in the United States, with more than 72,000 new cases diagnosed each year (with more than 20,000 deaths from the disease), compared with about 8,500 for Hodgkin lymphoma (and over 1,000 deaths).