Culture

Research by Cass Business School academics has presented a methodology for identifying how winter tourism operators can protect themselves against the risk of decreasing visitor numbers to ski destinations and lost revenues.

Due to the effects of climate change, ski tourism in the Alps is becoming endangered by decreasing levels of snow caused by rising winter temperatures.

Focusing on the use of weather derivatives as a means of revenue protection, the study uses a series of models to design useful weather derivatives payoff - where operators 'sell' risk to financial markets for a premium - by predicting visitor numbers and revenues in a given month. The methodology is based on more than 50 years' worth of snowfall and temperature data recorded at a resort in Austria.

Highlight findings from the report include:

Visitor numbers to resorts vary considerably within the ski season itself, depending on snow depth and temperature.

As snow depth decreases, companies become more heavily reliant on the traditionally busier days - such as Christmas Day and other public holidays, school holidays and weekends - to provide the necessary sustainable footfall.

Greater depths of snow on the first day of a ski season reduce the dependence of these popular days for visitors to provide revenues - showing that snowfall and temperature consistency is important out of season as well as in it.

Due to the variation of visitor numbers, financial markets and winter tourism operators should base weather derivative contracts on historical average monthly revenues - fluctuating strike prices every month to form different contracts for each.

On the other hand, a single contract based on cumulative snow fall at the season end is highly risky for all parties and attracts the highest profit and loss variance out of all options that were tested.

Figures from the study included 20,774 historic daily weather observations of Sonnblick, Austria, from the European Climate Assessment (ECA), with the assumption that a ski season runs annually from 1st December through to 15th April.

A '100-day' rule is used as a critical threshold for visitor numbers, with the study considering 30cm of snow for at least 100 days during the winter season as a minimum requirement for testing reliability of ski operations.

Co-author Dr Laura Ballotta, Reader in Financial Mathematics at Cass Business School, said the report's findings should encourage ski tourism companies to purchase weather derivatives and think more strategically about the risk involved:

"Treatment of premises through artificial 'snowmaking' and landscaping is costly and could release potentially harmful additives into the environment. Diversifying activities beyond traditional ski and snow sports activities can also have expensive investment costs, so we believe that accessing financial markets for weather derivatives and sharing risk is the most viable option.

"Winter tourism is vital to Alpine regions, not just in terms of snow sport facilities but also accommodation, catering, entertainment and retail opportunities that come with it. Higher temperatures are reducing snow levels each year, which could have major ramifications on tourism to an area that depends so heavily on the revenues it generates.

"By using our methodology based on more than 50 years' worth of snowfall and temperature data, companies can optimise weather derivative contracts to protect themselves from financial ruin if snow levels are insufficient."

The first detailed cell atlas of the immune cells and gut bacteria within the human colon has been created by researchers. The study from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and collaborators revealed different immune niches, showing changes in the bacterial microbiome and immune cells throughout the colon. As part of the Human Cell Atlas initiative to map every human cell type, these results will enable new studies into diseases which affect specific regions of the colon, such as ulcerative colitis and colorectal cancer.

Published today (17 February) in Nature Immunology, this study revealed the interaction between the microbiome and our immune cells. These results form an important resource, which will help scientists to understand how these microbial cells are tolerated by the immune system in health.

The gut microbiome is a complex ecosystem composed of millions of microbes, and these bacteria are thought to play important roles in digestion, in regulating the immune system and in protecting against disease. They are essential to human health, and imbalances in our gut microbiome can contribute to autoimmune diseases such as inflammatory bowel diseases and asthma.

The gut also has a rich community of immune cells, which help to repair tissues and defend against infection. However, there is little detailed information on how the microbiome interacts with the gut resident immune cells, which immune cells co-exist with bacteria in different locations, and why different diseases affect distinct areas of the gut.

To shed light on this, researchers studied three different parts of the healthy colon from organ donors*, simultaneously analysing the immune cells and the bacterial microbiome from each area. By sequencing the active genes of 41,000 individual immune cells, they were able to identify cell type specific genes that were switched on in different immune cell populations in each location. They also identified the bacteria present in the same colon region, to reveal how the immune system and bacteria interact.

Dr Kylie James, a first author on the study from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said: "The gut microbiome plays a major role in health and disease, and understanding how this interacts with the immune system is vital. Our unique approach allowed us to create the first in-depth map of immune cells and their neighbouring bacteria in the healthy human colon, and revealed that surprisingly, there are distinct immune niches across the colon, with different cell activation states in different areas."

The study revealed that not only were there differences between the immune cells in different parts of the colon, but that the microbiome also subtly changed, with a broader range of bacteria further down the colon.

Dr Trevor Lawley, an author on the paper from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said: "We are made up of as many bacteria as human cells and there is a symbiotic relationship between humans and their microbiome. We know this is linked to many aspects of health, with imbalances in gut bacteria associated with immune diseases ranging from Inflammatory Bowel Disease to asthma. By revealing the diversity of the microbiome in specific locations in the colon, and the interactions with immune cells, we can start to understand the biology behind this, and inform future research on site-specific gut bacteria."

Previous work on mice had shown that immune cells in lymph nodes could be targeted to particular destinations - like an immune satnav. For the first time, this study showed that regulatory immune cells, which dampen down an immune response, moved from lymph nodes to the colon. This could be one way the intestine tolerates or even welcomes the microbiome.

Dr Sarah Teichmann, the senior author on the paper from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and co-chair of the Human Cell Atlas Organising Committee, said: "This study is part of the global Human Cell Atlas initiative to map every cell type in the human body. It gives a new understanding of the relationship between immune cells and the microbiome in healthy colon tissue and by allowing us to hone in on cells in particular areas, it will be a critical reference for ongoing work into diseases that affect specific regions of the colon."

Potato virus Y is the most economically important and devastating aphid-transmitted virus, affecting both tuber yield and quality. The virus is also a major cause of seed potato degeneration, which leads to regular flushing out of seed potatoes after limited field production cycles. There is no remedy for this virus and once a plant becomes infected, it stays sick for life.

Current control methods focus on preventing the virus from infecting potato crops and current research focuses on enhancing preventative measures. In order to increase the efficiency of management of potato virus Y, University of Idaho scientists conducted research to determine when potato plants are most susceptible to infection.

In this study, the scientists matched a North American potato cultivar, Yukon Gold, and a North American isolate of potato virus Y. They discovered that potato plants are most susceptible to infection during the first three weeks of the growing season--these infected plants produced fewer tubers of smaller size and experienced a 70 percent yield reduction compared to plants inoculated during weeks five through eight. These plants did not suffer any yield or quality issues.

This research shows that potatoes develop an age-related resistance that prevents infection and suggests that management programs should focus on the early stages of potato development. These scientists are now conducting follow-up research on other potato cultivars and potato virus Y strains and research that will identify ways for potato growers to protect their crops during the most vulnerable period.

"As plant virologists in a land-grant university, we are interested in applied research that directly benefits the potato industry. This research project is in array with our view and mission," said first author Mohamad Chikh-Ali. "The most surprising results was the dramatic increase in potato resistance to virus infection as potato plants aged. We are very interested in this mechanism due to the great potential on the control of plant virus diseases."

For more information about this study, read "Effects of the Age-Related Resistance to Potato virus Y in Potato on the Systemic Spread of the Virus, Incidence of the Potato Tuber Necrotic Ringspot Disease, Tuber Yield, and Translocation Rates Into Progeny Tubers" published in the January issue of Plant Disease.

When emerging plant pathogens go undetected, they have the potential to negatively affect food industries, conservation efforts, and even human health. And, just like emerging human pathogens, such as the 2019 novel Coronavirus, emerging plant pathogens need to be diagnosed as soon as possible to prevent them from spreading.

Genetic sequencing technologies are powerful tools that are used for the early detection and precise identification of pathogens; they have shown great improvement over the past 20 years. Using these novel technologies, scientists can identify pathogens down to their distinct DNA sequences, without the time- and labor-intensive need to grow pathogens in the lab.

Scientists at Virginia Tech are taking advantage of this technological revolution by developing a way to apply these technologies to identifying diseases in crops.

"We truly try to take advantage of the DNA sequencing revolution. However, it's not enough to just sequence DNA. What we focus on in the lab is to combine the power of DNA sequencing with the power of new computer algorithms to interpret the DNA sequences to precisely and quickly identify these pathogens," said Boris Vinatzer, professor in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and an affiliated faculty member of the Fralin Life Sciences Institute.

Vinatzer recently published his findings in the journal Phytopathology, along with his graduate students and collaborators Song Li, an assistant professor in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences, and Lenwood Heath, a professor of the Department of Computer Science in the College of Engineering.

For this study, Vinatzer's team wanted to determine if an Oxford Nanopore Sequencing MinION device and a combination of different bioinformatic programs and sequence databases would be successful in identifying bacterial pathogens down to the exact outbreak strain.

When tested on tomato plants grown on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, the MinION device recognized Xanthomonas perforans, a proteobacteria responsible for bacterial leaf spot in tomato plants, as the pathogen in question.

What was even more impressive is the fact that the team was able to make their identifications down to the strain level. Strain identification poses a serious challenge to scientists because strains can be difficult to distinguish from one another. Without the proper technology and databases, new strains could be misidentified and the diseases they cause go untreated.

"If you want to know if it's a new strain that is causing a disease outbreak, you need to fine-tune your method. We have successfully done that. In fact, we didn't just find out that the pathogen that causes the disease in Virginia tomatoes belongs to the species X. perforans, we also identified which group of strains within the species it belongs to. Luckily, in this case, we found that the pathogen belongs to a group of strains that is common in Florida that has been circulating in the U.S. for years. Therefore, eradication will not be necessary," said Vinatzer.

In the past, scientists would have to run a separate test for every possible pathogen that could be in a sample. With new sequencing technologies, just one test can be used to identify anything and everything that is in a plant sample - including bacteria, fungi, and viruses.

After the DNA sequences are obtained, scientists must then feed sequence data into a database to compare them with reference sequences, which will tell them exactly what pathogen they are facing. Since databases can be accessed worldwide, local scientists can easily identify emerging pathogens by using data from where the pathogen has already been established.

However, at the time of the study, a comprehensive database that could precisely identify plant pathogens did not exist. Therefore, Vinatzer and Heath decided to take matters into their own hands and create their own database, LINbase. This database is unique in its use of Life Identification Numbers (LINs), which are like GPS coordinates. Each bacterial isolate has a number that scientists can reference and then use to classify and identify bacterial genome sequences to the strain level.

The lab's ultimate goal is to improve and then transfer their new sequencing technology and computer algorithms to the Plant Disease Clinic at Virginia Tech, which provides plant disease diagnostic services to farmers, nurseries, and homeowners as part of Virginia Cooperative Extension. Eventually, the lab hopes to extend its reach to other plant disease clinics from around the world.

The technology could eventually be deployed in the field, along with automated sampling devices from the SmartFarm Innovation Network, an initiative of Virginia Tech's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, to develop and deploy innovative technologies in food, agricultural, and natural resources production systems in Virginia.

"The Oxford Nanopore Sequencing MinION device is one of those technologies that will really have an impact and I think it will save growers a lot of money. By being fast and more precise in identifying diseases, growers can intervene early and manage diseases effectively, thus reducing losses in crop yield and quality," said Vinatzer.

With the success of their recent study, the lab's next steps involve further reducing the amount of time that it takes for pathogen identification. The goal is to decrease the time that it takes from receiving a plant sample to identifying the pathogen strain from days to hours.

HOUSTON - (Feb. 17, 2020) - Lugging a heavy backpack to school probably seems like a burden to most public school students, but it might explain a health advantage over home-schooled children: A heartier core.

A study by Rice University kinesiologists compares specific health metrics between two sets of students age 12 to 17 who have been a focus of the group over the past couple of years.

While previous work showed home-schoolers should expect no added risk to their general health over time, the new study, also led by Rice lecturer Laura Kabiri, draws a few disparities from a dataset she gathered at Texas Woman's University.

It specifically notes home-schooled adolescents had significantly lower abdominal strength and endurance than public school students required to take part in physical education programs. This was despite no significant difference between the two groups in measurements of body mass index.

The new study appears in the American Journal of Health Education. The second author is a Rice undergraduate student, Kendall Brice.

Public school students in the study proved significantly better at performing curl-ups, a metric that measures abdominal strength and endurance. The researchers wrote that could be explained by their daily use of backpacks weighing up to 25% of their body weight, sufficient to engage core-stabilizing muscles.

"This is actually a hot topic in pediatric health and wellness and I don't want anyone to think we are encouraging students to carry heavy loads in their backpacks," Kabiri said. "We all know that carrying heavy backpacks can lead to musculoskeletal problems. In fact, the American Chiropractic Association recommends a backpack weigh no more than 5-10% of a student's body weight.

"However, we are hypothesizing that heavy backpack use among public schoolers could be one explanation for the difference in core strength seen in our study," she said. "Improper instruction and form for abdominal exercises among home-schoolers is another. We really don't know the root cause but do see a difference. This is why we as health and wellness professionals need to do a better job reaching out to the home-school community."

The metrics were drawn from 132 participants evenly split between home and public school students. The home-schoolers took standardized fitness tests to measure body mass index, the ability to run for endurance and the capacity to perform curl-ups and push-ups. These results were matched to public school student data collected as required by states.

Push-up numbers revealed another interesting disparity. Public school students were on average able to meet requirements, but home-schooled students narrowly missed them.

"There was no significant difference in the mean for the push-up test, but it was significant for their health classification," said Brice, who will graduate from Rice this May.

For instance, she gave an example in which 17-year-old boys in public schools might be required to do 20 push-ups and averaged 20.4, while home-schoolers did only 19. "There's no significant difference there, but what we see is that more home-school kids dropped out of the healthy category," which mirrors the actual results of the study, Brice said.

"How does that happen? From my experience, our coaches and PE teachers often told us, 'You have to do 20,'" she recalled. "Or we'd ask how many we have to do. So the mean is similar, but public school kids knew the boundary, so they were able to push just past it."

Kabiri said home-school adolescents' fitness deficits could impact their health in the near term and in the future. The solution is to provide better advice for those students and their parents.

"The main conclusion is that we need to do a better job as health professionals in reaching out to this community," Kabiri said. "They're very well intended, and very willing to learn about technique and proper forms for doing these exercises."

ITHACA, N.Y. - Patients' ratings of hospitals and willingness to recommend them have almost no correlation to the quality of medical care provided or to patient survival rates, according to new Cornell University research.

Would you choose a hospital based on its Yelp reviews? Relying on hospitals' patient satisfaction scores as a guide amounts to much the same thing, according to the new study.

The scores - collected in surveys by hospitals and a top priority in the era of consumer-driven health care - overwhelmingly reflect patients' satisfaction with hotel-like amenities and hospitality services such as quiet rooms, better food and friendly nurses, said Cristobal Young, associate professor of sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University.

"The No. 1 thing that ultimately matters to patients - are you going to survive your operation? Can they fix you? - does not really factor into patient satisfaction scores," said Young. "There's very little awareness that these are essentially Yelp reviews."

Young is the lead author of "Patients as Consumers in the Market for Medicine: The Halo Effect of Hospitality," co-written with Xinxiang Chen of Minzu University in China and published in the journal Social Forces.

Young and Chen analyzed Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services data on patient satisfaction, mortality and technical medical quality for roughly two-thirds of U.S. general and acute-care hospitals - more than 3,000 hospitals - between 2007 and 2010.

They found patient satisfaction was higher at hospitals with the lowest death rates - but barely. Scores were only 2 percentage points lower at hospitals with the highest death rates.

"Patients do not have much awareness of their hospital's patient safety standards," the researchers wrote.

In contrast, interpersonal communication by nurses - such as their responsiveness and compassion (not their technical skill) - was a far bigger factor in patient satisfaction, with scores varying by nearly 27 percentage points.

The tidiness and quietness of rooms also had much bigger impacts on satisfaction than death rates or medical quality.

The fundamental problem, Young said, is one of visibility. Patients generally can only see and understand a hospital's "front stage" room-and-board presentation.

"They know when the food is cold and tasteless, when their room is loud and overcrowded, when the nurses are too busy to tend to their pains and frustrations," the researchers wrote.

They have little insight, however, into the "backstage" operations where critical medical care happens - sometimes while patients are heavily medicated or completely sedated. As a result, the study concludes, front stage room-and-board care creates a "halo effect" of patient goodwill, but the backstage delivery of medical excellence does not.

At the same time, research has shown, many hospitals, particularly in competitive markets, have invested heavily in hotel-like amenities: Grand atriums with waterfalls; private rooms with patios and scenic views; "healing gardens"; artwork; music; gourmet food; Wi-Fi; and premium TV channels.

Those investments, Young said, represent a distraction and a shifting of resources away from hospitals' core mission: excellent medical care.

"No one would object to nurses being friendly or to patients having private rooms and great food and manicured gardens," Young said. "But none of those things are medical treatment. They won't fix your health problem. And hospitals have limited resources and razor-thin margins."

Hospitals' growing emphasis on patient satisfaction is unexpected, Young said, in a U.S. health care system that is roughly twice as expensive as other high-income countries but has worse outcomes - lower life expectancy and higher rates of illness, according to the study.

"If I'm a patient, I know that three days in the hospital will be rough," he said. "Just make it worthwhile - give me the best medical treatment and the highest survival rate."

A fireball in the sky, accompanied by a bang, amazed hundreds of eyewitnesses in northern Germany in mid-September last year. The reason for the spectacle was a meteoroid entering the Earth's atmosphere and partially burning up. One day after the observations, a citizen in Flensburg found a stone weighing 24.5 grams and having a fresh black fusion crust on the lawn of his garden.

Dieter Heinlein, coordinator of the German part of the European Fireball Network at the German Aerospace Center in Augsburg, directly recognized the stone as a meteorite and delivered the rock to experts at the "Institut für Planetologie" at Münster University (Germany). Prof. Addi Bischoff and PhD student Markus Patzek have been studying the stone mineralogically and chemically ever since. About 15 university and research institutes in Germany, France, and Switzerland now take part in the science consortium.

The first research results show that the meteorite "Flensburg", named after the location of the fall, belongs to an extremely rare type of carbonaceous chondrites. Scanning electron microscopic analyses prove that it contains minerals, especially sheet silicates and carbonates that formed in the presence of water on small planetesimals in the early history of our solar system. Thus, these types of early parent bodies can be regarded as possible building blocks of the Earth that delivered water.

"The meteorite of Flensburg belongs to an extremely rare meteorite class and is the only meteorite fall of this class in Germany proving that 4.56 billion years ago there must have been small bodies in the early solar system storing liquid water. Perhaps such bodies also delivered water to the Earth," Addi Bischoff said.

Meteorites provide information on the development of the Earth

The new German meteorite "Flensburg" fully fits into the research program of the Collaborative Research Centre „TRR170 - Late Accretion onto Terrestrial Planets", a science cooperation between institutions in Münster and Berlin. The major aim of the Collaborative Research Centre TRR170 is to understand the late growth history of the terrestrial planets. This leads to the question about the possible building blocks of the Earth. In order to find answers to this question, the researchers investigate various aspects including meteorites - most of them are fragments of asteroids and can be regarded as the oldest rocks of our solar system. Thus, studying them allows scientists to gain insight into the formation processes of the first solids and accretion and evolution of small bodies and planets in our solar system.

First details on the Flensburg meteorite have just been published in the "Meteoritical Bulletin Database" of the "Meteoritical Society".

In addition to helping us chew and swallow, keeping the mouth moist and protecting us against germs, saliva can also be used for early detection of the risk of developing diseases associated with surplus body fat.

Researchers at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP) and the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil performed a study in which they used the level of uric acid in saliva to predict body fat percentages in teenagers and identify those with surplus fat even if they had no symptoms of chronic obesity-related disease.

The study was supported by FAPESP (São Paulo Research Foundation). The results are published in the journal Nutrition Research.

The goal of the study was to identify reliable biomarkers in saliva that correlated with those found in the blood as a contribution to the development of quick tests to monitor health, especially in children.

"The idea is to enable saliva to be more widely used as an alternative biological sample for clinical analysis. The advantage of saliva is that it can be collected several times noninvasively and painlessly, like urine," Paula Midori Castelo, a professor at UNIFESP in Diadema and principal investigator for the project, told Agência FAPESP.

According to Castelo, the study showed the level of salivary uric acid to be a good predictor of body fat percentage even in adolescents considered healthy, although the link between these two factors is poorly understood and will have to be investigated further.

Uric acid is the end-product of the metabolic breakdown of purines, which are nitrogenous bases in DNA and RNA. It accumulates in the blood and, in much smaller proportions, in the saliva. Although uric acid acts as an antioxidant, when levels become too high in the blood and saliva owing to dysregulated purine degradation, it can lead to a predisposition to develop hypertension, inflammation and cardiovascular disease.

Methods

The researchers collected saliva samples from 129 girls and 119 boys. In addition to uric acid, they measured the levels of several other substances, including cholesterol and vitamin D.

The subjects were aged 14-17 and were students at public schools in Piracicaba, São Paulo State. They first answered a questionnaire on their medical and dental history. They also underwent an oral examination to exclude participants with cavities and/or periodontal disease (gum inflammation).

"Cavities and periodontal disease are known to influence salivary parameters such as pH [acidity], electrolytic composition and biochemistry. Both relate to the secretion of substances that can change the composition of saliva," Castelo explained.

The remaining participants then submitted to an anthropometric evaluation that included measures of height, weight and body fat percentage, as well as skeletal muscle mass, using a bioelectrical impedance analyzer, which gauges resistance to a weak current as it passes through the body.

Saliva was sampled at home after the subjects had fasted for 12 hours. The samples were collected using a Salivette, a plastic tube containing a cotton swab. Levels of cholesterol, uric acid and other substances were measured by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), an analytical chemistry technique that separates, identifies and quantifies each component in a mixture.

Statistical analysis of the data showed that the adolescents with a high level of salivary uric acid also had a higher body fat percentage.

Using linear regression (a statistical technique that analyzes the relationships between variables), the researchers were also able to predict body fat percentage based on the level of salivary uric acid.

"The level of this compound in saliva proved to be a reliable indicator of body fat accumulation, even in adolescents who were not being treated for chronic disease. It could be the basis for an accurate noninvasive method of monitoring dietary health and achieving early detection of changes in nutritional state," Castelo said.

Hazardous air pollutants like benzene found in gasoline have been linked to cancer, asthma, autism, reduced fertility, and lower intelligence in humans.

With a $2.3 million award from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, an interdisciplinary team of Virginia Tech researchers led by Masoud Agah, the Virginia Microelectronics Consortium Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is working to revolutionize a testing process for these harmful pollutants, in particular for truck drivers.

According to Agah, a renowned researcher in chip-scale gas chromatography and Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation Faculty Fellow, the development of effective strategies for reducing occupational exposure to pollutants requires accurate, time-resolved measurement of exposure.

Current practice typically requires collection of an air sample using specialized equipment, transport of the sample to the lab, and time-consuming analysis using expensive equipment to identify and quantify the pollutants present in the environment. The results are not available for several days, and they only provide an average measure of a worker's exposure.

"Truck drivers have a higher risk of lung cancer that is associated with exposure to diesel exhaust," said Linsey Marr, the Charles P. Lunsford Professor in the Via Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a co-investigator on this project. "Diesel exhaust is a complex mixture of particles and gases and the specific component responsible for health effects has not been identified. Some of the gaseous compounds are known or suspected carcinogens. We are focusing on measuring some of these compounds."

The team will work to develop an intelligent wearable analyzer for vapor exposure, otherwise called iWAVE, that can be used to measure hazardous air pollutants in real-time in transportation-related and other workplaces.

The small, unobtrusive, wearable, direct-read device will provide a time resolution for exposure assessment in five short minutes and is expected to revolutionize the way drivers, mechanics, movers, loading dock workers, and similar occupations surrounding airplanes, trains, and ships combat harmful pollutants that they encounter on a daily basis.

"iWAVE will employ microelectromechanical systems technology, advanced microelectronics components and systems, and state-of-the-art micro gas chromatography and telecommunication techniques," said Leyla Nazhandali, an associate professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and co-investigator on this project. "The low-power, low-cost micro gas analyzer with its embedded system can replace cumbersome sampling methods that must be followed by costly analysis in a laboratory and is programmable through smartphone apps and can send alarms in case of high levels of exposures beyond the predefined set point."

The team will evaluate the performance of iWAVE and compare it to that of conventional industrial hygiene sampling train and analytical methods during experiments in which participants perform two transportation work tasks at VTTI: heavy-truck refueling and fuel-injection mechanical maintenance.

Other co-investigators of this award include Andrew Miller, research associate at the Center for Truck and Bus Safety at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute; Andrew Alden, executive director of the I-81 Coalition at Virginia Tech Transportation Institute; Julia Gohlke, associate professor of environmental health in the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine; and Inyoung Kim, associate professor of statistics in the College of Science.

You can't call it a dictionary just yet, but University of Delaware neuroscientist Joshua Neunuebel is starting to break the code mice use to communicate with each other.

So far, it's all action-specific. Mice sound one way when they are being chased, quite another when they are the chaser, not much at all when they are not in motion.

He knows this because he and his research team have found a way to identify precisely which mouse is making which sound, where and when.

Their findings, which were just published in Nature Neuroscience, provide a foundation for examining the neural circuits that link sensory cues -- specifically these ultrasonic mouse calls -- to social behavior.

"This is fundamental science that will allow us to potentially get at more complicated problems," Neunuebel said. That includes a broad range of communication disorders, including autism.

The work is supported by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, the University of Delaware Research Foundation and Delaware's General University Research Program.

Humans can't hear the majority of mouse-to-mouse vocal interactions at all because they happen on a scale our ears don't catch. This is likely one of life's hidden blessings, since mice like to scurry around in our walls, attics, basements and other human habitats.

But studying their communication patterns can help researchers understand the neurobiology of social behavior and bring valuable insight--not just into the secret life of rodents, but possibly into the mechanics of human communication. Research shows that about 98 percent of human genes are shared by mice.

To study these mouse interactions, Neunuebel's team gathered data as four mice -- two males, two females -- got acquainted. The mice interacted for five hours at a time in a chamber fitted with eight microphones and a video camera. Researchers recorded 10 similar encounters using different mice each time, studying a total of 44 mice.

They collected enormous amounts of data, with each microphone capturing 250,000 audio samples per second and the video camera capturing 30 frames per second. Each five-hour encounter produced more than 100 gigabytes of data.

Using machine-learning programs along with other computational approaches, they were able to show that specific sounds were associated with distinct behaviors.

"To make sense of the mountain of data, we wrote a lot of computer programs," Neunuebel said. "Everybody in the lab now writes code -- and that's a huge attribute of what my lab does. I think it's essential for deciphering very complex behavior."

That code is available -- free of charge -- to other interested researchers, he said.

Among their findings:

Mouse calls are different depending on the position of the mouse -- whether they are chasing or fleeing.

Decreasing pitch was related to dominant signals, while increasing pitch was related to non-dominant behavior.

A significant link was found between certain calls and behavior that followed.

The sounds affect only the mouse who is interacting, not those who are nearby but not involved in the action.

Different situations produced different types of calls.

Another recent study by Neunuebel's team drew on the same microphone/camera setup and showed how specific social interactions differ.

In that study, published by Scientific Reports, the calls of female mice were analyzed by their interaction with male mice or with other female mice.

They found two new distinctives in this study. First, female mice almost always vocalize at close range to other mice, while male mice call out at widely varying distances. Second, female mice vocalize sooner when in the company of male mice than in the company of other females.

The team said the most compelling finding of this study was that mouse behavior changes depending on the vocalizations of other mice. For example, the male accelerates after a female vocalizes if she is moving faster than he has been.

Neunuebel said his lab's setup -- where the mice mingle freely -- is much more dynamic than more standard approaches that allow animals to see each other but keep them separated to make it easier to quantify an animal's social behavior.

"Here there is free interaction," he said. "It is complex and the mice emit a lot of vocalizations.... We know who is vocalizing and we can see how they all respond to specific types of calls."

That is information that may soon produce much more insight into how a mouse's brain circuitry works -- the way messages are sent, interpreted and acted upon.

Washington, DC-- Aerosol emissions from burning coal and wood are dangerous to human health, but it turns out that by cooling the Earth they also diminish global economic inequality, according to a new study by Carnegie's Yixuan Zheng, Geeta Persad, and Ken Caldeira, along with UC Irvine's Steven Davis. Their findings are published by Nature Climate Change.

Tiny particles spewed into the atmosphere by human activity, called "anthropogenic aerosols," interact with clouds and reflect some of the Sun's energy back into space. They have a short-term cooling effect that's similar to how particles from major volcanic eruptions can cause global temperatures to drop. This masks some of the warming caused by much-longer-lived greenhouse gases, which trap the Sun's heat in the planet's atmosphere.

"Estimates indicate that aerosol pollution emitted by humans is offsetting about 0.7 degrees Celsius, or about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit, of the warming due to greenhouse gas emissions," said lead author Zheng. "This translates to a 40-year delay in the effects of climate change. Without cooling caused by aerosol emissions, we would have achieved 2010-level global mean temperatures in 1970."

Previous research has shown that climate change provides some economic benefits to countries in cool regions--which would be warmed to temperatures that are ideal for agricultural productivity and human labor--and economic harm to countries in already hot regions.

Does aerosol-related cooling have a similar distribution of economic impacts?

The four researchers set out to investigate the economic effects of cooling caused by aerosol emissions in different parts of the world. They found that, opposite to greenhouse gases, the cooling effect of aerosols benefitted the economies of tropical, developing countries and harmed the economies of high latitude, developed countries.

"Although aerosols have many negative impacts, our simulations demonstrated that aerosol-induced cooling, in particular, could actually diminish global economic inequality," Persad said.

"However, when you look at the whole world at once, rather than region by region, the net economic effect of this cooling is likely to be small due to these effects between latitudes," added Davis.

Despite this, the team noted that aerosols are dangerous and that the public health benefits of cleaning them up would far outweigh the economic benefits of continuing to release them.

"We need to understand how human activities affect our planet so we can make informed decisions that can protect the environment while giving everyone a high quality of life," Caldeira concluded. "Aerosol pollution might appear to have some upsides, but at the end of the day their profound harm far outweighs their meager benefits."

Many younger Americans are aware of new products that heat tobacco to produce a breathable aerosol, and individuals who use other tobacco products are those most likely to use them, according to a new RAND Corporation study.

About 12% of the young adults surveyed were aware of heated tobacco products and 5% reported using the products at some point in their life. The devices heat -- but do not burn -- tobacco to produce a nicotine-containing aerosol that is inhaled, similar to what occurs in smoking cigarettes or vaping e-cigarettes.

Previous use of tobacco products, use of marijuana or other drugs, and use of multiple tobacco products all were associated with a higher chance that a young adult had used heated tobacco products.

The study, published online by the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research, is one of the first to ask young adults in the U.S. about their awareness and use of heated tobacco products.

"Most people don't even know about these products, but they are what we will see promoted by the tobacco industry in the U.S. market over the next couple years," said Michael S. Dunbar, the study's lead author and a behavioral scientist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. "While some of these products are relatively new to the U.S., we found evidence that they may be making inroads among some young people."

Heated tobacco products are a diverse group of devices that heat tobacco to temperatures below combustion to produce an aerosol instead of smoke. They are different from vaping products, which heat a liquid containing nicotine to produce a vapor. As with vaping products, some heated tobacco products devices -- such as dry herb vaporizers -- also can be used to consume tobacco mixed with marijuana or marijuana alone.

Because they do not burn tobacco, heated tobacco products may expose consumers to lower levels of toxic chemicals as cigarettes. However, the health effects associated with heated tobacco products and their public health risks are unknown.

Although versions of heated tobacco products have been available for many years, tobacco companies have just recently begun to market new-generation products as alternatives to cigarettes. Sales of these newer products are expected to increase exponentially in the future.

RAND researchers surveyed 2,497 young adults during 2018-2019 who have been long-term participants in an ongoing RAND project examining multiple factors about the use of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and other drugs. Most of those in the study lived in California.

Men were more likely to report awareness and use of heated tobacco products than women, while use and knowledge about the products were lower among those in college compared to those who were not enrolled.

While some people see novel devices such as heated tobacco products as a way for those who smoke to reduce cigarette use and lower the harms caused by smoking, others see these products as yet another way to use tobacco in an increasingly diverse tobacco product landscape.

More than 40 percent of those who reported awareness or lifetime use of heated tobacco products had used some other tobacco product during the past month. Among young people who currently smoked cigarettes, rates of heated tobacco product use were higher in those who were more dependent on smoking, those who currently used multiple types of tobacco products and those who used marijuana.

"Earlier research suggests that using multiple tobacco products and smoking marijuana can make it harder for people to quit cigarettes in the future," Dunbar said. "Further work is needed to understand patterns and motivations for using heated tobacco products, including whether or not young people are actually using these products as a way to transition entirely off of smoking cigarettes."

The study also found that a sizable proportion of people (14%) who reported using heated tobacco products said they had not previously used any other tobacco products.

"This suggests that heated tobacco products may not exclusively appeal to people who already use tobacco," Dunbar said. "As these new products become increasingly accessible in the U.S., monitoring their use among tobacco-naïve individuals will be critical to understanding their potential public health impact."

The terminology humans have conceived to explain and study our own brain may be mis-aligned with how these constructs are actually represented in nature. For example, in many human societies, when a baby is born either a "male" or a "female" box is checked on the birth certificate. Reality, however, may be less black and white. In fact, the assumption of dichotomic differences between only two sex/gender categories may be at odds with our endeavours that try to carve nature at its joints. Such is the case with a new paper, published recently in the journal Cerebral Cortex, where researchers argue that there are at least nine directions of brain-gender variation.

Many classical statistical approaches pre-assume which groups they expect to see in the data; such as old vs. young participants, or introverted vs. extroverted participants. Everything else that follows after that critically depends on the initial decision of assigning individuals into strict groups. In this new study, the researchers did not pre-assume what the brain gender groups, transcending male, female, and individuals in-between, should be. Instead, they derived the brain-gender groups directly from brain-imaging and psychological assessment items in an agnostic data-driven fashion.

"Our goal was to demonstrate that widely available brain-imaging methods are capable of providing evidence against a strict binary view of how sex/gender is manifested in the brain," explains Dr. Danilo Bzdok, Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at McGill University's Faculty of Medicine and a senior author on the paper. "These findings have important consequences for the movement towards improved equity, diversity, and inclusion in Canada and other countries. By raising awareness from the biological perspective we may contribute to building a society where individuals identifying themselves in between the labels of male and female do feel included rather than discriminated against."

Pulling the data together

In order to conduct their study, the researchers acquired a unique dataset comprised of individuals of wide sex/gender diversity. Rather than only studying gender behaviour in a male and a female group, as is commonly done, they acquired a rich sample that also included individuals that underwent sex transformation from male to female as well as individuals that have undergone sex transformation from female to male. The measured brain connectivity fingerprints of these four groups were then related to a comprehensive profile of gender-stereotypical behavioural traits, working closely with Professor Ute Habel and Dr. Benjamin Clemens at the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, RWTH Aachen University.

The researchers used machine learning algorithms that could provide evidence that sex/gender may not be a dichotomic entity in the human brain. In an unbiased pattern-learning approach they could show that at least nine dimensions of brain-gender variation can be robustly identified. That is, the particular individuals can be assigned to nine "expressions" or coordinate system axes of how much they fall along a particular distribution of brain-gender variation.

"My lab works at the interface between systems neuroscience and tailoring machine-learning algorithms to answer questions in large neuroscience datasets," says Dr. Bzdok, who recently moved to Montreal to join the McGill community. "Montreal has the advantage of combining world-class neuroscience institutions, such as The Neuro, with top-notch Artificial Intelligence institutions, such as the Mila Quebec AI Institute, in the same city. In both of these research areas, there is a lot of legacy and, now, momentum to build a critical mass to promote forward progress. As such, Montreal is a particularly promising place that is likely to make important contributions to bridging neuroscience and AI."

Moving the research forward

Dr. Bzdok is optimistic that budding clinical consortium initiatives will allow them to pool even richer and multi-modal datasets to acknowledge even more facets of sex/gender variation existing in the wider population. From a data analytics standpoint, he explains that the more data we can gather, the more likely it is that we will discover a greater number of sex/gender dimensions.

"I am currently reaching out to various investigators across the McGill community to try to take these and other projects to the next level," shares Dr. Bzdok. "Such questions of mapping societally-relevant behavioural variation to brain variation can now be addressed from cross-cutting perspectives including genetics, genomics, interventional responses such as from temporary brain lesions, immunological markers, and so many more. McGill provides fertile ground to work towards such ambitious questions."

A new study by the University of Houston Institute for Research on Women, Gender & Sexuality (IRWGS) reports that women lag far behind men on multiple fronts in Harris County. Women are almost 50% more likely to live in poverty than men and the wage gap for men and women by race and ethnicity is considerably greater here than nationally. The report presents both new and summary analyses of select data on gender and sexuality, derived from the 2017 American Community Survey and other sources.

"These and other data in the report demonstrate that gender and sexuality are major factors in shaping the experience of Harris County residents, often inequitably. We've made some progress in moving toward equitable inclusion of all talented workers in the workforce including women, but there's far to go," said IRWGS director Elizabeth Gregory. "An important element seems to be that we haven't found a way to equitably provide child-care support for working families. As a result, mothers get stuck slowing their careers where it might not be to their, their family's or the community's advantage to do that."

Key findings of the report include:

In Harris County during 2017, women's poverty rate (15.3%) was nearly 50% higher than the male poverty rate (10.4%). The gender gap is higher than observed nationally, statewide (Texas) and in comparable counties in the United States.

Wage gap data for men and women by race/ethnicity in Harris County is considerably greater than the national wage gap, with the median non-Hispanic (NH) white woman here making 69.4 cents on the dollar made by the median NH white man; the median NH Asian woman making 63.6 cents; the median NH black woman making 47.1 cents; and the median Hispanic woman making 33.5 cents.

Thirty percent of Harris County women with minor children in the home were unpartnered, with a median household income of $31,600 and 36.0% living at or below the poverty line. Contrastingly, 8.2% of men with minor children in the home were unpartnered, with a median household income of $54,000 and 17.2% at or below poverty. Harris County children with partnered parents had a median family income of $78,000, with 11.2% living under the poverty rate.

Between the time of their birth and high school graduation, most U.S. children do not have access to public school/care during work hours 63% of the time. The new availability of pre-K for some four-year-olds in Harris County lowers the non-availability of public school/care to 60% of the time.

Texas and Harris County follow the national trend with rapidly declining teen fertility rates: The Texas teen fertility rate declined 59.1% between 2007 (the start of the recent recession) and 2018 and the Harris County rate fell 60.9% in that interval. Nonetheless, these rates remain high compared to national rates.

Though demographic data on sexuality is imprecise, recent U.S. Census data indicates that among same-sex cohabiting partners in Harris County, 59% were men, and 41% were women.

Gregory notes that the LGBT community is incompletely documented due to persistent social risk.

"Data on the LGBT community is limited, like much gender and sexuality data that operates in a context of risk --in this case due to lack of employment protection and other social stigma," said Gregory. The center works to responsibly document such data in ways that minimize risk.

Founded in 2019, the University of Houston Institute for Research on Women, Gender & Sexuality is the region's first gender and sexuality focused think tank. The institute's goal is to provide evidence-based data and analyses to amplify discussion around the social and economic forces linked to gender and sexuality that have long gone unexamined and to engender positive change.

"Instead of taking gender and sexuality disparities for granted as inevitable, people should start talking about them over dinner with friends and asking, 'How can we alter this?' 'What are the real economic dynamics of gender, and how can they be improved upon?' While gender has long served as a work-assignment system and has given men and women different jobs in the home and workforce and different pay scales, the old patterns don't make sense anymore, for employers or for families," said Gregory.

A healthy diet is essential to living well, but as we age, should we change what we eat?

UTS research fellow Dr Luna Xu has studied data from 139,000 older Australians and found strong links between certain food groups, memory loss and comorbid heart disease or diabetes.

Dr Xu found high consumption of fruit and vegetables was linked to lowered odds of memory loss and its comorbid heart disease. High consumption of protein-rich foods was associated with a better memory.

Dr Xu also found the link between food group and memory status may vary among different older age groups. People aged 80 years and over with a low consumption of cereals are at the highest risk of memory loss and its comorbid heart disease, her research showed.

"Our present study implies that the healthy eating suggestions of cereals consumption in the prevention of memory loss and comorbid heart disease for older people may differ compared to other age groups," said Dr Xu, who holds a Heart Foundation postdoctoral research fellowship.

She said the study pointed to a need for age-specific healthy dietary guidelines.

Memory loss is one of the main early symptoms for people with dementia, which is the second leading cause of death of Australians. People living with dementia have on average between two and eight comorbid conditions, which may accelerate cognitive and functional impairment. The most common comorbidities in dementia include cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and hypertension.

"The dietary intervention in chronic disease prevention and management, by taking into consideration the fact that older populations often simultaneously deal with multiple chronic conditions, is a real challenge," Dr Xu said.

"To achieve the best outcome for our ageing population, strong scientific evidence that supports effective dietary intervention in preventing and managing co-occurring chronic conditions, is essential."