Culture

As COVID-19 spread across the country earlier this year, forcing schools and universities to close, Jessica L. Malisch began to notice an alarming trend - but not related to the virus.

"I was alarmed by patterns I was observing in the academic community in regards to how COVID-19 campus and childcare closures appeared to be impacting female scientists disproportionately," said Malisch, an assistant professor of biology at St. Mary's College of Maryland.

She called a friend, Breanna N. Harris, a research assistant professor in Texas Tech University's Department of Biological Sciences, with an idea. The pair quickly outlined a paper about the effects of the pandemic on women in academia, then reached out to more than a dozen other women invested in gender equity to contribute their perspectives. The resulting article was published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

Among the authors were nine from Texas Tech:

Harris

Jessica L. Spott, a doctoral candidate in educational psychology

Elizabeth P. Karam, an assistant professor in the Area of Management

Naïma Moustaïd-Moussa, a professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and founding director of the Obesity Research Institute

Latha Ramalingam, a research assistant professor of nutritional sciences

Amelia E. Talley, an associate professor and associate chair of the Department of Psychological Sciences

Jaclyn E. Cañas-Carrell, a professor in the Department of Environmental Toxicology and director of the STEM Center for Outreach, Research & Education

Karin Ardon-Dryer, an assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences-Atmospheric Sciences Group

Dana A. Weiser, an associate professor in the Department of Human Development & Family Studies

The gender divide in academia is well documented. Women face inequality and inequity. Examples include women's underrepresentation in administrative positions; biases against marriage or having children; shortages of working-mother role models and female mentors in general; pay and grant-funding disparities; and advancement based on student evaluations, which consistently rate men higher than women. Culturally, women are more likely to be the caregivers of children and/or parents, leading to a more difficult work/life balance.

But in the age of COVID-19, these existing challenges have been exacerbated, the authors explained. Importantly, the impacts of inequality and inequity are amplified and compounded for women with intersecting identities. For example, Black women, indigenous women and other women of color experience racial and ethnic bias on top of gender bias.

"The upending of daily life and the shift to remote work is hard on everyone, but women, who traditionally do more of the household and dependent care labor, are likely to bear a greater burden," Harris said. "Women tend to teach more and larger classes, students depend on female faculty for emotional support and expect more leniency from women vs. male faculty, and students evaluate women more harshly in teaching evaluations. With the rapid shift to online learning, more students and/or courses means more work, and having more students during a crisis means students will expect more emotional and academic support.

"In addition to more student demands in the classroom, many women are experiencing increased demands at home - either for care and homeschooling of children or of elderly family members, or for running the household. Given the increased demand of teaching and home responsibilities, women have less time to devote to research and grant writing."

The economic impacts also are likely to be more severe for women, Harris noted, because many institutions' plans for coping with COVID-19 result in some form of decreased income, either through direct firing, furlough or decreased contributions to retirement.

Many universities have instituted gender-neutral policies that treat men and women the same, like tenure-clock extensions. But even these, the authors argue, lead to increased disparity between genders.

"On the surface, having adjustment policies that are gender neutral sounds like the right thing to do, but that isn't always the case," Harris said. "I think it is important to recall the difference between equity and equality. I like the visual of a family riding bikes - in this scenario, the man is riding a traditional man's bike. Equality would be providing everyone in the family with a man's bike, but this solution doesn't address the needs of the woman and the small child. They might be able to manage, but the man's bike isn't the best option. Providing bikes that are suited to their size and needs - for example, adding training wheels for the child - is the better option. This is the equitable solution as it gives each family member the tools they need to complete the task.

"Women in academia face inequality in teaching loads, mentoring and service requirements, and start-up funds and salary. Thus, using policies that are equal for men and women can increase gaps instead of reducing them. In the bike example, it is like giving the whole family a man's bike but the one given to the woman is a lesser or older model, thus there is inequality at the start. A gender-neutral adjustment is then adding something like a cushioned seat to each bike to help the family deal with a long ride. Given that the man already had an advantage, a better bike that is suited to his needs, adding the seat for everyone is helpful, but it helps the man more."

Instead of gender-neutral policies, the authors recommend institutions form Pandemic Faculty Merit Committees to deal with equity issues. Such committees should be proactive, diverse, transparent, informed and trained in both bias and the institution's history.

"We provide a downloadable guide with questions about research, teaching, service and other situations that committees can use as a starting point," Harris said. "We also have a website that contains additional sources and background information."

Co-author Cañas-Carrell, chair of the President's Gender Equity Council, has shared the paper with the council as well as the Women Full Professors Network (WFPN), both of which fully endorsed it.

"The WPFN Executive Board is in support of having some of the group's members work with the administration and the Pandemic Response Merit Committee," Cañas-Carrell said. "We have received a very positive response from the administration and are already working with the Provost's Office to either establish a separate Pandemic Response Merit Committee or to create a subcommittee of the Faculty Success Advisory Council focused on equity in the time of COVID-19."

While there is certainly progress to be made, the authors believe articles like this can help.

"I don't think one article can solve the issues of gender and racial inequity in academia," Harris said, "but I am hoping that committees, departments and institutions use our piece and the provided resources to have honest conversations and personal reflections on their policies and practices. Ultimately, I hope they then enact some changes to begin to remedy inequities."

BROOKLYN, New York, Tuesday, July 6, 2020 - Over the past 30 years, the use of glass- and carbon- fiber reinforced composites in aerospace and other high-performance applications has soared along with the broad industrial adoption of composite materials.

Key to the strength and versatility of these hybrid, layered materials in high-performance applications is the orientation of fibers in each layer. Recent innovations in additive manufacturing (3D printing) have made it possible to finetune this factor, thanks to the ability to include within the CAD file discrete printer-head orientation instructions for each layer of the component being printed, thereby optimizing strength, flexibility, and durability for specific uses of the part. These 3D-printing toolpaths (a series of coordinated locations a tool will follow) in CAD file instructions are therefore a valuable trade secret for the manufacturers.

However, a team of researchers from NYU Tandon School of Engineering led by Nikhil Gupta, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering showed that these toolpaths are also easy to reproduce -- and therefore steal -- with machine learning (ML) tools applied to the microstructures of the part obtained by a CT scan.

Their research, Reverse engineering of additive manufactured composite part by toolpath reconstruction using imaging and machine learning, published in Composites Science and Technology, demonstrates this method of reverse engineering of a 3D-printed glass-fiber reinforced polymer filament that, when 3D-printed, has a dimensional accuracy within one-third of 1% of the original part.

The investigators, including NYU Tandon graduate students Kaushik Yanamandra, Guan Lin Chen, Xianbo Xu, and Gary Mac show that the printing direction used during the 3D-printing process can be captured from the printed part's fiber orientation via micro-CT scan image. However, since the fiber direction is difficult to discern with the naked eye, the team used ML algorithms trained over thousands of micro CT scan images to predict the fiber orientation on any fiber-reinforced 3D-printed model. The team validated its ML algorithm results on cylinder- and square-shaped models finding less than 0.5° error.

Gupta said the study raises concerns for the security of intellectual property in 3D-printed composite parts, where significant effort is invested in development but modern ML methods can make it easy to replicate them at low cost and in short time.

"Machine learning methods are being used in design of complex parts but, as the study shows, they can be a double-edged sword, making reverse engineering also easier," said Gupta. "The security concerns should also be a consideration during the design process and unclonable toolpaths should be developed in the future research."

A study in the Journal of Biological Chemistry describes a new way to determine the age of insulin-storage parcels, known as granules, and sheds light on how their age affects their release into the bloodstream. The findings could help experts better understand diabetes and fine-tune therapies for it.

Insulin is a hormone that manages the level of sugar, or glucose, in the bloodstream. It is secreted by the pancreas into the bloodstream when blood sugar levels rise. When insulin circulates in the bloodstream, muscle and other cells absorb glucose to use it as fuel, and so blood sugar levels decline. In Type 2 diabetes, formerly known as adult-onset diabetes, this process fails. Glucose builds up in the blood, either because the pancreas cannot produce enough insulin to keep up with dietary sugar intake or because the gland simply isn't working as it should.

About one in 10 Americans and more than 415 million people worldwide have diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Up to 95% of them have Type 2. Treatment often requires painful and frequent insulin injections or the use of mechanical insulin pumps. There is no cure.

The researchers noted in their paper that existing therapies for diabetes increase insulin secretion without regard for insulin granule age. "Accordingly," they wrote, "these approaches are effective only for a short period."

Insulin is produced by β-cells of the pancreas and stored in insulin granules, which are then organized into pools and finally secreted into the bloodstream. Pools of young insulin granules are preferred for secretion over pools of old ones, for reasons that remain unclear.

The scientists whose work was published in JBC wanted to learn more about how pancreatic cells can distinguish between pools with young or old insulin granules.

"Current therapeutics do not take the existence of pools into consideration," said Melkam Kebede, an assistant professor at the University of Sydney who oversaw the study. "By evolution, the (pancreatic) cells have determined what to secrete and what not. Understanding the mechanism and molecular differences between the pools definitely is going to lead us into something meaningful."

In their paper, the researchers describe a technique they developed to distinguish younger insulin granules from older ones. The scientists placed a fluorescent protein, called Syncollin-dsRedE5TIMER, into newly created insulin granules and used a laser and detector to visualize that marker. In younger granules, the marker emits a green fluorescent light; as granules get older, the marker begins to emit a red fluorescence.

The authors monitored the movements of and other changes in insulin granule pools and saw that, as predicted, both mouse and human cells preferentially release younger insulin granule pools into the bloodstream in response to glucose.

The researchers then set out to learn more about how pancreatic cells sort insulin granules into pools and release them when they are experiencing metabolic stress. The concern is that, when under stress, "β-cells could potentially lose their ability to distinguish young (granules) from old," they wrote in their paper.

The team isolated β-cells from mice and simulated chronic low, high and normal blood sugar levels and found different glucose levels determine which pools of insulin granules, young or old, are secreted. They saw similar results when they used a common mouse model for Type 2 diabetes known as the db/db mouse.

These findings are important, Kebede said, because "all the drugs that affect insulin secretion...just push any granule within the cell and eventually fail."

Older insulin granules are naturally degraded in normally functioning beta cells, noted lead author Belinda Yau of the University of Sydney, but, in diabetes, a greater percentage of insulin granule pools are secreted, and there's a mismatch in how they're released.

Being able to visualize insulin granules as they age and understanding better how their age affects their secretion may lead to the discovery of new biomarkers capable of indicating the development of diabetes and could help in the creation of therapies for Type 2 diabetes.

"If we can understand what makes up the granules and makes them do what they do, we can figure out a way to target the things that slow down or speed up their secretion," Yau said.

Whether it's on top of a self-driving car or embedded inside the latest gadget, Light Detection and Ranging (lidar) systems will likely play an important role in our technological future, enabling vehicles to 'see' in real-time, phones to map three-dimensional images and enhancing augmented reality in video games.

The challenge: these 3-D imaging systems can be bulky, expensive and hard to shrink down to the size needed for these up-and-coming applications. But University of Colorado Boulder researchers are one big step closer to a solution.

In a new paper, published in Optica, they describe a new silicon chip--with no moving parts or electronics--that improves the resolution and scanning speed needed for a lidar system.

"We're looking to ideally replace big, bulky, heavy lidar systems with just this flat, little chip," said Nathan Dostart, lead author on the study, who recently completed his doctorate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Current commercial lidar systems use large, rotating mirrors to steer the laser beam and thereby create a 3-D image. For the past three years, Dostart and his colleagues have been working on a new way of steering laser beams called wavelength steering--where each wavelength, or "color," of the laser is pointed to a unique angle.

They've not only developed a way to do a version of this along two dimensions simultaneously, instead of only one, they've done it with color, using a "rainbow" pattern to take 3-D images. Since the beams are easily controlled by simply changing colors, multiple phased arrays can be controlled simultaneously to create a bigger aperture and a higher resolution image.

"We've figured out how to put this two-dimensional rainbow into a little teeny chip," said Kelvin Wagner, co-author of the new study and professor of electrical and computer engineering.

The end of electrical communication

Autonomous vehicles are currently a $50 billion dollar industry, projected to be worth more than $500 billion by 2026. While many cars on the road today already have some elements of autonomous assistance, such as enhanced cruise control and automatic lane-centering, the real race is to create a car that drives itself with no input or responsibility from a human driver. In the past 15 years or so, innovators have realized that in order to do this cars will need more than just cameras and radar--they will need lidar.

Lidar is a remote sensing method that uses laser beams, pulses of invisible light, to measure distances. These beams of light bounce off everything in their path, and a sensor collects these reflections to create a precise, three-dimensional picture of the surrounding environment in real time.

Lidar is like echolocation with light: it can tell you how far away each pixel in an image is. It's been used for at least 50 years in satellites and airplanes, to conduct atmospheric sensing and measure the depth of bodies of water and heights of terrain.

While great strides have been made in the size of lidar systems, they remain the most expensive part of self-driving cars by far--as much as $70,000 each.

In order to work broadly in the consumer market one day, lidar must become even cheaper, smaller and less complex. Some companies are trying to accomplish this feat using silicon photonics: An emerging area in electrical engineering that uses silicon chips, which can process light.

The research team's new finding is an important advancement in silicon chip technology for use in lidar systems.

"Electrical communication is at its absolute limit. Optics has to come into play and that's why all these big players are committed to making the silicon photonics technology industrially viable," said Miloš Popovi?, co-author and associate professor of engineering at Boston University.

The simpler and smaller that these silicon chips can be made--while retaining high resolution and accuracy in their imaging--the more technologies they can be applied to, including self-driving cars and smartphones.

Rumor has it that the upcoming iPhone 12 will incorporate a lidar camera, like that currently in the iPad Pro. This technology could not only improve its facial recognition security, but one day assist in creating climbing route maps, measuring distances and even identifying animal tracks or plants.

"We're proposing a scalable approach to lidar using chip technology. And this is the first step, the first building block of that approach," said Dostart, who will continue his work at NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia. "There's still a long way to go."

BOSTON - Many patients with severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) remain unresponsive after surviving critical illness. Investigators led by a team at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) now describe a patient with severe COVID-19 who, despite prolonged unresponsiveness and structural brain abnormalities, demonstrated functionally intact brain connections and weeks later he recovered the ability to follow commands. The case, which is published in the Annals of Neurology, suggests that unresponsive patients with COVID-19 may have a better chance of recovery than expected.

In addition to performing standard brain imaging tests, the team took images of the patient's brain with a technique called resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI), which evaluates the connectivity of brain networks by measuring spontaneous oscillations of brain activity. The patient was a 47-year-old man who developed progressive respiratory failure, and despite intensive treatment, he fluctuated between coma and a minimally conscious state for several weeks.

Standard brain imaging tests revealed considerable damage, but unexpectedly, rs-fMRI revealed robust functional connectivity within the default mode network (DMN), which is a brain network thought to be involved in human consciousness. Studies have shown that stronger DMN connectivity in patients with disorders of consciousness predicts better neurologic recovery. The patient's DMN connectively was comparable to that seen in healthy individuals, suggesting that the neurologic prognosis may not be as grim as conventional tests implied.

Twenty days later, on hospital day 61, the patient began following verbal commands. He blinked his eyes to command, opened his mouth to command, and on day 66 followed four out of four vocalization commands. By this time, he also consistently demonstrated gaze tracking with his eyes in response to visual and auditory stimuli.

"Because there are so many unanswered questions about the potential for recovery in unresponsive patients who have survived severe COVID-19, any available data that could inform prognosis are critical," said senior author Brian Edlow, MD, director of the Laboratory for NeuroImaging of Coma and Consciousness and associate director of the Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery at MGH. "Our unexpected observations do not prove that functional MRI predicts outcomes in these patients, but they suggest that clinicians should consider the possibility that unresponsive survivors of severe COVID-19 may have intact brain networks. We should thus exercise caution before presuming a poor neurologic outcome based on our conventional tests."

Providing families with an accurate prognosis about neurological recovery is particularly challenging for patients with COVID-19, because so little is known about how the brain is affected by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), or associated inflammation and clotting disorders. "Initially, our goal in the intensive care unit was to support patients through the critical illness of COVID-19," said lead author David Fischer, MD, Neurocritical Care fellow at MGH. "However, we found that a subset of patients, after surviving the critical illness, were not waking up as expected. As neurologists, we were asked by many families whether their loved ones would regain consciousness - a critical question given that decisions about life support often hinged on the answer - but we were uncertain. We used functional MRI to try to provide a more comprehensive assessment of brain function."

The application of functional MRI to critically ill patients with disorders of consciousness is the culmination of decades of work to develop this technology and ultimately translate it to clinical care. Co-author Bruce Rosen, MD, PhD, director of the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH, and one of the developers of functional MRI in the early 1990s, explained that "we have to be cautious when interpreting results from a single patient, but this study provides proof of principle that clinicians may be able to use advanced imaging techniques like functional MRI to get a clearer picture of a patient's brain function, and hence the potential for recovery."

LAWRENCE -- It lacks the drama of a shape-shifting alien creature, but another threat looms over the prospect of generations-long, interstellar space travel: Explorers arriving on Xanadu could face problems communicating with previous and subsequent arrivals, their spoken language having changed in isolation along the way.

Therefore, a new paper co-authored by a University of Kansas professor of linguistics and published in a journal affiliated with the European Space Agency recommends that such crews include, if not a linguist, members with knowledge of what is likely to occur and how to adapt.

Associate Professor Andrew McKenzie of KU and Jeffrey Punske, assistant professor of linguistics at Southern Illinois University, co-authored the article "Language Development During Interstellar Travel" in the April edition of Acta Futura, the journal of the European Space Agency's Advanced Concepts Team.

In it, they discuss the concept of language change over time, citing such earthbound examples of long-distance voyages as the Polynesian island explorers and extrapolating from there.

It might seem far-fetched, but the authors cite language change even during their own lifetimes with the rise - no pun intended - of uptalk.

They write that "it is increasingly common for speakers to end statements with a rising intonation. This phenomenon, called uptalk (or sometimes High Rising Terminal), is often mistaken for a question tone by those without it in their grammars, but it actually sounds quite distinct and indicates politeness or inclusion. Uptalk has only been observed occurring within the last 40 years, but has spread from small groups of young Americans and Australians to most of the English-speaking world, even to many Baby Boomers who had not used it themselves as youth."

"Given more time, new grammatical forms can completely replace current ones."

Imagine trying to chat with Chaucer today. Even improvements in translation technology might not be enough.

In a recent interview, McKenzie gamed it out.

"If you're on this vessel for 10 generations, new concepts will emerge, new social issues will come up, and people will create ways of talking about them," McKenzie said, "and these will become the vocabulary particular to the ship. People on Earth might never know about these words, unless there's a reason to tell them. And the further away you get, the less you're going to talk to people back home. Generations pass, and there's no one really back home to talk to. And there's not much you want to tell them, because they'll only find out years later, and then you'll hear back from them years after that.

"The connection to Earth dwindles over time. And eventually, perhaps, we'll get to the point where there's no real contact with Earth, except to send the occasional update.

"And as long as the language changes on the vessel, and then at an eventual colony, the question becomes 'Do we still bother learning how to communicate with people on Earth?' Yes. So if we have Earth English and vessel English, and they diverge over the years, you have to learn a little Earth English to send messages back, or to read the instruction manuals and information that came with the ship.

"Also, keep in mind that the language back on Earth is going to change, too, during that time. So they may well be communicating like we'd be using Latin -- communicating with this version of the language nobody uses."

The authors also point out that an adaptation in the form of sign language will be needed for use with and among crew members who, genetics tell us, are sure to be born deaf.

In any case, they write, "every new vessel will essentially offload linguistic immigrants to a foreign land. Will they be discriminated against until their children and grandchildren learn the local language? Can they establish communication with the colony ahead of time to learn the local language before arrival?

"Given the certainty that these issues will arise in scenarios such as these, and the uncertainty of exactly how they will progress, we strongly suggest that any crew exhibit strong levels of metalinguistic training in addition to simply knowing the required languages. There will be need for an informed linguistic policy on board that can be maintained without referring back to Earth-based regulations."

If a study of the linguistic changes aboard ship could be performed, it would only "add to its scientific value," McKenzie and Punske conclude.

Biologists from Lomonosov Moscow State University and HSE University have studied the patterns of flower development in yellow water-lily (Nuphar lutea). They found out that all the floral organs are arranged in cycles (whorls) rather than inserted sequentially in a spiral, as is the case in some other basal angiosperms. The ancestors of yellow pond-lily were among the first to diverge from the root of the angiosperm evolutionary tree, which is why it can be used to hypothesize about the structure of the first flowers. The study has been published in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology journal.

The flower is one of the key evolutionary innovations of angiosperms. It helps attract various pollinators, protect the seeds inside the fruit, and adds some new means of distribution that do not exist in gymnosperms. Thanks to these advantages, flowering plants have settled across the planet and have become the most numerous group of land plants.

How flowers evolved and how they looked initially remains a mystery. The appearance of the ancestral flowers can be inferred with the help of plants that have preserved the greatest degree of similarity to the first angiosperms. It makes sense to look for them among the basal groups, whose ancestors diverged from the phylogenetic root of flowering plants earlier than the others. It is highly probable that the flower structure in such organisms will be similar to the initial one.

Among extant flowering plants, Nymphaeales are rather close to the root of angiosperms. Yellow pond-lily (Nuphar lutea) is widespread in Eurasia; it is also sometimes seen in North America, which is why it could be a convenient model object. But detailed studies of its flower structure using modern research methods are lacking.

Researchers from Lomonosov Moscow State University and HSE University have collected several dozen rhizomes of Nuphar lutea with leaves and flowers. Some of them were dissected to prepare specimens for light and scanning electron microscopy.

The researchers focused on shoot tips, where new leaves and flowers form. Young flowers at different stages of development were selected for the study. To determine their architecture, the researchers measured the angles between similar organs of the flower.

Elements of shoots in plants--leaves, flowers, lateral buds and lateral branches developing from them--are frequently arranged in a spiral. It had previously been assumed that plants similar to basal angiosperm type, including Nuphar, have a similar arrangement of organs. But the researchers discovered that in Nuphar lutea, the angles between the sepals differed from the spiral insertion (85° and 55°, rather than 137.5°). It looked like sepals and petals form cycles--two whorls for sepals and a single whorl for petals--although they are not always initiated simultaneously within a whorl.

Nuphar lutea develops five sepals. If they all were in one whorl, the angle between adjacent sepals would be 72°. In fact, they were placed at such angles that de-facto formed two circles: three elements in the external circle, and two in the internal one. The number of petals usually varied from 14 to 15, but they also formed a cycle rather than a spiral. And even the numerous stamens tended to arrange in alternating whorls.

There's a fairly large flaw in the way that programmers are currently addressing ethical concerns related to artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous vehicles (AVs). Namely, existing approaches don't account for the fact that people might try to use the AVs to do something bad.

For example, let's say that there is an autonomous vehicle with no passengers and it is about to crash into a car containing five people. It can avoid the collision by swerving out of the road, but it would then hit a pedestrian.

Most discussions of ethics in this scenario focus on whether the autonomous vehicle's AI should be selfish (protecting the vehicle and its cargo) or utilitarian (choosing the action that harms the fewest people). But that either/or approach to ethics can raise problems of its own.

"Current approaches to ethics and autonomous vehicles are a dangerous oversimplification - moral judgment is more complex than that," says Veljko Dubljevi?, an assistant professor in the Science, Technology & Society (STS) program at North Carolina State University and author of a paper outlining this problem and a possible path forward. "For example, what if the five people in the car are terrorists? And what if they are deliberately taking advantage of the AI's programming to kill the nearby pedestrian or hurt other people? Then you might want the autonomous vehicle to hit the car with five passengers.

"In other words, the simplistic approach currently being used to address ethical considerations in AI and autonomous vehicles doesn't account for malicious intent. And it should."

As an alternative, Dubljevi? proposes using the so-called Agent-Deed-Consequence (ADC) model as a framework that AIs could use to make moral judgements. The ADC model judges the morality of a decision based on three variables.

First, is the agent's intent good or bad? Second, is the deed or action itself good or bad? Lastly, is the outcome or consequence good or bad? This approach allows for considerable nuance.

For example, most people would agree that running a red light is bad. But what if you run a red light in order to get out of the way of a speeding ambulance? And what if running the red light means that you avoided a collision with that ambulance?

"The ADC model would allow us to get closer to the flexibility and stability that we see in human moral judgment, but that does not yet exist in AI," says Dubljevi?. "Here's what I mean by stable and flexible. Human moral judgment is stable because most people would agree that lying is morally bad. But it's flexible because most people would also agree that people who lied to Nazis in order to protect Jews were doing something morally good.

"But while the ADC model gives us a path forward, more research is needed," Dubljevi? says. "I have led experimental work on how both philosophers and lay people approach moral judgment, and the results were valuable. However, that work gave people information in writing. More studies of human moral judgment are needed that rely on more immediate means of communication, such as virtual reality, if we want to confirm our earlier findings and implement them in AVs. Also, vigorous testing with driving simulation studies should be done before any putatively 'ethical' AVs start sharing the road with humans on a regular basis. Vehicle terror attacks have, unfortunately, become more common, and we need to be sure that AV technology will not be misused for nefarious purposes."

Global success for Canadian companies depends on prior R&D investment, receptiveness to new learning, shows new study.

Toronto - Canadian companies that go international are known to be more productive and successful than those that don't.

New research has quantified the reasons why. It shows that about 80 percent of global companies' productivity is due to what they did before going abroad - namely, making themselves more competitive, including by investing in research and development. The other 20 percent is due to what companies learned from their exposure to international markets.

The findings show that going global on its own is no guarantee of higher productivity, says lead researcher Walid Hejazi.

"A company has to be prepared, it has to be much, much better in Canada before it can be successful abroad," says Prof. Hejazi, an associate professor of economic analysis and policy at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management and an expert on Canadian companies' global competitiveness.

That preparation is required because a company needs processes and technologies in place that enable it to absorb and integrate what it learns once it has entered a foreign market.

Companies that have not yet reached a certain productivity threshold can still benefit from going global, however. The researchers found that the minimum required level of productivity represented a range, rather than being a fixed number.

"If a company is prepared well enough, it can still go abroad and then through learning, rise above the threshold that it needs," says Prof. Hejazi. Overall, global Canadian companies were found to be 60 to 76 percent more productive than those that stayed home. About 20 percent of their investment moved through offshore financial centres.

Companies have the best chance of learning when they locate to countries with a similar language - aiding in communication -- and with strong legal and government institutions, the researchers found.

If that's not the case, companies can still position themselves to take advantage of foreign market learning opportunities by assembling a culturally literate management team, with experience in the new market, says Prof. Hejazi.

The findings are drawn from advanced statistical analyses that Prof. Hejazi and his co-researchers conducted on confidential data from Statistics Canada about every Canadian company between 2000 and 2014. The research responds to the Canadian government's interest in better understanding the ingredients for international success among Canadian companies.

Given that Canadian companies still lag many other countries for R&D spending, the study's results underscore the importance of government and Canadian business working together to promote innovation and advancement to the global stage, says Prof. Hejazi.

To make new memories, our brain cells first must find one another. Small protrusions that bud out from the ends of neurons' long, branching tentacles dock neurons together so they can talk. These ports of cellular chatter -- called synapses, and found in the trillions throughout the brain -- allow us to represent new knowledge. But scientists are still learning just how these connections form in response to new experiences and information. Now, a study by scientists in UC San Francisco's Weill Institute for Neurosciences has identified a surprising new way that the brain's immune cells help out.

In recent years, scientists have discovered that the brain's dedicated immune cells, called microglia, can help get rid of unnecessary connections between neurons, perhaps by engulfing synapses and breaking them down. But the new study, published July 1, 2020 in Cell, finds microglia can also do the opposite -- making way for new synapses to form by chomping away at the dense web of proteins between cells, clearing a space so neurons can find one another. Continuing to study this new role for microglia might eventually lead to new therapeutic targets in certain memory disorders, the researchers say.

Neurons live within a gelatinous mesh of proteins and other molecules that help to maintain the three-dimensional structure of the brain. This scaffolding, collectively called the extracellular matrix (ECM), has long been an afterthought in neuroscience. For decades, researchers focused on neurons, and, more recently, the cells that support them, have largely considered the ECM unimportant.

But neurobiologists are starting to realize that the ECM, which makes up about 20 percent of the brain, actually plays a role in important processes like learning and memory. At a certain point in brain development, for example, the solidifying ECM seems to put the brakes on the rapid pace at which new neuronal connections turn over in babies, seemingly shifting the brain's priority from the breakneck adaptation to the new world around it, to a more stable maintenance of knowledge over time. Scientists also wonder if a stiffening of the extracellular matrix later in life might somehow correspond to the memory challenges that come with aging.

"The extracellular matrix has been here the whole time," said the study's first author Phi Nguyen, a biomedical sciences graduate student at UCSF. "But it's definitely been understudied."

Nguyen and his advisor, Anna Molofsky, MD, PhD, an associate professor in the UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, first realized the ECM was important to their research on the hippocampus, a brain structure critical for learning and memory, when an experiment yielded unexpected results. Knowing that microglia chew away at obsolete synapses, they expected that disrupting microglia function would cause the number of synapses in the hippocampus to shoot up. Instead, synapse numbers dropped. And where they thought they'd find pieces of synapses being broken down in the "bellies" of microglia, instead they found pieces of the ECM.

"In this case microglia were eating something different than we expected," Molofsky said. "They're eating the space around synapses -- removing obstructions to help new synapses to form."

Before springing into action, the microglia wait for a signal from neurons, an immune molecule called IL-33, indicating that it's time for a new synapse to form, the study found. When researchers used genetic tools to block this signal, microglia failed to fulfill their ECM-chomping duties, leading to fewer new connections between neurons in the brain of mice and leaving mice struggling to remember certain details over time. When researchers instead drove the level of IL-33 signaling up, new synapses increased in number. In older mice, in which brain aging already slows the formation of new connections, ramping up IL-33 helped push the number of new synapses towards a more youthful level.

The study could be important for understanding -- and perhaps one day treating -- the kinds of memory problems we see in age related diseases like Alzheimer's, according to study co-author Mazen Kheirbek, PhD, an associate professor of psychiatry whose lab studies brain circuits involved in mood and emotion. But the findings might also be important for specific types of emotional memory problems sometimes seen in anxiety related disorders.

To determine how changes in IL-33 affect memory, the researchers taught mice to distinguish between an anxiety-inducing box (inside which the mice received a mild foot shock) and a neutral box. After a month, normal mice expressed far more fear in the shock-associated box by freezing in place (a rodent reflex to throw off predators) than they did in the neutral box, where they moved around more casually. But mice with disrupted IL-33 expressed high levels of fear in either box, suggesting they'd lost the kind of precise memory needed to determine when they should be scared and when they were safe.

Kheirbek likens this overgeneralized response to the kind of trauma-induced fear that might result from being mugged in a parking lot at night. Instead of being able to separate that fearful memory from new, perhaps less-threatening experiences, some people might develop a generalized fear that makes it hard for them to enter any parking lot at any time. "Deficits in this ability to have very precise, emotional memories are seen in a lot of anxiety disorders and particularly in PTSD," he said. "It's an overgeneralization of fear that can really interfere with your life."

For Molofsky's part, stumbling upon this unexpected finding has left her eager to learn more about the ECM and how it shapes the way we learn. Her lab is now working to identify new, poorly characterized pieces of the matrix to look for as yet undocumented ways it interacts with neurons and microglia in the brain.

"I'm in love with the extracellular matrix," Molofsky said. "A lot of people don't realize that the brain is made up not just of nerve cells, but also cells that keep the brain healthy, and even the space in between cells is packed with fascinating interactions. I think a lot of new treatments for brain disorders can come from remembering that."

We all can describe our ideal partner. Perhaps they are funny, attractive and inquisitive. Or maybe they are down-to-earth, intelligent and thoughtful. But do we actually have special insight into ourselves, or are we just describing positive qualities that everyone likes?

New research coming out of the University of California, Davis, suggests that people's ideal partner preferences do not reflect any unique personal insight. The paper, "Negligible Evidence That People Desire Partners Who Uniquely Fit Their Ideals," was published last week in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

"The people in our study could very easily list their top three attributes in an ideal partner," noted Jehan Sparks, former UC Davis doctoral student and lead author of the study. "We wanted to see whether those top three attributes really mattered for the person who listed them. As it turns out, they didn't."

In the research, more than 700 participants nominated their top three ideals in a romantic partner -- attributes like funny, attractive or inquisitive. Then they reported their romantic desire for a series of people they knew personally: Some were blind date partners, others were romantic partners, and others were friends.

Participants experienced more romantic desire to the extent that these personal acquaintances possessed the top three attributes. If Vanessa listed funny, attractive and inquisitive, she experienced more desire for partners who were funny, attractive and inquisitive.

"On the surface, this looks promising," notes Paul Eastwick, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Psychology and co-author.

"You say you want these three attributes, and you like the people who possess those attributes. But the story doesn't end there." -- Professor Paul Eastwick, UC Davis

What would a stranger say?

The researchers included a twist: Each participant also considered the extent to which the same personal acquaintances possessed three attributes nominated by some other random person in the study. For example, if Kris listed down-to-earth, intelligent and thoughtful as her own top three attributes, Vanessa also experienced more desire for acquaintances who were down-to-earth, intelligent and thoughtful.

"So in the end, we want partners who have positive qualities," said Sparks, "but the qualities you specifically list do not actually have special predictive power for you." The authors take these findings to mean that people don't have special insight into what they personally want in a partner.

Eastwick compared it to ordering food at a restaurant. "Why do we order off the menu for ourselves? Because it seems obvious that I will like what I get to pick. Our findings suggest that, in the romantic domain, you might as well let a random stranger order for you -- you're just as likely to end up liking what you get."

The findings have implications for the way people approach online dating. People commonly spend many hours perusing online dating profiles in the search of someone who specifically matches their ideals. Sparks and colleagues' research suggests that this effort may be misplaced.

"It's really easy to spend time hunting around online for someone who seems to match your ideals," notes Sparks. "But our research suggests an alternative approach: Don't be too picky ahead of time about whether a partner matches your ideals on paper. Or, even better, let your friends pick your dates for you."

An efficient, robust method of examining the interactions between cells uses fluorescent tagging to simultaneously analyze multiple cell populations, speeding up a once tedious and limiting process. The new assay developed by KAUST also has applications in studying cellular processes in inflammation or cancer cell metastasis and in assessing potential treatments.

Cells move through blood vessels via cell adhesion--the interaction and attachment of cells to one another via specialized molecules on cell surfaces. During blood flow, shear forces act on the cells to help orchestrate cell adhesion. Manipulation of cell adhesion can lead to inflammation and diseases, like cancer, while pathogens, such as viruses exploit cell adhesion to infect the body.

"The conventional assay used to study cell-cell interactions is the parallel plate flow chamber (PPFC) assay, which records videos of cells rolling in flow and adhering to molecules on endothelial cells (blood vessel lining cells)," says group leader Jasmeen Merzaban. "This assay has been used for decades, but it is prone to error and possible bias, and it can only analyze one cell type at a time, making it hugely time consuming."

Ayman AbuElela, with the other graduate students in Merzaban's lab, wanted to improve upon PPFC and speed up analyses.

Their new fluorescent multiplex cell rolling assay (FMCR) uses unique fluorescent tags to label up to seven cell population types. The cell samples are mixed just prior to entering the simulated flow over a layer of endothelial cells. A spectral confocal microscope captures images of the mixed cell populations in real time, at high temporal resolution, in a single pass. This allows researchers to collect data on cell kinetics, including the rolling frequency, velocity and tethering capability of individual cell types.

"We developed a comprehensive data analysis pipeline, which enables us to analyze the multiple cell types we obtain by this approach and achieves high statistical power and sensitivity," says AbuElela. "FMCR is now used in our lab to study the migration of various human cells including stem cells, activated immune cells and breast cancer cells."

Another advantage of the new procedure is that before or during the assay, a test compound, such as a new drug, can be added to the cells to investigate the effect of the compound on cell adhesion.

"Such studies provide major insights into the effect of treatments on the migration and metastasis of cells and on how the drugs might work inside the body," notes Merzaban.

COLUMBIA, SC -- Research from University of South Carolina associate professor Saurabh Chatterjee's laboratory in Environmental Health Sciences, Arnold School of Public Health, and led by Ayan Mondal, a postdoctoral researcher from the same lab, has revealed the cause behind the previously established link between non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (i.e., NAFLD, recently reclassified as metabolic associated fatty liver disease or MAFLD) and neurological problems. The link they discovered, the unique role of an adipokine (Lipocalin-2) in causing neuroinflammation, may explain the prevalence of neurological Alzheimer's disease-like and Parkinson's disease-like phenotypes among individuals with MAFLD.

The investigators, which include members of Chatterjee's Environment Health & Disease Laboratory and researchers from across UofSC*, published their results in the Journal of Neuroinflammation, a pioneering journal in the field. These findings build on years of research conducted by the interdisciplinary team, which has unearthed previously unknown pathways and mechanisms between the liver and the gut microbiome with other parts of the body through their focus on how environmental toxins contribute to liver disease, metabolic syndrome and obesity.

MAFLD affects up to 25 percent of Americans and much of the global population - many of whom are unaware of their condition. Yet the effects of this silent disease are far-reaching, possibly leading to cirrhosis, liver cancer/failure and other liver diseases. The findings from the current study not only confirm the strong correlation between MAFLD and neuroinflammation/neurodegeneration that has been established by other recent research, but it explains how this happens.

"Lipocalin 2 is one of the important mediators exclusively produced in the liver and circulated throughout the body among those who have nonalcoholic steatohepatitis - or NASH - which is a more advanced form of MAFLD," Chatterjee says. "The research is immensely significant because MAFLD patients have been shown to develop Alzheimer's and Parkinson's-like symptoms as older adults. Scientists can use these results to advance our knowledge in neuroinflammatory complications in MAFLD and develop appropriate treatments."

Ninety percent of the obese population and 40 - 70 percent of those with type 2 diabetes appear to have MAFLD, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In addition to overweight/obese status and diabetes, other risk factors include high cholesterol and/or triglycerides, high blood pressure and metabolic syndrome.

These individuals have a higher risk for having diseased livers, which are associated with increased lipocalin 2 - as found in the present study. The lipocalin 2 circulates throughout the body at higher levels, possibly inducing inflammation in the brain.

"Chronic neuroinflammation is a critical element in the onset and progression of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease," says Prakash Nagarkatti, UofSC Vice President for Research and a member of the research team.

"Our study may help design new therapeutic approaches to counter the neuroinflammatory pathology in NASH but also in other related brain pathology associated with chronic inflammatory diseases," adds Chatterjee.

Teenagers who prefer to stay up late at night and sleep in late the next day are more likely to develop asthma and allergies than their "early bird" counterparts, according to new research published today.

"Compared to the morning type, those who go to bed late have approximately three times higher risk of developing asthma," said principal investigator Subhabrata Moitra, a post-doctoral fellow with the Alberta Respiratory Centre in the division of pulmonary medicine at the University of Alberta.

"We also found allergic rhinitis symptoms were twice as likely in late sleepers as in those who sleep early at night."

Moitra said more than 300 million people suffer from asthma worldwide and is the most common non-communicable disease among children, and the number is increasing every year. This is the first study to examine "chronotype" or sleep time preference and associations with asthma and allergies in teenagers.

The researchers questioned 1,684 adolescents in the Indian state of West Bengal about their sleep preferences and respiratory health, as part of the Prevalence and Risk Factors of Asthma and Allergy-Related Diseases Among Adolescents (PERFORMANCE) study. The questions included whether they had been diagnosed with asthma or experienced symptoms of rhinitis such as wheezing, runny nose or coughing.

Of the late risers, 23.6 per cent reported having asthma, compared with 6.2 per cent of the early risers.

The researchers found the association between asthma and sleep pattern preference held whether the teens were male or female, had a pet, lived in a rural or urban area, had a parent with asthma or allergies, or were exposed to second-hand smoke.

Moitra pointed out that humans are naturally early risers.

"Our ancestors evolved to wake as the sun rose and go to bed as the sun set," he said.

"However, a nighttime preference seems unavoidable for this young generation because digital screens are accessible at any hour."

Moitra said the researchers suspect that adolescents who go to bed late at night experience some level of sleep deprivation or sleep interruption. He said the blue or white-tinged light from computer, television and smartphone screens disrupts the production and function of melatonin, a sleep hormone.

"A perfect sleep is the result of good melatonin cycles," he said, adding that melatonin can also affect the immune system, and that the development of asthma and allergies is known to be the result of immune system alterations.

Moitra said his team intends to do further research to explore this association, including more objective tests of sleep quality and lung function.

In the meantime, he urges clinicians to ask patients more behavioural questions when diagnosing allergies and asthma.

"We need to be more vigilant to ask about eating habits, sleeping habits, whether they play outside, because these behaviours can be modified to help get rid of symptoms," he suggested.

Moitra said melatonin supplements can sometimes help with sleeplessness but should not be taken regularly because they can disrupt the body's natural production of the hormone.

He also suggested that we should minimize nighttime exposure to artificial light, and when it is unavoidable, use amber house lighting and LED screens and reduce brightness.

Below please find a summary and link(s) of new coronavirus-related content published today in Annals of Internal Medicine. The summary below is not intended to substitute for the full article as a source of information. A collection of coronavirus-related content is free to the public at http://go.annals.org/coronavirus.

1. Clinical Validity of COVID-19 Serum Antibodies

Researchers studied 11,066 patients tested at Johns Hopkins Hospital to examine the characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies and assess their clinical utility. Of those, 115 patients were hospitalized and investigated for COVID-19. Clinical record review was performed to classify the patient into a COVID-19 case group (n=60) or a non-COVID-19 control group (n=55). These groups were compared to a laboratory control group. The researchers surmised that antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 demonstrate infection when measured at least 14 days after symptom onset, associate with clinical severity, and provide valuable diagnostic support in patients who test negative by nucleic acid amplification test (NAAT) on nasopharyngeal swabs but remain clinically suspicious for COVID-19. Besides epidemiologic and therapeutic applications, the study shows the potential contribution of serology to COVID-19 diagnosis, which currently relies on integrating symptom surveillance, radiographic findings, and NAAT results. Read the full text: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-2889.

Media contacts: PDFs for these articles is not yet available. Please click the link to read the full text. The lead author, Patrizio Caturegli, MD, MPH, can be contacted directly at pcat@jhmi.edu.

2. Qualitative Assessment of Rapid System Transformation to Primary Care Video Visits at an Academic Medical Center

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, primary care practices across the United States have transitioned from in-person visits to virtual visits. However, there is limited information regarding the facilitators and barriers to the implementation of such a transition. Researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine evaluated the short-term implications of rapid transition to video visits at Stanford Primary Care through qualitative interviews with key stakeholders, and found critical issues to sustain video visits long-term. Read the full text: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-1814.

Media contacts: PDFs for these articles is not yet available. Please click the link to read the full text. The lead author, Malathi Srinivasan, MD, can be contacted directly at malathis@stanford.edu.

3. Obesity and COVID-19 in New York City: A Retrospective Cohort Study

Authors from Weill Cornell Medicine set out to study the association between obesity and outcomes among a diverse cohort of 1,687 persons hospitalized with confirmed COVID-19 at 2 New York City hospitals. The authors' findings support the need to consider the community-specific prevalence of obesity when planning a community's COVID-19 response and also suggest that risk conferred by obesity is similar across age, sex, and race. Read the full text: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-2730.

Media contacts: PDFs for these articles is not yet available. Please click the link to read the full text. The lead author, Parag Goyal, MD, MSc, can be contacted directly at pag9051@med.cornell.edu.

4. Regulatory T Cells for Treating Patients With COVID-19 and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome: Two Case Reports

Normally, regulatory T cells (also known as T regulatory cells or Tregs) migrate into inflamed tissues, dampening inflammatory responses. Patients with COVID-19 and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) have protracted hospitalizations characterized by excessive systemic inflammation (cytokine storm) and delayed lung repair, which is partly due to reduced or defective Tregs. Authors from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine describe outcomes in 2 patients with COVID-19 and ARDS who were treated with Tregs, and are planning a multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of CB Tregs for ARDS associated with COVID-19. Read the full text: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/L20-0681.

Media contacts: PDFs for these articles is not yet available. Please click the link to read the full text. The lead author, Douglas E. Gladstone, MD, can be contacted through Amy Mone at amone@jhmi.edu.