Culture

If somebody asks me "are you a coffee addict?" I may say, "Yeah it seems like, but on the one condition, only in my office." I don't have that much craving for coffee at home, but just being in the office, where I used to drink coffee all the time seeking to get caffeine jitters, seems to trigger my caffeine-addicted brain. It is often said that breaking bad habits or additions is all about a person's willpower. However, as a behavior study researcher Bruce Alexander put it, "Addiction is an adaption. It's not you--it's the cage you live in." (Source: Chasing the Scream (audiobook): The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs). Studies have revealed that environmental stimuli such as places are the strong force behind our addiction. For example, the studies into the heroin-addicted Vietnam war veterans found that changes in their living place - returning home from the battlefield were the hidden force to break their drug addictions so effectively.

When you feel happy or pleasant, several areas of the brain take part to feel, remember, and repeat the action. Specifically, the hippocampus is responsible for spatial memory acquisition. People may remember where such feeling-good experience takes place and revisit the place to remind such pleasant experience. However, things could get quite problematic if the experience involves drug abuse. The Conditioned Place Preference (CPP) is an experimental paradigm to study the mechanism of addictive behaviors associated pleasant experience. It was long believed until recently that the release of the hormone dopamine in the mesolimbic pathway of the brain is the key to CPP. However as dopamine-deficient mice were found to exhibit CPP, the brain's CPP pathways have remained elusive. Meanwhile, the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for spatial memory, has not been considered to be involved in CPP.

Led by Dr. C. Justin Lee, researchers at the Center for Cognition and Sociality within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in Daejeon, South Korea have identified a new mechanistic element of CPP, mu-opioid receptors (MORs) expressed in astrocytes of the hippocampus. Opioids include endorphins (our brain's feel-good transmitters) or morphine (a major painkiller) that can make people feel relaxed or happy, and can be addictive. Much has been studied on neuronal MORs, but failed to form a comprehensive understanding of the CPP mechanism. The research team looked at a seemingly unlikely cells that had been deemed to only provide support and protection for neurons, astrocytes (i.e. a cell type of non-neuron cells) in the brain. They narrowed their target range to the astrocytic MORs in the hippocampus as it is the place where spatial memory is formed.

In their mice experiments, the researchers placed mice in two separate spaces with one door in the middle. One compartment was black with a stainless steel grid rod floor and another one was striped with black and white. At first, they let mice to move around the two spaces through the door in order to find their preferred place and non-preferred one. Then they gave mice DAMGO or morphine in their non-preferred spaces to condition only opioids controls the mice's CPP. After this conditioning, the researchers again let the mice freely explore the two separate spaces, and observed which room the mice prefer. (See Figure 2.) The experiments demonstrated the injection of exogenous opiod (DAMGO) or morphine activates astrocytic MORs in the hippocampus to release glutamates. These excitatory neurotransmitters increase the synaptic transmissions at Schaffer collateral-CA1 synapse in the hippocampus, which is responsible for the acquisition of spatial memory to induce CPP. The increased synaptic activities is technically called the long-term potentiation (LTP). (See Figure 3.)

To see whether the astrocytic MORs are the essential component to initiate opioid-induced CPP, the researchers performed astrocyte-specific gene-silencing of MORs in the hippocampus and see if CPP is induced by DAMGO treatment. The researchers found that CPP was not induced by DAMGO treatment without hippocampal astrocytic MORs. These findings indicate that hippocampal astrocytic MORs are critical for CPP induction, in addition to mesolimbic neuronal MORs. The first author of this study, Dr. Min-Ho Nam says, "There have been long-believed dogma about conditioned place preference (CPP): Interneuronal MOR in mesolimbic dopamine system is the only key for CPP. To overcome this dogma, we adopt multidisciplinary strategies including genetics, histology, electrophysiology, and behavioral assays."

Notably, this study verified that the astrocytic MORs in the hippocampus is where both artificial (morphine) and biological opioids (endorphin replaced by DAMGO) begin to induce the acquisition of contextual memory associated with pleasure. "Astrocyte is the most abundant cell type in the brain. This astrocyte-oriented study allows to step forward in understanding how humans prefer a certain place where a happy memory is associated with. We expect this study fuel the move from neuro-centric to glio-centric view in the brain science field," explains the corresponding author of this study Dr. Lee.

The current leading method to assess the presence of viruses and other biological markers of disease is effective but large and expensive. It is prohibitively difficult for use in many situations, especially due to certain economic and geographic factors. So researchers created and tested an alternative miniaturized system that makes use of low-cost components and a smartphone. Researchers hope the system could aid those who tackle the spread of diseases.

A virus scanner for a smartphone might not sound too exciting at first, but this virus scanner doesn't search for the latest malware; it scans biological samples for real viruses. It is a portable, low-cost, battery-powered device and is the brainchild of Yoshihiro Minagawa from the University of Tokyo. It was tested with viruses but could also detect other biological markers.

"I wanted to produce a useful tool for inaccessible or less-affluent communities that can help in the fight against diseases such as influenza," said Minagawa. "Diagnosis is a critical factor of disease prevention. Our device paves the way for better access to essential diagnostic tools."

Current state-of-the-art tools for detecting and counting viruses and other biomarkers, such as fluorescence microscopes, are generally large, expensive, slow and difficult to use. Although highly accurate at counting viruses, these tools are just too cumbersome for many situations, especially when rapid diagnosis is required.

"Given two equal samples containing influenza, our system detected about 60 percent of the number of viruses as the fluorescence microscope. But it's much faster at doing so and more than adequate to produce good estimates for accurate diagnoses," continued Minagawa. "What's really amazing is that our device is about 100 times more sensitive than a commercial rapid influenza test kit, and it's not just limited to that kind of virus."

The device is about the size of a brick with a slot on top in which you place a smartphone such that its camera looks through a small lens to the inside of the device. On the screen through a custom-made smartphone app you would see what may at first glance look like a starry night sky, except those stars would in fact be individual viruses.

Viruses are held in place on a clear surface in tiny cavities lit with an LED. The surface and fluid surrounding it were designed so that only when a cavity has a virus inside does incident light -- the light that directly hits the surface -- from the LED redirect up to the camera, manifesting in a bright pixel in an otherwise dark void. Each cavity is 48 femtoliters (quadrillionths of a liter) -- it would take over 10 million of these to hold a single human tear.

"This is now possible because smartphones and their embedded cameras have become sufficiently advanced and more affordable. I now hope to bring this technology to those who need it the most," concluded Minagawa. "We also wish to add other biomarkers such as nucleic acids -- like DNA -- to the options of things the device can detect. This way we can maximize its usefulness to those on the front line of disease prevention, helping to save lives."

Japanese scientists have developed an efficient method of successfully generating hair growth in nude mice. The new method can be scaled up and therefore shows great potential for clinical applications in human hair regenerative therapy.

Their findings were published on May 9, 2019 in Biomaterials.

Several factors contribute to human hair loss: It can be hereditary, or it can occur as a result of aging, hormonal imbalances or treatment with cancer fighting medications, all of which can lead to the loss of stem cells responsible for hair formation during development and the replacement of hairs that are shed during normal hair cycling.

Hair loss is currently treated with drugs and hair transplantation -- where hair follicles are removed from one part of the body (ex. the back of the head) to the site of hair loss. However, these treatment methods have their limitations; drugs are inefficient at stimulating hair regrowth to the extent necessary to counteract hair loss and hair transplantation doesn't increase hair numbers in the scalp.

Previous studies have shown improved results by transplanting, onto the backs of mice, a three-dimensional tissue culture called hair follicle germ (HFG). HFG is composed of hair follicle stem cells derived from both epithelial (outer layer of the skin) and mesenchymal tissue (connective tissue derived from the mesoderm). However, this approach requires manually merging the stem cells derived from these two different origins under a microscope, making it a challenge to produce the 5,000 or more hair follicle germs (HFGs) required per transplant patient.

To make the method scalable and therefore clinically viable, a team of scientists led by Dr. Tatsuto Kageyama and Prof. Junji Fukuda from Yokohama National University in Japan proposed a new approach to regenerate hair using mouse and human hair follicle stem cells.

The team fabricated hair beads (HBs) in u-shaped wells in a plate array using hair follicle stem cells encapsulated in collagen, a structural protein in skin believed to play an important role in hair follicle generation during embryonic development and hair regrowth throughout life. A suspension of mouse epithelial cells was then added into the wells containing the gel encapsulated hair beads. After 24 hours, the epithelial cells clumped together in a ball and adhered to the collagen gel. The collagen gel then contracted to form a "bead-based hair follicle germ" (bbHFG).

To test the efficiency of the hair bead approach, the scientists transplanted HBs and bbHFGs onto the backs of mice.

The team also transplanted hair follicle cell aggregates fabricated with two other methods onto the backs of nude mice as comparisons. In the first of these methods, mesenchymal and epithelial cells were mixed before being seeded in the wells. These cells initially aggregated, but spatially separated out from each after three days of culture to form a hair follicle germ (ssHFG), as reported by the same team. For the second method, they prepared a collagen solution containing a mixture of epithelial and mesenchymal cells and prepared droplets from this mixture. The microgel containing the cell aggregate contracted similar to that of the hair beads, but they did not separate and remained randomly mixed.

The results showed that compared to the other methods, the collagen-enriched hair bead (bbHFG) approach produced a high rate of hair generation four weeks after being transplanted onto the skin of the mice. After comparing gene expression of hair-producing gene markers in the three different methods, they found that gene expression for almost all the hair producing gene markers was greater in the bbHFGs, suggesting that collagen enrichment and cell aggregation play an important role in promoting hair follicle stem cell development.

The researchers also investigated whether this method could be automated to mass produce hair follicle germs on the scale needed to be clinically feasible for hair regenerative treatment of patients suffering hair loss.

"Using an automated spotter, this approach was scalable to prepare a large number of hair follicle germs, which is important for human treatment because thousands of tissue grafts are necessary for a single patient," said Prof. Fukuda.

As the ultimate goal of this research is to develop an efficient method of hair regenerative therapy that can be upscaled to make it clinically viable, the researchers next step "is to find a way to expand the number of hair follicle stem cells," said Prof Fukuda. "In this study, we worked on how to prepare tissue grafts. However, to deliver this approach to hair loss patients, we need a proper approach to obtain a sufficient number of hair follicle stem cells before preparing tissue grafts."

According to the authors, further studies that use hair follicle stem cells derived from patients suffering from hair loss are also required.

CATONSVILLE, MD, July 29, 2019 - We've all been there... you're out to eat and in need of a refill or the check and the wait staff is nowhere to be found. It slows down business, reduces customer satisfaction and hurts the bottom line. New research in the upcoming INFORMS journal Management Science shows to counter this, restaurants should introduce tabletop technology as a demonstrated way to improve service and satisfaction.

Tabletop technology allows customers to view menu items, re-order beverages, pay for the meal, play games and browse news content. The technology is meant to assist waiters, not replace them.

The research conducted by Tom Fangyun Tan of the Cox Business School at Southern Methodist University and Serguei Netessine of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania reveals tabletop technology is likely to improve sales by 1% per check and reduce meal duration by 10%. The combination of these two effects increase the sales per minute or sales productivity by 11%.

"We estimate the 1% sales lift per check translates into $2 million in extra sales or $1 million in profit per month in the short-run," said Tan, an associate professor of information technology and operations management. "And that's a conservative estimate."

The data was collected from a restaurant chain here in the U.S. that owns 66 establishments. It looked at transaction data from 2012 to 2014 or 2.6 million transactions.

"A good, attentive waiter already does what the tabletop device does... a less attentive or forgetful waiter does not, but relies more on the device, which makes up for the lacking ability resulting in faster service," said Tan.

The data suggest that restaurants reevaluate their operations to fully reap the benefits of tabletop technology. They can gain new competitive and financial advantages in an industry that faces hyper-competition and high levels of closures in their first year of business.

Tiny gas-filled bubbles in the porous rock found around hot springs are thought to have played an important role in the origin of life. Temperature differences at the interface between liquid phases could therefore have initiated prebiotic chemical evolution.

A plethora of physicochemical processes must have created the conditions that enabled living systems to emerge on the early Earth. In other words, the era of biological evolution must have been preceded by a - presumably protracted - phase of 'prebiotic' chemical evolution, during which the first informational molecules capable of replicating themselves were assembled and selected. This scenario immediately raises another question: Under what environmental conditions could prebiotic evolution have taken place? One possible setting has long been discussed and explored - tiny pores in volcanic rocks. An international team of researchers led by Dieter Braun (Professor of Systems Biophysics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich) has now taken a closer look at the water-air interfaces in these pores. They form spontaneously at gas-filled bubbles and show an interesting combination of effects.

They found that they could have played an important part in facilitating the physicochemical interactions that contributed to the origin of life. Specifically, Braun and his colleagues asked whether such interfaces could have stimulated the kinds of chemical reactions that triggered the initial stages of prebiotic chemical evolution. Their findings appear in the leading journal Nature Chemistry.

The study strongly supports the notion that tiny gas-filled bubbles that were trapped in, and reacted with, the surfaces of pores in volcanic rocks could indeed have accelerated the formation of the chemical networks that ultimately gave rise to the first cells. Thus, the authors were able to experimentally verify and characterize the facilitating effects of air-water interfaces on the relevant chemical reactions. If there is a difference in temperature along the surface of such a bubble, water will tend to evaporate on the warmer side and condense on the cooler side, just as a raindrop that lands on a window runs down the flat surface of the glass and eventually evaporates. "In principle, this process can be repeated ad infinitum, since the water continuously cycles between the gaseous and the liquid phase," says Braun, who has characterized the mechanism and the underlying physical processes in detail, together with his doctoral student Matthias Morasch and other members of his research group. The upshot of this cyclical phenomenon is that molecules accumulate to very high concentrations on the warmer side of the bubble.

"We began by making a series of measurements of reaction rates under various conditions, in order to characterize the nature of the underlying mechanism," says Morasch. The phenomenon turned out to be surprisingly effect and robust. Even small molecules could be concentrated to high levels. "We then tested a whole range of physical and chemical processes, which must have played a central role in the origin of life - and all of them were markedly accelerated or made possible at all under the conditions prevailing at the air-water interface." The study benefitted from interactions between Braun's group of biophysicists and the specialists in disciplines such as chemistry and geology who work together with him in the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB/TRR) on the Origin of Life (which is funded by the DFG), and from cooperations with members of international teams.

For example, the LMU researchers show that physicochemical processes which promote the formation of polymers are either stimulated - or made possible in the first place - by the availability of an interface between the aqueous environment and the gas phase, which markedly enhances rates of chemical reactions and catalytic mechanisms. In fact, in such experiments, molecules could be accumulated to high concentrations within lipid membranes when the researchers added the appropriate chemical constituents. "The vesicles produced in this way are not perfect. But the finding nevertheless suggests how the first rudimentary protocells and their outer membranes might have been formed," says Morasch.

Whether or not this sort of process can take place in such vesicles "does not depend on the nature of the gas within the bubble. What is important is that, owing to differences in temperature, the water can evaporate in one location and condense in another," Braun explains. In earlier work, his group has already described a different mechanism by which temperature differences in water bodies can serve to concentrate molecules. "Our explanatory model enables both effects to be combined, which would enhance the concentrating effect and thus increase the efficiency of prebiotic processes," he adds.

LAWRENCE -- Politics have been known to put adults to sleep, but political engagement could be part of children's bedtime stories as well. Lessons about the importance of politics could be part of their early education. A new University of Kansas study analyzed political messages in the most popular picture books of the last several years to see what political messages are included and how they are presented.

Meagan Patterson, associate professor of educational psychology at KU, researches developmental psychology and has previously studied what children know about politics, presidential candidates, the political process and related topics. That research inspired the study of how kids learn about politics through picture books, one of the most popular forms of literature for children from birth to age 8. The study recently was published in the Journal of Genetic Psychology.

Disney movies have a wealth of kings, queens and princesses among their characters, but mayors and city council members rarely play the role of hero. Perhaps picture books provided a better window into politics.

"One of the things we saw in the earlier data set was a lot of variability and misconceptions in children's knowledge," Patterson said. "You'd have a kindergartner who knew a ton and an older student who had misconceptions about the difference between a president and a king. Picture books could be a good way to start conversations about those topics that can be difficult to discuss or for kids to get information on topics their parents aren't discussing."

Patterson and co-researchers analyzed the books on The New York Times' best-seller list for picture books from 2012 to 2017. They searched the 251 books for depictions of political issues, processes, leaders, symbols associated with politics or political leadership, and government employees. About half of the books had at least one instance of such content.

Researchers found a number of relevant themes:

Those that included political content contained very little information about political processes such as voting or protesting. Voting was almost always depicted in a formal setting like adults voting for president. More informal examples, such as a teacher having students vote what to name a classroom pet -- an instance that shows voting is something everyone can take part in -- were rare.

Protesting was usually depicted as past events such as the civil rights movement or the story of Rosa Parks. Those books did not, however, connect how those events are related to today, suggesting that protests were something that only happened in the past. That could provide an opportunity for parents and teachers to talk about the importance of such engagement now, Patterson said.

The analysis also showed several insights into how political leaders are portrayed. Monarchical leaders were depicted more often than democratic leaders. Among the former, they were mostly fictional characters and were most often presented as women or children. Democratic leaders tended to be historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln or George Washington, though there were a few contemporary figures such as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

"Especially for girls, those monarchical figures may give them more characters to identify with. The books with democratic leaders felt more educational, where the others seemed more for entertainment," Patterson said. "It makes me wonder if we are presenting democracy just as a thing you have to learn about, versus something exciting and important."

Democratic leaders were mostly presented at the national level, such as presidents. Mayors, city council members and government employees were rarely depicted. There were some instances of teachers, which could be expected given children's familiarity with educators, but few instances of government employees such as mail carriers, police officers or garbage collectors.

"How much do kids, or even their parents, know about who is or isn't a government employee?" Patterson said. "We included that element in the analysis because it could be a way into talking about political systems and processes and understanding who makes decisions and does the work that affects our everyday lives."

The findings suggest that picture books miss an opportunity for political socialization for young children. Patterson argues it is important to start educating children about the importance of politics and political processes, as research has shown lessons learned at a young age carry lasting effects into knowledge and attitudes adults hold on a variety of issues. Additionally, politics are an important part of life that affect individuals and those around them daily, children included. More educated, informed citizens are also more likely to grow up to be engaged adults who take part in political processes.

Like religion, politics have a long, complicated and nuanced history. When parents want a child to have a religious education, they start at a young age. Picture books could be a way to start important conversations with children about topics that can be difficult to discuss otherwise. Adults often cite literature or reading a certain book at a key time in their life as the impetus for career choices, passions, hobbies or interests.

"I think you could do the same thing for politics, in starting with literature that discusses them at a young age," Patterson said. "Literature can have a strong impact and help people think 'this is an important issue' or inform the type of person they want to be as an adult."

Building on research results published today in JAMA Neurology showing patients with larger ischemic strokes could benefit from endovascular thrombectomy, an international, multicenter Phase III clinical trial will be starting at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).

The trial, called SELECT2 (Optimizing Patient Selection for Endovascular Treatment in Acute Ischemic Stroke), is a randomized, controlled, open-label, assessor-blinded trial assessing efficacy and safety of thrombectomy procedure in patients with larger ischemic stroke.

While multiple previous clinical trials showed that endovascular thrombectomy was safe and beneficial for patients with smaller areas of damage from an ischemic stroke, potential safety and benefits for larger strokes are still unknown.

Ischemia refers to blood supply restriction to tissue. In an ischemic stroke, a clot blocks blood flow in a cerebral artery, preventing oxygen from reaching the surrounding brain tissue and resulting in cell death. That area of cell death is called an ischemic core.

In endovascular thrombectomy, a small catheter is guided through an artery, usually a femoral artery, through the body to the site of the blockage in the brain. A blood clot removal device is deployed, which captures the clot. The catheter is then retracted.

The earlier Phase II clinical trial (SELECT), which enrolled patients in nine U.S. comprehensive stroke centers, included 105 patients with large ischemic cores. It showed potential benefits: 31% of patients who were treated with endovascular thrombectomy achieved functional independence, compared to 14% of patients who received medical management only.

"It is unclear now if thrombectomy is safe and efficacious in patients with a large ischemic core stroke. Treating physicians face a dilemma on whether to intervene in these patients," said Amrou Sarraj, MD, first and corresponding author and associate professor of neurology at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth. "Our results represent very good preliminary data that thrombectomy may be safe and efficacious in this population. It's time to test those results in a randomized trial."

The results of SELECT showed reasonable safety outcomes with thrombectomy in patients with larger strokes. The risk of secondary bleeding with thrombectomy did not increase significantly compared to medical management. Mortality rate decreased with thrombectomy (29%) as compared to medical management (42%).

The Phase III trial, which begins in August, will enroll 560 patients at 30 comprehensive stroke centers in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

"If proven to be safe and effective, SELECT2 will extend thrombectomy indications to improve clinical outcomes in a large group of patients that does not have many treatment options at this point," said Sarraj, who is a member of UTHealth Institute for Stroke and Cerebrovascular Disease.

Many of the consequences of climate change are well reported in the press: rising seas, more severe storms, droughts and floods, and increasing numbers of heat-related illness and deaths. Now Ian Sue Wing, a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of earth and environment, Bas van Ruijven, a former visiting scholar at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, and Enrica De Cian, a professor at Ca' Foscari University of Venice in Italy, project another troubling outcome: a significant increase in global energy needs, largely anticipated to arise from cooling and air-conditioning usage.

In a new paper published in Nature Communications, Sue Wing, De Cian, and van Ruijven (now a scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria), warn that by 2050, even a modest warming of our climate could increase the world's energy needs by as much as 25 percent. And if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, we could demand up to 58 percent more energy than would be needed in a stable climate.

Anthony Janetos, chair of BU's Climate Action Plan Task Force and a CAS professor of earth and environment, says the findings underscore the need for rapidly deploying zero-carbon options for generating energy, so that climate change itself--and all the air-conditioning that will be used to cool a warmer world--doesn't end up accelerating the demand for more fossil fuel-generated electricity.

"We've known for a long time that energy demand would grow as a function of population growth and economic development," says Janetos, who is also director of the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. "But for the first time, this paper has given us estimates of the growth in energy demand as a function of climate change itself--a potentially disruptive positive feedback."

Sue Wing says earlier research that focused on areas like the United States suggested that a warming climate might actually reduce energy consumption. But when the research team coupled statistical models of energy demand with global temperature projections under warming scenarios (simulated by 21 independent climate models and 5 different scenarios for economic and population growth), the results showed substantial increases in energy needs.

But understanding that calculation is complicated, Sue Wing says, because the influence of climate change on an area's energy demand depends on the interaction of two uncertain drivers: how the area's population and income are projected to grow, and how its prevailing local temperature patterns are projected to change.

"In tropical areas, as the climate warms, it is simply going to get hotter," says Sue Wing. "In order for people in tropical areas to keep cool, they are going to have to use more electricity. But as you move toward the poles, things become more complicated."

That's because in temperate zones, a warming climate will increase the energy used for cooling during summer but reduce the energy used for heating during winter.

"In the tropics, we see a positive effect--energy increase--but as you move away from the tropics, we see a positive and a negative effect," he says. "When you add up the two positives and the negative, you could in principle get a negative...but what we actually see is a substantial positive"--a significant net increase in energy usage.

The researchers' calculations project that by 2050, the global demand for energy resulting from socioeconomic development will be two to three times what it is today, growing by a factor of 1.4 to 2.7 in industrialized nations, and by a factor of 2 to 4 in poorer but rapidly developing countries in the tropics. Moderate warming would increase the global baseline amount of energy demands by 11 to 17 percent, while vigorous warming would increase it by 25 to 58 percent.

Regionally, demands for energy could increase by more than 50 percent in the tropics and southern parts of the United States, while Southern Europe and China could see increases greater than 25 percent. Total energy consumption may actually decline in northern Europe, Russia, Canada, and the US Pacific Northwest, but by a much smaller amount than the increases projected for other locations.

Simply put, demand for electricity is very likely to rise across much of the world.

These findings highlight two important unanswered questions: how much of the additional demand will be satisfied by increases in energy supplies versus behavioral changes like conservation, and whether producing the needed additional energy might add to emissions of greenhouse gases, setting in motion a vicious circle that could accelerate global warming.

"At this point, we don't know," says Sue Wing, who explains that the outcome depends on the choices made today by businesses and private citizens. "To cool my house, I could buy a bigger air-conditioner and it would use more electricity," he says. "Or if higher demand makes electricity more expensive, I could choose to open my window or run a fan."

How we choose to generate the additional electricity for cooling will also have big implications for the climate. The International Energy Agency estimated that in 2018, two-thirds of global energy needs were met by oil and gas, while less than 10 percent was provided by solar and wind. Hydro and nuclear energy produced about 25 percent of global electricity.

"That is the focus of our research right now," says Sue Wing. "What happens will not just influence the climate, it will influence energy markets, and it will influence the ways we think about energy policy. It can change the economic and political relationships between countries."

By 2050, whether renewable sources can be scaled up quickly enough to make a difference--and what that might cost--is still an open question.

"We could use coal, or we could use renewable sources, and those two choices mean very different things for our future. With coal, [an increase in demand] will mean more greenhouse gas emissions. That's what keeps me up at night."

Physicists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, have devised a method to turn a non-magnetic metal into a magnet using laser light.

Magnets and their magnetic field are typically produced by circulating currents, like those found in everyday electromagnetic coils. The 'handedness' of these coils - whether they are wound in clockwise or anticlockwise fashion - determines the direction of the magnetic field produced.

The scientists theorise that when non-magnetic metallic disks are illuminated by linearly polarised light - light that does not possess any handedness of its own - circulating electric currents and hence magnetism can spontaneously emerge in the disk.

This method could in principle turn non-ferrous metals into magnets "on-demand" using laser light.

The new theory by Assistant Professor Justin Song from NTU's School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and Associate Professor Mark Rudner from Niels Bohr Institute, was published in the scientific journal Nature Physics earlier this month.

In formulating their proposal, the scientists developed a new way of thinking about the interaction between light and matter. They used a combination of pencil-and-paper calculations and numerical simulations to devise it.

Prof Song said that their scheme is an example of how novel strong light-matter interactions could be used to create material properties "on-demand". If realised experimentally, this would open up a wide variety of potential applications across a range of high quality plasmonic materials such as graphene.

Harnessing plasmonic fields

The properties of many materials are conventionally thought to be fixed, determined by the arrangement of its atoms at the nanoscale. For example, the configuration of atoms in a material dictates whether it conducts electricity easily or has insulating/non-conductive behaviour.

Song and Rudner wanted to explore how plasmons - local oscillations of charge in metals - and the intense oscillating electric fields they create, can be used to alter material properties.

Like how light consists of photons, the plasma oscillation consists of plasmons, a type of quasiparticle. Plasmons tend to oscillate and move in the same direction as the field that is driving it (for example, the light field's polarisation direction).

However, the scientists found that when the light irradiation is strong enough, the plasmons in a non-magnetic metallic disk can spontaneously rotate in either a left-handed or right-handed fashion, even when driven by linearly polarised light.

"This was a signature that the material's intrinsic properties had been altered," said Asst Prof Song. "We found that when a plasmon's strong internal fields modify a material's electronic band structure it would also transform the plasmon as well, setting up a feedback loop enabling the plasmon to spontaneously exhibit a chirality."

This chiral motion of the plasmon produced a magnetisation which then made the non-magnetic metallic disk of their scheme, magnetic.

The scientists say that the key observation in their theoretical analysis is that intense plasmonic oscillating electric fields can modify the dynamics of the electrons in the metal.

Assoc Prof Rudner said: "From the point of view of an electron within a material, an electric field is an electric field: it doesn't matter whether this oscillating field was produced from plasmons within the material itself or by a laser shining on the material."

Song and Rudner used this insight to theoretically demonstrate the conditions when feedback from the internal fields of the plasmons could trigger an instability towards spontaneous magnetisation in the system. The team expects that this theoretical approach could be realised in a range of high quality plasmonic materials such as graphene.

Emergent behaviour

The notion of using light to alter a material's properties has gained a lot of scientific attention recently. However, many of the published examples imbue a material with properties present in the light irradiation (for example, by irradiating a material with circularly polarised light, a material may acquire a chirality or handedness) or quantitatively enhance a property that was already present in the material.

Song and Rudner's research, in contrast to these approaches, has gone much further, they say.

"We found that the plasmons can acquire a kind of 'separate life' or 'emergence' with new properties that were not present in either the metal that hosts the plasmons or the light field that was driving it," Asst Prof Song added. The behaviour of the plasmon was emergent in the sense that it broke the intrinsic symmetries of both the light field and the metal.

Emergent behaviour, where the whole is more than the sum of its parts, arises when many particles interact with each other to act in a collective way. It is responsible for a range of useful phases of matter such as ferromagnets and superconductors that are typically controlled by temperature. The team's research extends this idea to plasmons and puts forward how it can be controlled by light irradiation.

"On a deeper level, there are many fundamental questions to explore about the nature of the non-equilibrium spontaneous symmetry breaking ("emergence") that we predicted," said Assoc Prof Rudner.

Asst Prof Song agreed, saying "Perhaps the most meaningful take-home message of our work is that it shows that collective modes can exhibit distinct new phases. If plasmonic magnetism is possible, what other phases of collective modes are waiting to be uncovered?"

The brain is composed of many different types of neurons, and scientists are just beginning to uncover the functional significance of this vast cellular diversity. At Baylor College of Medicine, Drs. Benjamin Arenkiel, Gary Liu and their colleagues at Baylor, the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children's Hospital and Rice University studied the functional relationships between inhibitory interneurons, a type of nerve cell, and two excitatory cell types, called tufted cells and mitral cells, in the murine olfactory bulb.

Using cell-type specific genetic tools, optogenetic mapping, electrophysiological data, live 2-photon imaging and computational modeling, the researchers discovered that when they removed the ability of inhibitory interneurons to inhibit the activity of tufted cells and mitral cells, these excitatory neurons dramatically changed the way they responded to odors. Unexpectedly, the responses changed more drastically in tufted cells than in mitral cells. The study appears today in the journal Nature Communications.

These findings provide new insights into the complex functional consequences of the vast diversity of cell types in the brain and underscore the need to better understand these relationships in order to grasp how the brain processes sensory information.

Neural activity that reflects the intention to drink alcohol is observed in the prefrontal cortex and is blunted in rats with a family history of excessive drinking, according to research from eNeuro. This insight could lead to novel treatments for alcohol use disorders.

The prefrontal cortex is a brain region involved in decision-making that becomes active before a behavior is initiated, indicating intention. David Linsenbardt, Nicholas Timme, and Christopher Lapish at Indiana University ? Purdue University Indianapolis investigated neural activity in the prefrontal cortex to determine if it encodes the intention to consume alcohol.

Linsenbardt's team compared activity before and during alcohol consumption in two types of rats. One modeled a family history of alcohol abuse, while the other lacked this family history. The prefrontal cortex was active during consumption in both types of rats, but only active pre-consumption in the rats without a family history of drinking.

These findings suggest that the prefrontal cortex directly encodes the intention to consume alcohol but less so in those with greater risk of abusing alcohol. Restoring prefrontal cortex activity in individuals with a predisposition to over-drink could be a new approach for treating alcohol use disorders.

A University of Oklahoma-led study generated improved annual maps of tropical forest cover in the Brazilian Amazon in 2000-2017 and provided better characterization on the spatio-temporal dynamics of forest area, loss and gain in this region. The Amazon basin has the largest tropical forests in the world. Rapid changes in land use, climate and other human activities have resulted in substantial deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon over the past several decades.

"Monitoring, verification and reporting of tropical forest dynamics in the Brazilian Amazon have been a critical but challenging task for the research community and society-at-large. Available maps of tropical forest cover in the region have large uncertainty. In 2015, we assembled an international team from the United States, Brazil and China to tackle the challenging problem," said Xiangming Xiao, George Lynn Cross Research Professor, Department of Microbiology and Plant Biology, OU College of Arts and Sciences.

"The international team used both optical and microwave images acquired by satellite-based sensors and advanced algorithms to improve annual maps of tropical forests in the Brazilian Amazon during 2000-2017," said Yuanwei Qin, lead author for the study and research scientist, Center for Spatial Analysis, OU College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences.

The estimates of tropical forest area in the Brazilian Amazon from this study were ~15% higher than estimates from the PRODES forest dataset that has been widely used in research communities. This study also reveals a renewed increase of tropical forest area loss after 2013, driven in part by land use change and strong El Nino in 2015/2016. The findings from the OU-led study could have significant implications for land-use policy, forest management and conservation, terrestrial carbon-cycle, hydrology and climate.

Teenagers report higher levels of stress than adults, and cite school as the highest contributing factor, according to the American Psychological Association's annual report. A summary from 2013 concluded that while stress among Americans was not new, "what's troubling is the stress outlook for teens in the United States."

In response, recently some schools have turned to mindfulness-based programs as a way to alleviate stress among their students. These programs could benefit from more research into what activities students find most useful.

In a pilot study led by the University of Washington, researchers explored art-based mindfulness activities that schools could use to reduce headaches, a common side effect of stress in adolescent girls. The test group of eight teenage girls gave feedback on which activities they preferred.

After three weeks of twice-weekly mindfulness and art therapy sessions, the girls reported experiencing significantly fewer headaches. At the beginning of the study, the girls reported 7.38 headaches, on average, within the previous two-week period. At the end of the study, that number had dropped to 4.63 -- almost a 40% decrease. This drop remained even seven weeks after the study had ended. The researchers published their findings May 22 in the journal Art Therapy.

"This study highlights one of my main research missions: We should be making interventions in cooperation with teenagers if we want these strategies to work," said corresponding author Elin Björling, a senior research scientist in the UW's human centered design and engineering department. "There's something powerful about saying 'I'm inviting you to start thinking about how you could get better. Come have a conversation with me about how we could do this.' I think that's why we saw such a strong response even in this tiny study."

The team recruited eight girls between the ages of 14 to 17 from a high school in Seattle. All of the participants reported experiencing three or more headaches not related to an injury within a two-week period, and five of the eight mentioned tension or stress as the main reason for headaches.

During the program, the students met twice a week for a 50-minute session with the research team. Each session began with an activity in which students would map where they were feeling stressed on a drawing of a body. Then the teens would participate in mindfulness and art activities before closing the session with another body map.

"After the study, we looked at all the before and after body maps side by side. It was so clear that something significant was going on," Björling said. "In the beginning everything was in pieces, and in the end everything was flowing through the whole body."

The teens tried different mindfulness techniques in each session so they could find which ones worked the best for them.

What teens liked: square breathing, a technique that encourages people to take slow breaths by concentrating and counting.

"I thought: 'No teen ever wants to do counted breathing, and they're never going to do it,'" Björling said. "But a few of them said 'That's my favorite. I do it all the time now.'"

What teens didn't like: mindful eating, a technique that asks people to focus on what and how they're eating.

"They hated it," Björling said. "This was a technique straight out of a lot of mindfulness programs for teens, but it didn't connect with them. It just annoyed them. It goes to show I need them to be experts in their own lives."

The researchers also asked the students to participate in different mindful art activities. During each session, the students tried a new art medium -- they particularly liked using oil pastels -- and different types of art therapy projects, including one where they worked together to create mandalas before and after a meditation exercise.

While the teens experienced fewer headaches after the study ended, their overall stress levels didn't change much. But the students reported feeling better in the moment, saying that they felt like they could handle whatever happened for the rest of the day.

The team was surprised to see any differences, given the small size of the group.

"It's not just about this study," Björling said. "This problem of teen mental health and headaches is so big that I'm worried about what happens if we don't take it on. Somistine Stevens, a nursing professor at UW Tacoma, and Narayan Singh, a psychology doctoral student at Seattle Pacific University, are also co-authors on this paper.e teens will want nothing to do with art mindfulness. So we need to come at this in lots of different ways. We're going to need an army of people and a cornucopia of options."

Dicyemids, microscopic parasites comprised of 30 cells, are in-between creatures. With their basic three-part body plan, they are more complex than single-celled protozoans but considerably less complex than multicellular metazoans - the animals of the kingdom Animalia. Yet the simple makeup of these so-called mesozoans does not translate to a simple life.

For example, dicyemids eliminate genes to conserve energy and change how they sexually reproduce.

Growing up in the renal sac of an octopus doesn't sound all that luxurious, but for a dicyemid, it's an all-inclusive home. In the sac they can feed on urine and reproduce asexually and sexually. When population becomes too dense in the sac, dicyemids become sexual. The larvae produced sexually vary from the larvae produced by asexual reproduction - sexual larvae leave the host in search of a new octopus to call home, and once a new host is found, the cycle continues. However, scientists are still not sure why this simple organism has such a complex lifestyle.

Researchers at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) and Osaka University have decoded the genome sequence of dicyemids, providing key insight into the parasites' not-so-simple lifestyle. The study, published in Genome Biology and Evolution, will help shed light on some of these mysteries.

Prof. Nori Satoh of the OIST Marine Genomics Unit and former PhD student Dr. Tsai-Ming Lu collaborated with renowned dicyemid researcher, Dr. Hidetaka Furuya of Osaka University to sequence the parasite.

The research began in Osaka, where the scientists went to the local fish market and purchased live octopuses. The sourced cephalopods were then brought to the lab, where the scientists collected their urine using a pipette.

They then extracted dicyemids from the urine, carefully removing octopus cells to make sure the samples were pure.

"We rinsed the cells with saltwater and separated them out," Lu said. "This was repeated several times to remove as many cells of the octopus as we could. Finally, we picked up dicyemid individuals one by one under the microscope to obtain the samples for sequencing."

Even with this cleaning step, however, obtaining a pure sample of dicyemids was a challenge.

"It is really difficult to exclude all octopus cells from dicyemid samples; however, to obtain a pure sample from the octopus is much easier, so we extracted the genomic DNA," Lu said.

This obstacle added two years of work to the study, but the researchers ultimately got a clear result: They sequenced the genomes of both organisms and - because the octopus genome has already been sequenced, they were able to extract it out to obtain the sequence of the parasite.

The team found that the dicyemid genome is highly reduced compared to other parasites. For example, these parasites have just four so-called Hox genes, which are responsible for building an organism's body-plan. These genes are groups of related genes. The groups are usually organized, but that isn't the case for dicyemids. Scientists found disorganized clusters of genes possibly due to how dicyemids can eliminate genes for energy conservation. They remove genes in their metabolic, immune, and nervous systems.

"Hox genes are important elements in building complicated animal bodies," Furuya said. "If genomes of many parasites are sequenced, that accumulated genome information can possibly reveal parasites specific gene organization."

Every animal on Earth has parasites, and while some are simple, others are not. The complete genome sequence of dicyemids not only answers some big questions in dicyemid biology but also offers insights into the evolution of parasites.

A small protein previously associated with cell dysfunction and death in fact serves a critical function in repairing breaks in DNA, according to new research led by scientists at Oregon Health & Science University.

The discovery, published today in the journal Scientific Reports, marks the first demonstration of the role that alpha-synuclein plays in preventing the death of neurons in brain diseases such as Parkinson's, which affects 1.5 million people in the United States alone.

The findings suggest that it may be possible to design new therapies to replace alpha-synuclein's function or boost it in people with Parkinson's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders.

Aggregates of alpha-synuclein, known as Lewy bodies, have long been connected to Parkinson's and other forms of dementia.

The study published today casts a new light on that process.

The findings suggest that Lewy bodies are problematic because they pull alpha-synuclein protein out of the nucleus of brain cells. The study, which examined the cells of living mice and postmortem brain tissue in humans, reveals that these proteins perform a crucial function by repairing breaks that occur along the vast strands of DNA present in the nucleus of every cell of the body.

Alpha-synuclein's role in DNA repair may be crucial in preventing cell death. This function may be lost in brain diseases such as Parkinson's, leading to the widespread death of neurons.

"It may be the loss of that function that's killing that cell," said senior author Vivek Unni, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor of neurology in the OHSU School of Medicine.

Researchers found that the alpha-synuclein protein rapidly recruited to the site of DNA damage in the neurons of mice. In addition, they found increased double-strand breaks in the DNA of human tissue and mice in which the protein was clumped together in the form of Lewy bodies in the cytoplasm surrounding the cell's nucleus. Taken together, the results suggest that alpha-synuclein plays a crucial role in binding broken strands of DNA within the cell's nucleus.

Put another way: If alpha-synuclein are workers in a factory, it's akin to all of them gathering for an extended coffee break and leaving the machinery unattended.

Unni, who also sees patients in the OHSU Parkinson Center and Movement Disorders Program, said he hopes that these findings lead to the development of methods to deliver alpha-synuclein proteins into the nucleus of cells or designing methods to replace its function.

"This is the first time that anyone has discovered one of its functions is DNA repair," Unni said. "That's critical for cell survival, and it appears to be a function that's lost in Parkinson's disease."