Culture

A landmark Commission report convened by WHO, UNICEF and The Lancet has found the health and future of every child and adolescent worldwide is under immediate threat from ecological degradation, climate change and exploitative marketing practices that push fast food, sugary drinks, alcohol and tobacco at children.

No single country is adequately protecting children's health, their environment and their futures, according to an accompanying global index of 180 countries, comparing performance on child flourishing, including measures of child survival and well-being, such as health, education, and nutrition; sustainability, including a proxy for greenhouse gas emissions, and equity, or income gaps

The US, for example, fails to offer children a top 30 start in life, according to the new Global Index, but of significant concern, the US is one of the worst performing countries on providing a climate fit for their future - coming in at 173rd place globally, within the bottom 10 [Global top and bottom 10 countries listed here]

As climate and commercial threats intensify, WHO-UNICEF-Lancet Commission presses for radical rethink on child health

No single country is adequately protecting children's health, their environment and their futures, finds a landmark report released today by a Commission of over 40 child and adolescent health experts from around the world. The Commission was convened by the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF and The Lancet.

The report, A Future for the World's Children?, finds that the health and future of every child and adolescent worldwide is under immediate threat from ecological degradation, climate change and exploitative marketing practices that push heavily processed fast food, sugary drinks, alcohol and tobacco at children.

"Despite improvements in child and adolescent health over the past 20 years, progress has stalled, and is set to reverse," said former Prime Minister of New Zealand and Co-Chair of the Commission, Helen Clark. "It has been estimated that around 250 million children under five years old in low- and middle-income countries are at risk of not reaching their developmental potential, based on proxy measures of stunting and poverty. But of even greater concern, every child worldwide now faces existential threats from climate change and commercial pressures.

"Countries need to overhaul their approach to child and adolescent health, to ensure that we not only look after our children today but protect the world they will inherit in the future," she added.

Intensifying climate change threatens every child's future

The report includes a new global index of 180 countries, comparing performance on child flourishing, including measures of child survival and well-being, such as health, education, and nutrition; sustainability, with a proxy for greenhouse gas emissions, and equity, or income gaps. [Top & Bottom 10 countries; Interactive Index, Full Global Index on pp. 35-38] [1]

According to the report, while the poorest countries need to do more to support their children's ability to live healthy lives, excessive carbon emissions -disproportionately from wealthier countries - threaten the future of all children. If global warming exceeds 4°C by the year 2100 in line with current projections, this would lead to devastating health consequences for children, due to rising ocean levels, heatwaves, proliferation of diseases like malaria and dengue, and malnutrition.

The index shows that children in Norway, the Republic of Korea, and the Netherlands have the best chance at survival and well-being, while children in Central African Republic, Chad, Somalia, Niger and Mali face the worst odds. However, when authors took per capita CO2 emissions into account, the top countries trail behind: Norway ranked 156, the Republic of Korea 166, and the Netherlands 160. Each of the three emits 210% more CO2 per capita than their 2030 target. The United States of America (USA), Australia, and Saudi Arabia are among the ten worst emitters.

"More than 2 billion people live in countries where development is hampered by humanitarian crises, conflicts, and natural disasters, problems increasingly linked with climate change," said Minister Awa Coll-Seck from Senegal, Co-Chair of the Commission. "While some of the poorest countries have among the lowest CO2 emissions, many are exposed to the harshest impacts of a rapidly changing climate. Promoting better conditions today for children to survive and thrive nationally does not have to come at the cost of eroding children's futures globally."

The only countries on track to beat CO2 emission per capita targets by 2030, while also performing fairly (within the top 70) on child flourishing measures are: Albania, Armenia, Grenada, Jordan, Moldova, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Uruguay and Viet Nam.

Harmful commercial marketing preys on children - with childhood obesity increasing 11-fold

The report also highlights the distinct threat posed to children from harmful marketing. Evidence suggests that children in some countries see as many as 30,000 advertisements on television alone in a single year, while youth exposure to vaping (e-cigarettes) advertisements increased by more than 250% in the USA over two years, reaching more than 24 million young people.

Professor Anthony Costello, one of the Commission's authors, said: "Industry self-regulation has failed. Studies in Australia, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand and the USA - among many others - have shown that self-regulation has not hampered commercial ability to advertise to children. For example, despite industry signing up to self-regulation in Australia, children and adolescent viewers were still exposed to 51 million alcohol ads during just one year of televised football, cricket and rugby. And the reality could be much worse still: we have few facts and figures about the huge expansion of social media advertising and algorithms aimed at our children."

Children's exposure to commercial marketing of junk food and sugary beverages is associated with purchase of unhealthy foods and overweight and obesity, linking predatory marketing to the alarming rise in childhood obesity. The number of obese children and adolescents increased from 11 million in 1975 to 124 million in 2016 - an 11-fold increase, with dire individual and societal costs.

A manifesto for immediate action on child and adolescent health

To protect children, the independent Commission authors call for a new global movement driven by and for children. Specific recommendations include:

Stop CO2 emissions with the utmost urgency, to ensure children have a future on this planet;

Place children and adolescents at the centre of our efforts to achieve sustainable development;

New policies and investment in all sectors to work towards child health and rights;

Incorporate children's voices into policy decisions;

Tighten national regulation of harmful commercial marketing, supported by a new Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Dr. Richard Horton, Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet family of journals, said: "The opportunity is great. The evidence is available. The tools are at hand. From heads-of-state to local government, from UN leaders to children themselves, this Commission calls for the birth of a new era for child and adolescent health. It will take courage and commitment to deliver. It is the supreme test of our generation."

"From the climate crisis to obesity and harmful commercial marketing, children around the world are having to contend with threats that were unimaginable just a few generations ago," said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF Executive Director. "It is time for a rethink on child health, one which places children at the top of every government's development agenda and puts their well-being above all considerations."

"This report shows that the world's decision makers are failing today's children and youth: failing to protect their health, failing to protect their rights, and failing to protect their planet," Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization said. "This must be a wakeup call for countries to invest in child health and development, ensure their voices are heard, protect their rights, and build a future that is fit for children."

Despite the benefits of well-child care visits (WCV), up to half of WCVs are missed. A team of researchers and pediatricians at Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Washington, and the University of Vermont sought to understand the challenges that prevent families from attending their child's scheduled appointment. They interviewed caregivers of children who had missed WCVs as well as family and pediatric physicians from a large safety-net health system in Richmond, Virginia. Caregivers and physicians alike identified social factors as key barriers to attendance, including transportation, difficulty taking time off from work, childcare, and underlying financial stressors. The researchers conclude, "Our findings suggest there is a need to further explore the potential relationship between WCV attendance and social determinants of health."

Leading educators and clinical experts on transgender health care from Harvard, Fenway Health, and The Fenway Institute address access issues for transgender patients seeking care by providing a plan to integrate gender-affirming hormone therapy, surgical referrals, or wrap-around services into primary care. Such programs provide a much-needed service for this underserved but increasingly visible population that experiences significant health inequities. Authors provide a concise and practical guide to developing transgender health programs within existing primary care practices. Programs may be as streamlined as having one or two clinicians who provide hormone therapy within a welcoming primary care practice. The guide provides tips on how to access low-cost clinical training and how to generate organizational buy-in for the development of new services. The plan can be adapted across primary care practices of varying sizes and resources. This is the first peer-reviewed publication that provides a guide to implementing a transgender health program in primary care settings.

A new study from the University of Missouri concluded that a physician's decision not to intensify hypertension treatment is often a contextually appropriate choice. In two-thirds of cases where physicians did not change treatment for patients with hypertension, patients' blood pressure returned to normal in follow-up readings taken at home. This pre- and post-study tracked 90 patients with hypertension to understand the role that follow-up home blood pressure measures could play in understanding cases of "therapeutic inertia." Sixty-six percent of patients who had a blood pressure reading of 140/90 or higher when they were in the clinic and whose doctors did not change their treatment, had average readings under 140/90 when patients took their blood pressure at home.

According to the authors, there are implications for health care quality metrics. Doctors' success rates in controlling hypertension are based solely on clinic blood pressure rates. The authors extrapolated the home blood pressure metrics to show that when home metrics replaced clinical ones, the department's hypertension control success rates rose from 58% to 86%. They conclude, "Most validated home blood pressure should be accepted and preferred for physician hypertension performance measures."

Additionally, when surveyed after the home blood pressure reading intervention, participants shared that home blood pressure monitoring enhanced their understanding of blood pressure control. Eighty-three percent of participants agreed that they would consider buying a home blood pressure monitor if it was covered by insurance.

Lincoln, Nebraska -- For decades, research examining the intersection of religion and politics counted the religious "nones" -- or the unaffiliated -- as a small, homogeneous and liberal group, and conservatives have treated them as such.

But the number of religiously unaffiliated has grown exponentially to become one of the largest demographic groups in the United States, now reaching 23 percent of the population. This begs the question, do religious nones still cluster on the blue end of the political spectrum?

New research from University of Nebraska-Lincoln sociologist Philip Schwadel finds the unaffiliated are now much more varied in their political beliefs than previously believed. As this group grows, repercussions could be felt by political parties in the future.

Through survey data collected from Pew Research Center's American Trends Panel, Schwadel examined religious nones, further distilling the group into three categories --atheists, agnostics and "nothing in particulars" -- for the first time. When he measured their political activities and beliefs, he found agnostics and atheists were more likely to be liberal, while the largest group, the "nothing in particulars," was more likely to be conservative.

"As you would expect and as past research has shown, non-religious Americans as a whole are less likely to be Republican, more likely to be Democrat," Schwadel said. "But when we break it apart, it's really the atheists and agnostics who are especially likely to be Democrats, while those who are nothing in particular fall in between the (religiously) affiliated, who are significantly more likely to be conservative, and the atheists and agnostics."

Schwadel was surprised to find, however, that those who reported that their religion is "nothing in particular" seemed to shun politics altogether, being the least likely group to have voted in the previous election.

"They were also the least likely, even when compared to the religiously affiliated, to have talked about politics," Schwadel said.

The religiously unaffiliated have been largely ignored by the Republican Party, because it was thought to be a wholly liberal group, but these findings show an opening for conservative politics.

"It's possible that in the future, the Republican Party may be able to count on them as a constituency, but unfortunately, they're relatively uninterested politically," Schwadel said. "It would be up to the party to mobilize them."

The results raise questions for future prognostications about politics in America, too.

"Now that this group is one of the largest religious groups in our country, as political pollsters, political scientists, the media make political projections, I think it's important that they understand this group of non-affiliated Americans is not a monolithic group, they're not all the same," he said.

Schwadel noted the study also found that agnostics were the most politically active, more likely to vote, and reported that they feel politically isolated from their families, while atheists were politically active, too, but were more likely to have conflicts with others over politics.

New Rochelle, NY, February 18, 2020--A new study has shown metformin - a glucose-lowering drug commonly used to treat diabetes - to be effective at lowering some measures of obesity in children and adolescents. The results of a systematic review and meta-analysis are published in Childhood Obesity, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. Click here to read the full-text article free on the Childhood Obesity website through March 18, 2020.

The article entitled "Metformin Therapy Reduces Obesity Indices in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Randomized Clinical Trials" was coauthored by Alireza Milajerdi, Tehran University of Medical Sciences (Iran) and colleagues from Tehran University of Medical Sciences and University of Utah (Salt Lake City). The researchers searched the medical literature for randomized clinical trials that examined the effects of metformin use on obesity measures in children and adolescents. Overall, they found significant reductions in body mass index (BMI), body weight, waist circumference, and fat mass, but not in lean body mass. However, the reductions in BMI and waist circumference were not significant in the youngsters who were overweight or obese.

"Metformin, a pharmaceutical, has been a staple in the treatment of diabetes. Some have been interested in whether this pharmaceutical might also reduce body fat," says Childhood Obesity Editor-in-Chief Tom Baranowski, PhD, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX. "Alereza Sadeghi and colleagues found 38 articles that tested this relationship among children and adolescents. Their important findings need to be explored in additional research, especially why metformin did not affect adiposity in some groups. These findings could be an early step in establishing the clinical use of metformin for weight management in children.""

In a study published in the American Heart Association scientific journal Circulation, Kaiser Permanente research scientists report a steady decline in heart attacks for both men and women enrolled in the health system from 2000 to 2014, although that rate of decline slowed among women in the last 5 years of the study.

"The study points to the need for continued improvement in the awareness, prevention, recognition, and treatment of risk factors for heart disease in women," said Kristi Reynolds, PhD, MPH, the senior author on the study and the director of Epidemiologic Research with the Kaiser Permanente Southern California Department of Research & Evaluation. "It also shows that more research needs to be done to understand the disparities between men and women."

The study was based on 45,331 hospitalizations for heart attacks occurring in patients who were ages 35 years and older within Kaiser Permanente in Southern California between 2000 and 2014.

This research showed the rate of heart attacks:

Declined overall by nearly 50% between 2000 and 2014

Declined among men during the study period by about 4.7% annually

Declined among women from 2000 to 2008 by about 4.6% annually

Declined among women from 2009 to 2014 by about 2.3% annually

Men have roughly double the risk for heart attack hospitalization compared to women in the United States, although several studies have reported increasing rates of hospitalization for heart attacks among women under the age of 55 years. Heart attacks are the leading cause of death for women.

The study did not determine why the decline in heart attacks was not as great among women.

Researchers said the overall declines in heart attacks reflect a national trend of decreasing heart attack rates and may be due in part to increased use of medications, such as statins, and lifestyle changes.

The heart attack trends at Kaiser Permanente in Southern California may not be generalizable to the United States because the organization has had systemic programs in place to reduce cardiovascular disease since 2001. Systemwide care initiatives resulted in large improvements in cardiovascular health risk factors such as blood pressure and cholesterol control that exceeded the improvements observed in most other health care systems.

"We are very proud the rate of heart attacks continues to decline among men and women within Kaiser Permanente Southern California," said study co-author Ronald Scott, MD, a family physician at the Kaiser Permanente West Los Angeles Medical Center, and the cardiovascular co-lead for the Southern California Permanente Medical Group.

Most heart attacks and strokes are preventable, Dr. Scott said.

"And we want to continue the trend of lowering the rate of heart attacks among both men and women by prescribing statins as a preventive medication and continuing to recommend lifestyle changes such as improved diet and exercise," he said.

Matthew Mefford, PhD, the lead author on the research, suggested that the takeaway message from the research is that women especially should talk with their doctors to find out what they can do to reduce their risk of heart attacks.

AMES, Iowa - Fingerprints are telling us more and more about the people that left them behind.

Sure, we all know the unique whorls, loops and arches in a print can identify a person. But now researchers are studying how the natural and environmental compounds within them can also offer clues about a person's lifestyle, gender and ethnicity.

But even as researchers discover new information in fingerprints, they still hadn't found a way to determine a basic fact about a print: How old is it?

That's information that could potentially tie a suspect to a crime scene.

And that's information chemists at Iowa State University are beginning to provide.

What happened to the unsaturated oils?

Paige Hinners was using a computer algorithm to objectively analyze the degradation and spread of fingerprint ridges over time - potentially a way to determine the age of a fingerprint - when she noticed something else in her data. The unsaturated fatty oils in a fingerprint were disappearing from her measurements.

"If we're losing them, where are they going?" asked Hinners, who in December completed her doctorate in analytical chemistry at Iowa State and now works as a senior chemist for Ames-based Renewable Energy Group Inc. She worked on the fingerprint project while she was a graduate student in the research group of Young-Jin Lee, a professor of chemistry at Iowa State. Madison Thomas, a former Iowa State undergraduate student, also assisted with the project.

Eventually the research group found answers: As the unsaturated fats - triacylglycerols, to be exact - disappeared from the data, other compounds resulting from reactions with ozone - or ozonolysis - started showing up.

That led to numerous trials and steps to confirm that ozone was causing the degradation of the unsaturated fats in fingerprints. And that led to the conclusion that, with more study, this could turn into a useful tool to determine the age of a fingerprint.

The Iowa State chemists' discovery was recently published online by the research journal Analytical Chemistry and is featured on a supplementary cover of the current print edition.

The paper describes how the chemists used a tool called matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry imaging. It's technology that uses a laser to analyze compounds left on a surface then records the mass and electrical charge of each component within a sample, such as the various oils in a fingerprint. The imaging tool allowed the chemists to track the degradation of unsaturated oils due to reaction with ozone in the air.

How precise is the technique?

"Right now, we can measure the number of days (since a print was left)," Hinners said. "It's easy to tell one-day old from fresh. There's no doubt about that."

The chemists also tested whether the powder used to make fingerprints visible would affect the ability of mass spectrometry to analyze fingerprint degradation and aging. It turned out the powder did not affect the researchers' ability to collect data and determine fingerprint aging.

'This might be the way'

Lee described the study - which was supported by a $362,000 grant from the National Institute of Justice - as a proof-of-concept project. And so the testing was limited to fingerprints from three people.

The data did show individual differences in the amount of unsaturated oils in fingerprints and the rate of reaction with ozone and resulting degradation, he said. So more study is needed to understand the different levels of fatty oils individuals have and how that would affect degradation. The researchers are also looking at how environmental factors such as humidity could affect reactions with ozone.

A new $516,800 grant from the National Institute of Justice will keep the fingerprint-aging study going. The grant will also allow the researchers to study how fatty oils in fingerprints could offer clues about a person's health and other characteristics.

Though the technique for determining fingerprint aging needs more study, Lee said the concept has been proven:

"We can measure decomposition of unsaturated triacylglycerols as a function of time," he said. "We've studied the mechanisms and proved what's happening. By measuring how fast it's decaying, we can come up with an idea of how old it is."

The most exciting part of the project, which began by looking in a different direction?

"When we reproduced this with each person, it was fairly consistent," said Hinners, who still serves as a resource for Lee's research group. "And so we learned this might actually tell us how old a fingerprint actually is. This might be the way - that's exciting."

TORONTO, ON - A team of researchers at the University of Toronto has successfully tested a new strategy for identifying genetic resources critical for the ongoing battle against plant pathogens such as bacteria, fungi, and viruses that infect and destroy food crops worldwide.

"As much as 40 per cent of global crop yield annually is lost to pests and pathogens such as bacteria, viruses and other disease-causing microorganisms," said David Guttman, a professor in the Department of Cell & Systems Biology (CSB) at the University of Toronto and co-author of a study published in Science. "In Canada, pathogens of the top five crops cause annual losses of approximately CDN $3.2B, even with no significant outbreaks."

By focusing on the near limitless arsenal of disease-associated genes available to pathogens, and the defences available to plants, they not only uncovered new insights into the ways plants survive relentless attacks, they developed a blueprint that could one day be used to protect the health of any species grown for food production.

"We wanted to know how relatively long-lived plants defend themselves against very rapidly evolving disease-causing pathogens, why disease is so uncommon even while plants are under continual attack by these highly diverse pathogens, and why domesticated crop species are so much more susceptible to pathogen attacks than wild species," said Guttman.

Guttman and fellow CSB professor Darrell Desveaux, who co-led the study, addressed these questions by specifically asking how a single plant is able to fight off the attacks of a common, bacterial, crop pathogen. They did this by first characterizing the global diversity of an important class of pathogen proteins, called effectors.

"Effectors play key roles in disease since they evolved to enhance the ability of pathogens to attack and infect their hosts. Fortunately, plants have evolved counter-defenses in the form of immune receptors that can recognize certain effectors," said Desveaux. "A plant is able to mount an 'effector-triggered' immune response that usually stops the infection, if it carries a specific immune receptor that recognizes a specific pathogen effector. This effector-receptor interaction has been called gene-for-gene resistance, and is the basis for nearly all agricultural resistance breeding."

The team started by sequencing the genomes of approximately 500 strains of the bacteria Pseudomonas syringae (P. syringae), which causes disease on nearly every major crop species.

"From these bacterial genomes we identified approximately 15,000 effectors from 70 distinct families," said Guttman. "We then reduced this complexity by identifying 530 effectors that represent their global diversity."

The researchers next had all of these representative effectors synthesized and put into a particularly harmgul strain of P. syringae that causes disease when infecting the plant Arabidopsis thaliana (A. thaliana), a common weed widely used in plant biology studies. By doing infections with each individual effector they saw how many of the 530 effectors elicited an effector-triggered immune response that protected the plant.

The results were unexpected.

"We found that over 11% of the effectors elicited immune response, and that almost 97% of all P. syringae strains carry at least one immune-eliciting effector," said Desveaux. "We also identified new plant immune receptors that recognize these effectors, and found that almost 95% of all P. syringae strains can be blocked by just two A. thaliana immune receptors."

The results shed new light on how plants survive relentless pathogen attack. They also provide an exciting new approach for identifying new plant immune receptors, which is a genetic resource in short supply in agricultural breeding.

"While wild plant species have a diverse array of immune receptors, most domesticated crop species have lost much of this immunodiversity due to intensive artificial selection," said Guttman. "Our approach enables the rapid identification of new immune receptors in wild relatives of crops that can then be moved into elite agricultural lines by traditional breeding, ultimately creating new varieties with greater ability to resist agricultural pathogens."

TAMPA, Fla. (February 18, 2020)- For many adults, the mid-30's is a busy time. There's often career advancement, the start of a new family and associated responsibilities. It's also a critical time for how we diversify our days in order to stay up to speed. A new study from the University of South Florida (USF) finds a key piece to maintaining cognitive function throughout adulthood is to engage in diverse activities regularly.

Researchers focused on seven common daily activities: paid work, time with children, chores, leisure, physical activity, volunteering, and giving informal help. They reviewed two sets of data from 732 people ranging between the ages of 34 and 84 that was collected by the National Survey of Daily Experiences. Every day for eight consecutive days, each participant was asked if they partook in those activities and scored on an activity diversity score that captures both the breadth (variety) and evenness (consistency) of activity participation. The same group was queried ten years later. The study published in the Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences found those who increased activity diversity over the decade exhibited higher levels of cognitive functioning than those who maintained lower or decreased activity diversity.

Their cognitive functioning was assessed using the Brief Test of Adult Cognition by Telephone (BTACT) battery, which measures multiple dimensions of cognition, including working memory span, verbal fluency, attention, speed of processing, reasoning and verbal memory. Previous studies have examined how activity variety and frequency impact cognition. This is the first study to prove activity consistency is also essential, regardless of age.

"Results support the adage to 'use it or lose it' and may inform future interventions targeting the promotion of active lifestyles to include a wide variety of activities for their participants," said Soomi Lee, PhD, assistant professor in the USF College of Behavioral and Community Sciences. "Findings suggest that active and engaged lifestyles with diverse and regular activities are essential for our cognitive health."

Daily engagement results in greater accumulation of intellectual and social repertoires. Life experiences, such as educational attainment or leisure activities, can help compensate for progressing Alzheimer's Disease. Conversely, a lack of activities or passive behavior, like binge watching TV, is associated with cognitive decline. While participants did keep their minds sharp, Lee says she did not find a correlation between activity diversity and episodic memory, which is known to decline with age. A previous study by Lee also shows that activity diversity is important for psychological well-being, especially for older adults. The current study shows that activity diversity matters for cognitive health across age groups and an active lifestyle is important for different domains of health.

Anxiety disorders such as phobias and PTSD are fairly common problems in society. One of the prime causes of anxiety disorders is the inability to overcome the fear for certain contexts when they no longer apply. Attempts to facilitate this process of overcoming fear, therefore, has been the focus of recent efforts to treat anxiety disorders. These efforts have culminated in the discovery that certain opioid compounds, called delta opioid receptor (DOP) agonists, assist in masking fear memory. Consequently, DOP agonists have been at the center of clinical explorations in this area over the last decade.

In the thick of such clinical explorations, scientists from the Tokyo University of Science and the University of Tsukuba, Japan, led by Professor Akiyoshi Saitoh, first discovered the depression- and anxiety-relieving effects of DOP agonists. Subsequently, in a new study published inNeuropharmacology in 2019, they explored the potential of these agonists to help in the fear memory masking process. "We looked at the effects of DOP agonists on anxiety and fear memory, which have not been sufficiently studied so far," explains Prof Saitoh.

Prof Saitoh and team applied the "fear conditioning test" to mice in their laboratory. On day 1 of their experiment, they placed the mice in conditioning chambers and inflicted footshock on them at regular intervals. This was designed to induce fear for the chamber in the mice, who would henceforth associate the chamber with painful footshocks. On day 2, the mice were given either saline ("control" group), KNT-127, or SNC80 (both DOP agonists) and released into the conditioning chamber once again. They were not given any more footshocks. On day 3, they were given no drugs or saline but re-exposed to the conditioning chamber, to test their fear memory--or whether they remembered to be afraid. When mice are afraid, they freeze. On day 2, the mice on both drugs showed significantly less "freezing" behavior. On day 3, the mice on KNT-127 showed reduced freezing behavior, but those on SNC80 did not.

The scientists also examined the effects of these drugs on the activities of enzymes and pathways in the brain that are known to drive the masking of fear memory. They found that KNT-127 increased the levels of "phosphorylated" (or activated) molecules of an enzyme called ERK, which is involved in the ability to overcome fear conditioning in certain parts of the brain.

Taken together, these results suggest that although both KNT-127 and SNC80 reduce conditioned fear, only KNT-127 helps suppress contextual fear memory. Further, KNT-127 performs this role by increasing the levels of phosphorylated ERK in certain parts of the brain. So, both drugs reduce anxiety in the case of conditioned fear but do so via different pathways in the brain.

These observations and inferences are based on mice in a laboratory, but they clearly suggest new therapeutic possibilities for people. Prof Saitoh and Dr. Yamada say, "the fear conditioning test used in this study is also a model of PTSD. PTSD is a psychiatric disorder in which the memory (trauma) of anxiety and fear once experienced cannot be forgotten and thus impairs daily life, causing problems like insomnia and withdrawal. At present, the widely prescribed medication for PTSD takes several weeks to have therapeutic effects and is not satisfactory. There are also no potential breakthrough therapies for such disorders. Our study shows that DOP agonists, when used in combination with cognitive behavioral therapy, can enhance the efficacy of treatment for anxiety disorders. It offers hope for the realization of a safe and effective new mode of therapy for PTSD and other related psychiatric disorders."

"And the Lord delivered Lachish into the hand of Israel, which took it on the second day, and smote it with the edge of the sword, and all the souls therein..." -Joshua, 10:32

The Biblical Book of Joshua tells the story of the ancient Israelites' entry into the Promised Land after a 40-year sojourn in the desert. Now, a team of archaeologists led by Professor Yosef Garfinkel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Institute of Archaeology and Professor Michael Hasel at Southern Adventist University in Tennessee, have opened a window onto the Canaanite society that inhabited the land during that era.

In a study published last month in Levant, Garfinkel and his co-authors revealed, for the first time ever, extensive ruins of a Canaanite temple dating to the 12th century BCE that they uncovered in National Park Tel Lachish, a large Bronze Age-era settlement near the present-day Israeli city of Kiryat Gat.

Lachish was one of the most important Canaanite cities in the Land of Israel during the Middle and late Bronze Ages; its people controlled large parts of the Judean lowlands. The city was built around 1800 BCE and later destroyed by the Egyptians around 1550 BCE. It was rebuilt and destroyed twice more, succumbing for good around 1150 BCE. The settlement is mentioned in both the Bible and in various Egyptian sources and was one of the few Canaanite cities to survive into the 12th century BCE.

"This excavation has been breath-taking," shared Garfinkel. "Only once every 30 or 40 years do we get the chance to excavate a Canaanite temple in Israel. What we found sheds new light on ancient life in the region. It would be hard to overstate the importance of these findings."

The layout of the temple is similar to other Canaanite temples in northern Israel, among them Nablus, Megiddo and Hazor. The front of the compound is marked by two columns and two towers leading to a large hall. The inner sanctum has four supporting columns and several unhewn "standing stones" that may have served as representations of temple gods. The Lachish temple is more square in shape and has several side rooms, typical of later temples including Solomon's Temple.

In addition to these archaeological ruins, the team unearthed a trove of artifacts including, bronze cauldrons, Hathor-inspired jewellery, daggers and axe-heads adorned with bird images, scarabs, and a gold-plated bottle inscribed with the name Ramses II, one of Egypt's most powerful pharaohs. Near the temple's holy of holies, the team found two bronze figurines. Unlike the winged cherubs in Solomon's Temple, the Lachish figurines were armed "smiting gods".

Of particular interest was a pottery sherd engraved with ancient Canaanite script. There, the letter "samek" appears, marked by an elongated vertical line crossed by three perpendicular shorter lines. This makes it the oldest known example of the letter and a unique specimen for the study of ancient alphabets.

Only time will tell what treasures still remain to be uncovered in the ancient city of Lachish.

Since its launch in San Francisco in 2010, Uber has experienced phenomenal growth, reaching six continents, more than 70 countries, and 700 cities through 2018. Whilst it took Uber roughly six years to reach the 1 billion ride milestone (March 2016), it took just two and a half more years (September 2018) to reach 10 billion total rides.

Professor David Kirk from the University of Oxford's Department of Sociology and Nuffield College said: 'Ride-hailing is a private sector intervention that may have transformative potential to change the nature of road safety worldwide, yet there has been relatively little research on the potentially beneficial and detrimental effects of ride-hailing for public safety. Our study presents the very first findings of the association between the deployment of Uber and road accident injuries in the UK, thereby adding much needed research to the public debate about the safety of ride-hailing.'

The study, a collaboration between researchers at Oxford, Bocconi University, and the University of California-Davis, exploited differences in the timing of the deployment of Uber across Britain to test the association between the advent of Uber's services and rate of fatal and non-fatal accidents in those areas.

In Great Britain, road accident fatalities and injuries have steadily declined since the mid-1960s, due in part to efforts to improve road and vehicle safety and limit the extent of drink-driving. Yet progress on reducing road fatalities as well as serious injuries stalled in recent years and even began to reverse course, with serious injuries increasing nearly 12% from 2014 to 2018. Along with suicide and drug overdose, traffic fatalities are among the leading causes of death of 15 to 29 year olds in the UK, as well as worldwide.

Professor Kirk said: 'Expanding the availability and lowering the cost of alternate transportation options should, in theory, reduce the number of drink-driving occurrences and fatalities. Conversely, Uber may actually increase road accidents by increasing the number of vehicles and vehicle miles travelled on Great Britain's roads.'

Kirk, with colleagues Nicolo Cavalli (Bocconi) and Noli Brazil (UC-Davis), found that slight injuries (sprains and bruises) declined outside of London after the rollout of Uber, but increased within London. No statistically significant association between Uber and traffic fatalities was observed.

Professor Kirk said: 'One interpretation for the decline in serious road injuries is that Uber may be a substitute form of transportation for risky drivers, including drink-drivers. However, ride-hailing is also a substitute for public transit, particularly buses, thereby increasing traffic congestion.

'Our next step is to examine the effect on road traffic accidents following the withdrawal of Uber in cities such as London, where the provider may have lost its licence to operate. We also want to examine the effects of Uber and other ride-hailing competitors in countries besides the US and UK, given that most of the ride-hailing market is in Asia.'

One of the frustrations with anti-cancer therapy is that no one drug fits all: Most work well in some people but have little effect in other patients with the same type of cancer. This is as true of the newer immunotherapy treatments as it is of older types of chemotherapy. Weizmann Institute of Science researchers have now identified new markers that can help predict which patients have a better chance for a positive response to immunotherapy treatments. Their findings were reported in Nature Communications.

For Prof. Yardena Samuels and her research group partnered with Prof. Eytan Ruppin's lab in the National Institutes of Health (USA), basing their research on the understanding that learning to predict which treatments are most likely to work is the first step to creating a personalized approach to curing cancer. The focus of their work is melanoma - a collection of skin cancers that are often hard to treat, and which may be made up of varied tumor cells containing hundreds of different mutations. A certain percentage of melanomas have in recent years been successfully treated with immunotherapy drugs known as checkpoint inhibitors, which work by removing internal "obstacles" that trip up the body's own immune system and keep it from attacking the cancer. Unfortunately, for others, these drugs remain ineffective.

To understand the differences in response between different people, the research team, led by postdoctoral fellow Dr. Shelly Kalaora in Samuels' group and Joo Sang Li in the Ruppin group, first analyzed data from 470 melanoma patients that has been made available in the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). They were particularly interested in differences in survival rates of patients in whom particular subunits of "immunoproteasomes" are overexpressed compared to those with low expression of these subunits. These are a variation on the proteasome subunits normally expressed in most cells (except for immune cells). Proteasomes are protein complexes that function as "cutters," reducing long proteins to short pieces called peptides. These peptides are later presented on the cells' surface by molecules called human leucocyte antigens (HLA). HLA peptides are basically bits of "information" - small molecules displayed on the outsides of cells - that "report" about new threats that the immune system needs to assess and address.

The immunoproteasome is assembled out of altered subunits and thus produces a unique collection of HLA peptides. The team thought that a particular change and overexpression in the HLA peptide repertoire might result in better recognition of the tumor cells by the immune system and thus better elimination of cancer cells.

To test this idea, the researchers cultured lines of tumor cells from melanoma patients in which they overexpressed the immunoproteasome subunits and identified the HLA peptides presented in each situation. By testing the response of the immune cells from the same patients, they showed that the newly formed HLA peptides were indeed more reactive compared to the HLA peptides presented by cells without this overexpression.

Could two subunits the research identified in particular and the unique HLA-bound peptides these produce be a predictor of immunotherapy success? The experiments showed that in tumor cells in which the subunits were overexpressed, the various immune system components that directly fight the cancer were more prevalent and more active than average. Indeed, looking back at the details of cancer patients in the database, the team reported that the expression levels of the two subunits were excellent predictors of the outcome - better than the tumor mutational burden, a biomarker that is currently used in the clinic. The researchers in Samuels's and Ruppin's lab suggest that expression of the immunoproteasome may be used as a biomarker for predicting better outcomes in melanoma and, together with mutational load testing, may improve patient matching to currently available immunotherapy.

Policies regulating fishing in international waters do not sufficiently protect officials who monitor illegal fishing, the prohibited dumping of equipment, or human trafficking or other human rights abuses, finds a new analysis by a team of environmental researchers.

"These fisheries observers risk their lives to watch over industrial fishing activities, and yet they are often not afforded sufficient legal safeguards," says Jennifer Jacquet, an associate professor in New York University's Department of Environmental Studies and a co-author of the study. "If we are serious about protecting ocean life, we must first put policies in place to protect fisheries observers."

The analysis, co-authored with the nonprofit Greenpeace and the Association of Professional Observers, appears in the journal Marine Policy.

There are an estimated 2,500 observers globally, and in recent years many have been subject to human rights and safety violations, including intimidation, assault, and even murder or disappearance under suspicious circumstances. The researchers add that since 2010, at least seven fisheries observers have disappeared while monitoring fisheries under the authority of Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs). Notably, very little information is available regarding the circumstances.

This first-ever examination of observer-related policies for the 17 RFMOs, which are the main institutions in charge of high seas fisheries, uncovered several important gaps and shortcomings:

No RFMOs include regulations to sufficiently protect fisheries observer rights and safety.

Only four of 17 RFMOs, which manage high seas fisheries, have a policy in place on what to do if a human observer disappears or dies.

Only three RFMOs mandate 100-percent observer coverage on fishing vessels under their authority.

To address these shortcomings, the authors advocate for 100-percent observer coverage achieved using a complementary approach of remote electronic monitoring and human observers. They also call for RFMOs to be publicly transparent about what the monitoring reveals, including violations, and, especially, if observers are harmed or disappear.

"Requiring full observer coverage and protecting the safety and rights of human observers will lead to stronger environmental and animal protection on the high seas," says Jacquet.