Culture

DURHAM, N.C. -- Duke University researchers have developed an AI tool that can turn blurry, unrecognizable pictures of people's faces into eerily convincing computer-generated portraits, in finer detail than ever before.

Previous methods can scale an image of a face up to eight times its original resolution. But the Duke team has come up with a way to take a handful of pixels and create realistic-looking faces with up to 64 times the resolution, 'imagining' features such as fine lines, eyelashes and stubble that weren't there in the first place.

"Never have super-resolution images been created at this resolution before with this much detail," said Duke computer scientist Cynthia Rudin, who led the team.

The system cannot be used to identify people, the researchers say: It won't turn an out-of-focus, unrecognizable photo from a security camera into a crystal clear image of a real person. Rather, it is capable of generating new faces that don't exist, but look plausibly real.

While the researchers focused on faces as a proof of concept, the same technique could in theory take low-res shots of almost anything and create sharp, realistic-looking pictures, with applications ranging from medicine and microscopy to astronomy and satellite imagery, said co-author Sachit Menon '20, who just graduated from Duke with a double-major in mathematics and computer science.

The researchers will present their method, called PULSE, next week at the 2020 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), held virtually from June 14 to June 19.

Traditional approaches take a low-resolution image and 'guess' what extra pixels are needed by trying to get them to match, on average, with corresponding pixels in high-resolution images the computer has seen before. As a result of this averaging, textured areas in hair and skin that might not line up perfectly from one pixel to the next end up looking fuzzy and indistinct.

The Duke team came up with a different approach. Instead of taking a low-resolution image and slowly adding new detail, the system scours AI-generated examples of high-resolution faces, searching for ones that look as much as possible like the input image when shrunk down to the same size.

The team used a tool in machine learning called a "generative adversarial network," or GAN, which are two neural networks trained on the same data set of photos. One network comes up with AI-created human faces that mimic the ones it was trained on, while the other takes this output and decides if it is convincing enough to be mistaken for the real thing. The first network gets better and better with experience, until the second network can't tell the difference.

PULSE can create realistic-looking images from noisy, poor-quality input that other methods can't, Rudin said. From a single blurred image of a face it can spit out any number of uncannily lifelike possibilities, each of which looks subtly like a different person.

Even given pixelated photos where the eyes and mouth are barely recognizable, "our algorithm still manages to do something with it, which is something that traditional approaches can't do," said co-author Alex Damian '20, a Duke math major.

The system can convert a 16x16-pixel image of a face to 1024 x 1024 pixels in a few seconds, adding more than a million pixels, akin to HD resolution. Details such as pores, wrinkles, and wisps of hair that are imperceptible in the low-res photos become crisp and clear in the computer-generated versions.

The researchers asked 40 people to rate 1,440 images generated via PULSE and five other scaling methods on a scale of one to five, and PULSE did the best, scoring almost as high as high-quality photos of actual people.

See the results and upload images for yourself at http://pulse.cs.duke.edu/.

Hamburg/Borstel/Leipzig. The tuberculosis pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis can protect itself better when combined and thus stay alive longer in the air. This was the result of a study by the Leibniz Research Alliance INFECTIONS, which was published in the scientific journal Scientific Reports on Monday.

The study examined the biophysical properties of tiny particles in the air (aerosols) that contribute to the spread of the pathogen. A successful human-to-human infection is determined, among other things, by the distance that the pathogen can travel through the air before the infectivity decreases. Conclusion: Although individual mycobacteria form smaller aerosols and can thus travel longer distances in the air, interconnected mycobacteria remain alive for longer. The study is based on earlier results that showed that mycobacteria-infected host cells die necrotic cell death, as occurs in the lungs of tuberculosis patients. It has now been shown that larger aerosol particles from mycobacterial clusters are produced together with components of the dead cells, which are more viable in the air than individual bacteria. Based on these data, computer simulations of airborne dispersal, which take into account the particle size distribution, can be carried out in the future, which will help to find out which aerosol composition may pose an increased risk of infection for humans.

The study was carried out at the Research Center Borstel, Leibniz Lung Center (FZB) in Schleswig-Holstein and the Heinrich Pette Institute (HPI), Leibniz Institute for Experimental Virology in Hamburg. The Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) contributed its expertise in modelling the dispersion of aerosols such as mycobacterial associations floating in the air to the study.

Currently there is a controversial discussion about the importance of the aerosol dispersion of the SARS-CoV-2 virus for the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings on the aerosol spread of pathogens are therefore of particular interest. Whether parts of the new findings on the tuberculosis pathogen can be transferred to the COVID-19 pathogen is, however, currently completely open, since tuberculosis is transmitted by a bacterium that is significantly larger than the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Viruses are considered to be much more sensitive to environmental influences, as they depend on protection by moisture and dry out relatively quickly.

The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 that originated in China has claimed an estimated 100,000 lives in the United States, while a different sort of pandemic is spreading online against Asian Americans, particularly of Chinese descent. A study published in Frontiers in Communication suggests there is a strong relationship between social media use and prejudice.

The authors surveyed nearly 300 people in the United States on their attitudes about China and Chinese people in the wake of the pandemic. They found that "the more an individual believes their most used daily social media is fair, accurate, presents the facts, and is concerned about the public (social media belief), the more that person sees Chinese Americans as a realistic and symbolic threat."

Lead author Dr. Stephen Croucher, a professor of communication at Massey University in New Zealand whose research focuses on the dynamics between majority and minority groups, states that: "This was a big finding for us, as it shows the relationship between a pandemic, social media use and prejudice."

The online questionnaire of 277 white Americans gathered data on demographics, social media use, and various sentiments about Chinese people. The researchers analyzed the results within the framework of Integrated Threat Theory (ITT). ITT examines the components - realistic threats, symbolic threats, intergroup anxiety and negative stereotypes - that lead to prejudice between social groups.

Realistic threats, for example, represent fears related to economic or social power. A sample question on the survey assessing the degree of realistic threat included, ''Because of the presence of Chinese, unemployment will increase.'' Respondents then answered on a scale of one to five, from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree."

Symbolic threats, on the other hand, relate to concerns about a group's "way of life." Intergroup anxiety refers to negative perceptions that arise from individual interactions between a member of the majority and a minority.

One key finding was that gender plays a significant role in predicting realistic and symbolic threats versus intergroup anxiety among Americans. Women tend to experience realistic or symbolic threats from Chinese Americans, while men experience higher levels of anxiety, according to the study.

"In this case, when faced with a crisis like a pandemic, it just makes sense that men would tend to respond more affectively while women would respond more cognitively - on average," Croucher said.

One head-scratching result from the study found that respondents who identified politically as a Democrat scored higher than Republicans on perceiving Chinese Americans as a symbolic threat.

"The result about political lines really was a surprising result," Croucher said, adding that it would be "really interesting" to further research how political leanings shift when a group is perceived as life threatening.

More than 1,700 incidents of harassment and assaults against Asian Americans have been reported since March 19, according to a website maintained by Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, San Francisco State University and Chinese for Affirmative Action.

Until the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Asian hate crime has been on the decline for at least the past two decades, according to a report in The Washington Post, and the FBI has not reported any anti-Asian-motivated murders since at least 2003.

Croucher said that social media channels, like any media, can also be used effectively for spreading positive messages about Asian Americans. He and his co-authors proposed governments and healthcare industries use social media to combat COVID-19 prejudice.

"In the case of COVID-19, social media, and other media, were and are being used as venues to share and build ideas, values and morals," Croucher said. "Many of these are very positive, but some are not."

The colourful pictures of the whole mouse brain at different ages are the first of their kind and a pivotal step forward in understanding behaviour, scientists say.

Findings - published in the journal Science - could shed light on learning disability and dementia and help to reveal how memories are affected by age.

The images are of synapses - vital connections that carry electrical and chemical messages between brain cells. Synapses store memories and synapse damage is linked to more than 130 brain diseases.

Researchers based at the University of Edinburgh colour-coded the different types of molecules to highlight the range of synapses in mouse brains from birth to old age.

They discovered that the number and molecular makeup of synapses shifts with age in different parts of the brain. This happens at three main phases - childhood, middle and elderly age.

Synapse type shifts with age in patterns unique to areas of the brain, blossoming into a diverse array in midlife.

Images from middle-aged brains burst with colour, illustrating a wide variety of synapses. Both very young and very old brain show less synapses and less complexity.

Researchers say these changes give insights into why genes cause synapse damage at set ages and in set brain areas.

The findings could shed light on why we are more likely to develop brain conditions at certain ages, helping to explain why schizophrenia often starts in adolescence, or why dementia affects older adults.

The study was funded by Wellcome and the European Research Council.

Lead researcher, Professor Seth Grant of the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, said: "The brain is the most complex thing we know of and understanding it at this level of detail is a momentous step forward.

"We believe that these findings will be instrumental to helping understand why the brain is susceptible to disease at different times of life and how the brain changes as we age."

Dashcams are an important in-car accessory that record car journeys, the footage from them is important for evidence if an incident has occurred.

However how the dashcam footage is submitted, managed and processed can be a problem for forensics investigating the case

The recording mode, GPS data, speed, license plate and temporal data of seven different devices has been assessed by researchers from WMG, University of Warwick

Dashcams are vital for helping police investigate car incidents, however the way the footage is submitted to police, managed and processed can cause problems. A researcher at WMG, University of Warwick has assessed seven different types of dashcams' SD storage systems to see how they help and hinder digital forensics.

Many cars now have dashcams, an in-vehicle mountable camera which records video and audio footage of journeys. They have significant evidential value in digital forensics as they provide GPS data, temporal data, vehicular speed data, audio, video and photographic images.

In the paper, 'Dashcam forensic: A preliminary analysis of 7 dashcam devices', published in the paper Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation, Dr Harjinder Lallie, from WMG, University of Warwick explores two aspects of dashcam evidence: the problems related to the management and processing of dashcam evidence, and an analysis of artefacts generated by dashcams.

The first dedicated UK dashcam evidence submission portal was established in 2018, called Nextbase, currently five police forces use Nextbase, whilst fourteen accept it to police sites, with seventeen more intending to active acceptance online and seven not accepting online submissions.

Seven different dashcams SD card systems were analysed for their:

Recording mode

GPS data

Vehicular speed data

License plate data

Temporal data

It was found that all of the artefacts above are available in several different locations: NMEA files, configuration files, directory naming structures, EXIF metadata, filename structures, file system attributes and watermarks.

A number of tools were required to extract the artefacts needed from the different locations in the SD card, and to analyse them. It was also found that evidential artefacts can be synthesised using tools such as native video players, therefore better methods are required for extracting and synthesising metadata from dashcams.

Dr Harjinder Lallie, from WMG, University of Warwick explains:

"We are increasingly reliant on the evidence produced by dashcam devices. However, there exist no standard guidelines on how to investigate dashcams and this can have an impact on judiciary process and the outcome thereof. This research is the first step towards developing such guidance."

Future research will look at

a. Formulating dashcam investigation guidelines for law enforcement.

b. Methods of automating the extraction of geospatial data and internally corroborating them.

c. Automating the extraction of evidence presented in watermarks in dashcam recorded videos.

A new set of precision distance measurements made with an international collection of radio telescopes have greatly increased the likelihood that theorists need to revise the "standard model" that describes the fundamental nature of the Universe.

The new distance measurements allowed astronomers to refine their calculation of the Hubble Constant, the expansion rate of the Universe, a value important for testing the theoretical model describing the composition and evolution of the Universe. The problem is that the new measurements exacerbate a discrepancy between previously measured values of the Hubble Constant and the value predicted by the model when applied to measurements of the cosmic microwave background made by the Planck satellite.

"We find that galaxies are nearer than predicted by the standard model of cosmology, corroborating a problem identified in other types of distance measurements. There has been debate over whether this problem lies in the model itself or in the measurements used to test it. Our work uses a distance measurement technique completely independent of all others, and we reinforce the disparity between measured and predicted values. It is likely that the basic cosmological model involved in the predictions is the problem," said James Braatz, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).

Braatz leads the Megamaser Cosmology Project, an international effort to measure the Hubble Constant by finding galaxies with specific properties that lend themselves to yielding precise geometric distances. The project has used the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), and Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), along with the Effelsberg telescope in Germany. The team reported their latest results in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Edwin Hubble, after whom the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope is named, first calculated the expansion rate of the universe (the Hubble Constant) in 1929 by measuring the distances to galaxies and their recession speeds. The more distant a galaxy is, the greater its recession speed from Earth. Today, the Hubble Constant remains a fundamental property of observational cosmology and a focus of many modern studies.

Measuring recession speeds of galaxies is relatively straightforward. Determining cosmic distances, however, has been a difficult task for astronomers. For objects in our own Milky Way Galaxy, astronomers can get distances by measuring the apparent shift in the object's position when viewed from opposite sides of Earth's orbit around the Sun, an effect called parallax. The first such measurement of a star's parallax distance came in 1838.

Beyond our own Galaxy, parallaxes are too small to measure, so astronomers have relied on objects called "standard candles," so named because their intrinsic brightness is presumed to be known. The distance to an object of known brightness can be calculated based on how dim the object appears from Earth. These standard candles include a class of stars called Cepheid variables and a specific type of stellar explosion called a Type Ia supernova.

Another method of estimating the expansion rate involves observing distant quasars whose light is bent by the gravitational effect of a foreground galaxy into multiple images. When the quasar varies in brightness, the change appears in the different images at different times. Measuring this time difference, along with calculations of the geometry of the light-bending, yields an estimate of the expansion rate.

Determinations of the Hubble Constant based on the standard candles and the gravitationally-lensed quasars have produced figures of 73-74 kilometers per second (the speed) per megaparsec (distance in units favored by astronomers).

However, predictions of the Hubble Constant from the standard cosmological model when applied to measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) -- the leftover radiation from the Big Bang -- produce a value of 67.4, a significant and troubling difference. This difference, which astronomers say is beyond the experimental errors in the observations, has serious implications for the standard model.

The model is called Lambda Cold Dark Matter, or Lambda CDM, where "Lambda" refers to Einstein's cosmological constant and is a representation of dark energy. The model divides the composition of the Universe mainly between ordinary matter, dark matter, and dark energy, and describes how the Universe has evolved since the Big Bang.

The Megamaser Cosmology Project focuses on galaxies with disks of water-bearing molecular gas orbiting supermassive black holes at the galaxies' centers. If the orbiting disk is seen nearly edge-on from Earth, bright spots of radio emission, called masers -- radio analogs to visible-light lasers -- can be used to determine both the physical size of the disk and its angular extent, and therefore, through geometry, its distance. The project's team uses the worldwide collection of radio telescopes to make the precision measurements required for this technique.

In their latest work, the team refined their distance measurements to four galaxies, at distances ranging from 168 million light-years to 431 million light-years. Combined with previous distance measurements of two other galaxies, their calculations produced a value for the Hubble Constant of 73.9 kilometers per second per megaparsec.

"Testing the standard model of cosmology is a really challenging problem that requires the best-ever measurements of the Hubble Constant. The discrepancy between the predicted and measured values of the Hubble Constant points to one of the most fundamental problems in all of physics, so we would like to have multiple, independent measurements that corroborate the problem and test the model. Our method is geometric, and completely independent of all others, and it reinforces the discrepancy," said Dom Pesce, a researcher at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian, and lead author on the latest paper.

"The maser method of measuring the expansion rate of the universe is elegant, and, unlike the others, based on geometry. By measuring extremely precise positions and dynamics of maser spots in the accretion disk surrounding a distant black hole, we can determine the distance to the host galaxies and then the expansion rate. Our result from this unique technique strengthens the case for a key problem in observational cosmology." said Mark Reid of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian, and a member of the Megamaser Cosmology Project team.

"Our measurement of the Hubble Constant is very close to other recent measurements, and statistically very different from the predictions based on the CMB and the standard cosmological model. All indications are that the standard model needs revision," said Braatz.

Astronomers have various ways to adjust the model to resolve the discrepancy. Some of these include changing presumptions about the nature of dark energy, moving away from Einstein's cosmological constant. Others look at fundamental changes in particle physics, such as changing the numbers or types of neutrinos or the possibilities of interactions among them. There are other possibilities, even more exotic, and at the moment scientists have no clear evidence for discriminating among them.

"This is a classic case of the interplay between observation and theory. The Lambda CDM model has worked quite well for years, but now observations clearly are pointing to a problem that needs to be solved, and it appears the problem lies with the model," Pesce said.

June 11, 2020 - How do we decide which patients with COVID-19 should get priority for lifesaving ventilators and ICU beds? Writing in the July issue of Medical Care, a prominent bioethicist argues that COVID-19 triage strategies should focus on saving lives, rather than prioritizing life-years saved. Medical Care is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

"Justice supports triage priority for those with better initial survival prognosis, but opposes considering subsequent life-years saved," according to a special editorial by John R. Stone, MD, PhD, Professor of Bioethics and Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of the Center for Promoting Health and Health Equity at Creighton University, Omaha. He adds: "Groups experiencing historical and current inequities must have significant voices in determining triage policy."

'Justice-Respect-Worth' Framework Calls for Rethinking COVID-19 Triage

Recent articles have proposed frameworks for making the "terrible choices" posed by COVID-19 - focused on maximizing the benefits of treatment based on life-years saved. In one approach, patients with lower "prognosis scores" get lower priority for critical care.

But the focus on counting life-years violates "the foundational moral framework of social justice, respect for persons, and people's equal and substantial moral worth," Dr. Stone writes. In particular, prioritizing treatment for patients with a better prognosis will give lower priority, on average, "to individuals for whom social/structural inequities are significant causes of worse health" - with racial/ethnic minorities being a key example.

"Historical and present inequities have reduced expected life-years in populations experiencing chronic disadvantage," according to the author. "Justice requires avoiding policies that further increase inequities...greater priority for more predicted life-years saved will exacerbate those inequities."

A more just approach would be to consider the individual's likelihood of initial survival, while ignoring subsequent life-years saved. "Triage policies can reasonably give priority to people more likely to survive hospitalization and a brief time after," Dr. Stone writes.

By this approach, a younger and older patient would have similar priority for lifesaving care- as long as they had a similar chance of surviving for more than a few months after leaving the hospital. (Dr. Stone adds that bias against the elderly is another reason not to prioritize life-years gained.)

While guidance for triage decisions tries to ensure objectivity, assessments may still be affected by implicit and unconscious negative bias. For that reason, specific diversity on triage teams is essential. Policy decision-makers must include representatives of "populations historically oppressed and disadvantaged," according to the author.

Dr. Stone highlights the importance of the "justice-worth-respect" framework in making difficult decisions about which patients should be prioritized for scare healthcare resources. He concludes: "Triage policies focused on life-years saved will perpetuate social injustice and generally should be rejected."

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Experts have documented that political polarization is intensifying in the United States. However, a Penn State sociologist now suggests that this separation isn't just more intense, but it is also growing broader, coagulating into an ideological slick of opinions.

In the study of data from a national opinion survey, Daniel DellaPosta, assistant professor of sociology and social data analytics, said that opinions on many seemingly unconnected political issues -- and even non-political issues -- have become increasingly correlated ideologically.

As an example of this division, DellaPosta said that, in the past, people could have disagreed on abortion rights, but they may have still agreed on gun control or tax rates. Now agreement on those unconnected issues have become more tightly bound with the person's ideology.

"This study represents a different structural element of polarization, which is how different opinions and beliefs are related to one another in the population at large," said DellaPosta." This builds on a long line of work, often called opinion alignment."

More troubling, added DellaPosta, who is also an affiliate of the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS), there is a drop in opinions that people from opposing groups could agree on -- often referred to as cross-cutting alignments -- which may mean there is less room for compromise and agreement.

"People who have studied polarization in the past have often concluded that polarization has increased in some ways, but it is not occurring in the opinions in the population as a whole -- and that's been a somewhat comforting thought," said DellaPosta. "In a sense, this study provides a less hopeful conclusion because it suggests that it's not just that, for example, political parties have become more extreme, but that polarization has happened in the population itself."

According to DellaPosta, the results may show that there is a widening gap in political divisions.

"Political divisions have become broader and it seems that these divisions have come to incorporate much more and include opinions that were once not involved," said DellaPosta.

DellaPosta, who reports his findings in the current issue of American Sociological Review, which is available online now, compared the difference between the increase in the average political opinion alignment and the broadening of social, cultural and political alignments as the difference between a fence and an oil spill.

"I think of that average opinion alignment as a fence -- the divisions are there, but they're not moving," he said. "In an oil spill division, it's not just that the previously existing division is getting stronger, it's that other opinions that weren't even part of those division to begin with are getting drawn in."

The opinion oil spill can also be seen in how non-political issues and behaviors, such as sports interests, or even food and beverage preferences, can become part of the nation's political division, he added.

"You may have heard politicians referring to 'latte-drinking liberals,' for example, which captures the idea of the oil spill," said DellaPosta. "Why should something like drinking a latte become associated with your political ideology? Or, if someone goes to a football game and sees a bunch of trucks in the parking lot with [U.S. President Donald] Trump bumper stickers and that becomes internalized to suggest that liking football means fans support Trump. That's another way that things that previously weren't political suddenly get sucked into this matrix of political identity."

DellaPosta created a network model using data from the General Social Survey (GSS), a robust data set that the University of Chicago has gathered about the nation's opinion between 1972 and 2016. The network model is similar to the way sociologists track social networks by asking people who they know and what their relationship is with that person.

However, rather than just seeing the average intensity of the disagreement over issues between people, DellaPosta analyzed the network of opinions itself.

DellaPosta analyzed about 14,910 pairs of opinions in the GSS poll, which was conducted almost annually, except 1979, 1981 and 1992 and has been conducted in even numbered years since 1994. The questionnaires cover important topics, including national spending priorities, crime and punishment, intergroup relations and confidence in institutions.

ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. -- The U.S. Army has implemented a one-of-a-kind outdoor system to test swarming drones--with a capacity of more than 1,500 times the volume of a typical testing facility.

Future Soldiers will operate with many of these unmanned aircraft systems across the battlespace, using an interconnected swarm to provide capabilities for situational awareness, defense and logistics.

To enable the testing capability, Army researchers worked with PhaseSpace, Inc., to develop a new motion-capture capability that works for outdoor use -- where sunlight interferes with motion-capture devices typically used for purposes such as video game development.

"This new capability enables us to expand the scale of our testing -- from indoor testing in small rooms or spaces typically smaller than half of a basketball court, to now the size of five football fields," said Dan Everson, a researcher at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory. "This will allow us to replicate more realistic UAS operation conditions and conduct experiments that were previously not possible, such as using cameras to navigate terrains, testing RF [radio frequency] communication within a swarm and flying larger drones."

The system enables the lab to focus on advancements in multi-agent collaborative navigation technologies, heterogeneous swarming concepts, ground/aerial agent interactions, counter-UAS systems and human-agent teaming, Everson said. The researchers described their findings in their technical report, Implementation and Evaluation of the World's Largest Outdoor Optical Motion-Capture System.

PhaseSpace developed the system to track motion, creating brightly illuminated LED marker strobes that attach to the UAS test devices and move throughout the entirety of the testing area.

To track the LED markers, 96 cameras housed within 16 tracking pods are positioned around the perimeter of the testing area. Evaluation of the Army-developed system demonstrated accurate marker tracking within a space of 460 x 110 x 70 meters--more than 1,500 times as large as a typical 15 x 15 x 10-meter system. The system has a measurement rate of 100Hz, meaning it measures the position of the markers 100 times every second.

Located at APG, the testing system is transportable, and can be scaled up or down and even change shape. Everson said he hopes collaborators in academia, industry or within the government can use this capability to test their own research and development in robotics.

"Our future Army will need to interact with a large number of autonomous agents to compete in future conflicts," Everson said. "The flexibility and scalability of this system will help the Army develop capabilities that will achieve overmatch against our adversaries."

For a nematode worm, a big lawn of the bacteria that it eats is a great place for it to disperse its eggs so that each hatchling can emerge into a nutritive environment. That's why when a worm speedily roams about a food patch it methodically lays its eggs as it goes. A new study by neuroscientists at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory investigates this example of action coordination - where egg-laying is coupled to the animal's roaming - to demonstrate how a nervous system coordinates distinct behavioral outputs. That's a challenge many organisms face, albeit in different ways, during daily life.

"All animals display a remarkable ability to coordinate their diverse motor programs, but the mechanisms within the brain that allow for this coordination are poorly understood," note the scientists, including Steven Flavell, Lister Brothers Career Development Assistant Professor in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Flavell lab members Nathan Cermak, Stephanie Yu, and Rebekah Clark were co-lead authors of the study published June 8 in eLife.

A new imaging platform

To study how animals coordinate their motor programs, Flavell's team invented a new microscopy platform capable of taking sharp, high-frame-rate videos of nematodes for hours or days on end. Guided by custom software, the scope automatically tracks the worms, allowing the researchers to compile information about each animal's behavior. The team also wrote machine vision software to automatically extract information about each of the C. elegans motor programs - locomotion, feeding, egg-laying, and more -- from these videos, yielding a near-comprehensive picture of each animal's behavioral outputs. Flavell said the scope parts cost about $3,000 and can be assembled in a day or two using the team's online tutorial. They have posted that and the system's software online for free. The affordability and flexibility of these microscopes should allow them to be useful for many different applications in the biological sciences.

By using this system and then analyzing the data, Flavell's team was able to identify for the first time a number of patterns of nematode behavior that involve the coordination of multiple motor actions. Flavell said one insight yielded by the system and the subsequent analysis is that the intensely studied nematodes, known scientifically as C. elegans, have more distinct behavioral states than generally assumed. For example, the study finds that the behavioral state known as "dwelling," previously defined based on the animal staying put, actually consists of multiple different sub-states that could be readily identified using this new imaging approach.

Behaviors coordinated by dopamine

But one of the most pronounced new behavioral patterns that emerged from the analyses was the observation that worms lay many more eggs while roaming on a food lawn than they do while dwelling. This likely allows animals to thoroughly disperse their eggs across a nutritive environment. The two motor circuits that control locomotion and egg-laying in this animal had been carefully defined by previous work. So, based on their new observation, Flavell's team decided to investigate how the worm's nervous system couples locomotion and egg-laying together. It turned out to hinge on the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is abundant in all animals including humans.

They started out by knocking out genes for various neurotransmitters and other brain-modulating molecules. Many of those candidates, such as serotonin, affected the animal's behavior in important ways, but did not disrupt this coupling of roaming and egg laying. It was only when the team knocked out a gene called cat-2, which is needed for dopamine production, that the worms no longer increased their egg laying while roaming. Notably, it didn't affect the pace of egg laying while dwelling, suggesting that the worms without dopamine were still capable of laying eggs normally while engaged in other behavioral states.

The team further confirmed the role of dopamine by taking direct control of dopamine-producing cells using optogenetics, a technology that allows neuron activity to be turned on or off with flashes of light. In these experiments, they learned that acutely shutting down the dopaminergic neurons reduced egg-laying only while animals were in the roaming state, but activating these neurons could drive the animals to start laying eggs, even under circumstances when the pace of egg-laying is normally low.

Next, the team wanted to know where the dopamine that triggers this coordinated response emerges and when. They engineered worms so that their neurons would glow when they became electrically active, an indication provided by a surge of calcium ions. From those flashes they saw that a particular dopamine-producing neuron called PDE stood out as being especially active as worms roamed across a food lawn, and their activity fluctuated in association with the worms' motion. It peaked, they saw, just before the worm assumed the posture that precipitates egg laying, but only when the worms were crawling along a bacterial food source. Notably, the neuron has the means - a little hair-like structure called a cilium - to sense food outside the worm's body. These studies suggested that the PDE neuron integrates the presence of food in the environment with the worm's own motion, generating an activity pattern that essentially reports how quickly worms are progressing through their nutritive environment. The release of dopamine by this neuron, and potentially others as well, could relay this information to the egg-laying circuit, allowing for coordination between the behaviors.

Flavell's team also mapped out the neural circuitry downstream of dopamine and found that its effects are mediated by two receptors in the D2 family of dopamine receptors (dop-2 and dop-3). In addition, a set of neurons that utilize the neurotransmitter GABA appear to play a critical role downstream of dopamine release. They hypothesize that the role of dopamine may be a send the signal amid plentiful food and roaming behavior to override GABA's inhibition of egg laying, allowing this behavior to proceed.

Ultimately, egg laying while roaming was just one example of motor program coupling that the lab chose to dissect. Flavell and co-authors note there are many others, too.

"One thing that excites us about this study is that it's now easy with this new microscopy platform to simultaneously measure each of the main motor programs generated by this animal. Hopefully, we can start thinking about the full repertoire of behaviors that it generates as a complete, coordinated set," they said.

The research team notes that recently-developed technologies for whole-brain calcium imaging have opened the possibility of measuring neuronal activity throughout the brains of various animals, including the worm.

"To understand these comprehensive neural imaging datasets, it will be important to consider how they relate to the output of the whole brain: the full repertoire of behavioral outputs that an animal generates" Flavell said.

The covid-19 pandemic remains an important topic throughout the world. A number of contributions on the IASS website address the pandemic and its consequences from the perspective of sustainability. We would be happy to put you in contact with the respective authors.

How ecological Value Chains Can Help Societies Tackle the Coronavirus Crisis

(Armin Haas)

The coronavirus pandemic has cast a spotlight on the vulnerability of global value chains. Sustainable value chains at the regional level could bring more stability to the post-pandemic world. A team of researchers at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) has developed a typology of climate win-win strategies that can be used to identify sustainable regional value chains.

Article and publication: https://www.iass-potsdam.de/en/news/how-ecological-value-chains-can-help-societies-tackle-coronavirus-crisis

Brazil: Can Covid-19 Open the Door for New Pandemics?

(Artur Sgambatti Monteiro)

Brazil is one of the hotspots of the corona pandemic, and the Brazilian Amazon is particularly hard hit. In a new Discussion Paper, IASS Fellow Artur Sgambatti Monteiro and Lucas Lima dos Santos describe the impacts of the pandemic on the region. The virus has overwhelmed the poor healthcare system in Amazonian cities and towns. Indigenous groups are especially vulnerable because the pandemic has opened the floodgates for the illegal deforestation and invasion of their territories. The authors warn that the encroachment on previously untouched parts of the forest could give rise to new transmissible zoonoses.

Article: https://www.iass-potsdam.de/en/news/brazil-can-covid-19-open-door-new-pandemics

Discussion paper: https://www.iass-potsdam.de/sites/default/files/2020-05/Discussion%20Paper%20Covid%2019%20Artur_0.pdf

Better Prepared for Future Crises: Recommendations from Risk Researchers

(Ortwin Renn)

Although there were early warnings of an exponentially growing pandemic, most policymakers around the world were unprepared and reluctant to act when Covid-19 first spread from China around the world. Since then the crisis has led to unprecedented restrictions and triggered the worst recession since the Second World War. In an article published in the Journal of Risk Research, Aengus Collins, Marie-Valentine Florin (both EPFL International Risk Governance Center) and IASS Scientific Director Ortwin Renn analyze the key factors and offer recommendations on how we can better prepare for future crises.

Article and publication: https://www.iass-potsdam.de/en/news/better-prepared-future-crises-recommendations-risk-researchers

Covid-19 Crisis: Renewables Can Help to Unburden Health Care Systems and Restart Economies

(Laura Nagel)

Economies around the world have been severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. Substantial political efforts will be needed to stabilize employment markets and relieve pressure on health systems. Renewable energy generation can provide important stimuli for efforts to achieve these goals. A team of researchers with the COBENEFITS project at the IASS has analysed the potential benefits of decarbonizing the energy sector.

Article: https://www.iass-potsdam.de/en/news/covid-19-crisis-renewables-can-help-unburden-health-care-systems-and-restart-economies

Fact Sheet: https://www.iass-potsdam.de/sites/default/files/2020-05/COBENEFITS-COVID-19_Recovery_factsheet_200511_web.pdf

Build Resilience with Cleaner Air: Learning from Covid-19

(Kathleen A. Mar, Erika von Schneidemesser)

New research links air pollution to severe Covid-19 progression. This should prompt a re-evaluation of German commitments to safeguarding and improving air quality. Clean air deserves a more prominent place in Germany's Strategy for Sustainable Development 2020.

Blogpost: https://www.iass-potsdam.de/en/blog/2020/06/build-resilience-cleaner-air-learning-covid-19

The transport sector - Climate policy's problem child and the coronavirus crisis

(Tobias Haas, Ina Richter)

Transport is the problem child of climate). While emissions reductions have been achieved across every other sector since 1990, transport-related emissions have climbed by 3.7 percent between 1990 and 2018. And the number of passengers on public transport has collapsed in the pandemic.

Blogpost: https://www.iass-potsdam.de/en/blog/2020/06/transport-sector-climate-policys-problem-child-and-coronavirus-crisis

Impacts of the Pandemic on the Argentinean Energy Sector

(German Bersalli)

Argentina is among the countries hardest hit by the social and economic consequences of the current pandemic. The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) is predicting the worst economic crisis in the history of Latin America, with a fall in GDP of over 5 percent and millions more people pushed into poverty.

Blogpost: https://www.iass-potsdam.de/en/blog/2020/05/tale-golden-goose-and-ugly-duckling-impacts-pandemic-argentinean-energy-sector

Lack of Clean Cooking Energy Aggravates Coronavirus Impact in Africa (Grace Kageni Mbungu)

d the world the coronavirus pandemic has disrupted life as we know it. However, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that the coronavirus exists on top of many underlying health, social, and economic inequalities, and vulnerabilities. The best hope for African countries is to be spared by the coronavirus, but in truth, people are already suffering from the burdens of stringent lockdown measures imposed to contain the spread of the virus.

Blogpost: https://www.iass-potsdam.de/en/blog/2020/05/lack-clean-cooking-energy-aggravates-coronavirus-impact-africa

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Many Christian and political conservatives in the U.S. support legislation to deny sexual and gender minorities the rights most Americans enjoy: unfettered access to jobs, housing, services and public facilities; the opportunity to marry as they choose; and the right to adopt a child.

A new study published in the American Journal of Community Psychology offers insight into the factors that correlate with support for such laws. The study asked 1,015 heterosexual college undergraduates who self-identified as either Christian (68%) or nonreligious a series of questions to determine their thoughts and attitudes about Christian privilege and power in American society. The researchers also asked whether participants supported or opposed efforts to curtail the rights of sexual and gender minorities.

"Although same-sex marriage is now the law of the land in the U.S., there continue to be problems with employment discrimination, housing discrimination and other types of discrimination against sexual and gender minorities," said Nathan Todd, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who led the study. "One of the key barriers to those rights has been opposition from some Christian and political conservatives. We wanted to know whether people's ideas about political power explain some of this opposition."

Todd and his colleagues evaluated participants' take on Christian power and influence in society. The students were asked to rank how strongly they agreed or disagreed with statements such as: "To be Christian is to have religious advantage in this country." Or, "Christianity is valued more in this society than other religions."

The researchers also asked participants whether Christians "should have religious advantage in this country," or if Christianity "should be valued more in this society than other religions." These questions differentiated participants' awareness of advantages conferred to Christians in the U.S. from the belief that such advantages are right and should exist, Todd said.

Because Christian practices and traditions are so embedded in American life and politics, identifying as Christian confers a lot of privileges, he said.

"People who are Christian are not singled out or asked to speak for their religion on a regular basis, as members of other religions often are," Todd said. "Christians in the U.S. do not face systemic bias or violence based on their religion and they do not live in fear of this type of experience."

Other advantages stem from the fact that government and school calendars revolve around the Christian sabbath and Christian holidays. A large majority of elected officials also identify as Christian.

"All of these factors work together to the advantage of Christians," Todd said.

Participants also rated their support or opposition to specific sexual- and gender-minority rights, such as the right to marry, to adopt children or to have equal access to jobs and housing, and to use public bathroom facilities that align with one's gender identity. They also rated how strongly they identified as political conservatives, and Christian students rated how strongly their religious beliefs aligned with conservative Christian views.

"Our analyses revealed that opposition to sexual- and gender-minority rights was correlated with Christian and political conservatism, and with the belief that Christians should be the dominant group in society," Todd said.

Further analyses suggested that greater support for Christians being the dominant group in power in the U.S. partially explains why Christian conservatives and political conservatives oppose sexual- and gender-minority rights, he said. These findings were consistent across Christian and nonreligious students.

"Our goal with this study is not to antagonize or demonize political or Christian conservatives, but to learn more about what drives them to support or oppose sexual- and gender-minority rights," Todd said. "I also think it's a mistake to characterize all Christians as thinking or acting the same way, especially as some Christians do support rights for sexual and gender minorities."

Todd said he hopes the research will increase constructive dialogue by promoting a broader understanding of the relationship between Christianity, politics, and sexual- and gender-minority rights.

Pump threads rings onto polymer chains to build polyrotaxanes

Polyrotaxanes show promise in soft materials, such as scratch-resistant coatings and actuators

Pump allows researchers to control precisely how many rings thread onto the chain, which was previously impossible

Nobel laureate: 'This is one of the best papers I've been associated with during the past 50 years'

EVANSTON, Ill. -- Northwestern University researchers have developed the most precise way to build polyrotaxanes, a mechanically locked polymer for slide-ring gels, battery electrode materials and drug-delivery platforms.

A necklace-like molecule made with rings threaded onto a polymer string, polyrotaxanes are notoriously difficult to construct. A new method from the laboratory of Nobel Prize-winning chemist Sir Fraser Stoddart uses two artificial molecular pumps to install rings onto each end of a polymer string. The tiny pumps allow researchers to control precisely how many rings pass onto the polymer.

"These polyrotaxanes have never before been made with such precision," Stoddart said. "Without the ability to define accurately the polymer's structure, you cannot fine-tune the material's overall properties."

The paper will be published on Friday, June 12 in the journal Science.

Stoddart is the Board of Trustees Professor in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. Yunyan Qiu, a postdoctoral fellow in Stoddart's lab, is the paper's first author.

Researchers have studied polyrotaxanes for years, fascinated by their stretchy mechanical properties and potential of materials containing them to self-heal. But, until now, it was impossible to build these promising polymers with a precise number of rings.

"Traditionally, researchers mix the rings and polymers together, and they form inclusion complexes by noncovalent interactions," Qiu said. "But you couldn't know how many rings were threaded until you analyzed it later using nuclear magnetic resonance microscopy. People could roughly control the percentage of rings to some extent, but it was still an estimate."

To overcome this challenge, the Northwestern researchers used an artificial molecular pump, which was developed in Stoddart's laboratory in 2015. The first of its kind, the pump draws power from redox reactions, driving molecules from a low-energy state to a high-energy state.

To build polyrotaxanes, the pump employs repetitive redox reactions either chemically or electrochemically, in which a molecule gains or loses electrons. Initially, the pump -- situated at both ends of the polymer string -- and the rings are both positively charged and, thus, repel each other.

Upon injecting electrons, units in both pumps and rings change from dicationic to radical cationic states. Suddenly, the rings are attracted to the pump heads and thread onto both ends of the polymer string. Subsequent oxidation removes the electrons, restoring the positive charges. The rings try to escape but cannot due to the positively charged units at both end of the polymer string. Mild heating allows the ring to pass over a speed bump onto the polymer chain. The pump repeats this process to recruit rings in pairs onto the polymer string.

"We can recruit up to 10 rings onto the thread," Qiu said. "But we believe we're only limited by the length of the chosen polymer chain. If we double the length of the polymer, we can double the number of rings."

The team also believes that, with this method, they could use many different types of polymers to create untraditional polyrotaxanes with unusual properties.

"I'm very excited about this research," Stoddart said. "I put it up there with some of the best papers I've been associated with during the past 50 years."

Toronto - We think that we will choose our personal and professional advisors based on reasoned criteria about their expertise, competence and experience.

In practice, we go more with our gut than our head, choosing the person who shows enthusiasm for us and our goals. A team of researchers has used the popular singing competition show The Voice to prove it.

Now in its 18th season, The Voice is a "really extreme version of life," said researcher Rachel Ruttan, an assistant professor of organizational behaviour and human resources at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. Yet the high stakes environment is ideal for studying decision-making.

"For the purposes of the research, it was perfect," said Prof. Ruttan, who worked with Julia Hur of New York University and Catherine Shea of Carnegie Mellon University. "We think that our findings apply to a wide range of contexts and all sorts of advising relationships."

Show contestants first go through "blind auditions," each performing before a panel of four potential coaches whose chairs are turned away from the singer. A coach signals they're interested in working with a singer by turning their chair towards them, displaying a message that says, "I want you." Singers and coaches next have a brief on-stage chat. Singers with more than one interested coach must then choose who will coach them for the rest of the multi-stage competition.

The researchers analysed and coded four early seasons of the show, finding a significant correlation between the enthusiasm coaches showed for a contestant and the likelihood the contestant would choose them. A coach's track record in coaching other successful contestants played less of a factor.

That result flew in the face of a separate experiment in which the researchers interviewed aspiring contestants while they lined up to apply for a spot on the show. Not yet in the spotlight, those people ranked enthusiasm significantly below experience and expertise in the qualities they would want in a coach. Other lab-based experiments confirmed the "prediction error" between what people say they want in an advisor and the way they ultimately choose them. In another experiment, the researchers also tested how people select advisors for their professional careers.

The findings are useful, said Prof. Ruttan, because quality mentorship has become increasingly important in the pursuit of personal and professional goals. Setting up a checklist of priorities in advance may help people choose job coaches, educational supervisors, financial advisors and others more wisely.

Besides that, their choice "may actually be consequential for performance," said Prof. Ruttan. In a final experiment, lab volunteers twice sang the popular karaoke song Don't Stop Believin' by Journey, receiving feedback in between from randomly assigned advisors who were also professional musicians. An advisor's enthusiasm made no difference the second time, but singers who got feedback from those with specific expertise in vocal music showed better subsequent performance.

While the research was extremely time-consuming, it ranks among Prof. Ruttan's favourites. "It's not often that you get to include reality TV and karaoke in a single paper," she said.

Philadelphia, June 11, 2020 - Diabetic retinopathy is a common complication of diabetes and a leading cause of blindness among the working-age population. A new study in the American Journal of Pathology reports that visual function in diabetic mice was significantly improved after treatment with a single dose of visual chromophore 9-cis-retinal, a vitamin A analog that can form a visual pigment in the retina cells, thereby producing a light sensitive element of the retina.

"In an earlier study we found that diabetes causes vitamin A deficiency in the retina, which results in deterioration of vision, even before any vascular changes can be seen. That finding led to the assumption that early changes in vision in diabetes are probably caused by vitamin A deficiency in the retina," explained lead investigator Gennadiy Moiseyev, PhD, Department of Physiology, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, OK, USA.

In the current study investigators hypothesized that treating diabetic mice with 11-cis-retinal could rescue visual function. They investigated its effect in Akita mice, a genetic model of type 1 diabetes, by measuring electroretinogram (ERG) responses, retinal oxidative stress, and neuronal apoptosis (cell death). ERG was performed on two groups of three-month-old Akita mice and one group of non-diabetic control mice matched for age and genetic background. One group of Akita mice was treated with 9-cis-retinal and the other with a vehicle solution. Average blood glucose concentrations and body weights of the mice were measured monthly during the study. Akita mice showed high glucose concentrations throughout the study. ERG recordings and rhodopsin assay were performed two hours after 9-cis-retinal injection, whereas assessment of cell death by ELISA and TUNEL assay were both performed 24 hours after the injection.

Results showed that the visual function in diabetic mice improved significantly after treatment with the single dose of 9-cis-retinal. In addition, researchers reported that the treatment reduced oxidative stress in the retina, decreased retina cell death and retina degeneration, and improved visual function.

"This work supports our novel hypothesis that diabetes-induced disturbance of the vitamin A metabolism in the eye is responsible for reduced visual function in early stages of diabetic retinopathy," commented Dr. Moiseyev. "Currently, there is no available therapy to prevent the development of the retinal complication in patients suffering from diabetes. This study suggests that the delivery of visual chromophore to the diabetic eye may represent a potential therapeutic strategy for the early stages of diabetic retinopathy to prevent vision loss in patients with diabetes."

Traditionally, diabetic retinopathy was considered a disease caused by the pathology of blood vessels in the retina, whereby light-sensitive tissue at the back of the eye (fundus) becomes damaged. Patients with diabetes often experience functional deficits in dark adaptation, contrast sensitivity, and color perception before any microvascular pathologies are detected on the eye fundus. However, recent data underscore the importance of vitamin A for normal visual function. It serves as a precursor for light-sensitive 11-cis-retinal, the chromophore of visual pigments that can produce a light-sensitive protein in the retina.