Brain

Whether at a birthday party in Brazil, a funeral in Kenya or protests in Hong Kong, humans all use variations of the same facial expressions in similar social contexts, such as smiles, frowns, grimaces and scowls, a new study from the University of California, Berkeley, shows.

The findings, published today, Dec. 16, in the journal Nature, confirm the universality of human emotional expression across geographic and cultural boundaries at a time when nativism and populism are on the rise around the world.

"This study reveals how remarkably similar people are in different corners of the world in how we express emotion in the face of the most meaningful contexts of our lives," said study co-lead author Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychology professor.

Researchers at UC Berkeley and Google used machine-learning technology known as a "deep neural network" to analyze facial expressions in some 6 million video clips uploaded to YouTube from people in 144 countries spanning North, Central and South America, Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

"This is the first worldwide analysis of how facial expressions are used in everyday life, and it shows us that universal human emotional expressions are a lot richer and more complex than many scientists previously assumed," said study lead author Alan Cowen, a researcher at both UC Berkeley and Google who helped develop the deep neural network algorithm and led the study.

Cowen created an online interactive map that demonstrates how the algorithm tracks variations of facial expressions that are associated with 16 emotions.

In addition to promoting cross-cultural empathy, potential applications include helping people who have trouble reading emotions, such as children and adults with autism, to recognize the faces humans commonly make to convey certain feelings.

The typical human face has 43 different muscles that can be activated around the eyes, nose, mouth, jaw, chin and brow to make thousands of different expressions.

First, researchers used Cowen's machine-learning algorithm to log facial expressions shown in 6 million video clips of events and interactions worldwide, such as watching fireworks, dancing joyously or consoling a sobbing child.

They used the algorithm to track instances of 16 facial expressions one tends to associate with amusement, anger, awe, concentration, confusion, contempt, contentment, desire, disappointment, doubt, elation, interest, pain, sadness, surprise and triumph.

Next, they correlated the facial expressions with the contexts and scenarios in which they were made across different world regions and discovered remarkable similarities in how people across geographic and cultural boundaries use facial expressions in different social contexts.

"We found that rich nuances in facial behavior -- including subtle expressions we associate with awe, pain, triumph, and 13 other feelings -- are used in similar social situations around the world," Cowen said.

For example, Cowen noted, in the video clips, people around the world tended to gaze in awe during fireworks displays, show contentment at weddings, furrow their brows in concentration when performing martial arts, show doubt at protests, pain when lifting weights and triumph at rock concerts and competitive sporting events.

The results showed that people from different cultures share about 70% of the facial expressions used in response to different social and emotional situations.

"This supports Darwin's theory that expressing emotion in our faces is universal among humans," Keltner said. "The physical display of our emotions may define who we are as a species, enhancing our communication and cooperation skills and ensuring our survival."

Progress towards 'cold fusion,' where nuclear fusion can occur at close to room temperatures, has now been at a standstill for decades. However, an increasing number of studies are now proposing that the reaction could be triggered more easily through a mechanism involving muons - elementary particles with the same charge as electrons, but with around 200 times their mass. Through a study published in EPJ D, researchers led by Francisco Caruso at the Brazilian Centre for Physical Research have shown theoretically how this process would unfold within 2D systems, without any need for approximations.

The team's results could lead to long-awaited advances in the field of cold fusion - which has been proposed as an efficient, sustainable way to harvest vast amounts of energy. Since muons are so much heavier than electrons, they will orbit far closer to atomic nuclei when captured by hydrogen atoms. This enables the nuclei to fuse into helium far more readily - after which the muon is released from the system. However, since the amount of energy released is relatively small, it has remained challenging for theoretical physicists to propose a reliable basis for the technique, limiting its progress so far.

Caruso's team took a different approach in their study: this time, focusing on calculating the elementary processes involved in muon-catalysed fusion in 2D. The researchers then compared the behaviour of their model with 3D measurements, which revealed that the 2D process is influenced by significantly different parameters. Most strikingly, they showed that fusion is 1 billion times more likely to occur between a muonic pair of tritium atoms - a form of hydrogen containing two extra neutrons in its nucleus - than is the case for 3D. By directly calculating these probabilities, instead of estimating them, the team's findings could provide valuable insights for future studies of cold fusion.

BIODIVERSITY University of Copenhagen researchers have found and described two fungal species for the first time. The fungi infect adult flies and subsequently create a hole in the abdomen of their hosts' bodies. Infected flies then buzz around days as the fungi devour them from within and eject fungal spores from these holes in their bodies. The discovery marks a contribution to the mapping of global biodiversity. At the same time, the new studies open the door for potentially useful nature-made pharmacological discoveries.

Spores (conidia) of Strongwellsea acerosa. They are dischared from a large hole in the abdomen of the infected, yet still living fly

Spores (conidia) of Strongwellsea acerosa. They are dischared from a large hole in the abdomen of the infected, yet still living fly

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen's Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences and the Natural History Museum of Denmark have found and described two new fungal species. Both fungi were discovered in the Capital Region of Denmark -- with Strongwellsea tigrinae, being found in Jægerspris and Strongwellsea acerosa, on Amager.

The fungi infect two Danish fly species (Coenosia tigrina and Coenosia testacea). As they do, they create a large hole in the abdomen of their infected hosts. The flies buzz about for days as fungal spores are released into the air from this hole and drift upon new victims. If, for example, a fly comes by to mate, it risks becoming infected. The fungi are nourished from within the rear segments of flies' bodies right up until the end. After a few days, the fly lies on its back and spasms in its final hours of life.

"This is an exciting and bizarre aspect of biodiversity that we have discovered in Denmark", says Professor Jørgen Eilenberg of the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences. He adds: "In and of itself, this mapping of new and unknown biodiversity is valuable. But at the same time, this is basic new knowledge that can serve as a basis for experimental studies of infection pathways and the bioactive substances involved."

The fly species Coenosia tigrina with two large holes in the abdomen. The holes are an effect of infection with the fungus Strongwellsea tigrinae. The infective spores are discharged through these holes.

The fungal parasites probably only infect a small percentage of these two fly species, which, ironically, live by predating other flies. These fungi survive the stresses of winter with the help of their thick-walled, orange or yellow resting spores. The researchers believe that these resting spores germinate in spring and infect flies as they become active.

"It is fascinating how the life cycles of these fungi are so well adapted to the lives of the flies they target," says Professor Jørgen Eilenberg.

Could Pave the Way for New Medicines

The ability of these fungi to keep flies fresh enough to buzz around for days while being eaten from within has raised speculation among the researchers that the fungi may be producing substances which "dope" their hosts. Research into other types of fungi, that infect cicadas, suggests that amphetamine-like substances may be at play.

We suspect therefore that these fungi may produce amphetamine-like substances which keep a fly's energy level high up until the end. At the same time, we have a theory that the fungi also produce substances which keep microorganisms away from the fly's fungal wound. We would definitely like to continue our research, as doing so has the potential to discover and later make use of these substances, perhaps in medicine," says Jørgen Eilenberg.

STONY BROOK, NY, December 1, 2020 - A paper to be published in Frontiers in Marine Science on December 15 is calling for action to remove the oil from a decaying and inactive tanker in the Red Sea that holds approximately one million barrels of oil - four times the amount of oil contained in the Exxon Valdez, the tanker that had a disastrous environmental oil spill in 1989 - before its current seepage turns into a massive oil spill into the sea. The paper, a policy brief, is authored by a team of international scientists led by Karine Kleinhaus, MD, MPH, an Associate Professor of the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS) at Stony Brook University.

Called the Safer, the tanker is a floating storage and offloading unit (FSO) abandoned for years, and with access controlled by Yemen's Houthis. The paper, titled "A Closing Window of Opportunity to Save a Unique Marine Ecosystem," comes shortly after The New York Times reported on November 24 that the Houthis will grant permission to a United Nations (UN) team to board the Safer to inspect and repair the vessel in the near future.

"The time is now to prevent a potential devastation to the region's waters and the livelihoods and health of millions of people living in half a dozen countries along the Red Sea's coast," says Dr. Kleinhaus. "If a spill from the Safer is allowed to occur, the oil would spread via ocean currents to devastate a global ocean resource, as the coral reefs of the northern Red Sea and Gulf of Aqaba are projected to be among the last reef ecosystems in the world to survive the coming decades."

She explained that the reason the coral reefs of the northern Red Sea are unique is because they survive in much warmer waters than today's ocean temperatures, which are becoming too high for most coral to tolerate (over half of the Great Barrier Reef has degraded due to marine heat waves caused by climate change). Additionally, the fish living on the reefs off Yemen in the southern Red Sea are a major resource of food for the populations of the region, and the entire sea and its coral reefs are a highly biodiverse and rich ecosystem.

Dr. Kleinhaus and co-authors point out that in May 2020 seawater breached the Safer and entered the engine compartment, and news agencies have reported oil spots next to the tanker, indicating likely seepage. The tanker has been abandoned since 2015, which the authors emphasize is a long advance warning of a decaying tanker poised to degrade to the point of a mass oil leak into the Red Sea.

The paper reveals a computer model of how the oil will disperse if a major leak begins this winter. The model shows that the oil will reach much further if the spill occurs now rather than in summer, due to the typical winter currents in that region of the Red Sea. A spill now will cause much broader and more extensive devastation as a result.

Despite the signs of the Safer's structural deterioration, access to the tanker has yet to be achieved and concrete steps to repair or to prevent an oil spill have yet to been taken, the authors point out. Dr. Kleinhaus adds that winter is the worst time to have an oil spill in that region, as winter currents will disperse oil much more widely.

The authors urge that "Emergent action must be taken by the UN and its International Maritime Organization to address the threat of the Safer, despite political tensions, as a spill will have disastrous environmental and humanitarian consequences, especially if it occurs during winter. With millions of barrels of oil, a day passing through the Red Sea, a regional strategy must be drafted for leak prevention and containment that is specific to the Red Sea's unique ecosystems, unusual water currents, and political landscape."

Ann Arbor, December 15, 2020 - Structural racism can lead to discrimination in many aspects of life including criminal justice, employment, housing, health care, political power, and education. A new study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine examines the impact of structural racism on health and confirms that chronic exposure to stressors leads to a marked erosion of health that is particularly severe among foreign-born Blacks and Latinx. Investigators say largescale structural policies that address structural racism are needed.

Structural racism is defined as laws, rules, or official policies in a society that result in a continued unfair advantage to some people and unfair or harmful treatment of others based on race. "There is evidence that structural racism has a material impact on the health of racial/ethnic minorities and immigrants," explained lead investigator Brent A. Langellier, PhD, Department of Health Management and Policy, Dornsife School of Public Health, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA. "Comparing allostatic load--a multidimensional measure of the body's response to stressors experienced throughout the life course--between immigrants and non-immigrants of different racial/ethnic backgrounds can help shed light on the magnitude of health differences between groups."

Investigators examined patterns in allostatic load among US- and foreign-born Whites, Blacks, and Latinx. Using data from the 2005-2018 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), they collected data on a 10-item measure of cardiovascular, metabolic, and immunologic risk. Measures of cardiovascular risk included systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, total cholesterol, and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol. Metabolic risk indicators included body mass index (BMI), blood sugar (HbA1c), urinary albumin, and creatinine clearance. Immunologic measures were white blood cell count and current or previous asthma diagnosis. Based on the literature suggesting that, for many outcomes, immigrants have paradoxically good health that declines with time in the US, investigators examined aging gradients in allostatic load for each group. They also assessed whether allostatic load in each group changed across NHANES survey cycles. Their analyses were conducted in March 2020.

Results showed that allostatic load increased with age among all groups, but the increases were much steeper among foreign-born Blacks of both genders and foreign-born Latina women. The difference between the first and last survey cycle was most pronounced among US-born Black women (from 2.74 in 2005-2006 to 3.02 in 2017-2018), US-born Latino men (from 2.69 to 3.09), and foreign-born Latino men (from 2.58 to 2.87). Aging gradients in allostatic load were steepest among foreign-born Blacks of both genders and foreign-born Latina women, and flattest among US-born and foreign-born Whites. Notably, foreign-born Latina women had among the lowest allostatic load at the youngest ages but among the highest at the upper end of the age distribution.

"Our findings add to the evidence that structural racism has a material impact on the health of racial/ethnic minorities and immigrants - and that this effect accumulates throughout the life course," noted Dr. Langellier. "They further suggest that the disadvantage experienced by racial/ethnic minorities is compounded among minorities who are also immigrants, which erodes the health advantage that many immigrants have at early ages."

These findings highlight the magnitude of the disparities in health that are produced by inequities in exposure to these risk and protective factors. "Collectively, our findings and evidence in the broader literature suggest that reducing these disparities will require big, structural policies that address structural racism, including inequities in upstream social determinants of health," concluded Dr. Langellier.

Precious metal-free nanoparticles could serve as powerful catalysts in the future, for example for hydrogen production. To optimize them, researchers must be able to analyze the properties of individual particles. A new method for this has been suggested by a team from the Center for Electrochemistry at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE). The group developed a method using a robotic arm that allows them to select individual particles under an electron microscope and place them on a nanoelectrode for electrochemical analysis. The method is described in the journal Angewandte Chemie, published online in advance 19 November 2020.

Using a robotic arm to deposit nanoparticles onto electrode

For the studies, the scientists used hexagon-shaped particles of cobalt oxide with diameters of 180 to 300 nanometers, which the Duisburg-Essen team consisting of Professor Stephan Schulz and Sascha Saddeler had synthesized. In the experiment, the particles catalyzed the so-called oxygen evolution reaction. During the electrolysis of water, hydrogen and oxygen are formed, with the limiting step in this process currently being the partial reaction in which the oxygen is formed. More efficient catalysts for the oxygen evolution reaction would simplify the efficiency for electrochemical water splitting under formation of hydrogen. Nanoparticle catalysts are supposed to help with this. Since their catalytic activity often depends on their size or shape, it is important to understand the properties of individual particles in order to find the optimal catalysts.

The Bochum team consisting of Thomas Quast, Dr. Harshitha Barike Aiyappa, Dr. Patrick Wilde, Dr. Yen-Ting Chen and Professor Wolfgang Schuhmann analyzed selected cobalt oxide particles first microscopically, then electrochemically. "Using a movable robotic arm, we can pick out individual nanoparticles under the electron microscope," Schuhmann explains. "The selected particle, which we then already know microscopically, we place on a tiny electrode to test what it can do as a catalyst." The researchers then use electrochemical methods to measure its catalytic activity for the oxygen evolution reaction.

High catalytic activity

In this way, the chemists analyzed several individual particles. Since they knew the size and crystal orientation of a particle, they were able to relate the catalytic activity to the number of cobalt atoms. "Here, the particles showed remarkably high activities in the oxygen evolution reaction, and the measured current densities exceeded commercially available alkaline electrolyzers by more than 20 times," says Stephan Schulz.

"We believe that by applying the proposed methodology, single particle analysis of catalyst materials has finally reached the point of reliable and comparatively simple sample preparation and characterization, which are crucial for establishing structure-function relationships," the authors write in conclusion.

PULLMAN, Wash. - The more people rely on social media as their main news source the more likely they are to believe misinformation about the pandemic, according to a recent survey analysis by Washington State University researcher Yan Su.

The study, published in the journal Telematics and Informatics, also found that levels of worry about COVID-19 increased the strength of people's belief in that misinformation. Two factors weakened beliefs in false information: having faith in scientists and a preference for "discussion heterogeneity," meaning people liked talking with others who held different views.

Su, a doctoral student in WSU's Murrow College of Communication, said the findings point to possible practical solutions to disrupt the spread of misinformation.

"Fact checkers are important for social media platforms to implement. When there is no fact checker, people just choose to believe what is consistent with their pre-existing beliefs," said Su. "It's also important for people to try to get out of their comfort zones and echo chambers by talking with people who have different points of view and political ideologies. When people are exposed to different ideas, they have a chance to do some self-reflection and self-correction, which is particularly beneficial for deliberation."

For the study, Su analyzed responses to the 2020 American National Election Studies Exploratory Testing Survey, which was conducted at the start of the pandemic. Of the 3,080 people who submitted questionnaires, a little more than 480 said they believed at least one of two pieces of misinformation about COVID-19: that the coronavirus was developed intentionally in a lab and that there was currently a vaccine for the virus. The respondents were also asked to rate how confident they were in these beliefs.

Su compared this data to the participants' other responses on the survey related to social media use, levels of worry and trust in scientists as well as how much the respondents valued discussions with people of differing viewpoints.

He found an amplification effect from social media users who were particularly worried about the coronavirus.

"It seems that the more you use social media, the more likely you become worried about COVID-19, perhaps because there is a lot of unfounded and conspiracy theories on social media," Su said. "Then this in turn can trigger a higher level of worry which leads to further belief in misinformation."

The survey data was collected during the beginning of the pandemic. Around the same time, the Pew Research Center found that nationally 3 in 10 Americans believed that the coronavirus was created in a lab, despite there being no evidence for this statement, and a third believed there was already a vaccine.

Su said more research is needed because of the continued proliferation of false and misleading stories around the pandemic.

"During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media has spread a lot of conspiracy theories and misinformation, which has negative consequences because many people use these false statements as evidence to consolidate their pre-existing political ideologies and attack each other," said Su. "It's important to understand the antecedents and motivations for believing and circulating misinformation beliefs, so we can find ways to counteract them."

Analytical optical methods are vital to our modern society as they permit the fast and secure identification of substances within solids, liquids or gases. These methods rely on light interacting with each of these substances differently at different parts of the optical spectrum. For instance, the ultraviolet range of the spectrum can directly access electronic transitions inside a substance while the terahertz is very sensitive to molecular vibrations.

Throughout the years many techniques have been developed to achieve hyperspectral spectroscopy and imaging, allowing scientists to observe the behavior of, for example, molecules when they fold, rotate or vibrate in order to understand the identification of cancer markers, greenhouse gases, pollutants or even substances that could be harmful to us. These ultrasensitive techniques have proven to be very useful in applications related to food inspection, biochemical sensing or even in cultural heritage, to investigate the structure of the materials used for ancient objects, paintings or sculptures.

A standing challenge has been the absence of compact sources that cover such large spectral range with sufficient brightness. Synchrotrons provide the spectral coverage, but they lack the temporal coherence of lasers, and such sources are available only in large-scale user facilities.

Now, in a recent study published in Nature Photonics, an international team of researchers from ICFO, the Max-Planck Institute for the Science of Light, the Kuban State University, and the Max-Born-Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Ultrafast Spectroscopy, led by ICREA Prof. at ICFO Jens Biegert, report on a compact high-brightness mid-IR-driven source combining a gas-filled anti-resonant-ring photonic crystal fiber with a novel nonlinear-crystal. The table top source provides a seven-octave coherent spectrum from 340 nm to 40,000 nm with spectral brightness 2-5 orders of magnitude higher than one of the brightest Synchrotron facilities.

Future research will leverage the few-cycle pulse duration of the source for the time-domain analysis of substances and materials, thus opening new opportunities for multimodal measurement approaches in areas such as molecular spectroscopy, physical chemistry or solid-state physics, to name a few.

The Gerontological Society of America's highly cited, peer-reviewed journals are continuing to publish scientific articles on COVID-19. The following were published between November 16 and December 2; all are free to access:

Living Alone During COVID-19: Social Contact and Emotional Well-Being among Older Adults: Research: report in The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences by Karen L Fingerman, PhD, Yee To Ng, MA, Shiyang Zhang, BS, Katherine Britt, BSN, RN, Gianna Colera, BS, Kira S. Birditt, PhD, and Susan T. Charles, PhD
Well-Being and Loneliness in Swiss Older Adults during the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Role of Social Relationships: Research article in The Gerontologist by Birthe Macdonald, PhD, and Gizem Hülür, PhD
Beyond chronological age: Frailty and multimorbidity predict mortality in patients with coronavirus disease 2019: Research article in The Journals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences by Alessandra Marengoni, MD, PhD, Alberto Zucchelli, MD, Davide Liborio Vetrano, MD, PhD, Andrea Armellini, MD, Emanuele Botteri, MD, Franco Nicosia, MD, Giuseppe Romanelli, MD, Eva Andrea Beindorf, MD, Paola Giansiracusa, MD, Emirena Garrafa, MD, PhD, Luigi Ferrucci, MD, PhD, Laura Fratiglioni, MD, PhD, Roberto Bernabei, MD, and Graziano Onder, MD, PhD

After Julia had a minor stroke, she was thankful for receiving rapid treatment and recovering well. But she did notice an unexpected aftereffect as she returned to normal activities. In meetings at work, she was unable to follow the back and forth among attendees. And when she was asked for her own opinions, she found she hadn't grasped well enough what had been discussed to participate. At home, if she was working on a task like cooking dinner, she realized she couldn't easily carry on a conversation with her husband.

So at her next visit with her doctor, she mentioned her symptoms--and found out she was not alone.

Julia is experiencing poststroke acute dysexecutive syndrome (PSADES), a cognitive dysfunction that people commonly experience after even minor strokes. The condition becomes evident soon after the stroke occurs, and while it correlates to having dead tissue lesion(s) in the brain left behind by the stroke, it does not seem to be related to the location of the lesion(s). Fortunately, PSADES gradually improves in the months after recovery. But what has been going on inside the brain during this time?

Stroke patients have reported these cognitive difficulties to their doctors for a long time. Until now, the evidence of this problem has mostly been anecdotal. A new study by University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University and New York University researchers for the first time provides measurable physical evidence of diminished neural processing within the brain after a stroke. It suggests that PSADES is the result of a global connectivity dysfunction. The paper, "Poststroke acute dysexecutive syndrome, a disorder resulting from minor stroke due to disruption of network dynamics," has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).

The paper was written by the University of Maryland's Professor Jonathan Simon (Electrical and Computer Engineering/Biology/Institute for Systems Research), his former postdoctoral researcher Christian Brodbeck, now a visiting assistant professor at the University of Connecticut, and UMD Ph.D. student Joshua Kulasingham; the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine's Associate Professor Elisabeth Marsh, Professor Rafael Llinas and Dania Mallick, all of the Department of Neurology; and NYU Grossman School of Medicine Research Professor Rodolfo Llinas. Marsh is the lead author.

"We tend to think that certain parts of the brain are responsible for specific functions, but in reality you need your entire brain to think clearly and complete tasks," Marsh says. "In this study we show how a small lesion anywhere can disrupt the cognitive network and result in a global dysfunction."

The researchers used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to look at the brain functioning of patients who recently experienced minor strokes. MEG is a non-invasive neuroimaging technology that employs very sensitive magnetometer sensors to make high-speed recordings of naturally occurring magnetic fields produced by electrical currents inside the brain. The subject typically sits under or lies down inside the MEG scanner, which resembles a whole-head hair drier.

Once inside the scanner, patients had their magnetic fields recorded as they completed word and picture matching tasks. These tasks all involved memory, memory search or identification. In some tasks the patient needed to speak the answer, while others required them to press a "yes" or "no" button. An age-matched control group of people who had not suffered a stroke also completed the tasks and were recorded.

Then the two sets of MEG recordings were compared. The stroke patients' recordings exhibited distinct characteristics that were different from the control group. For example, the signals within their brains were noticeably more subdued, appearing more like rolling hills rather than mountain peaks. This is an indicator that the brain is processing less efficiently. The stroke patients also took about twice as long as the control group to complete the tasks. In addition, they were not able to modulate their brain activity at different stages of performing the tasks, a further indicator of neural sluggishness.

These patterns of inefficient processing suggest a dysfunction in the brain's distributed network--a disruption of the network's dynamics.

"If the problem is not because of the lesion itself, affecting visual processing regardless of where the lesion is located, and you can't see what is wrong in an MRI or CAT scan, then we conclude that the issue is more global: how the brain talks to itself," says Professor Simon. "That is where the MEG technology shines--in showing us the dynamics of neural processing."

"This shows that even a minor stroke, whose visible signs of damage are small, has a profound impact on the brain as a whole," says Simon. "Damage to a local neural community affects the global neural community."

"A single little lesion can disrupt the entire network and result in global dysfunction," Marsh says.

After six months, the stroke patients returned for a second time to complete the same tasks. They not only performed better on the tests, but also anecdotally reported their symptoms of impairment had largely resolved. However, surprisingly the scans themselves looked relatively the same.

Why symptoms improved while the recordings did not look very different is a mystery.

"Right now we don't know the neural mechanisms that allowed the patients to improve," says Simon. "It could be that new neural communication routes have formed, to bypass the sluggish pathways. Or it could be that older, less used, communication pathways have been repurposed." Further studies could help to unlock this question.

The study called for patients to be scanned again at the one-year mark. But because of the pandemic, they were not able to come in to the test site to repeat the tests. After the pandemic subsides, the researchers have received funding for a new study that will explore ways in which recovery from these symptoms, and the neural sluggishness underlying them, can be sped up, furthering their efforts to unlock the mysteries of the brain.

"What we still don't know is the specifics of how a small lesion disrupts neural communication so widely," says Simon. "We hope that looking at the details of which neural connections are disrupted, and how, will be a next step in understanding not only this particular effect of a minor stroke, but also give us a new window into understanding in how information is processed across the brain."

"This is the first step to better understanding the cause of PSADES, which will allow us to design more effective treatments," Marsh says. "The next step will be to do formal network connectivity studies. Then we can test therapies to help people get better faster."

Conservation of fish and other marine life migrating from warming ocean waters will be more effective and also protect commercial fisheries if plans are made now to cope with climate change, according to a Rutgers-led study in the journal Science Advances.

"Sticking our heads in the sand doesn't work," said lead author Malin Pinsky, an associate professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. "Effective ocean planning that accounts for climate change will lead to better safeguards for marine fish and commercial fisheries with few tradeoffs."

As the ocean becomes busier with shipping, energy development, fishing, conservation, recreation and other uses, planning efforts that set aside parts of the ocean for such uses have begun on all seven continents. But these efforts typically do not plan ahead for the impacts of climate change despite establishing plans that can last for many decades.

With ocean waters warming, many commercially valuable fish species could move hundreds of miles northward toward colder water in the years ahead. Such movement is already underway - in some cases dramatically - substantially disrupting fisheries and exacerbating international fisheries conflicts.

Researchers led by Pinsky focused on the costs and benefits of planning ahead for the impacts of climate change on marine species. They simulated the ocean planning process in the United States and Canada for conservation zones, fishing zones and wind and wave energy development zones. Then they looked at nearly 12,000 different projections for where 736 species around North America will move during the rest of this century. They also looked at potential tradeoffs between meeting conservation and sustainable fishing goals now versus in 80 years.

"We were worried that planning ahead would require setting aside a lot more of the ocean for conservation or for fishing, but we found that was not the case," Pinsky said. "Instead, fishing and conservation areas can be set up like hopscotch boxes so fish and other animals can shift from one box into another as they respond to climate change. We found that simple changes to ocean plans can make them much more robust to future changes. Planning ahead can help us avoid conflicts between, for example, fisheries and wind energy or conservation and fisheries."

While the study focused on long-term changes, many fisheries decisions are focused on near-term changes - one to a few years ahead, Pinsky said. So the scientists are now testing whether they can forecast near-term shifts in where species are found so fisheries can adapt more easily to species on the move.

While climate change will severely disrupt many human activities and "complete climate-proofing is impossible, proactively planning for long-term ocean change across a wide range of sectors is likely to provide substantial benefits," the study says.

Tokyo, Japan - Researchers from the Institute of Industrial Science at The University of Tokyo used molecular dynamics calculations to simulate the glass-forming ability of metallic mixtures. They show that even small changes in composition can strongly influence the likelihood that a material will assume a crystalline versus a glassy state upon cooling. This work may lead to a universal theory of glass formation and cheaper, more resilient, electroconductive glass.

If you have important guests coming over for dinner, you might set your table with expensive "crystal" glasses. To scientists, however, crystal and glass are actually two very different states that a liquid might assume when cooled. A crystal has a defined three-dimensional lattice structure that repeats indefinitely, while glass is an amorphous solid that lacks long-range ordering. Current theories of glass formation cannot accurately predict which metallic mixtures will "vitrify" to form a glass and which will crystallize. A better, more comprehensive understanding of glass formation would be a great help when designing new recipes for mechanically tough, electrically conductive materials.

Now, researchers at the University of Tokyo have used computer simulations of three prototypical metallic systems to study the process of glass formation. "We found that the ability for a multi-component system to form a crystal, as opposed to a glass, can be disrupted by slight modifications to the composition," first author Yuan-Chao Hu says.

Stated simply, glass formation is the consequence of a material avoiding crystallization when cooled. This locks the atoms into a "frozen" state before they can organize themselves into their energy-minimizing pattern. The simulations showed that a critical factor determining the rate of crystallization was the liquid-crystal interface energy.

The researchers also found that changes in elemental composition can lead to local atomic orderings that frustrate the process of crystallization with arrangements incompatible with the crystal's usual form. Specifically, these structures can prevent tiny crystals from acting as "seeds" that nucleate the growth of ordered regions in the sample. In contrast with previous explanations, the scientists determined that the chemical potential difference between the liquid and crystal phases has only a small effect on glass formation.

"This work represents a significant advancement in our understanding of the fundamental physical mechanism of vitrification," senior author Hajime Tanaka says. "The results of this project may also help glass manufacturers design new multi-component systems that have certain desired properties, such as resilience, toughness and electroconductivity."

Phase transitions describe dramatic changes in properties of a macroscopic system - like the transition from a liquid to a gas. Starting from individual ultracold atoms, Heidelberg University physicists were able to observe the emergence of such a transition with an increasing number of particles. The research work was carried out in the field of quantum physics under the direction of Prof. Dr Selim Jochim from the Institute for Physics.

In order to formulate effective theories in physics, microscopic details are set aside in favour of macroscopically observable quantities. A cup of water can be described by properties like pressure, temperature and density of the fluid, whereas the position and velocity of the individual water molecules are irrelevant. A phase transition describes the change of a macroscopic system from one state of matter, like fluid, to a different state of matter, like gaseous. The properties of macroscopic systems - so-called many-body systems - can be described as emergent because they result from the interaction of individual components which themselves do not possess these properties.

"I have long been interested in how this dramatic macroscopic change at a phase transition emerges from the microscopic description," states Selim Jochim. To answer this question, the researchers designed an experiment in which they assembled a system from individual ultracold atoms. Using this quantum simulator, they investigated how collective behaviour arises in a microscopic system. To this end, they trapped up to twelve atoms in a tightly focused laser beam. In this artificial system it is possible to continuously tune the interaction strength between the atoms from non-interacting to being the largest energy scale in the system. "On the one hand, the number of particles in the system is small enough to describe the system microscopically. On the other hand, collective effects are already evident," explains Luca Bayha, a postdoc in Prof. Jochim's team.

In their experiment, the Heidelberg physicists configured the quantum simulator such that the atoms attract one another, and if the attraction is strong enough, form pairs. These pairs of atoms are the necessary ingredient for a phase transition to a superfluid - a state in which the particles flow without friction. The current experiments focused on when the pair formation emerges as a function of the interaction strength and the particle number. "The surprising result of our experiment is that only six atoms show all the signatures of a phase transition expected for a many-particle system," adds Marvin Holten, a doctoral student in Prof. Jochim's group.

A realtor sends a prospective homebuyer a blurry photograph of a house taken from across the street. The homebuyer can compare it to the real thing -- look at the picture, then look at the real house -- and see that the bay window is actually two windows close together, the flowers out front are plastic and what looked like a door is actually a hole in the wall.

What if you aren't looking at a picture of a house, but something very small -- like a protein? There is no way to see it without a specialized device so there's nothing to judge the image against, no "ground truth," as it's called. There isn't much to do but trust that the imaging equipment and the computer model used to create images are accurate.

Now, however, research from the lab of Matthew Lew at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis has developed a computational method to determine how much confidence a scientist should have that their measurements, at any given point, are accurate, given the model used to produce them.

The research was published Dec. 11 in Nature Communications.

"Fundamentally, this is a forensic tool to tell you if something is right or not," said Lew, assistant professor in the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical & Systems Engineering. It's not simply a way to get a sharper picture. "This is a whole new way of validating the trustworthiness of each detail within a scientific image.

"It's not about providing better resolution," he added of the computational method, called Wasserstein-induced flux (WIF). "It's saying, 'This part of the image might be wrong or misplaced.'"

The process used by scientists to "see" the very small -- single-molecule localization microscopy (SMLM) -- relies on capturing massive amounts of information from the object being imaged. That information is then interpreted by a computer model that ultimately strips away most of the data, reconstructing an ostensibly accurate image -- a true picture of a biological structure, like an amyloid protein or a cell membrane.

There are a few methods already in use to help determine whether an image is, generally speaking, a good representation of the thing being imaged. These methods, however, cannot determine how likely it is that any single data point within an image is accurate.

Hesam Mazidi, a recent graduate who was a PhD student in Lew's lab for this research, tackled the problem.

"We wanted to see if there was a way we could do something about this scenario without ground truth," he said. "If we could use modeling and algorithmic analysis to quantify if our measurements are faithful, or accurate enough."

The researchers didn't have ground truth -- no house to compare to the realtor's picture -- but they weren't empty handed. They had a trove of data that is usually ignored. Mazidi took advantage of the massive amount of information gathered by the imaging device that usually gets discarded as noise. The distribution of noise is something the researchers can use as ground truth because it conforms to specific laws of physics.

"He was able to say, 'I know how the noise of the image is manifested, that's a fundamental physical law,'" Lew said of Mazidi's insight.

"He went back to the noisy, imperfect domain of the actual scientific measurement," Lew said. All of the data points recorded by the imaging device. "There is real data there that people throw away and ignore."

Instead of ignoring it, Mazidi looked to see how well the model predicted the noise -- given the final image and the model that created it.

Analyzing so many data points is akin to running the imaging device over and over again, performing multiple test runs to calibrate it.

"All of those measurements give us statistical confidence," Lew said.

WIF allows them to determine not if the entire image is probable based on the model, but, considering the image, if any given point on the image is probable, based on the assumptions built into the model.

Ultimately, Mazidi developed a method that can say with strong statistical confidence that any given data point in the final image should or should not be in a particular spot.

It's as if the algorithm analyzed the picture of the house and -- without ever having seen the place -- it cleaned up the image, revealing the hole in the wall.

In the end, the analysis yields a single number per data point, between -1 and 1. The closer to one, the more confident a scientist can be that a point on an image is, in fact, accurately representing the thing being imaged.

This process can also help scientists improve their models. "If you can quantify performance, then you can also improve your model by using the score," Mazidi said. Without access to ground truth, "it allows us to evaluate performance under real experimental conditions rather than a simulation."

The potential uses for WIF are far-reaching. Lew said the next step is to use it to validate machine learning, where biased datasets may produce inaccurate outputs.

How would a researcher know, in such a case, that their data was biased? "Using this model, you'd be able to test on data that has no ground truth, where you don't know if the neural network was trained with data that are similar to real-world data.

"Care has to be taken in every type of measurement you take," Lew said. "Sometimes we just want to push the big red button and see what we get, but we have to remember, there's a lot that happens when you push that button."

Fan mussel populations -the biggest bivalve mussel in the Mediterranean- are endangered due to the severe parasitosis caused by the protozoan Haplospridium pinnae since 2016. Now, a study published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science reveals the fan mussel would express a certain natural ability to recover thanks to the dispersal in the marine environment of larvae from populations which are not affected by the pathogen. These populations would be crucial for the future of the species.

The study is led by the expert Diego Kersting, from the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio) of the University of Barcelona. More than twenty institutions take part in the study as well, such as the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies IMEDEA-UIB-CSIC), the Oceanographic Centre of the Spanish Institute of Oceanography (COB-IEO), the Coastal Observation System of the Balearic Islands (SOCIB), the University of Alicante, the University of Murcia, the Environment and Water Agency of Andalusia, the Catholic University of Valencia, the Abdelhamid Ibn Badis Mostaganem University (Argelia), SUBMON entity in Barcelona, Zagreb University (Croatia), the Oceanographic Institute Paul Ricard (France), and University of Messina (Italy), among others.

A lifesaver for an endangered species

The future of the fan mussel (Pinna nobilis) -one of the largest and long-lived bivalves worldwide- is becoming more and more uncertain. The parasitosis has affected almost all populations of this species in the Mediterranean, "except for some which seem to be free from pathogens and are in environments -specially in coastal lagoons or deltas- which are under certain conditions of salinity, such as the Mar Menor (high salinity) and the Ebro Delta (low salinity). Apart from these particular habitats, most populations of the fan mussel would have disappeared or are endangered species since 2016", says Diego Kersting, member of the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences of the UB and first author of the article.

As part of the study, experts monitored for three years the effects of massive mortality in fan mussels during the recruitment process, that is, the introduction of young individuals to the adult population. in the study, experts used larval collectors placed in 38 localities of the western Mediterranean, northern Africa and the Adriatic Sea.

The study shows that massive mortality alters the recruitment process of the fan mussel, which involves a loss of adult population and an obstacle for the recovery of the species. "The recruitment is the main way to recover the species as long as there are recruiters that resist the disease, and unaffected populations that can work as larval exporters", notes Kerving.

However, exceptionally, recruitment episodes have also been recorded in areas where fan mussel populations had disappeared due to massive mortality. By using current models and the location of unaffected populations, experts have determined the areas of origin of these larvae -for instance, the Ebro Delta or the coast of Algeria and southern France- which would become a true lifesaver for this species in extreme situation

"Populations in areas not affected by the parasite are exporting larvae that can travel hundreds of kilometres thanks to ocean currents. Therefore, these populations can play a decisive role in the recovery of the species in the Mediterranean", says Kersting. "In addition, everything suggests that the parasitosis does not seem to affect dramatically larvae or juvenile specimens during the first months of life".

The recovery of the affected populations, if this takes place, could be a very limited process and many years in duration, experts warn. However, the protection of marine areas that can act today as larvae donors should be extreme. "In general, these are highly anthropized areas and are subject to many threats. For this reason, its conservation and protection should be a priority to avoid any type of impact or ecological stress on fan mussel populations, which build the only hope for the recovery of the species", says Kersting.

Science to protect an emblematic species in the Mediterranean

In only a short time, the fan mussel has gone from being considered a vulnerable species to joining the Red List of Threatened Species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (Kersting et al., 2019). Apart from the study on recruitment as the main process of recovery of populations, the international research effort to save the species also focuses on studying the parasitosis and the causative pathogen, in order to better understand how it works and thus predict the evolution of the infection in the future.

"Today, it has to be yet confirmed whether the virulence of the disease is due solely to the protozoan H. pinnae or whether other microorganisms could also be involved. Despite the efforts of the international groups to collaborate on this issue, it would be necessary to provide more support to current research by the scientific community in order to provide an appropriate response to the critical situation of the fan mussel and prevent the disappearance of an emblematic Mediterranean species", concludes Diego Kersting.