Culture

Children in social care have poorer mental health and perform worse in school than other children. But they have trust in the school staff and perform better after individual assessment at school. These are findings in a doctoral thesis from Linköping University.

Every year, the social services assume the care of more than 10,000 children and adolescents, who for various reasons are not able to live at home. In 2018, for instance, 39,000 children and adolescents lived in foster families or at various types of homes. Previous research shows that these children constitute a risk group in terms of poorer health, abuse and developing drug addiction. Additionally, they have worse prospects at school and on the labour market.

Rikard Tordön's experiences as a psychologist spurred him to make his own contribution to the research into children in state and municipal care.

"When I worked as a psychologist in the foster care sector, I discovered that it is guided by values and political decisions, not by knowledge. I saw a lack of research about what actually works. My thesis shows that initiatives in school can help the children perform better. And these initiatives must be implemented", says Rikard Tordon, psychologist and new PhD at Linköping University's Department of Biomedical and Clinical Sciences. His previous roles include national coordinator for Skolfam, a programme aimed at increasing the school results of children in foster care.

More vulnerable and less trust in adults

Rikard Tordön's doctoral thesis consists of four studies, published in different scientific journals.

The first study confirms that abuse and mental illness are more common among final-year upper secondary pupils in out-of-home care (OHC). It also found that these children, compared to their non-OHC peers, are less inclined to disclose abuse, in particular to police and social services.

The doctoral thesis' second study shows that on the whole, pupils in OHC have less trust in the adults in their (foster) homes, compared to non-OHC pupils. Of pupils in OHC, one in five reported that it is difficult to turn to their foster parents, although they trust teachers, school nurses and healthcare professionals.

"It's positive that children in OHC trust professionals. This means we've found a channel for reaching these children", says Rikard Tordön.

School results suffer, but this can be remedied

The results from study three show that the intelligence of children in foster care is affected by their insecure situation. An assessment of 856 children in elementary school shows that children in foster care have lower values on tests of, e.g., literacy and mathematical skills. They have difficulty with text decoding, literacy and mathematics. However what surprised Rikard Tordön was not that intelligence was affected, but how much it was affected. Children in OHC had a mean value of 91 points, compared to 100 points for children who live with their parents.

But the good news is that this can be remedied. 475 of the children in the previous study took part in a second mapping, following individual intervention according to the Skolfam model. After a two-year individual training plan, the children performed better, in e.g. mathematics and literacy, so-called higher-order executive functions. However, lower-order executive functions and affective functioning, such as text decoding and impulse control, did not change. Moreover, intelligence increased from 91 to 95 points, as mean values, after the first two years of the intervention.

"It is possible to help these children do better in school, and school has a protective effect in the long-term. Now we have to start to measure, systematically, how good we are at helping our vulnerable children, so that we discover what works, and what doesn't work."

The prevalence of drug use has increased for decades all around the world despite the strict measures taken. As the traditional prohibitionist drug policy has created social injustice, public health problems, and high social costs, decriminalization of drug use has emerged as a response.

Researchers at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) have evaluated the impact of decriminalization policy in different settings. The new study reviews reports, peer-review articles, and critical response papers on the topic.

The review shows that one of the essential steps in policy design is to alter the government approach in managing the drug problem. Drug policy has been considered a criminal justice issue for many decades. Today, it has been acknowledged that the system is not able to produce the best results.

"The power politics of government institutions play a significant role in policy design. However, the loosening of the role of law enforcement might be a crucial prerequisite for transition. The findings point out that intervening drug issues within a health framework will produce better outcomes," says Research Professor Pekka Hakkarainen.

Decriminalization policy reduces public health risks and overdose deaths

The findings in countries where decriminalization policy has been implemented provide substantial evidence for reducing infectious diseases and drug-related deaths among people who use drugs.

"For instance, if the aim is to prevent overdose deaths, more resources should also be devoted to harm reduction services. A simple change in the status in law in terms of personal drug use or possession is not an adequate response to reduce the number of overdose deaths. The outcomes should be defined more carefully, and the impacts of policy should be interpreted more cautiously," stresses Research Programme Director Tuukka Tammi.

The decriminalization policy provides an encouraging environment for seeking help and drug treatment. It also facilitates the integration of people who use drugs in the society and increases educational attainment and employment.

Besides, drug-related overloads on criminal justice have reduced tremendously, which reduces the cost of policing and prisoning.

Fear over increased drug use is a barrier for the adaptation of decriminalization

One of the main barriers to decriminalization policy adaptation is the fear of a rapid increase in overall drug use after implementation. However, the findings show that there is no significant increase in the long run.

"Since the legal status of the drugs is not the only predictor of drug use in a society, the focus should be on the regional trends, drug culture, and other drug-related policies to comprehend the drug initiation broadly," Hakkarainen says.

Decrimalization models vary between countries

The researchers stress that decriminalization is a generally used umbrella term, and every country must find the model that best fits its aims, values, and local circumstances.

"Since the way the issue has emerged in each country has varied, each design focuses on particular needs, which has led to different results. The report mainly draws attention to the underlying reasons of policy development in states where it has been implemented for a while. On the other hand, since the policy expectations define the means, the study shows that the context shapes the desired ends. To highlight the impact of the contextual factors, the report includes examples of policy successes or failures around the world", says visiting researcher Ali Unlu.

Insects that feed only on plants have a number of challenges to overcome. But they also have some active helpers to assist them with the supply of important nutrients. So-called symbiotic microorganisms make essential amino acids, vitamins, and enzymes available and in this way supplement and enrich the limited diet of their host insects. Reed beetles with their semi-aquatic lifestyle also have such helpers that extend their range of available nutrients. Scientists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in collaboration with researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena and partners in Hamburg and Japan have investigated the contributions that the symbiotic bacteria make to the unusual life cycle and diet of reed beetles. "Thanks to their symbiotic bacteria, reed beetles have been able to access new ecological niches. Although this means that the symbionts promote the ecological potential of their hosts, what is even more interesting is the fact that they can also restrict their adaptability," explained Professor Martin Kaltenpoth, head of the Department of Evolutionary Ecology at JGU.

Symbionts help nourish reed beetle larvae under water

Reed beetles are an ecologically unusual subgroup of the leaf beetle family and consist of around 165 species that live all or part of the time in water. The larvae of these reed beetles are aquatic and attach themselves to underwater plant roots from which they suck the sap as food. The adult beetles of most species live in vegetation above the water level and eat the leaves of plants such as grasses, sedges, and water lilies. In contrast with many other leaf beetles, the food sources of the larvae and the adult insects of the same species differ considerably. "The aquatic life stage of the larvae is highly unusual," stated Kaltenpoth, pointing out that the larvae even produce a cocoon under water, from which the mature beetles hatch. Since the early 1930s it has been known that reed beetles live in close symbiosis with bacteria that colonize blind sacs in the midgut of the larvae, but in the adult beetles they occupy the so-called Malpighian tubules, which are comparable to our kidneys. Scientists were also aware that without these symbionts the larvae would not be able to form a cocoon. However, how exactly the symbiotic bacteria contribute to the sustenance of their hosts has, as yet, remained a mystery.

Using high-throughput sequencing techniques, the team led by Kaltenpoth sequenced the genetic material of the symbionts of 26 species of reed beetles from North America, Asia, and Europe. They reconstructed the entire genomes of the symbionts and were able to make predictions as to what these microbes actually do for their beetle hosts. It turns out that the bacteria can produce almost all of the essential amino acids, that is the ten protein components vital to life that the beetles cannot synthesize themselves. This is likely important for the larvae in particular, because the plant sap from roots does not supply sufficient amounts of amino acids - and most importantly, not enough to build the protein-rich cocoon. "We know this form of cooperation in which most or all of the essential amino acids are supplied from many plant sap-feeding Hemiptera, for example aphids and cicadas, but this is uncommon in beetles," said the evolutionary biologist.

Some of the symbionts help adult beetles to break down pectins

A second aspect of the coexistence of adult reed beetles and bacteria is even more interesting. Some of the symbionts provide one or two enzymes that can break down pectins. Pectins are present in the cell walls of plants and are difficult to digest. They can be broken down by pectinases in order to contribute to the carbohydrate and energy supply of the herbivorous insects.

The research team drew up a phylogenetic tree of the symbiotic bacteria to trace their evolutionary history. Interestingly, over the course of their evolution, the pectinases have disappeared from the symbiont genomes in four independent beetle lineages. Beetles that do not obtain pectinases through their symbiont are specialized to live on grasses and sedges, plants with low amounts of pectin. "These beetles have changed their food plant preferences. And because grasses and sedges only have small amounts of pectin in the cell wall, the pectinases provided by the symbionts were no longer useful and got subsequently lost," said Kaltenpoth. Beetles that continue to feed on water lilies, grass rush, or pondweed still have at least one pectinase.

Microbial symbiosis can extend as well as restrict ecological niches

The results reveal that, on the one hand, symbionts can broaden the ecological potential of their host and enable it to adapt to a new niche. However, they also show that symbiotic microbes can restrict the selection of host plants if their enzymatic abilities are lost. "We think that the species of reed beetle that live on grasses and sedges can no longer return to consuming pectin-rich host plants," concluded Kaltenpoth.

Reed beetles are among the few groups of beetles that have changed from a terrestrial to an aquatic life cycle. Symbiotic microorganisms have made a significant contribution to this move from land to water by supporting the nutrient supply of the larvae and adult beetles. However, as certain types of reed beetles no longer have pectinases available, they are also responsible for limiting the ecological environment their host can occupy.

Research funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant

Professor Martin Kaltenpoth's research on the microbial ecology of reed beetles is being supported by an ERC Consolidator Grant, which he was awarded in 2018 to investigate aspects of symbiosis between beetles and bacteria. The biologist has been Professor of Evolutionary Ecology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz since 2015. He has recently been appointed new director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, where he will be setting up the new Department of Insect Ecology and Evolution from February 2021.

Research assumes that many sleep disorders are caused by our modern lifestyle, which is characterized by pressure to constantly perform and be active. Rhythms of work and leisure activities thus set a cycle that is often at a mismatch with the body's internal biological clock. If the differences in sleep timing and duration between work days and days off become too large, this can lead to "social jetlag". With this in mind, restrictions that involve working from home could offer some benefits: flexible working hours, no commuting and potentially more time to sleep.

Researchers from the University of Basel and the Psychiatric Hospital of the University of Basel investigated the effects of the restrictions implemented to contain the Covid-19 pandemic on sleep rhythms and sleep behavior in a six-week online survey conducted between 23 March and 26 April 2020. Under the leadership of psychologist Dr. Christine Blume, a total of 435 people were surveyed in Switzerland, Austria and Germany. More than 85% of the respondents were working from home at that time. Overall, the participants slept rather well, 75% of them were women.

Less "social jetlag"

The survey found that a relaxation of social rhythms - for example, through more flexible working hours - led to a reduction in "social jetlag". "This suggests that the sleep-wake patterns of those surveyed were guided by internal biological signals rather than social rhythms," says Blume. Furthermore, 75% of those surveyed reported sleeping up to 50 minutes longer than before the lockdown. One factor contributing to this could be that people no longer had to commute to work in the morning, the sleep researcher explains.

Tip: outdoor activities

However, this reduction of "social jetlag" was not paralleled by an improvement in perceived sleep quality. To the contrary, those surveyed reported that their sleep quality actually deteriorated a little during the lockdown. This is not very surprising, explains Blume, as this unprecedented situation also was highly burdening in many ways. Financial and health concerns or stress related to child care are just a few relevant aspects.

The sleep expert has a tip for those whose sleep has deteriorated: "Our findings suggest that physical activity outdoors could counteract a deterioration in sleep quality."

In the U.S., someone has a heart attack every 40 seconds, and yet researchers have not had a model that fully mimics what occurs in the human heart after a heart attack.

A team of investigators at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) and Clemson University recently reported in an article in Nature Biomedical Engineering that they have developed human cardiac organoids less than 1 millimeter in diameter that closely resemble the physiological conditions that occur during a heart attack.

The team was led by bioengineer Ying Mei, Ph.D., who holds a joint faculty position at MUSC and Clemson University. He is part of the MUSC Clemson Bioengineering program, which places Clemson bioengineers and bioengineering doctoral students on the MUSC campus so that they can interact with clinicians in need of engineering solutions. The article's lead author, Dylan Richards, Ph.D., is a graduate of the joint program.

"We were essentially able to take that 3D complex nature of a heart attack and then downsize it into a microtissue model," said Richards.

Organoids are three-dimensional multicellular tissues that are less than 1 millimeter in diameter. These organoids, or microtissues, function like their full-size counterparts. In this case, the heart organoids actually beat and contract as the human heart does. This model uses induced pluripotent stem cells, almost like "parent cells," that divide and mature into several types of heart cells that interact and self-assemble to form the organoid.

Traditionally, biologists use cells in a dish or animal models, such as mice or rats, to model diseases being studied. These methods have their own disadvantages that the organoid model overcomes.

Cells in a dish are great for learning things at the cellular level, but it is very unnatural for cells to grow in two dimensions on a flat surface.

Animal models are very useful in taking the next steps toward recapitulating what happens in the human body, but organoids, especially those for the heart, are the closest to recreating what occurs in humans.

"The hearts of rats and mice beat five to 10 times faster than those of humans," Richards explained. "How those mechanisms work physically -the electrophysiology and the pumping action - is just different because of the scale."

In contrast, the cardiac organoid recreates a human version of the heart and closely resembles the tissue dysfunction that takes place after the oxygen shortage caused by a heart attack. Because it is very difficult to obtain a sample immediately after a heart attack occurs, most of what we know about heart attacks comes from observations made long after the initial oxygen shortage. The organoid model fills in this gap, enabling visualization immediately after oxygen deprivation.

"This can help us to understand better how cells respond in the short term and, in turn, how that makes way for long-term damage," said Richards of the organoid model.

This model also enables researchers to test whether heart drugs improve heart attack outcomes.

"It could help us determine whether a drug is effective at preventing some of this damage or preventing a detrimental response to an oxygen shortage," explained Richards.

The model could also provide a way to test whether a drug that is safe in a healthy heart is also safe in a diseased one. Such information could guide physicians in prescribing drugs more appropriately in patients who had preexisting heart conditions at the time of the heart attack.

In short, the model provides researchers with an understanding of the early events of a heart attack that they have not had before. But Mei intends to make the model even better by including immune cells. Immune cells are responsible for cleaning out any dead cells caused by the heart attack, but by doing so, they can determine how immune cells play a role in the restructuring of heart tissue after damage from an oxygen shortage. The Mei lab would like to study how they do so in hopes of preventing the death of damaged but still living areas of the heart.

Mei would also like to examine the effects of patients' genetics on their outcomes. His laboratory is currently working on creating organoids from cells from patients with diverse outcomes. Those organoids can then be used to help us to understand more fully how a patient's specific genetic profile affects his or her recovery.

"We are not the first ones to recapitulate the cellular or even the tissue-level response. I would argue, however, that we are the first ones to recapitulate the organ-level response," said Mei.

Special note: Mei, Richards and their co-authors would like to dedicate this work to their dear friend and co-author Craig Beeson, Ph.D., who was lost to cancer before the publication of their article.

What nitrogen is getting up to in permafrost soils may be much more interesting than researchers have long believed--with potentially significant consequences for our management of climate change.

Nitrogen is a constituent part of nitrous oxide (N2O)--an often overlooked greenhouse gas, and there is a vast amount of nitrogen stored in permafrost soils.

But little is known about N2O emissions from permafrost soils and until recently, it was assumed that releases had to be fairly minimal because of the cold climate.

Decomposition of organic matter is slow in low temperatures. Exacerbating this, there would have to be high competition amongst organisms for what little nitrogen there was in a form that they can use. So there couldn't be much nitrogen left over to contribute to N2O releases.

In recent years however, a growing number of papers have started to hint that there might be very high N2O emissions from such soils, perhaps as much as those from tropical forests or croplands, which suggests that there's a gap in our understanding of what happens to nitrogen in permafrost soils.

To get to the bottom of the issue, Dr. Michael Dannenmann from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Dr. Chunyan Liu from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences with their colleagues have established the "NIFROCLIM" project in a high-latitude permafrost region in northeast China that is part of the Eurasian permafrost complex--the world's largest permafrost area.

The profile of "NIFROCLIM" was publsihed on May 23 in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.

"In contrast to the huge volumes of research into permafrost carbon climate feedbacks, research into permafrost nitrogen climate feedbacks is lagging behind terribly," said by Elisabeth Ramm, the first author of the News & Views article. "We urgently need to better understand what is happening to nitrogen in these soils, especially as the world warms and permafrost thaws."

The researchers are taking high-resolution soil and gas samples down to the upper layers of the permafrost across multiple sites with differing landscape characteristics, from upland forests to lowland bogs, as well as engaging in experiments that simulate varying levels of warming.

Building a scientific outpost on the southern edge of this region is ideal for studying impact of climate change on permafrost as the arctic and subarctic in particular is being hit hard already by global warming.

Temperature increases occur here at more than double the pace of the global average, accelerating permafrost degradation and N transformations.

"If anywhere is going to tell us if we've been getting the math wrong on nitrogen, it's here." said Liu.

CHICAGO (June 12, 2020): A cost-effective strategy for health care systems to offset N95 mask shortages due to the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is to switch to reusable elastomeric respirator masks, according to new study results. These long-lasting masks, often used in industry and construction, cost at least 10 times less per month than disinfecting and reusing N95 masks meant to be for single use, say authors of the study, published as an "article in press" on the Journal of the American College of Surgeons website in advance of print.

The study is one of the first to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of using elastomeric masks in a health care setting during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Sricharan Chalikonda, MD, MHA, FACS, lead study author and chief medical operations officer for Pittsburgh-based Allegheny Health Network (AHN), where the study took place.

Disposable N95 masks are the standard face covering when health care providers require high-level respiratory protection, but during the pandemic, providers experienced widespread supply chain shortages and price increases, Dr. Chalikonda said. He said hospitals need a long-term solution.

"We don't know if there will be a shortage of N95s again. We don't know how long the pandemic will last and how often there will be virus surges," he said. "We believe now is the time to invest in an elastomeric mask program."

Dr. Chalikonda said an immediate supply of elastomeric masks in a health care system's stockpile of personal protective equipment is "game changing" given the advantages.

Benefits of elastomeric masks

Elastomeric masks are made of a tight-fitting, flexible, rubber-like material that can adjust to nearly all individuals' faces and can withstand multiple cleanings, Dr. Chalikonda said. These devices, which resemble gas masks, use a replaceable filter. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), elastomeric masks offer health care workers equal or better protection from airborne infectious substances compared with N95 masks.1

Like many hospitals during the COVID-19 crisis, AHN was disinfecting and reusing N95 masks for a limited number of uses. However, Dr. Chalikonda said, "Many caregivers felt the N95 masks didn't fit quite as well after disinfection."

At the end of March, AHN began a one-month trial of a half-facepiece elastomeric mask covering the nose and mouth. The mask holds a P100-rated cartridge filter, meaning it filters out almost 100 percent of airborne particles.2

Until AHN could procure more elastomeric masks, the system began its program for P100 elastomeric mask "super-users": those providers who have the most frequent contact with COVID-19 patients. At each of AHN's nine hospitals in Pennsylvania and Western New York, the first providers to receive the new masks were respiratory therapists, anesthesia providers, and emergency department and intensive care unit (ICU) doctors and nurses. Initially, providers shared the reusable masks with workers on other shifts, and the masks underwent decontamination between shifts using vaporized hydrogen peroxide similar to the technique used to sterilize disposable N95 masks.

As more masks became available, workers kept their own mask and disinfected it themselves according to the manufacturer's guidelines. Gradually AHN provided more staff with the new masks.

Among nearly 2,000 health care providers receiving fit testing for an elastomeric mask (as required for any mask to make sure no unfiltered air penetrates it), 94 percent could wear one, the investigators reported. The small number of workers without a proper fit received an alternate type of respirator mask.

After a month of use, no one wearing an elastomeric mask chose to return to an N95 mask, according to the authors. Regarding the elastomeric masks, Dr. Chalikonda said, "Our clinicians were very comfortable with the fit, knowing it was an equivalent if not superior amount of protection, and that these masks were intended to be reused."

Furthermore, patients were receptive to their care providers wearing this type of respirator, he noted.

Cost savings

To determine if the elastomeric masks were cost-effective, the researchers performed a cost-benefit analysis over one month of mask disinfection and reuse comparing the new masks, with the filter replaced monthly, versus N95 masks at one hospital's 18-bed intensive care unit (ICU). Although the elastomeric mask costs about $20 and the filter costs $10 compared with only $3 at that time for an N95 mask, the research team found the elastomeric masks were "conservatively" 10 times less expensive.

The cost savings, Dr. Chalikonda said, increases the longer they use the elastomeric masks, which often can last for years, and these masks can remain in storage for long periods, thus improving the planning and management of the medical supply stockpile for future outbreaks.

He explained the monthly cost is lower because they can disinfect elastomeric masks much more often, multiple caregivers can share the same mask, and, unlike N95s masks, they do not need to waste the mask after a failed fit test.

Another advantage of an elastomeric respirator program, according to Dr. Chalikonda, is it does not require any additional hospital resources to implement if the hospital already has an N95 mask reuse and resterilization program. The AHN elastomeric mask program presented fewer operational challenges than disinfecting N95 masks, he stated.

Emerging evidence suggests that COVID-19 may actually trigger the onset of diabetes in healthy people and also cause severe complications of pre-existing diabetes.

A letter published today in the New England Journal of Medicine and signed by an international group of 17 leading diabetes experts involved in the CoviDiab Registry project, a collaborative international research initiative, announces the establishment of a Global Registry of new cases of diabetes in patients with COVID-19.

The Registry aims to understand the extent and the characteristics of the manifestations of diabetes in patients with COVID-19, and the best strategies for the treatment and monitoring of affected patients, during and after the pandemic.

Clinical observations so far show a bi-directional relationship between COVID-19 and diabetes. On the one hand, diabetes is associated with increased risk of COVID-19 severity and mortality. Between 20 and 30% of patients who died with COVID-19 have been reported to have diabetes. On the other hand, new-onset diabetes and atypical metabolic complications of pre-existing diabetes, including life-threatening ones, have been observed in people with COVID-19.

It is still unclear how SARS-Cov-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, impacts diabetes. Previous research has shown that ACE-2, the protein that binds to SARS-Cov-2 allowing the virus to enter human cells, is not only located in the lungs but also in organs and tissues involved in glucose metabolism such as the pancreas, the small intestine, the fat tissue, the liver and the kidney. Researchers hypothesise that by entering these tissues, the virus may cause multiple and complex dysfunctions of glucose metabolism. It has also been known for many years that virus infections can precipitate type 1 diabetes.

Francesco Rubino, Professor of Metabolic Surgery at King's College London and co-lead investigator of the CoviDiab Registry project, said: "Diabetes is one of the most prevalent chronic diseases and we are now realizing the consequences of the inevitable clash between two pandemics. Given the short period of human contact with this new coronavirus, the exact mechanism by which the virus influences glucose metabolism is still unclear and we don't know whether the acute manifestation of diabetes in these patients represent classic type 1, type 2 or possibly a new form of diabetes".

Paul Zimmet, Professor of Diabetes at Monash University in Melbourne, Honorary President of the International Diabetes Federation and co-lead investigator in the CoviDiab Registry project said: "We don't yet know the magnitude of the new onset diabetes in COVID-19 and if it will persist or resolve after the infection; and if so, whether or not or COVID-19 increases risk of future diabetes. By establishing this Global Registry, we are calling on the international medical community to rapidly share relevant clinical observations that can help answer these questions".

Stephanie Amiel, Professor of Diabetes Research at King's College London and a co-investigator of the CoviDiab Registry project said: "The registry focuses on routinely collected clinical data that will help us examine insulin secretory capacity, insulin resistance and autoimmune antibody status to understand how COVID-19 related diabetes develops, its natural history and best management. Studying COVID-19-related diabetes may uncover novel mechanisms of disease."

Like most galaxies, the Milky Way hosts a supermassive black hole at its center. Called Sagittarius A*, the object has captured astronomers' curiosity for decades. And now there is an effort to image it directly.

Catching a good photo of the celestial beast will require a better understanding of what's going on around it, which has proved challenging due to the vastly different scales involved. "That's the biggest thing we had to overcome," said Sean Ressler, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Barbara's Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP), who just published a paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, investigating the magnetic properties of the accretion disk surrounding Sagittarius A*.

In the study, Ressler, fellow KITP postdoc Chris White and their colleagues, Eliot Quataert of UC Berkeley and James Stone at the Institute for Advanced Study, sought to determine whether the black hole's magnetic field, which is generated by in-falling matter, can build up to the point where it briefly chokes off this flow, a condition scientists call magnetically arrested. Answering this would require simulating the system all the way out to the closest orbiting stars.

The system in question spans seven orders of magnitude. The black hole's event horizon, or envelope of no return, reaches around 4 to 8 million miles from its center. Meanwhile, the stars orbit around 20 trillion miles away, or about as far as the sun's nearest neighboring star.

"So you have to track the matter falling in from this very large scale all the way down to this very small scale," said Ressler. "And doing that in a single simulation is incredibly challenging, to the point that it's impossible." The smallest events proceed on timescales of seconds while the largest phenomena play out over thousands of years.

This paper connects small scale simulations, which are mostly theory-based, with large-scale simulations that can be constrained by actual observations. To achieve this, Ressler divided the task between models at three overlapping scales.

The first simulation relied on data from Sagittarius A*'s surrounding stars. Fortunately, the black hole's activity is dominated by just 30 or so Wolf-Rayet stars, which blow off tremendous amounts of material. "The mass loss from just one of the stars is larger than the total amount of stuff falling into the black hole during the same time," Ressler said. The stars spend only around 100,000 years in this dynamic phase before transitioning into a more stable stage of life.

Using observational data, Ressler simulated the orbits of these stars over the course of about a thousand years. He then used the results as the starting point for a simulation of medium-range distances, which evolve over shorter time scales. He repeated this for a simulation down to the very edge of the event horizon, where activity takes place in matters of seconds. Rather than stitching together hard overlaps, this approach allowed Ressler to fade the results of the three simulations into one another.

"These are really the first models of the accretion at the smallest scales in [Sagittarius] A* that take into account the reality of the supply of matter coming from orbiting stars," said coauthor White.

And the technique worked splendidly. "It went beyond my expectations," Ressler remarked.

The results indicated that Sagittarius A* can become magnetically arrested. This came as a surprise to the team, since the Milky Way has a relatively quiet galactic center. Usually, magnetically arrested black holes have high-energy jets shooting particles away at relativistic speeds. But so far scientists have seen little evidence for jets around Sagittarius A*.

"The other ingredient that helps create jets is a rapidly spinning black hole," said White, "so this may be telling us something about the spin of Sagittarius A*."

Unfortunately, black hole spin is difficult to determine. Ressler modeled Sagittarius A* as a stationary object. "We don't know anything about the spin," he said. "There's a possibility that it's actually just not spinning."

Ressler and White next plan to model a spinning back hole, which is much more challenging. It immediately introduces a host of new variables, including spin rate, direction and tilt relative to the accretion disc. They will use data from the European Southern Observatory's GRAVITY interferometer to guide these decisions.

The team used the simulations to create images that can be compared to actual observations of the black hole. Scientists at the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration -- which made headlines in April 2019 with the first direct image of a black hole -- have already reached out requesting the simulation data in order to supplement their effort to photograph Sagittarius A*.

The Event Horizon Telescope effectively takes a time average of its observations, which results in a blurry image. This was less of an issue when the observatory had their sights on Messier 87*, because it is around 1,000 times larger than Sagittarius A*, so it changes around 1,000 times more slowly.

"It's like taking a picture of a sloth versus taking a picture of a hummingbird," Ressler explained. Their current and future results should help the consortium interpret their data on our own galactic center.

Ressler's results are a big step forward in our understanding of the activity at the center of the Milky Way. "This is the first time that Sagittarius A* has been modeled over such a large range in radii in 3D simulations, and the first event horizon-scale simulations to employ direct observations of the Wolf-Rayet stars," Ressler said.

Hollings Cancer Center researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) and colleagues assessed the connection between dietary advanced glycation end products (AGEs) and breast cancer risk in a study first published online March 2020 in Cancer Prevention Research.

It supports an increasingly evident link between high levels of AGEs in the body and cancer risk, said principal investigator David Turner, Ph.D., who worked with colleagues Susan Steck, Ph.D., with the University of South Carolina, and Lindsay Peterson, M.D., with Washington University School of Medicine.

The study was part of a larger decade-long prostate, lung, colorectal and ovarian cancer screening trial (PLCO) designed and sponsored by the National Cancer Institute. It included over 78,000 women between the ages of 55 and 74 years who were cancer free at the start of the study. The women completed a food frequency questionnaire at the beginning and again at five years into the study. After an average of 11 ½ years, 1,592 of the women were diagnosed with breast cancer. When the intake of high-AGE food was assessed, based on the questionnaires, increased AGE intake via the diet was associated with an increased risk of in situ and hormone receptor positive breast cancers.

Advanced glycation end products are proteins and lipids (fats) that go through a chemical alteration called glycation when they are exposed to sugars. This process occurs naturally in the body. However, processed foods and foods cooked at high temperatures are extremely high in AGEs, which can lead to a dangerous overabundance in the body.

Turner said AGEs are involved in nearly every chronic disease, in some way. "The study of AGEs in cancer is just starting to get traction. The presence of AGEs has been known for at least 100 years, but the research has been challenging. In order to determine how they work, their mechanism of action, researchers first have to determine a role in various diseases."

Turner said this study is important because it adds to the evidence between high levels of AGEs in the body and cancer risk. Turner and his collaborators are promoting the connection between AGEs and lifestyle choices to help the public make better food choices.

This will become an even more popular area of study as researchers employ new tools to help study AGEs. "A novel device, the AGE reader, is about to change how we look at AGEs in the clinic," Turner said. The AGE reader, made by Diagnoptics, is an easy to use noninvasive device where someone rests their forearm for just 12 seconds. It uses light at certain wavelengths to excite AGE autofluorescence in the human skin tissue.

"This machine actually measures glow from some of the AGEs. The more AGEs that are in the skin, the higher the glow," explained Turner.

While the AGE reader has been used to show strong correlations between AGE levels and Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and even mortality, Turner is using a cancer center support grant to validate further the AGE reader for use in cancer patients. He and his colleagues plan to investigate whether pigmentation in the skin skews the reading and use the reader as part of a growing community outreach program.

Since a link between AGEs and breast cancer has been shown, the ultimate goal is to test all Hollings Cancer Center patients who are interested at each visit, Turner said. This will provide a huge amount of data about the link between AGEs and a wide variety of cancers. Turner and his collaborators expect that future multicenter grants will come out of this project.

While the connection between high AGE levels and cancer risk might be disconcerting, research is also being done to determine if there is a way to reverse the detrimental effects of AGEs.

Bradley Krisanits, a Ph.D. student in Turner's lab, said that preliminarily, they have seen that physical activity reduces the amount of AGEs in the circulation.

"In our prostate cancer models, we see that physical activity counteracts prostate cancer progression in mice fed a high-AGE diet. This may be occurring due to a reduction in AGEs and changes in the immune system that we need to study more."

Turner hopes that by educating people about AGEs, they can make informed lifestyle decisions and lower their risks for chronic diseases. The top three things that a person can do is learn what AGEs are, avoid processed foods and think about how you cook your food in order to make changes to avoid the highest AGE-inducing cooking methods such as frying, grilling and broiling.

"AGEs build up in a cumulative way. Fats, sugars, everything that is bad for you leads to the accumulation of AGEs. One of our goals at Hollings is to reach out to the community to encourage the public to make healthier choices. Just making small changes in your diet can have a big effect."

Five years before the novel coronavirus ran rampant around the world, saiga antelopes from the steppes of Eurasia experienced their own epidemic.

Millions of these grazing animals--easily recognizable by their oversized snouts--once migrated across what is today Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Georgia and more.

But then, over the span of three weeks in 2015, nearly 200,000, or two-thirds of their existing population, sickened and died from a bacterial infection. Today, the a little more than 100,000 saiga are hanging onto survival in a few pockets of Eurasia.

The decline, and uncertain fate, of the saiga is a story that resonates with Joanna Lambert. She's a conservation biologist at the University of Colorado Boulder and a coauthor of a paper published this week in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. The study explores the current state of ungulates, or hoofed animals like the saiga, in the western U.S. and around the world.

Lambert, who has studied ecological communities in both North America and Equatorial Africa, explained that many of these creatures aren't well-known outside of their home regions. But when these animals disappear, entire ecosystems can reshuffle, occasionally beyond recognition.

"We're losing these animals without people ever knowing they were there in the first place," said Lambert, a professor in the Program of Environmental Studies at CU Boulder.

For the researcher, the study's publication marks an opportunity to reflect on how she stays hopeful even amid tremendous losses--and how to talk about the natural world during a period of unprecedented social upheaval.

"I tell my students, 'I have to give you the facts. This is the world you're growing up in, but don't let that paralyze you,'" Lambert said.

Unsung species

The new research was led by Joel Berger of Colorado State University and also included scientists from Bhutan, Argentina and Chile.

The team decided to look at ungulates because--with a few exceptions like rhinos and elephants--they don't usually pop up in brochures for conservation organizations. But, Lambart said, they're still in trouble: Huemel, for example, once roamed across the Patagonia region of South America. Today, a little more than 1,000 of these fluffy deer still live in the wild. The tamaraw, a pint-sized buffalo from the Philippines, is down to just a few hundred individuals.

"The whole world knows the stories of pandas and mountain gorillas, but there are untold numbers of unsung species that come and go without the world's attention," she said.

Their cases also show just how complicated conservation can be.

Lambert has spent years trekking the grasslands and forests of Yellowstone National Park to study wildlife. After federal officials killed all the park's wolves in the 1940s, elk herds there began to multiply--big time. Head counts for these herbivores surged from a few thousand individuals to tens of thousands, and they devoured once-abundant plants like cottonwood and willow trees.

"When you pull one species out of its community, or if you add a new one in, the entire assembly changes," Lambert said. "That has been the history of what humans have done on the planet."

When the park brought wolves back in the 1990s, and elk numbers dropped back down, something unexpected happened: beavers, which had also disappeared from Yellowstone, began reappearing, too. The furry swimmers, it turns out, depend on those same tree species to build their dams.

"In many cases, we don't know what rules these ecosystems followed in the past," she said. "Even when we do know, it doesn't matter because we now have this added element of human tinkering."

Ecological grief

Lambert has also struggled to keep going as a conservation biologist as the wilds around her field sites in Africa and North America dwindled, then vanished entirely.

"As I returned each year from the field, it was taking me longer and longer to recover from a sort of existential depression," she said. "I realized that I have been profoundly impacted by the losses I've seen."

Many of Lambert's students feel similarly hopeless, a phenomenon that psychologists call "ecological grief." She tells them to focus on the success stories, however rare they are. Protected areas like Yellowstone have saved countless animals from extinction and have given others like wolves new chances at survival. Lambert is also providing scientific guidance around proposals to return wolves to Colorado.

And there are still a lot of animals out there--including the few remaining herds of big-nosed saiga.

"We need to fight like hell to keep all that," she said.

Here's some good news for U.S. states trying to spur an economic recovery in the years ahead: The R&D tax credit has a significant effect on entrepreneurship, according to a new study led by an MIT professor.

Moreover, the study finds a striking contrast between two types of tax credits. While the R&D tax credit fuels high-quality new-firm growth, the state-level investment tax credit, which supports general business needs, actually has a slightly negative economic effect on that kind of innovative activity.

The underlying reason for the difference, the study's authors believe, is that R&D tax credits, which are for innovative research and development, help ambitious startup firms flourish. But when states are simply granting investment tax credits, allowing long-established firms to expand, they are supporting businesses with less growth ahead of them, and thus not placing winning policy bets over time.

"What we see is an improvement in the environment for entrepreneurship in general, specifically for those growth-oriented startups that ultimately are the engine of business dynamism," says MIT economist Scott Stern, co-author of a newly published paper detailing the study's results.

"States that introduced R&D tax credits set the table for increased entrepreneurship," says Catherine Fazio MBA '14, a co-author of the study and research affiliate at the MIT Lab for Innovation Science and Policy.

Specifically, the study finds that -- other things being equal, and accounting for existing growth trends -- areas introducing R&D tax credits experience a 20 percent rise in high-quality new-firm-formation over a 10-year period, whereas areas using investment tax credits see a 12 percent drop in high-quality firm growth, also over a 10-year period.

"The investment tax credit arguably reinforces the strength of big business in these states, and that might create a barrier to entry for new firms," Stern explains. "It might harm entrepreneurship. But the R&D tax credit facilitates knowledge, facilitates science, facilitates exactly the sorts of things that can spur new ideas, and spurring new ideas is the key for our entrepreneurial ecosystem."

Indeed, adds Jorge Guzman MBA '11, PhD '17, a management professor and co-author of the study, "States offering both R&D and investment tax credits in an effort to stimulate high-growth entrepreneurship may actually be offering incentives that work at cross purposes to each other."

The paper, "The Impact of State-Level Research and Development Tax Credits on the Quality and Quantity of Entrepreneurship," appears in the latest issue of Economic Development Quarterly. Fazio is also a lecturer at Boston University's Questrom School of Business; Guzman is an assistant professor at the Columbia Business School of Columbia University; and Stern is the David Sarnoff Professor of Management of Technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Third year is the take-off point

The R&D tax credit was introduced in 1981 at the federal level, with states soon adding it to their own policy toolkits. From 1981 through 2006, 32 states have implemented R&D tax credits. At the same time, 20 states granted investment tax credits. Yet no study has specifically examined the impact of state R&D tax credits on new firms.

"A classical question that had previously resisted empirical scrutiny was the impact of the state-level R&D tax credit on entrepreneurship," Stern says. Moreover, he adds, it's reasonable to question how effective the policy might be: "Growth-oriented startups don't pay a lot of taxes upfront, so it's not clear how salient taxes would be for entrepreneurship."

To conduct the study, the researchers used a unique database they have created: the Startup Cartography Project, which features about 30 years of data on business formation and startup quality -- including data showing the likelihood of success for new firms based on their key characteristics. (For instance, firms that seek intellectual property protection, or are organized to attract further equity financing, are more likely to succeed).

The scholars also used the Upjohn Panel Data on Incentives and Taxes, which contain detailed records of state tax policies, collected by Timothy Bartik, a senior economist at the W.J. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

By evaluating tax policy changes alongside changes in business activity, the researchers could assess the state-level effects of the R&D tax credit. Crucially, the study not only tallies firm formation, but also analyzes the quality of those startup firms and the development of local innovation ecosystems, to measure the full impact of the policy changes.

Ultimately the study examined 25 states where the two data sets overlapped thoroughly from 1990 to 2010, with the R&D tax credit available to companies in counties within these states 46 percent of the time.

By examining before-and-after data around the introduction of the state-level R&D tax credit, the researchers concluded that the policy change created more startup activity.

Intriguingly, the study found that the third year after the introduction of the R&D tax credit is the real take-off point for entrepreneurship in a state, with a roughly 2 percent annual growth in high-quality firm formation from that year through the 14th year after the policy change.

"It takes a few years for that impact to make its way through the system," Stern says. "If you expect a one-year payoff from this, that's too short."

To be clear, many large businesses have long featured active R&D arms, and may also benefit from the state-level R&D tax credit. Indeed, Stern says, the current study was partly motivated by policymakers' past focus on the benefits of tax credits for major corporations. Those may be real enough, but they are not the sole area of influence for the R&D tax credit.

"The policy discussion has mostly focused on lowering the burden on, and providing incentives for, investment for big business," Stern says. "Right now Amazon, for example, takes a very large R&D tax credit. And it can say, 'Do you like your Amazon Echo or Alexa and your crowdsourcing services? Well, all that came from our R&D.'" At the same time, Stern adds, "If the main policy rationale has always been to help big business, over time, [people in] public policy have discussed if it also helps startups." The study now brings data to that conversation.

The long road ahead

The current study started well before the Covid-19 crisis, which has led to a massive rise in unemployment and severe problems and uncertainty for small businesses. To be clear, Stern observes, any reasonable recovery will require policy tools that extensively reach long-existing types of firms, rather than just depending on new growth.

"In this particular economic crisis, and public health crisis, we're going to need to be restoring Main Street in a really important way," Stern says. That means helping local restaurants, retail stores, and many other traditional small businesses, Stern emphasizes. As part of his ongoing work, he is now examining new business registrations of all kinds this spring, in the midst of the pandemic.

Still, the damage from the recovery has been so vast that efforts to bounce back must take multiple tracks -- including incentives for innovative firms that might fill business needs created by the Covid-19 crisis.

"While no one can predict the future, we know that the actual economic recovery is going to depend on restoring business dynamism," Stern says. "And that means we need to start getting new entrants, and make new entrepreneurship easier and better."

States willing to give R&D tax relief to firms could well see the tactic spurring on part of a larger, eventual recovery.

"The R&D tax credit is one of the few innovation policy instruments that at relatively low administrative cost, can make a big difference for spurring innovation and entrepreneurship within a region," Stern emphasizes. "You have to be committed to it. You have got to be patient. But it does pay off."

Since the discovery of the double helix form of DNA and the hypothesis of DNA mutation induced by proton transfer more than 50 years ago, it has been recognized that proton transfer is crucial to many chemical and biological processes.

As these processes are known to be relevant to biophysics and radiation therapy, a question arises whether a massive ion could be transferred in biochemical processes and lead to fragmentation. Specifically, in a complex bio-environment, does heavy ion transfer play a role?

Published in Nature Communications on June 12, a study reporting a new channel involving heavy N+ ion transfer observed in a charged Van der Waals cluster helps address the above questions.

The study was conducted by a team of researchers from the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the Institute of Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, and Centre de recherche sur les Ions, les MAtériaux et la Photonique (CIMAP) in France.

"Small van der Waals systems can be employed as experimentally feasible model systems," said Prof. ZHU Xiaolong of IMP, one of the first authors. Van der Waals (vdW) clusters are weakly bound atomic/molecular systems. "They are common in nature and important for understanding microenvironmental chemical phenomena in biosystems."

Interatomic Coulombic decay is a typical process that demonstrates the energy and charge transfer over a large distance between atomic components in a cluster and results in fragmentation, proving that forbidden channels for isolated atoms/molecules may be opened due to the presence of neighboring atoms. Here, the energy and charge transfers are mediated by virtual photon or Coulomb interaction.

In hydrogen-bond clusters, the proton transfer process plays an important role as well. It involves mass and charge migration over large distances within the cluster and results in fragmentation of the latter. Nevertheless, in previous research, this kind of transfer process was limited to hydrogen-bond clusters.

In the current work, the scientists used the neutral vdW cluster N2 Ar as a target in collisions with 1 MeV Ne8+ ions to produce the doubly charged cluster (N2Ar)2+.

Surprisingly, an exotic heavy N+ ion transfer channel (N2 Ar)2+ → N+ + NAr+ was observed. It is the first time that such a heavy-ion transfer process in a vdW cluster has ever been reported and the consequent formation of NAr+ is a novel scenario.

According to the study, this channel originates from the dissociation of the parent doubly charged cluster N22+ Ar generated by the "N2-site" two-electron loss process.

Theoretical calculations show that the polarization interactions between Ar and N22+ lead first to an isomerization process of N22+ Ar from its initial T-shape to a linear shape (N-N-Ar).

In addition, the neighboring neutral Ar atom decreases the N22+ barrier height and width, resulting in significantly shorter lifetimes for the metastable electronic state.

Consequently, the breakup of the covalent N+-N+ bond, the tunneling out of the N+ ion from the N22+ potential well, as well as the formation of the N-Ar+ bound system take place almost simultaneously. Then the Coulomb explosion starts between N+ and NAr+ ion pairs.

"This new mechanism might be general for molecular dimer ions in the presence of a neighboring atom, and be of potential importance in understanding the microdynamics of biological systems," said Prof. MA Xinwen from IMP, one of the corresponding authors of this paper. "For example, it may help us understand the micromechanism of cancer therapy by heavy ion irradiation."

Physicians must be competent collaborators with team members in order to practice medicine effectively. Health professional students have limited opportunities to work and learn together during the course of their medical education. Not only is it important for students to acquire prodigious knowledge, they must also learn how to collaborate well, and the results of their efforts must be evaluated fairly to measure the effectiveness of this collaborative, active learning.

Assistant professor Ikuo Shimizu of Shinshu University School of Medicine and collaborators used a modified Delphi procedure to develop the content validity of the students social interdependence in collaborative learning. Teamwork and collaboration are common goals in all of higher education and the workplace, but not always properly evaluated. It is crucial to come up with a fair assessment that can be utilized for further improvement of techniques and procedures.

Although it was difficult to recruit a diverse panel from abroad, assistant professor Shimizu was able to form a panel of medical students, education experts and medical educators from 8 different countries including Australia, Czech Republic, Japan, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Singapore, Thailand and the United States. The medical educators all had experience on collaborative learning such as problem based learning and team-based learning in health profession education curriculum.

Social interdependence theory, widely applied in educational psychology states that the transformation from self-interest to mutual interest when the outcomes of individuals are affected by their own and other's actions in a positive or negative social interdependence acts as an incentive for collaboration or not. When the common goal can only be achieved by the input of all members and not of just one player, positive social interdependence plays a role in collaborative efforts from all.

In order to execute the study, instrument development was conducted through building consensus among experts in a systematic manner and allowing for multiple feedback rounds and effective implementation. After the instrument development phase, validation of the instrument was performed through evaluating questionnaires. The group was successful in developing a scale for measuring social interdependence in collaborative learning by incorporating the opinions of international stakeholders.

Assistant professor Shimizu expresses, "in medical education, it is important to develop mutual reciprocal interdependence to aim for better practice while bringing out the best in each other's skills. I hope others will utilize this evaluation method in multi-disciplinary cooperative education. By using this evaluation method, active learning practices can hopefully be further improved."

Please read Measuring social interdependence in collaborative learning: instrument development and validation for more information.

Professor Junichiro Shiomi et al. from The University of Tokyo aimed to reduce the thermal conductivity of semiconductor materials by reducing the internal nanostructure, and successfully minimized thermal conductivity by designing, fabricating, and evaluating the optimal nanostructure-multilayer materials through materials informatics (MI), which combines machine learning and molecular simulation. In 2017, this research group developed a method to design an optimal structure that minimizes or maximizes thermal conductivity via MI based on computational science. However, it has not been experimentally demonstrated, and preparation of nano-scale structures and realization of an optimal structure based on property measurements were desired.

Thus, the research group utilized a film deposition method able to regulate, at a molecular level, a superlattice structure wherein two materials were alternately layered at several nm thick, and a measurement method that could assess thermal conductivity of a film at nano-scale, and realized the optimal aperiodic superlattice structure that minimizes thermal conductivity. With the optimal structure, wave interference of the lattice vibration (phonon) that conducts heat was maximized, and thermal conductivity was strongly regulated.

In the present study, using the semiconductor lattice structure as the model, the research group verified the utility of the MI method in design, fabrication, assessment, and mechanism elucidation toward regulation of thermal conductivity. In the future, application of the MI method to various material systems is anticipated. It was also shown that optimization of the aperiodic structure can regulate thermal conductivity by fully controlling the wave property of a phonon at near room temperature. This is expected to contribute to developments in phonon engineering for instance in thermoelectric conversion devices, optical sensors, and gas sensors, where low thermal conductivity is needed while maintaining electric conductivity and mechanical properties.