Brain

The global problem of unowned domestic cats, driven by the cats' phenomenal reproductive success, carries significant economic, animal welfare and biodiversity costs. Big-data research led by an expert on veterinary medicine and infectious diseases at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has found that although more than 80% of cats in Australia were desexed, only a fraction have had surgery before reaching puberty, thus creating a "pregnancy gap". To close this gap and prevent unwanted litters, it is recommended that the age of desexing is before four months.

The research was led by Professor Julia Beatty, Head of the Department of Veterinary Clinical Sciences; Chair Professor of Veterinary Medicine and Infectious Diseases; and Director of the Centre for Companion Animal Health at CityU, in collaboration with the University of Sydney. Their findings have been recently published in the scientific journal Scientific Reports, titled "A shift towards early-age desexing of cats under veterinary care in Australia".

This is the first large scale analysis of feline desexing practices in Australia using outcomes documented in the patient medical record. Researchers at CityU and the University of Sydney studied anonymous medical records of over 52,000 cats brought into vet clinics, including pet cats, breeding cats, cats owned by shelters, and semi-owned cats in Australia.

Early onset of puberty in female cats

The team found that despite a clear shift over time towards desexing cats at a young age, only 21.5% of female cats were desexed at four months or younger, while 59.8% of female cats had been desexed by six months of age. "Cats' early onset of puberty can be as young as 3.5 months of age in females," explained Professor Beatty, who started this research with her team from the University of Sydney before she joined CityU. "This creates a potential pregnancy gap between the time the female cat reaches puberty and the age at surgery."

Also, female cats were less likely than males to be desexed (at all) or to have undergone early-age desexing. "A female can give birth to up to six kittens in each litter, up to three litters every year. So this is suboptimal for preventing unwanted litters," she said.

The recommendation of early-age desexing is made by global organisations including the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Australia, the International Society for Feline Medicine and The Cat Group in the UK, as an important means to prevent unwanted kittens heading into overburdened and under-resourced shelters or into the stray cat population, which is detrimental to their well-being and puts additional stress on wildlife already impacted by other predators, habitat loss and global warming.

Early-age desexing is safe

"Evidence-based studies have shown that earlier desexing for cats is not only safe, it also offers advantages including shorter surgery time, a smaller incision and a quicker recovery, and reduced cancer risk," Professor Beatty added.

Their latest study confirms that while the desexing rates in Australia are among the highest reported internationally, compared with 80% in the USA and 43% in Italy, opportunities to control reproduction by prepubertal desexing are still being lost. "We hope the findings will inform the design of front-line strategies promoting prepubertal desexing," she said.

Other factors affect desexing

They also found that whether a cat was desexed or not, would be influenced by several factors. For example, purebred cats were less likely to be desexed than mixed breeds. Cats born in winter had the lowest odds of being desexed in each age group. Cats that were not desexed were more common in remote and low income areas.

"We really hope the research encourages anyone caring for a free-roaming cat in Hong Kong or elsewhere to arrange for that cat to be desexed, preferably before they reach four months of age. This would be a win for animal welfare and would help to reduce the number of unwanted kittens," said Professor Beatty.

New research led by Monterey Bay Aquarium reveals that even the revered white shark cannot escape the impacts of a changing ocean. The study, published in Scientific Reports, finds that unprecedented sightings of juvenile white sharks at the northern end of Monterey Bay signal a significant shift in the young white sharks' range.

Researchers conclude the northward range shift demonstrates the young sharks are being subjected to a loss of suitable thermal habitat, meaning water temperatures within their preferred temperature range are becoming harder to find.

"Nature has many ways to tell us the status quo is being disrupted, but it's up to us to listen," said Monterey Bay Aquarium Chief Scientist Dr. Kyle Van Houtan. "These sharks - by venturing into territory where they have not historically been found - are telling us how the ocean is being affected by climate change."

Aquarium scientists and their research partners began using electronic tags to learn about juvenile white sharks in southern California two decades ago when they were preparing to display the young white sharks to the public.

When the dramatic North Pacific marine heatwave hit the California coast between 2014-2016, these same researchers started to notice uncharacteristic sightings of juvenile white sharks in nearshore, central California waters near Aptos, California. This is farther north than young white sharks have ever been seen before as the animals historically remain in warmer waters in the southern California Current.

Water temperature in the Aptos area averages about 55 degrees Fahrenheit (13 degrees Celsius), but temperature extremes have become more common since the heatwave hit, rising as high as 69 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees Celsius) in August 2020.

Scientists conducted the research by collecting data from tags the Aquarium and its partners deployed on juvenile white sharks beginning in 2002 to see where the animals were spending most of their time.

The team analyzed 22 million electronic data records from 14 sharks and then compared these data to 38 years of ocean temperatures to map the cold edge of the animals' thermal preferences, or "niche."

The study charts the significant northward shift in the young white sharks' range.

Between 1982 and 2013, the northernmost edge of the juveniles' range was located near Santa Barbara (34° N). But after the marine heatwave, their range shifted dramatically north to Bodega Bay (38.5° N). Ever since, the young sharks' range limit has hovered near Monterey (36° N).

"After studying juvenile white shark behavior and movements in southern California for the last 16 years, it is very interesting to see this northerly shift in nursery habitat use," said Dr. Chris Lowe, a co-author of the study and director of the Shark Lab at California State University, Long Beach. "I think this is what many biologists have expected to see as the result of climate change and rising ocean temperatures. Frankly, I'll be surprised if we don't see this northerly shift across more species."

Because this shift took scientists by surprise, the team turned to novel sources of data such as community science and recreational fishing records to document this northward movement of the population.

"This study would not have been possible without contributions from our community scientists and treasured Aquarium volunteers," says Dr. Van Houtan. "Eric Mailander, a local firefighter, provided a decade of detailed logbook records of shark sightings, and volunteer Carol Galginaitis transcribed those hand-written data into an electronic database."

The researchers say this study reinforces what scientists have been saying for years: animals and the living world are revealing the impacts of climate change.

"White sharks, otters, kelp, lobsters, corals, redwoods, monarch butterflies - these are all showing us that climate change is happening right here in our backyard," says Dr. Van Houtan. "It's time for us to take notice and listen to this chorus from nature. We know that greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly disrupting our climate and this is taking hold in many ways. Our study showed one example of juvenile white sharks appearing in Monterey Bay. But let's be clear: The sharks are not the problem. Our emissions are the problem. We need to act on climate change and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels."

Samara Polytech chemists investigated the potential anticarcinogenic effects of extracts obtained from plant materials of lingonberry, raspberry, black chokeberry, grapes, Krasnodar green tea, ginseng, fireweed and coffee, and also evaluated their effect on the growth and viability of colon cancer cells. The research was carried out within the framework of the state assignment for fundamental research No. 0778-2020-0005, its results were published Dec. 29, 2020 in the journal Proceedings of Universities. Applied Chemistry and Biotechnology (DOI: https://doi.org/10.21285/2227-2925-2020-10-4-613-626).

Prevention is the most cost-effective and long-term strategy for controlling this disease. It is now well known that almost 50% of all malignant tumors can be prevented with proper nutrition based on natural products with a preventive effect.

"Polyphenols are the largest variety of plant components. It is this class of chemical compounds that have shown powerful antioxidant properties. They actively fight against cellular damage caused by free radicals, slowing down the aging and preventing oxidation. In addition, they protect the body from inflammatory, cardiovascular, neurodegenerative diseases, and some forms of cancer", one of the authors of this study, associate professor of the Department of Technology and Organization of Public Catering of Samara Polytech Natalya Eremeeva explains. "We studied in detail the beneficial properties of lingonberry, raspberry, black chokeberry, grapes, Krasnodar green tea, ginseng, fireweed and coffee.

When conducting the MTT cytotoxicity test, the scientists found that the ginseng extract was the most cytotoxic, and the coffee extract was the least cytotoxic. It has been proven that all the studied extracts are able to reduce the expression of pro-inflammatory genes. The most pronounced inhibitory effect on the expression of these genes is possessed by the extracts of chokeberry and fireweed.

The research team supposes that this study may serve as a basis for conducting in vivo experiments to determine anticarcinogenic activity.

Exposure to sexual assault in the U.S. military doubled the odds that a service member would leave the military within 28 months, and sexual harassment was associated with roughly 8% of all military separations during this same time period, according to a new report from the RAND Corporation.

Specifically, the report estimates that sexual assaults were associated with 2,000 more separations than would normally be expected, and another 8,000 separations were associated with sexual harassment.

"Sexual assault and sexual harassment are associated with a wide range of harms to individual service members, but this study highlights another negative impact of these crimes - higher rates of attrition and associated harms to force readiness." said Andrew Morral, senior behavioral scientist at nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND and lead author of the report. "We estimate that sexual assaults and harassment of service members that occurred in a single year were associated with the premature loss of at least 16,000 person-years of service over the following 28 months."

The researchers found that separations from the military following sexual assault or sexual harassment are disproportionately voluntary, meaning the service member opts not to reenlist of their own volition. This trend harms military readiness as well as the wallets of affected service members, according to the report. Because military compensation is weighted toward retirement and deferred benefits, those who leave the service early may forego considerable compensation.

Further, while separations from the military following sexual assault or sexual harassment are disproportionally voluntary for both men and women, the research shows that men are especially likely to seek voluntary separations following a sexual assault or sexual harassment.

To combat these separation and force readiness issues, the authors recommend that the Department of Defense prioritize sexual harassment training, prevention and response, including highlighting its prevalence among both male and female service members. Additionally, the DoD should continue to study how reporting a sexual assault affects separation.

The report, drawing on findings from the 2014 RAND Military Workplace Study and military separation data from 2015-2016, assesses the effects of sexual assault and sexual harassment on service members' decisions to leave military service. Completed in 2019, and recently cleared for publication by DoD's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office (SAPRO), the report is the latest in a series of reports that take a more detailed look at specific findings from the initial survey.

It is likely that the actual numbers of military separations caused by sexual assault and sexual harassment are underestimated because this study only reflects a 28-month window of time and thus only a fraction of all the sexual assault and sexual harassment experiences during the careers of the service members included in the 2014 study.

Betelgeuse is normally one of the brightest, most recognizable stars of the winter sky, marking the left shoulder of the constellation Orion. But lately, it has been behaving strangely: an unprecedentedly large drop in its brightness has been observed in early 2020 (Figure 1), which has prompted speculation that Betelgeuse may be about to explode.

To find out more, an international team of scientists, including Ken'ichi Nomoto at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU), conducted a rigorous examination of Betelgeuse. They concluded that the star is in the early core helium-burning phase (which is more than 100,000 years before an explosion happens) and has smaller mass and radius--and is closer to Earth--than previously thought. They also showed that smaller brightness variations of Betelgeuse have been driven by stellar pulsations, and suggested that the recent large dimming event involved a dust cloud.

The research team is led by Dr. Meridith Joyce from the Australian National University (ANU), who was an invited speaker at Kavli IPMU in January 2020, and includes Dr. Shing-Chi Leung, a former Kavli IPMU project researcher and a current postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology, and Dr. Chiaki Kobayashi, an associate professor at the University of Hertfordshire, who has been an affiliate member of Kavli IPMU.

The team analyzed the brightness variation of Betelgeuse (Figure 2) by using evolutionary, hydrodynamic and seismic modelling. They achieved a clearer idea than before that Betelgeuse is currently burning helium in its core. They also showed that stellar pulsations driven by the so-called kappa-mechanism is causing the star to continuously brighten or fade with two periods of 185 (+-13.5) days and approximately 400 days. But the large dip in brightness in early 2020 is unprecedented, and is likely due to a dust cloud in front of Betelgeuse, as seen in the image (Figure 1).

Their analysis reported a present-day mass of 16.5 to 19 solar mass--which is slightly lower than the most-recent estimates. The study also revealed how big Betelgeuse is, as well as its distance from Earth. The star's actual size has been a bit of a mystery: earlier studies, for instance, suggested it could be bigger than the orbit of Jupiter. However, the team's results showed Betelgeuse only extends out to two-thirds of that, with a radius 750 times the radius of the sun. Once the physical size of the star is known, it will be possible to determine its distance from Earth. Thus far, the team's results show it is a mere 530 light years from us, or 25 percent closer than previously thought.

Their results imply that Betelgeuse is not at all close to exploding, and that it is too far from Earth for the eventual explosion to have significant impact here, even though it is still a really big deal when a supernova goes off. And as Betelgeuse is the closest candidate for such an explosion, it gives us a rare opportunity to study what happens to stars like this before they explode.

New research finds caffeine consumed during pregnancy can change important brain pathways that could lead to behavioral problems later in life. Researchers in the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) analyzed thousands of brain scans of nine and ten-year-olds, and revealed changes in the brain structure in children who were exposed to caffeine in utero.

"These are sort of small effects and it's not causing horrendous psychiatric conditions, but it is causing minimal but noticeable behavioral issues that should make us consider long term effects of caffeine intake during pregnancy," said John Foxe, Ph.D., director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience, and principal investigator of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development or ABCD Study at the University of Rochester. "I suppose the outcome of this study will be a recommendation that any caffeine during pregnancy is probably not such a good idea."

Elevated behavioral issues, attention difficulties, and hyperactivity are all symptoms that researchers observed in these children. "What makes this unique is that we have a biological pathway that looks different when you consume caffeine through pregnancy," said Zachary Christensen, a M.D/Ph.D. candidate in the Medical Science Training Program and first author on the paper published in the journal Neuropharmacology. "Previous studies have shown that children perform differently on IQ tests, or they have different psychopathology, but that could also be related to demographics, so it's hard to parse that out until you have something like a biomarker. This gives us a place to start future research to try to learn exactly when the change is occurring in the brain."

Investigators analyzed brain scans of more than 9,000 nine and ten-year-old participants in the ABCD study. They found clear changes in how the white matter tracks - which form connections between brain regions - were organized in children whose mothers reported they consumed caffeine during pregnancy.

URMC is one of 21-sites across the country collecting data for the ABCD study, the largest long-term study of brain development and child health. The study is funded by the National Institutes of Health. Ed Freedman, Ph.D., is the principal investigator of the ABCD study in Rochester and a co-author of the study.

"It is important to point out this is a retrospective study," said Foxe. "We are relying on mothers to remember how much caffeine they took in while they were pregnant."

Previous studies have found caffeine can have a negative effect on pregnancy. It is also known that a fetus does not have the enzyme necessary to breakdown caffeine when it crosses the placenta. This new study reveals that caffeine could also leave a lasting impact on neurodevelopment.

The researchers point out that it is unclear if the impact of the caffeine on the fetal brain varies from one trimester to the next, or when during gestation these structural changes occur.

"Current clinical guidelines already suggest limiting caffeine intake during pregnancy - no more than two normal cups of coffee a day," Christensen said. "In the long term, we hope to develop better guidance for mothers, but in the meantime, they should ask their doctor as concerns arise."

One of humanity's biggest challenges right now is reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Research groups worldwide are trying to find ways to efficiently separate carbon dioxide (CO2) from the mixture of gases emitted from industrial plants and power stations. Among the many strategies for accomplishing this, membrane separation is an attractive, inexpensive option; it involves using polymer membranes that selectively filter CO2 from a mix of gases.

Recent studies have focused on adding low amounts of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) into polymer matrices to enhance their properties. MOFs are compounds made of a metallic center bonded to organic molecules in a very orderly fashion, producing porous crystals. When added to polymer membranes, MOFs can enhance their gas separation performance as well as their stability and tolerance to harsh conditions. However, one of the main issues of integrating MOFs into polymer membranes is finding compatible compounds with favorable interactions, such as covalent bonds. Unfortunately, those which have been tried require very expensive synthesis and materials.

To tackle this issue, an international team of scientists recently conducted a study that was published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. Led by Professor Tae-Hyun Kim from Incheon National University, Korea, the scientists focused on incorporating a zirconium-based MOF called 'UiO-66' into a multi-polymer matrix they had previously developed. They achieved this by modifying the MOFs so that they would readily form covalent bonds with the main strands of the polymer matrix.

The scientists synthesized UiO-66-NB, which is UiO-66 with norbornene units, a small organic molecule. Through a simple synthesis process, norbornene units can become links in the main polymer chains of the matrix. In this way, the norbornene in UiO-66-NB incorporates the MOFs into the matrix, as Prof. Kim explains, "Instead of simply blending the MOFs and polymers, we found a new and efficient method for incorporating MOFs into the polymer matrix via covalent bonds; this strengthens the interactions at the interfaces of both compounds and creates defect-free polymer matrices."

The characteristics and performance of the MOF-filled polymer membranes were outstanding: their permeability towards CO2 was enhanced without significantly compromising its selectivity. Their CO2/N2 separation performance approached the theoretical Robeson upper bound set in 2019. Additionally, the membranes were not only remarkably tolerant to harsh conditions such as high pressure or temperature switching, but also very stable over long periods of time of almost a year.

These achievements are a step in the right direction toward removing the barriers for commercialization that these polymer membranes face for industrial applications. Excited about the results, Prof. Kim remarks, "We believe our findings will open up new strategies to assess potential interfaces between MOFs and polymer matrices for high-performance gas separation."

Let us hope this technology keeps evolving so that we can keep excess CO2 away from our atmosphere!

Classifying a death as suicide may be easiest for medical examiners and coroners in the western United States, which reports the highest suicide rates officially. Suicide by firearm is the leading method there, and usually clear in terms of evidence.

By contrast, suicides by drug overdose, spurred primarily by the opioid epidemic in the remainder of the country, are less obvious to investigators.

But a new West Virginia University-led injury mortality study combines most drug overdose deaths with all suicides into an expanded self-injury category. Exposing a mental health crisis that has unraveled across the United States over the past two decades, study data have direct implications for suicide prevention efforts.

Ian Rockett, professor emeritus of epidemiology in the WVU School of Public Health, spearheaded the research that examined fatal self-injury in the United States from 1999 to 2018. Measuring self-injury mortality (SIM)--suicides plus estimated "non-suicide" drug self-intoxication deaths--circumvents suicide misclassification and more accurately accounts for fatal self-injuries.

"Broadening the definition of SIM to encompass most drug overdose deaths, even if they don't meet the standards used by medical examiners and coroners to classify them as suicides, shows the whole nation is afflicted by a mental health crisis," Rockett said. "On the other hand, if we only represent SIM by registered suicides, this crisis misleadingly appears concentrated in western states."

Rockett, also adjunct professor in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Rochester Medical Center, elaborated on differences in suicide classification between regions.

"Suicides likely have been easiest to detect in the west because the leading method is shooting and it is highly lethal," he said. "The remainder of the country has been more severely affected by the opioid epidemic through the opening decades of the 21st century. Our previous research indicating substantial overlap with a more hidden suicide epidemic, led me to develop SIM in collaboration with a very talented group of multidisciplinary researchers and practitioners about six or seven years ago. That the suicide epidemic was most pronounced in the west and the opioid epidemic elsewhere in the nation -- West Virginia stands out -- motivated us to look at SIM versus suicide rates across the country as a whole and across time."

The findings appear in Lancet's EClinicalMedicine. Other WVU researchers joining Rockett on the study were Brian Hendricks, research assistant professor of epidemiology, and James Berry, chair of the Department of Behavioral Medicine and Psychiatry.

The research team tapped into cause-of-death data for all 50 states and Washington, D.C. from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research.

After broadening the SIM definition, they found the national annual average percentage change in the SIM rate was 4.3% versus 1.8% for the suicide rate. By 2017-2018, all states except Nebraska posted a SIM rate of at least 21 deaths per 100,000 population. All located in the west, only five states had a rate that high in 1999-2000.

"Despite victims sharing many common risk factors, suicide and drug overdose deaths tend to be treated separately in the scientific literature, media, health care system, and by funding agencies and prevention programs," Rockett said. "Among these risk factors are unemployment, family discord, unmanaged and mismanaged physical pain, and various psychiatric disorders that include alcohol and other substance use disorders.

"While most people dying by overdose may not have intended to die, they were engaging in repetitive, intentional, self-injurious behaviors that they understood markedly increased their chances of dying prematurely. Calling these deaths 'accidents' (the forensic classification most often used in the U.S.) or 'unintentional' (the term used by the CDC) mischaracterizes what occurred, even if consistent with the classification criteria used by medical examiners and coroners."

Early data indicate the COVID-19 pandemic is making the national mental health crisis worse.

"Opioid and other drug-overdose deaths continue to rise in spite of medical efforts to make life-saving medications for opioid use disorder available to patients and communities," said co-author Hilary Connery, from McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School. "Many persons suffering drug use disorders become hopeless--they relapse frequently, continue to experience relationship losses, health consequences, and economic instability, and they frequently suffer other mental disorders, such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other anxiety disorders. We know that people with addiction have 10 times the rate of suicide compared to those without addiction."

Another of Rockett's co-investigators, Eric Caine, professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical Center, underscored that this work has major implications for future suicide prevention efforts. It is especially important to deploy programs "upstream" when groups and individuals can be helped with fundamentally distressing problems long before they ever become suicidal, he said. Recognizing a patient's full story - risk factors, long-term health history, socioeconomic experiences - is key to providing lifesaving, comprehensive care.

"Ultimately it is less about 'classifying suicide' and more about understanding that suicide and overdose fatalities reflect common social and psychological risk factors that were present long before death," Caine said.

"There are large groups of persons in our country who have suffered adverse early life experiences, family and social turmoil, economic hardships and life disappoints, as well chronic ailments; many die prematurely. Our goal must be to eliminate or mitigate those circumstances. Separating these groups using misclassified or misleading postmortem labels does little to enhance prevention. We need to focus on the lives of persons in these groups long before they get close to dying if we aspire to overcome these tragic losses of life."

The Vlasov-Poisson equations describe many important physical phenomena such as the distribution of gravitating particles in the interstellar space, high-temperature plasma kinetics, and the Landau damping effect. A joint team of scientists from the Mathematical Institute of RUDN University and the Mathematical Institute of the University of Munich suggested a new method to obtain stationary solutions for a system of Vlasov-Poisson equations in a three-dimensional case. The obtained solutions describe the phenomena of stellar dynamics. The results of the study were published in the Doklady Mathematics journal.

Modern-day physics distinguishes between four main types of interactions. Elementary particle physics covers strong and weak interactions, electromagnetism is studied by electrodynamics, and systems with gravitational interaction fall into the scope of a special branch of physics called gravidynamics. On the space scale, gravitational fields play a key role. One domain of study within gravidynamics is called stellar dynamics.

"We have considered a three-dimensional stationary system of the Vlasov-Poisson equations concerning the distribution function of gravitating matter, local density, and Newtonian potential, and developed a new method for obtaining spherically symmetric stationary solutions. This was the result of our fruitful collaboration with renowned German scientists J. Batt and E. Joern," said Alexander Skubachevskii, a D Sc in Physics and Mathematics, and the Head of the Nikolskii Mathematical Institute of RUDN University.

The movement and interaction of multiple particles in gravitational, electric, and electromagnetic fields are described using the equations that were developed by the eminent Soviet physicist Anatoly Vlasov. They model the dynamics and stationary distribution of a system of particles in view of the influence of a self-consistent field. The Vlasov-Poisson equation for a system of gravitating particles consists of the Poisson equation covering the gravitational potential and the Vlasov equation covering the function of density distribution in interconnected particles. Vlasov's model was initially supposed to describe electron gas dynamics. The model views processes in plasma not as a series of collisions between individual particles but as a simplified system in which particles interact through a field, and the field, in turn, correlates with the particle density distribution function. Therefore, the Vlasov equations are sometimes called equations with a self-consistent field. Together with his German colleagues, the mathematician from RUDN University established the theorem of expandability, i.e. demonstrated how the local density function should look like in order for it to be supplemented to a stationary spherically symmetric solution of the Vlasov-Poisson system.

Researchers from the HSE Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience have proposed a new method to process magnetoencephalography (MEG) data, which helps find cortical activation areas with higher precision. The method can be used in both basic research and clinical practice to diagnose a wide range of neurological disorders and to prepare patients for brain surgery. The paper describing the algorithm was published in the journal NeuroImage.

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a method based on measuring very weak magnetic fields (several orders of magnitude weaker than the Earth's magnetic field) induced by the brain's electrical activity. When using MEG, researchers face the complicated task of understanding which areas inside the brain were active when they only have the measurements of sensors placed around the head. This problem is called an 'inverse problem' and fundamentally has no universal solution: any set of measurements can be explained by an endless number of different configurations of neural activity sources on the cortex.

To make application of MEG practical, special mathematical methods are used to turn sensor signals into cortical activity maps. These methods can be categorized into two groups. As part of the so-called 'global' approach, the multitude of possible solutions for the inverse problem is narrowed down based on the generalized a priori assumptions on brain activity. Under these constraints researchers look for a distribution of sources in the cortex that would explain the measured data. The 'local' methods, including the algorithm described in the paper (ReciPSIICOS), aim to find separate sources, and only after that, to create a complete image of brain activity.

ReciPSIICOS uses adaptive beamformers (BF) - a method to process sensor measurements that allows detection of an activity signal of a target neuronal population. For this purpose, it attempts to mute the signals from other sources, but not from all of them as is done in the 'global' approach, but instead only the ones that are active at the moment. When suppressing only active signals, this approach is able to provide a considerably higher fidelity in activity visualization as compared to the 'global' approach. However, this method can also suppress the target signals begotten by neuronal ensembles activated simultaneously with neuronal populations in other brain areas. In real-life conditions, such correlation reflects the interaction between neuronal populations, which is an inherent property of the brain, and researchers have to look for methods to overcome this obstacle.

Information on active neuronal populations and the nature of their interaction is encoded in a special covariance matrix, which can be calculated based on the sensor data. This matrix is used by the beamforming algorithm to decide which of the sources should be suppressed. Strictly speaking, this approach is applicable only when sources do not interact: information on such interaction is also contained in the correlation matrix and negatively impacts beamforming algorithm performance. Using the observed data model and the correlation matrix model, the researchers developed a mathematical algorithm that is able to erase the information on sources' interaction from the correlation matrix. This way they extended the range of applicability of the beamforming method to the environment with synchronous neuronal sources and provided the necessary precision in the visualization of interacting neuronal populations.
'Magnetoencephalography technology combines the ability to register precise aspects of the temporal evolution in neuronal activity and a potentially high fidelity of localizing the active neuronal populations. The first feature comes from registration of electrical activity that is changing significantly faster than the hemodynamic responses exploited by fMRI, a popular functional brain imaging modality. To achieve a high precision in spatial localization complicated mathematical methods are needed. The family of ReciPSIICOS and PSIICOS methods is an example of mathematical algorithms aimed at increasing the spatial resolution of MEG modality detect active and interacting neuronal populations,' said Alexey Ossadtchi, Ph.D., Director of the HSE Centre for Bioelectric Interfaces, the author of the new methods.

To evaluate the algorithm performance, the researchers first generated a dataset that mimics the signals received by the sensors in real-life and tested four methods on it: two types of ReciPSIICOS and two previously developed algorithms (linearly constrained minimum variance (LCMV) beamformers, and Minimum-Norm Estimates (MNE) approach). In situations when there is no correlation between signals, LCMV and both ReciPSIICOS methods work well, but when there is a correlation, ReciPSIICOS handles the task much better than its predecessors. Under the stress test for the forward modelling accuracy the results are similar: ReciPSIICOS proved to be less sensitive to inaccuracy of the models used, which are inevitable in practice. The scholars also demonstrated operability and high performance characteristics of the new approach on several real MEG datasets characterized by the presence of synchronous neuronal sources that could not be adequately processed by the classical beamforming algorithm.

Professionalisation in any field requires long-term experience and training. In the past decades, studies have demonstrated that the professionalisation of athletes and artists create differences in the behaviour of the brain while carrying out activities related to their area of expertise.

To detect the effects of media professionalisation in the brain, a research team from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, the Instituto Ràdio Televisió Espanyola and the Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Seville conducted a study published in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience in which audiovisual contents were presented to a group of media professionals and a control group, with the aims of registering and analysing their brain activity. The study covers what happens to professionals in audiovisuals when they view media works, using a triple approach: eyeblink rate, electrical activity of the brain and functional connectivity.

Researchers observed that audiovisual cuts have a greater impact on media professionals, generating a decrease in their eyeblink rate, while non-professionals are not affected in the same manner when viewing these cuts. They also detected that the experience of media professionals has a greater effect on the brain's mu rhythm in the somatosensory area immediately after a cut. Non-media professionals, however, demonstrate a highly diverse Granger causality in terms of connectivity when compared to their media professional counterparts, whose connectivity is much more concise in the visual cortex, somatomotor and frontal areas.

Videos and other audiovisual contents are filled with cuts that artificially segment narrative content. Films can contain dozens or hundreds of cuts and viewers are nevertheless not conscious of them. Previous studies conducted by the same team of researchers demonstrated that scene cuts have an impact on the management of viewer's attention. In this study, researchers aimed to discover how this impact differs among media professionals. The experience acquired through years of producing and working with media contents causes a long-term impact on how professionals process these contents. Given that society produces and consumes more and more of these types of contents, there is an interest in discovering the effects the visual perception of these contents have on brain activity.

Doctor Celia Andreu-Sánchez, head researcher of this study and member of the Neuro-Com Group at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, considers that the results can be of interest for neuroscience, given that "knowing that spending many hours with media works as a professional not only affects visual perception, but also the brain rhythms such as the mu rhythm, is without a doubt of great interest to science. These results present neuroscience with a highly important work tool: audiovisuals. We know that working and consuming these contents professionally affect the brain's behaviour, therefore, it seems plausible that the design of consumption strategies for videos may be relevant in several areas of neuroscience research".

Doctor Miguel Ángel Martín-Pascual, from the Instituto Radio Televisión Española and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, also author of this research published in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, believes that these results are of utmost importance in the professional audiovisual production field. According to Martín-Pascual, "knowing the impact audiovisual professionalisation has on its professionals is of vital importance for the development of long-term strategies related to the occupational health of this group".

José María Delgado, researcher at the Neuroscience Division of the Universidad Pablo de Olavide, highlights that "this study and other similar ones conducted by our two groups points out the enormous amount of unconscious processing taking place in the brain (particularly in the non-media profesional group) during the viewing of videos and films, especially when the material is edited to contain very short scenes. However, in some way this unconscious processing can have an effect, for example, on our emotional state: although we do not fully perceive all the shots in the video as displaying aggressive interactions, we are able to detect them from an emotional point of view".

Borderline Personality Disorder, or BPD, is the most common personality disorder in Australia, affecting up to 5% of the population at some stage, and Flinders University researchers warn more needs to be done to meet this high consumer needs.

A new study in the Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing (Wiley) describes how people with BPD are becoming more knowledgeable about the disorder and available treatments, but may find it difficult to find evidence-based help for their symptoms.

The South Australian psychiatric researchers warn these services are constrained by stigma within health services and from health professionals, with inadequate funding for BPD treatments and general health policies leaving consumers struggling to find appropriate help.

"Lived Experience Australia's 75-question survey of more than 500 patients in 2011 and 2017 found many people with BPD often experience significant distress in their personal lives as well as dealing with community mental health and emergency departments in the health system," says researcher Jessica Proctor, from the Flinders College of Medicine and Public Health.

"While the general public are becoming more aware about BPD, there is still a lot of stigma, along with clinician and research biases, which complicate this situation."

BPD is typically characterised by instability in a person's sense of self, personal relationships, goals, and expression of emotions and feelings, as well as impulsive behaviour, risk taking, and outbursts of intense anger or hostility. However a person does not need to show all of these signs to have a diagnosis of BPD.

People with BPD can also experience other disorders, such as major depression, that also required targeted, evidence-based treatment.

While it's commonly thought BPD is untreatable, the experts say BPD is in fact very responsive to effective treatments, primarily psychotherapies including Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, or DBT.

Professor Sharon Lawn says some health professionals acknowledge the shortfalls in access to DBT and other evidence-based therapy to treat the disorder.

"Lack of interventions for severe borderline personality disorder leads to lots of extra pressure on emergency hospital services, not to mention the suffering while consumers waiting a possible 12-18 months for appropriate care in the public system," she says.

Public subsidies for specialised stand-alone BPD focused services in the private sector with a psychiatrist referral would be a good starting point to improve services in Australia, she adds.

In the meantime, more mental health nurses and other health professionals can support front-line services by applying NHMRC BPD guidelines in clinical practice, the research concludes.

"It was very pleasing to see more people in the 2017 survey showing more recognition of their symptoms and willingness to reach out for help," says another senior author on the paper, national consumer advocate and chair of Lived Experience Australia, Janne McMahon OAM.

"Approaching people with BPD without stigma and with sound understanding of the evidence-based treatments can help them to recognise and manage their emotions more effectively," she says.

Scientists at Bielefeld University's Faculty of Physics have succeeded for the first time in imaging the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus with a helium ion microscope. In contrast to the more conventional electron microscopy, the samples do not need a thin metal coating in helium ion microscopy. This allows interactions between the coronaviruses and their host cell to be observed particularly clearly. The scientists have published their findings, obtained in collaboration with researchers from Bielefeld University's Medical School OWL and Justus Liebig University Giessen, in the Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology.

'The study shows that the helium ion microscope is suitable for imaging coronaviruses - so precisely that the interaction between virus and host cell can be observed,' says physicist Dr Natalie Frese. She is the lead author of the study and a researcher in the research group Physics of Supramolecular Systems and Surfaces at the Faculty of Physics.

Coronaviruses are tiny - only about 100 nanometres in diameter, or 100 billionths of a metre. So far, mainly scanning electron microscopy (SEM) has been used to examine cells infected with the virus. With SEM, an electron beam scans the cell and provides an image of the surface structure of the cell occupied by viruses. However, SEM has a disadvantage: the sample becomes electrostatically charged during the microscopy process. Because the charges are not dispersed from non-conductive samples, for example viruses or other biological organisms, the samples must be coated with an electrically conductive coating, such as a thin layer of gold.

'However, this conductive coating also changes the surface structure of the sample. Helium ion microscopy does not require a coating and therefore allows direct scanning,' says Professor Dr Armin Gölzhäuser, who heads the research group Physics of Supramolecular Systems and Surfaces. With the helium ion microscope, a beam of helium ions scans the surface of the sample. Helium ions are helium atoms that are each missing an electron - they are therefore positively charged. The ion beam also charges the sample electrostatically, but this can be compensated for by additionally irradiating the sample with electrons.

Furthermore, the helium ion microscope has a higher resolution and a greater depth of field.

In their study, the scientists infected cells - artificially produced from the kidney tissue of a species of monkey - with SARS-CoV-2 and studied them in dead state under the microscope. 'Our images provide a direct view of the 3D surface of the coronavirus and the kidney cell - with a resolution in the range of a few nanometres,' says Frese. This enabled the researchers to visualise interactions between the viruses and the kidney cell. Their study results indicate, for example, that helium ion microscopy can be used to observe whether individual coronaviruses are just lying on the cell or are bound to it. This is important in order to understand defence strategies against the virus: an infected cell can bind the viruses, which have already multiplied inside it, to its cell membrane on exit and thus prevent them from spreading further.

'Helium ion microscopy is well suited for imaging the cell's defence mechanisms that take place at the cell membrane,' says virologist Professor Dr Friedemann Weber, too. He is investigating SARS-CoV-2 at Justus Liebig University in Gießen and collaborated with the Bielefeld researchers on this study. Professor Dr Holger Sudhoff, head physician at the University Clinic for Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery, Medical School OWL at Bielefeld University, adds: 'This method is a significant improvement for imaging the SARS-CoV-2 virus interacting with the infected cell. Helium ion microscopy can help to better understand the infection process in COVID-19 sufferers.'

Helium ion microscopy is a comparatively new technology. In 2010, Bielefeld University became the first German university to acquire a helium ion microscope, which is used primarily in nanotechnology. Worldwide, helium ion technology is still rarely used to examine biological samples. 'Our study shows that there is great potential here,' says Gölzhäuser. The study appears in a special issue of the Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology on the helium ion microscope.

Scientists globally aim to control chemical reactions--an ambitious goal that requires identifying the steps taken by initial reactants to arrive at the final products as the reaction takes place. While this dream remains to be realized, techniques for probing chemical reactions have become sufficiently advanced to render it possible. In fact, chemical reactions can now be monitored based on the change of electronic properties of a single molecule! Thanks to the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), this is also simple to accomplish. Why not then utilize a single-molecule approach to uncover reaction pathways as well?

With this goal, scientists from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan decided to explore DNA "hybridization" (formation of a double-stranded DNA from two single-stranded DNA) by measuring the changes in single-molecule electrical conductivity using an STM. "Single-molecule investigations can often reveal new details on chemical and biological processes that cannot be identified in a bulk collection of molecules due to the averaging out of individual molecule behavior," explains Prof Tomoaki Nishino, who was part of the study, recently published in Chemical Science.

The scientists attached a single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) to an STM tip made of gold and used a flat gold film to stick the complementary strand on it via a process known as "adsorption." They then applied a bias voltage between the coated STM tip and the gold surface and brought the tip extremely near to the surface without touching it (Fig. 1). This, in turn, allowed a current to flow through the space in between due to a process known as "quantum tunneling". Chemists monitored the time variation of this tunneling current as the DNA strands interacted with each other.

The team obtained current traces depicting plateau regions formed of steep inclines and subsequent declines in the tunneling current. Further, these plateaus did not form when either the gold surface was not modified with ssDNA or was modified with a non-complementary strand. Based on this, scientists attributed the plateaus to the formation of a double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) resulting from hybridization of ssDNA on the STM tip and the surface. Equivalently, they attributed the abrupt decrease in current to the breakdown or "dehybridization" of the dsDNA due to thermal agitation.

The team next investigated the kinetics (time evolution of reaction) of the dehybridization and hybridization processes using experimental results and molecular dynamics simulations. The former revealed a plateau conductance independent of DNA concentration, confirming that the current measurements reflected single-molecule conductance, while the latter suggested the formation of a partially hybridized DNA intermediate that could not be detected from conductance alone.

Interestingly, the hybridization efficiency was higher for high DNA concentration samples, contradicting the findings of a previous study made with bulk ssDNA solution. Chemists attributed this observation to the absence of bulk diffusion in their study.

"These new insights should contribute to improved performance for many DNA-based diagnoses," observes Prof Nishino, excited about the findings, "In addition, our method can be extended to the investigation of intermolecular chemical reactions between a variety of single molecules, enabling a mechanistic understanding of chemical reactions as well as discovery of novel chemical reactivity from a single-molecule perspective."

A biologist from RUDN University confirmed that selenium nanoparticles and garlic extract can effectively reduce the negative impact of stress on the health of grass carp in the breeding industry. The results of his study were published in the Journal of the World Aquaculture Society.

Grass carp or Ctenopharyngodon Idella is a valuable commercial fish type. In order to increase productivity, fish farms tend to breed more and more fish in small reservoirs. This extreme population density causes stress in carps that negatively affects their health, namely, reduces immunity, slows down growth, suppresses digestion, and interferes with intestinal functions. To mitigate these effects and support the immune system of the fish, farmers often use dietary supplements. A biologist from RUDN University confirmed the efficiency of selenium and garlic extract that increase stress resistance in carps.

"Being a component of the enzyme glutathione peroxidase, selenium protects cell membranes from oxidative damage. It is also known to support immunity and gut health in fish. In its turn, garlic increases the growth rate, improves immunity and antioxidant activity, and supports the activity of digestive enzymes in fish. However, until recently, no data on the effect of selenium and garlic extract on the productivity of actively bred young grass carps has been available. Therefore, we decided to research the ability of these substances to mitigate stress," said Morteza Yousefi, PhD, an assistant professor at the Department of Veterinary Medicine, RUDN University.

The team divided 1,008 healthy juvenile grass carps with an average weight of two grams into six groups and put them into 18 48-liter pools with low (24 fish), medium (48 fish), and high (96 fish) population density. Half of the fish received 1 mg of Se nanoparticles and 1 g of garlic per 1 kg of fodder (diet 1), while the other half got twice as much of both supplements (diet 2). After 60 days, the team compared the growth rate, blood composition, and digestive enzyme activity in both groups and broke the data down by population density levels.

The fish from the pools with medium and low population density that received more selenium and garlic grew the most: by 286% and 276%, respectively. The experiment showed that both low and high population density caused a stress reaction in fish that led to the reduction of antioxidant enzyme activity. However, regardless of the density, the levels of cortisol, also known as the hormone of stress, were lower in the group that received diet 2: 30 ng/ml against 40 ng/ml in the group that received diet 1. According to the researchers, adding selenium and garlic to fodder could partially compensate for the stress of breeding in highly populated pools.

"We confirmed that both dietary supplements and population density have a prominent effect on growth rate and food utilization in grass carp. Higher concentrations of selenium and garlic extract in the diet suppress the stress reaction, reduce oxidizing damage and lipid damage, and improve the growth rate, digestive enzyme activity, antioxidant properties, and the general state of health of the fish. Moreover, at medium population density, the fish grew bigger than at low or high density. Therefore, these conditions should be considered the most optimal for breeding," added Morteza Yousefi, PhD, an assistant professor at the Department of Veterinary Medicine, RUDN University.