Culture

Instead of protecting us, the immune system can sometimes go awry, as in the case of autoimmune diseases and allergies. An Ludwig-Maximilian-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich team has dissected how mast cells regulate their calcium levels to keep the immune response under control.

The immune system defends us against attack by viruses and bacteria and also helps to eliminate cancer cells. The innate immune system is responsible for the initial detection and destruction of invasive pathogens. It then alerts the cells of the adaptive immune system, which eliminates infectious organisms and provides long-term protection against them. There are situations, however, in which immune responses can be misdirected, causing the system to focus its firepower on the wrong targets - either the body's own proteins (in the case of autoimmune diseases) or on intrinsically harmless foreign proteins (in the case of allergies). Now a team of researchers led by LMU immunopharmacologist Susanna Zierler and pharmacologist

Ingrid Boekhoff from the Walther Straub Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology has now shown that the activity of certain ion-channel proteins in mast cells plays an important role in preventing allergic and anaphylactic reactions and ensuring that immune responses do not overshoot. Mast cells are found in practically all organs in the body and regulate the initiation and resolution of inflammatory reactions mounted by the immune system as a means of combating infections and metabolic dysregulation.

Immune responses are highly complex processes, which must be carefully targeted. This means that immune cells must be capable of detecting specific signals that interact with receptor proteins on the cell surface and converting them into clearly defined sets of molecular interactions that result in the activation of the appropriate response at the right time and in the right place. Among the reactions triggered within the cell are alterations in the levels of positively charged ions including calcium, sodium and potassium. It turns out that rapid and transient changes in ion concentrations are essential for the activation of many types of immune cells. It is clear that cells regulate intracellular levels of these ions principally via proteins called ion channels and ion pumps, but how these flows are controlled in the context of immune responses is not understood in detail.

The research groups headed by Susanna Zierler and Ingrid Boekhoff have now, within the framework of the Collaborative Research Center TRR-152 funded by the DFG, characterized the functions of ion channels that selectively regulate the concentration of free calcium in mast cells. Like many other cell types, mast cells achieve this by activating the release of calcium from intracellular stores. The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) is the largest storage organelle for calcium in cells. But other intracellular organelles, such as the mitochondria (the cell's power stations) and the lysosomes (intracellular waste disposal units), can also supply calcium ions on demand. All of these intracellular compartments are delimited by membranes in which specialized ion channels are inserted. Endolysosomal membranes, for instance, contain a protein that belongs to the family known as two-pore channels (TPCs). Zierler, Boekhoff and their colleagues report that one of these, TPC1, plays a major role in regulating changes in the intracellular distribution of calcium ions between endolysosomes and the ER. They demonstrated that selective genetic knockout or pharmacological inhibition of TPC1 in mast cells in mice alters the balance between the amounts of calcium stored in these organelles. Crucially, this change is associated with a marked increase in the secretion of histamine, which then triggers a severe allergic reaction, on both the cellular and systemic levels. "These results show that perturbation of the sensitively regulated equilibrium that controls the level of intracellular calcium ions in mast cells can lead to drastic allergic and anaphylactic reactions," says Zierler.

The identification of the TPC1 channel protein as an important regulator of mast-cell activity and histamine secretion has clear therapeutic implications. "The study pinpoints the TPC1 channel as a promising drug target for the treatment of allergic and mast-cell-dependent disorders," says Zierler. All in all, targeted pharmacological control of the ion channels in immune cells has great potential for the treatment of infections, allergies and perhaps even leukemias.

Using a simple urine test alongside routine imaging for patients with adrenal masses could speed up adrenal cancer diagnosis, improving patient's prognosis and reducing the need for invasive diagnostic procedures, a new multi-centre study published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology has found.

Imaging procedures, such as CT and MRI scans, are used in clinical practice with increasing frequency and often lead incidentally to the discovery of a nodule in the adrenal glands, detected on average in 5% of scans. These so-called adrenal incidentalomas are in the majority harmless, but once an adrenal mass has been discovered it is important to exclude adrenal cancer as well as adrenal hormone excess.

Prognosis for patients discovered to have an adrenal cortical carcinoma (ACC) - a cancerous adrenal mass - is poor, and a cure is only achievable through early detection and surgery. The incidental discovery of an adrenal mass often triggers additional scans to determine whether the mass is cancerous. However, recent studies have suggested that imaging tests have limited ability in establishing whether a mass is cancerous or benign. Therefore, carrying out additional scans to characterise an adrenal mass increases costs, radiation exposure and anxiety in the patient, but mostly does not provide any more valuable information that could inform clinical management.

Led by experts from the University of Birmingham, a new multi-centre study, which is the first and the largest of its kind, has suggested that the addition of urine steroid metabolomics (USM) in the form of a simple urine test to detect the presence of excess adrenal steroid hormones - a key indicator of adrenal tumours - could speed up diagnosis and treatment for patients found to have an ACC and help eliminate the need for unnecessary surgery for patients with a harmless adrenal mass.

Over a six-year period, researchers studied more than 2000 patients with newly diagnosed adrenal tumours from 14 centres of the European Network for the Study of Adrenal Tumours (ENSAT). Patients collected a urine sample after being diagnosed and the researchers then analysed the types and amounts of adrenal steroids in the urine, with results automatically analysed by a machine learning based computer algorithm. Results showed that the urine test made fewer mistakes than imaging tests, which more frequently wrongly diagnosed ACC in a harmless adrenal nodule.

Professor Wiebke Arlt, Director of the Institute of Metabolism and Systems Research at the University of Birmingham and senior author of the study said: "Introduction of this new testing approach into routine clinical practice will enable faster diagnosis for those with cancerous adrenal masses. We hope that the results of this study could lead to significant decreases in patient burden and a reduction in healthcare costs, by not only reducing the numbers of unnecessary surgeries for those with benign masses, but also limiting the number of imaging procedures that are required."

Dr Alice Sitch and Professor Jon Deeks, University of Birmingham diagnostic test specialists involved in the study, explained: "The study showed that the highest accuracy was provided when combining tumour size and imaging characteristics with the urine test, in particular when applying the urine test to patients with larger adrenal masses and suspicious looking imaging results. Following the initial scan that leads to the discovery of the adrenal mass, this combined test strategy would only have required further imaging in 488 (24.2%) of the study's 2017 participants, who actually underwent 2737 scans prior to diagnostic decision."

Irina Bancos, joint first author and Associate Professor of Endocrinology at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, USA, said: "The findings of this study will feed into the next International guidelines on the management of adrenal tumours, and the implementation of the new test will hopefully improve the overall outlook for patients diagnosed with adrenal tumours."

Angela Taylor, Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham and joint first author, explains: "This study shows the power of high-throughput steroid profiling by mass spectrometry, which we used to analyse the more than 2000 urine samples here in our Steroid Metabolome Analysis Core at the University of Birmingham."

Michael Biehl, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, said: "It is highly rewarding to see our transparent and interpretable algorithm validated in this large prospective study, which constitutes a superb example of truly interdisciplinary and international collaboration. This study paves the way to one of the first implementations of machine learning based classifiers in clinical practice."

BAR HARBOR, MAINE -- The extraordinary progress that has been achieved in the biomedical sciences in the modern era can be attributed in large measure to imaging technologies that have allowed scientists to observe the structure and function of tissues and organs in the context of their natural tissue environments in greater detail than possible with the naked eye.

But that ability has been limited to a handful of traditional animal model systems, including worms, flies and mice, either by tissue characteristics that make them amenable to imaging (such as a lack of natural pigmentation), or by the fact that the techniques used for preparing microscopic specimens in these models are not broadly applicable to a diverse range animal species.

The development of a new imaging technique by Prayag Murawala, Ph.D., of the MDI Biological Laboratory and his collaborators, however, enables unprecedented insight subcellular structures, tissues, organs and even whole organisms, and -- because of its wide applicability -- broadens the range of animal models that can be studied, processes that can be explored and biological questions that can be addressed.

"The use of traditional animal models has contributed enormously to scientific progress, but these models represent only a tiny fraction of species of ecological or evolutionary interest," Murawala said. "By developing a method that opens up previously inaccessible models to imaging, we hope to accelerate discoveries that can be translated into new cures and interventions for human disease."

The fast, simple and powerful new method, called DEEP-Clear (DEpigmEntation-Plus-Clearing), is the subject of recent paper in the international journal Science Advances to which Murawala was a contributing author.

The paper, entitled "A Versatile Depigmentation, Clearing and Labeling Method for Exploring Nervous System Diversity," was written by a 16-member team from research institutions and universities in Vienna, Austria, led by Hans-Ulrich Dodt of the Vienna University of Technology and the Medical University of Vienna, and Florian Raible of the University of Vienna.

Murawala, who recently joined the MDI Biological Laboratory as assistant professor, conducted research for the paper at the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna, where he studied limb and spinal cord regeneration in the axolotl, a highly regenerative salamander that was a subject of the paper. He will continue to study the axolotl at the MDI Biological Laboratory, which focuses on research in regenerative medicine.

The main advantage of the new method is that it allows scientists using state-of-the-art imaging technologies to view a specimen in three dimensions rather than the usual two, Murawala said. In addition to allowing scientists to better track biological processes at the cellular level, the method avoids the structural damage that can occur using traditional techniques, which involve cutting tissues into thin layers, or sections.

The DEEP-Clear method is particularly valuable for scientists studying development, neuroscience and regeneration, Murawala said. For instance, it can be used to study the entire nervous system of a small organism, or to gain insight into regeneration by investigating the dynamics of behavior in cells that are migrating to the site of a lost limb or tissue that is in the process of regenerating.

"Traditional techniques limit our understanding of biology, "Murawala explained. "If you want to understand the connections between neurons [nerve cells] -- how a neuron connects one part of the brain to another part or to the spinal cord, for example -- you can't capture that in a section because you are limited to two dimensions."

The new method expands the roster of model organisms that are optically accessible by addressing one of the major problems in specimen preparation: the absorption of light by natural pigments, which limits how deeply specimens can be imaged. While traditional techniques work well in non-pigmented organs like the mouse brain, pigments in the eye and skin pose a challenge to the study of specimens from non-traditional models.

In addition to removing pigmentation that could shield tissues and organs from view, the new method addresses another problem posed by traditional methods: the scattering of light caused by differences in refractive indices (RIs), or the speed at which light travels through various types of molecules, i.e., water, fat and protein. The method builds on techniques used in unpigmented specimens to resolve the RI heterogeneity issue.

Still another advantage of the method is its ability to be used at various scales -- from the detailed high-resolution investigation of confocal microscopy, which uses a pinhole to illuminate a point of interest, to the three-dimensional imaging of light-sheet microscopy, which, because it scans specimens using a very thin plane of laser light rather than a point, is advantageous for tracking cells and tissues in living organisms.

The development of a new tool with potential to expand the roster of model animals used in biological research represents a return to the roots of the biological sciences -- and to the origins of the MDI Biological Laboratory. Prior to the development of sophisticated tools to work with a short list of preferred species, biologists studied a wide variety of models, many of them from the sea.

The 122-year-old laboratory is one of many research institutions originally founded to study the diversity of marine life. Over the years, its scientists have studied crabs, fish, jellyfish, sea squirts, seals, sharks, skates, starfish and more. Though the goal has always been to use the model best suited to the question under study, that hasn't always been possible due to the lack of new tools for studying nontraditional models.

"The natural world is rich with organisms that science and medicine can learn from," said Hermann Haller, M.D., the laboratory's president. "By developing an imaging method that can be applied to a broad spectrum of species and experimental approaches, Prayag is building on a long and distinguished history of discovery at the MDI Biological Laboratory using non-traditional species in a comparative context."

In Vienna, Murawala was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Elly Tanaka, Ph.D., a highly regarded scientist (and another author of the recent paper) who studies limb and spinal cord regeneration in the axolotl. One of five nontraditional species studied in the paper, the axolotl is prized in regenerative medicine research because -- unlike mammals -- it can regenerate almost any body part.

Do you want to get the most out of a museum and encourage your child's interest in STEM? Try interacting with a teenaged museum docent. Research led by investigators from North Carolina State University and the University of Exeter in the U.K. has found that youth docents have an overall positive effect on visitors' experiences, learning and information retention at informal learning sites. The positive effects accrued across age groups regardless of museum type, but were most apparent in children ages 9 to 11.

Informal learning sites - such as museums, zoos and aquariums - often have programs for teenaged docents, or educators. The programs serve as a way for the teens to build social skills, as well as reinforce their abilities in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). But what about the visitors? Do they also benefit from these programs?

NC State researchers Kelly Lynn Mulvey, associate professor of psychology, Adam Hartstone-Rose, associate professor of biological sciences, and their colleagues surveyed the effect of teen docents at five informal learning sites in the U.S. and the U.K. The sites included a zoo, an aquarium, a children's museum, a technology-themed museum and a health-themed science center.

They surveyed over 2,100 (979 children and adolescents and 1,184 adults) visitors who either explored the exhibit on their own or who had interacted with either an adult or youth educator. The survey questions covered topic interest, perceived learning and informational recall of exhibit content. The researchers used multi-levelled modeling to control for differences between sites.

While all groups reported greater topic interest when interacting with an educator of any age, their engagement and interest levels were higher when interacting with youth educators. But the largest impact was on children between 9 and 11 years old, whose information retention levels were significantly higher when interacting with a youth, rather than an adult, educator.

"We know that learning is highly social, so we expected that visitors would benefit more when they interacted with an educator," Mulvey says. "But, we were very surprised at how helpful talking with a teen educator was.

"Perhaps this is because a teenaged educator isn't too far removed from these kids, age-wise. Not only can the educator present the topic on the correct level, these kids look up to and can see themselves in the teenagers, more so than to an adult who they might see as just another teacher."

Additionally, the researchers found that adult visitors also reported high benefits from interacting with youth educators. "What was fascinating was not only the strong impact on child visitors, but also the higher engagement level from adults," Hartstone-Rose says. "I refer to that effect as the 'charm factor' - the idea that the adults may want to invest time to help youth succeed."

The researchers emphasize the beneficial overall effect of educators, regardless of age.

"Having someone there to make the exhibit personally relevant is important to engagement, interest, how much you think you learn and how much you actually learn," Mulvey says. "This is especially important now, when museums are trying to figure out how to reopen. This work shows that cutting back to just the exhibits would really impact their educational value."

"These results also make a compelling argument for investing in youth programs - not only for the benefit of the educators, but as a way to keep younger generations engaged throughout their school years," Hartstone-Rose says. "The bottom line is, if you visit a zoo or museum, seek these people out - you will have a better experience."

WASHINGTON, D.C. (July 23, 2020) -- Factors linked to structural racism put Latino communities in the U.S. at high risk of COVID-19, a study published today says. The new study is the first nationwide analysis of COVID-19 cases and deaths among Latinos.

"We found that crowded housing, air pollution, jobs in the meatpacking and poultry industry and other factors put Latinos at high risk of COVID-19 infections and death," said lead author of the study Carlos E. Rodriguez-Diaz, PhD, MPH, an associate professor of prevention and community health at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health (Milken Institute SPH). "Our study's findings will help us look for tailored interventions aimed at keeping Latino communities healthy and safe."

Latino counties account for 11 percent of counties in the Northeast, 4 percent of counties in the Midwest and 33 percent of counties in the West, yet they comprise a disproportionate number of COVID-19 cases in each region, Rodriguez-Diaz and his team found.

Other reports suggest that Latinos make up 18 percent of the U.S. population but they account for 33 percent of all known COVID-19 cases.

To help identify some of the factors that put Latinos at such high risk, Rodriguez-Diaz and a multi-institutional team compared COVID-19 cases and deaths through May 11, 2020 in counties with a disproportionately large number of Latinos to all other U.S. counties. They also looked at county characteristics that could affect the risk and created a map of hot spots for COVID-19 among Latinos.

The study found that Latino risks and deaths varied by region, with more COVID-19 infections found in the Midwestern and Northeastern Latino counties.

However, the study suggests different reasons for the high risk. In the Northeast, many Latinos live in crowded housing units and are working on the frontlines or in essential jobs. Such conditions make it difficult to practice social distancing or isolation when necessary.

Also, these predominantly Northeastern Latino neighborhoods are often located near busy highways or polluting industries. Researchers know that breathing in traffic emissions and other kinds of pollution can affect the respiratory system and can put people at risk for COVID-19 infection or a severe case of COVID-19.

At the same time, the researchers found that COVID-19 deaths were higher only in the Midwestern Latino counties. Rodriquez-Diaz thinks that the high risk of death is related to the lack of health care and occupational risk - many of the Latinos in these areas work in risky meatpacking plants. Workers in these plants typically are not provided with protective equipment and cannot maintain a safe distance from co-workers, he said.

Across the United States, five out of six Latinos work in delivery jobs or other work that requires travel and thus can increase the risk for exposure to the COVID-19 virus. This study is limited to the data available through mid-May. Many Latinos live in the South and Western states, which are the regions that are currently experiencing a surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths. While not captured in this study, it is very likely that the risks for infections and disease for these communities remains the same due to the lack of policies to address them early in the epidemic, Rodriguez-Diaz warns.

Other research has shown that Latinos, Blacks and other people of color are at higher risk of getting infected with the virus or dying of COVID-19. Some of the same authors of this study previously showed that factors that contribute to structural racism also mean that COVID-19 deaths in predominantly Black communities are much higher than average.

"It's clear that the social determinants of health place communities of color at greater risk for COVID-19," said Greg Millett, MPH, senior author of the paper and Vice President and director of public policy at amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research. "And, in the absence of complete national data, using the demographics of counties is a useful way to track the impact of COVID-19 in Latino as well as black communities."

Such studies might help policymakers find tailored solutions to help protect these vulnerable communities. For example, many Latinos are left out of public health insurance programs and mainstream health systems are unwelcoming. "Better access to medical care and support for grass roots organizations in the communities could help save lives," Rodriguez-Diaz said.

UPDATE:

The American Academy of Pediatrics has updated its guidance since the Article (discussed in the press release below) went to press. This guidance is now in line with the findings of the Article from The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health.

As a result of the updated guidance, we wanted to flag that certain sections of the press release are no longer relevant. These sections are in bold and italics in the text below for your awareness.

Please find the updated AAP guidance here:
https://services.aap.org/en/pages/2019-novel-coronavirus-covid-19-infections/clinical-guidance/faqs-management-of-infants-born-to-covid-19-mothers/
https://www.aappublications.org/news/2020/07/22/newbornguidance072220

Mothers with COVID-19 infection are unlikely to pass the virus to their newborn babies, if correct hygiene precautions are observed, according to a small observational study published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health journal.

The study, involving 120 babies born to mothers with COVID-19 infection, found no cases of transmission of the virus during childbirth or after two weeks of breastfeeding and skin-to-skin contact.

The findings suggest that mothers with COVID-19 infection can breastfeed and stay in the same room as their newborn safely, if they use appropriate face coverings and follow infection control procedures.

Dr Christine M. Salvatore, who is the primary lead for the study, from the Weill Cornell Medicine-New York Presbyterian Komansky Children's Hospital, USA, said: "Data on the risk of COVID-19 transmission during pregnancy or while breastfeeding are limited to a small number of case studies. Consequently, guidelines for pregnant women and new mothers vary. We hope our study will provide some reassurance to new mothers that the risk of them passing COVID-19 to their babies is very low. However, larger studies are needed to better understand the risks of transmission from mother to child." [1]

Current guidance for new mothers infected with COVID-19 is conflicting. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises that mothers and newborns should be temporarily separated at birth. They recommend that babies are fed expressed breastmilk until their mothers are deemed to no longer be infectious according to certain clinical criteria. In contrast, the World Health Organisation and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists recommend that mothers should share a room with their babies and breastfeed, with appropriate precautions. They emphasise that the benefits of breastfeeding outweigh potential risks of COVID-19 transmission.

The latest study observed outcomes from 120 babies born to 116 mothers at 3 hospitals in New York City, USA, between 22 March and 17 May 2020. All of the babies were allowed to share a room with their mothers and breastfeed, if their mothers were well enough. The babies were kept in enclosed cribs, six feet apart, except during feeding. Mothers were required to wear surgical masks while handling their babies and followed frequent hand and breast washing procedures.

All of the babies underwent a PCR test from a nasal swab within the first 24 hours of birth and none tested positive for COVID-19. Follow-up data was available for 82 babies after 5 to 7 days of life. Of these, the vast majority had been sharing a room with their mothers (83%, 68/82) and three quarters were still breastfeeding (78%, 64/82). 79 babies were tested for the SARS-CoV-2 virus again after 5-7 days and 72 babies received a further test after two weeks of life. None of the results were positive and none of the babies showed symptoms of COVID-19 at any time.

53 babies underwent a remote check up by video conferencing after one month of life. All of them continued to be clinically well and were growing appropriately.

Dr Patricia DeLaMora, who jointly led the study, from the Weill Cornell Medicine-New York Presbyterian Komansky Children's Hospital, USA , said: "We know that skin-to-skin contact and breastfeeding are important both for mother-infant bonding and for long-term child health. Our findings suggest that babies born to mothers with COVID-19 infection can still benefit from these safely, if appropriate infection control measures are followed." [1]

The researchers highlight that the sample size in the study is small to draw firm conclusions and larger studies may be needed. In addition, almost one third of babies were not followed-up (38/120), which they say might be explained by parents' fear of leaving their homes and using public transportation to attend clinic appointments in the midst of the pandemic.

The COVID-19 test used in the study relied on nasal swabs. If babies had been infected in the womb, it is possible the virus would not have been present in these samples. The researchers were not able to screen for the presence of the virus in blood, urine or faecal samples because these tests were not validated at the time of the study.

Writing in a linked Comment, Dr Melissa Medvedev, of the University of California San Francisco, who was not involved in the study, said: "Salvatore and colleagues provide valuable data indicating that perinatal SARS-CoV-2 transmission is unlikely and allowing newborns to room-in and breastfeed is safe, with appropriate precautions. Despite these insights, key questions remain unanswered. Robust population-based data are needed to quantify the incidence of complications among pregnant women and neonates, and to understand rates and routes of vertical and horizontal transmission, including asymptomatic transmission. Studies are also required to determine the effectiveness of infection prevention and control practices in the neonatal care setting."

A Penn State College of Medicine research team found that playing a simple conversation game may encourage African Americans to make plans for their end of life care. Researchers say the game may be a useful tool in addressing the disparities in end-of-life care in African American communities.

Dr. Lauren Van Scoy, an associate professor of medicine, humanities and public health sciences, and lead author of the study published in JAMA Network Open, said that after playing the game, 98% of participants engaged in some form of advanced care planning, including conversations about care preferences with family members and completing or updating advanced directives, where an individual outlines their preferences for end-of-life medical care.

Less than 25% of African Americans have advance care directives according to prior research. Van Scoy says that means African Americans are less likely to receive end-of-life care aligned with their preferences, such as hospice services. Although advanced care planning has doubled to approximately 60% of the general population, the disparity remains in African American communities.

"Completing an advance care directive is associated with reduced unwanted end-of-life medical interventions, increased hospice use and decreased psychological distress and it may reduce end-of-life costs," Van Scoy said. "We hypothesized that this game, which increased advance care planning behaviors in other study populations, might help address the disparities in end-of-life care in African American communities."

The game is called "Hello" and involves a series of open-ended discussion questions where players in groups of three to six answer questions that are designed to stimulate conversations about preferences for end of life care. Examples include, "If you had to choose between experiencing the worst pain of your life or not saying good-bye to your family, which would you choose and why?" or "What are three non-medical facts about you that your doctor should know?"

Researchers arranged for gameplay at 53 community venues (15 were included in the research analysis) across the U.S. from 2018-2019 and conducted follow up phone surveys between within an 11 month period. The study reached 1,122 participants and researchers collected data from 384 African American individuals. Of the 220 participants who completed follow up interviews, 41% completed an advanced directive and 80% discussed end-of-life wishes with loved ones.

Major themes from follow up interviews revealed that participants felt the game was emotionally beneficial, increased appreciation for advanced care planning, empowered and motivated individuals to perform advance care planning behaviors, offered new information about advanced care planning and was a safe, fun and enjoyable context for talking about end-of-life care.

"The results demonstrate that this game is a valuable tool for helping people begin the advance care planning process and for sharing their values and beliefs about sensitive end-of-life issues during a relaxed and even enjoyable conversation," said co-author Pamela Witt.

The research team believes the intervention works because it's designed to be played in a safe, comfortable atmosphere. The team partnered with the Hospice Foundation of America and other community organizations like places of worship and senior citizen centers to ensure the participants could have these conversations with friends and leaders they trust.

"In order to reach underserved communities, who often have a mistrust of the health care systems, it's essential to deliver the game in a space where those communities can engage with people who they trust," Witt said. She believes that community stakeholders are essential to ensuring the intervention can achieve its intended outcome of increasing advance care planning behaviors. "Death and end-of-life care are difficult topics to talk about and the community-based delivery model might facilitate these difficult discussions among trusted social networks."

The researchers noted that one weakness of the study was that all participants played the game, meaning there was no control arm. Van Scoy has applied for funding to start a randomized, controlled trial to confirm whether the game encourages advanced care planning. She also said that the current COVID-19 crisis has amplified the need for individuals, especially African Americans who have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, to engage in advance care planning. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported at the end of June that non-Hispanic Black persons were five times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than non-Hispanic white persons.

"Before the pandemic, people were adamant about not talking about end-of-life care because they had beliefs that they would not get sick," Van Scoy said. "COVID-19, a disease that continues to affect people of all ages and health conditions, has shed a light on the fact that everybody should think about their end-of-life wishes."

ITHACA, N.Y. - Quantum mechanics can seem a bit confounding, so for a quantum material to be called "strange" is really saying something.

A Cornell University-led collaboration has used state-of-the-art computational tools to model the chaotic behavior of Planckian, or "strange," metals. This behavior has long intrigued physicists, but they have not been able to simulate it down to the lowest possible temperature until now.

The team's paper, "Linear Resistivity and Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) Spin Liquid Behaviour in a Quantum Critical Metal with Spin-1/2 Fermions," published July 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study's lead author is doctoral student Peter Cha.

Leading the collaboration is Eun-Ah Kim, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, who is interested in the social phenomena of electrons and how they interact as a society, with all the complications that entails.

Like people, electrons have different innate tendencies. In metals, electrons are independently minded and mostly roam freely. In insulators, electrons are stuck in a fixed position. Between these metal and insulator phases exists the strange case of Planckian metals. In Planckian metals, electrons dissipate energy at the fastest possible rate allowed by the fundamental laws of quantum mechanics. They have a high level of chaotic behavior and electrical resistivity.

Imagine a congested road with slow-moving traffic. The vehicles are heading in the same general direction, but they are sluggish and their movement is restricted. This is the plight of electrons in Planckian metals. Now compare that with electrons in a superconductor, which is the most organized, coherent state possible, a superhighway with huge numbers of electrons rushing along in lockstep, without resistance or scattering. For more than three decades, scientists have been puzzled that Planckian metals can switch into high-temperature superconductors. This inexplicable behavior appears to be somehow related to the individualistic electrons' desire to distance themselves from each other.

"Just as we have social distancing recommendations at the order of our governor, electrons have social distancing recommendations at the order of Mother Nature," Kim said. "But exactly how this social distancing order resulted in this particular, maximally chaotic behavior has been a mystery. How do you go from the mandate of, okay, you're all repelling each other, to this particular form of chaotic, incongruent behavior? It suggests there is something in this very confusing state that is a seed for a very organized state."

Kim's research group collaborated with scientists at the Flatiron Institute, an internal research division of the Simons Foundation in New York City, who specialize in computational quantum physics. Together, they created the first-ever model of Planckian behavior down to the lowest possible temperature, absolute zero (zero degrees Kelvin or -273.15 degrees Celsius). This marks the quantum critical region when one state of matter transitions to another.

By adjusting the ratio between the electrons' urge to bounce around (kinetic energy) and the strong social interactions that lock the electrons into position according to their spins (interaction energy), which is essentially a mandate for social distancing, the researchers tuned the system to the verge of transition between an ordinary metal and an interaction-driven insulator. When the social distancing is stronger, the system enters a spin glass insulator state, in which immobile electrons are only represented by their loosely aligned spins. But when kinetic energy dominates, the system enters a Fermi liquid metal state.

"We found there is a whole region in the phase space that is exhibiting a Planckian behavior that belongs to neither of the two phases that we're transitioning between," Kim said. "This quantum spin liquid state is not so locked down, but it's also not completely free. It is a sluggish, soupy, slushy state. It is metallic but reluctantly metallic, and it's pushing the degree of chaos to the limit of quantum mechanics."

The model is minimalist by design, allowing the researchers to identify the most basic ingredients for Planckian metal behavior. This will provide a template for building more complicated models that can capture even more elusive phenomena, such as high-temperature superconductivity. And maybe even more than that.

"The universes and societies of electrons that we study are not only a subject of curiosity and intellectual satisfaction," Kim said. "They're also a subject that makes a difference in the society. We can change society - revolutionize society - by understanding new materials, new kinds of states. The discovery of semiconductors led to the transistor. And we cannot imagine what the world would be like today if there were no transistors."

Breast cancer rates among women globally are on the rise, but new research is uncovering trends related to age and where you live that could help target prevention measures to improve the situation.

A new study published in The Lancet Global Health includes data on women from 41 countries and found that in higher income nations, including Canada, rates of breast cancer in premenopausal women are increasing, while postmenopausal breast cancer is increasing more rapidly in lower income countries.

"To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the global rates and trends of pre- and postmenopausal breast cancer," says Dr. Miranda Fidler-Benaoudia, PhD, study principal investigator and member of the O'Brien Institute for Public Health at the Cumming School of Medicine (CSM).

"Distinguishing between pre- and postmenopausal breast cancer allowed us to uncover different trends, which could be important for tailoring prevention efforts and curbing the future breast cancer burden worldwide."

Although the study provides evidence of an increase in breast cancer rates in women of all ages, the increase in premenopausal breast cancer in higher income countries is particularly concerning, says Fidler-Benaoudia, an adjunct assistant professor with the departments of Oncology and Community Health Sciences at the CSM. Premenopausal breast cancer was significantly increasing in 20 out of 44 populations, each representing a country or an ethnic group, she studied.

The risk of developing cancer increases as a woman ages, says Fidler-Benaoudia. Postmenopausal breast cancer risks, such as obesity and having children later in life are well studied, but risk factors for developing breast cancer when you're young are not as well known.

"When young people get cancer, the impact on them is huge and it can lead to major repercussions later in life," says Fidler-Benaoudia. "For example, the current life expectancy in Canada is around 80 years, so when a person is diagnosed at 30, they could live another 50 years where they are more likely to experience major health, financial and career repercussions compared to the general population as a result of their treatment."

Postmenopausal breast cancer is significantly increasing in 24 out of the 44 populations, most notably in countries undergoing transitions from lower to higher income status. Fidler-Benaoudia says this could be a result of these countries adopting a more Western lifestyle that includes unhealthy behaviours that increase breast cancer risk such as lower levels of physical activity and increased alcohol consumption. Adopting early screening procedures, which are common in higher income countries, could play a part as well, by identifying more cases early on.

"The increasing rates of postmenopausal breast cancer in lower income countries highlights opportunities for prevention," says Dr. Hyuna Sung, PhD, a cancer epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society, and study co-author. "We know several well-established risk factors are modifiable, including excess body weight and physical inactivity, which is encouraging for prevention efforts."

Measuring the global breast cancer burden

Although breast cancer is thought to be a disease of the developed world, almost 50 per cent of breast cancer cases and 58 per cent of deaths occur in less developed countries, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The study highlights the inequities in cancer mortality worldwide, showing that about 47 per cent of women diagnosed with premenopausal breast cancer in less developed countries will die, compared to only 11 per cent per cent in the most developed countries. Postmenopausal breast cancer saw a fatality rate of 56 per cent in less developed nations compared to 21 per cent in their more developed counterparts.

Fidler-Benaoudia says early diagnosis and access to treatment remain key to combating breast cancer in low- and middle-income countries, and that prevention efforts to decrease exposure to known risk factors for the disease must be increased globally.

"The findings from this study shows important differences in the breast cancer burden by age and point to the need for prevention initiatives such as efforts to reduce obesity and alcohol consumption, increase physical activity and breastfeeding--all of which reduce one's risk for developing breast cancer," says Fidler-Benaoudia.

Dr. Miranda Fidler-Benaoudia, PhD, is an epidemiologist at CancerControl Alberta, Alberta Health Services, and adjunct assistant professor in the departments of Oncology and Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary's Cumming School of Medicine. She is a member of the O'Brien Institute for Public Health, Arnie Charbonneau Cancer Institute and Alberta Children's Hospital Research Institute.

OSNABRUECK / JENA.- In nature, organisms often support each other in order to gain an advantage. However, this kind of cooperation contradicts the theory of evolution proposed by Charles Darwin: Why would organisms invest valuable resources to help others? Instead, they should rather use them for themselves, in order to win the evolutionary competition with other species. A new study led by Prof. Dr. Christian Kost from the Department of Ecology at the Osnabrueck University now solved this puzzle. The results of the study were published in the scientific journal Current Biology (link: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.06.100). The research project was performed in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena.

Interactions between two or more organisms, in which all partners involved gain an advantage, are ubiquitous in nature and have played a key role in the evolution of life on Earth. For example, root bacteria fix nitrogen from the atmosphere, thus making it available to plants. In return, the plant supplies its root bacteria with nutritious sugars. However, it is nevertheless costly for both interaction partners to support each other. For example, the provision of sugar requires energy, which is then not available to the plant anymore. From this results the risk of cheating interaction partners that consume the sugar without providing nitrogen in return.

The research team led by Prof. Dr. Christian Kost used bacteria as a model system to study the evolution of mutual cooperation. At the beginning of the experiment, two bacterial strains could only grow when they provided each other with essential amino acids. Over the course of several generations, however, the initial exchange of metabolic byproducts developed into a real cooperation: both partners increased the production of the exchanged amino acids in order to benefit their respective partner. Even though the increased amino acid production enhanced growth when both partners were present, it was extremely costly when individual bacterial strains had to grow without their partner.

The observed changes were caused by the fact that individual bacterial cells had assembled into multicellular clusters. In these cell groups, cooperative mutants were rewarded. The more resources they invested in the growth of other cells, the more nutrients they received in return from their partners.

"This kind of feedback represents a previously unknown mechanism, which promotes the evolution of cooperative interactions between two different organisms," says Prof. Dr. Christian Kost, leader of the study. Although the study was performed with bacteria in a test tube, the mechanism discovered can most likely explain the evolution of cooperation in many different ecological interactions.

Though many people find them intimidating, menacing or just plain scary, sharks are vital to the health of the world's oceans.

These often misunderstood creatures are found in just about every ocean habitat around the globe, but their populations are plummeting. Indeed, the true extent of their decline is not fully known.

To better understand the level of shark disappearance across tropical, coastal reefs, an international team of scientists, including researchers from UC Santa Barbara, conducted a landmark study under the Global FinPrint organization. Their findings, published in the journal Nature, reveal that sharks are virtually absent from many of the world's coral reefs.

The results indicate that sharks are too rare to fulfill their normal role in these ecosystems -- otherwise referred to as "functionally extinct." Of the 371 reefs surveyed in 58 countries, sharks were not observed on nearly 20%, suggesting a widespread decline that has gone undocumented on this scale until now.

"Things aren't good for sharks," said coauthor Darcy Bradley, co-director of the Ocean and Fisheries Program at UC Santa Barbara's Environmental Market Solutions Lab. Scientists have known this for a while, she added, but this study shows it in robust, empirical detail.

Essentially no sharks were detected on any of the reefs of six nations: The Dominican Republic, the French West Indies, Kenya, Vietnam, the Windward Dutch Antilles and Qatar. Among these, a total of only three sharks were observed on more than 800 survey hours.

Bradley and UCSB research biologist Jennifer Caselle conducted surveys at Palmyra Atoll, a small American territory smack in the center of the Pacific Ocean. Their contribution to the project was particularly important because the atoll is a protected area. The data they gathered helped to establish what a healthy shark population looks like. And since all of these surveys measure relative abundance, without baselines from pristine reefs like Palmyra, there's no context for the data from other locations.

This first-ever benchmark for the status of reef sharks around the world, funded by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, reveals an alarming global loss of these iconic species that are important food resources, tourism attractions and top predators on coral reefs. Their decline is due in large part to overfishing of sharks and their prey, with the single largest contributor being destructive fishing practices, such as the use of longlines and gillnets.

"Although our study shows substantial negative human impacts on reef shark populations, it's clear the central problem exists in the intersection between high human population densities, destructive fishing practices and poor governance," said Demian Chapman, Global FinPrint co-lead and associate professor at Florida International University. "We found that robust shark populations can exist alongside people when those people have the will, the means and a plan to take conservation action."

The study revealed several countries where shark conservation is working and the specific actions that seem promising. The best performing nations, in comparison to the average of their region, included Australia, the Bahamas, the Federated States of Micronesia, French Polynesia, the Maldives and the United States.

These nations reflect key attributes that were found to be associated with higher populations of sharks. They are generally well-governed, and either ban all shark fishing or have strong, science-based management limiting how many sharks can be caught.

"These nations are seeing more sharks in their waters because they have demonstrated good governance on this issue," said Aaron MacNeil, lead author of the Global FinPrint study and associate professor at Dalhousie University. "From restricting certain gear types and setting catch limits, to national-scale bans on catches and trade, we now have a clear picture of what can be done to limit catches of reef sharks throughout the tropics."

The FinPrint team is wrestling with the fact that conservation action on sharks alone can only go so far. Researchers are now looking at whether recovery of shark populations requires management of the wider ecosystem to ensure there are enough reef fish to feed these predators.

"Now that the survey is complete, we are also investigating how the loss of sharks can destabilize reef ecosystems," said Mike Heithaus, Global FinPrint co-lead and dean of the College of Arts, Sciences & Education at Florida International University. "At a time when corals are struggling to survive in a changing climate, losing reef sharks could have dire long-term consequences for entire reef systems."

Launched in the summer of 2015, Global FinPrint's data were generated from baited remote underwater video stations (BRUVS). These consist of a video camera placed in front of a standard amount of bait -- a "Chum Cam." Standardizing the BRUVs across all the sites made data much easier to compare between locations. Coral reef ecosystems were surveyed in four key geographic regions across the tropics: the Indo-Pacific, Pacific, the Western Atlantic and the Western Indian Ocean.

Over the course of four years, the team captured and analyzed more than 15,000 hours of video from surveys of 371 reefs in 58 countries, states and territories around the world. The work was conducted by hundreds of scientists, researchers and conservationists organized by a network of collaborators from Florida International University, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, Curtin University, Dalhousie University, and James Cook University.

"This work doesn't just document the demise of sharks," said UC Santa Barbara's Caselle. "It provides hope, and more importantly, it provides actionable solutions that countries can follow to protect and rebuild their shark populations."

The optimum amount of a methane-inhibiting supplement in dairy cattle feed has been determined by an international team of researchers, indicating that widespread use of the compound could be an affordable climate change-battling strategy, if farmers embrace it.

Previous studies conducted at Penn State and around the world showed the addition of 3-Nitrooxypropanol -- often referred to as 3-NOP -- to the feed of dairy cows reduced their enteric methane emissions by about a third. This follow-up research showed that the optimum dose of the white, granular compound made by Dutch health and nutrition giant DSM is 150 mg/kg --about a tablespoon in every 250 pounds of dry feed.

"The maximum mitigation effect was achieved with the three highest 3-NOP doses tested -- with no statistical difference among 100, 150 and 200 mg/kg," said researcher Alex Hristov, distinguished professor of dairy nutrition in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences. "The decrease in methane emission yield in the study ranged from 16 to 36%, and emission intensity reduction ranged from 25 to 45%."

3-NOP is the only substance that has worked significantly in reducing enteric methane in cattle and not had unacceptable effects on milk production or quality, added Hristov, who has experimented with many feed additives in recent years.

DSM, which has a patent on 3-NOP, has already applied to European regulators for authorization to sell the compound as a cattle feed additive. The company hopes to launch the product in the European Union soon, followed by registrations in other regions such as Brazil, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. U.S. approval, if it is granted, will come slower because 3-NOP is considered a drug here and will be regulated by the Food and Drug Administration.

In this research conducted at Penn State's Dairy Teaching and Research Center, recently reported in the Journal of Dairy Science, 49 lactating cows were alternately fed rations containing no 3-NOP, and 40, 60, 80, 100, 150 and 200 mg of 3-NOP per kilogram of feed dry matter. Importantly, according to Hristov, dry matter intake and milk yield of the cows was not affected by 3-NOP. As a bonus to the methane mitigation, milk fat concentration and yield increased.

Methane -- a natural byproduct of digestion in ruminants -- is released by cows into the atmosphere mostly through belching. So, the results of 3-NOP trials are viewed by many scientists as critical, if the carbon footprint of dairy and beef cattle production is to be reduced to help slow climate change, explained Hristov.

The climate-change contribution of methane from cow burping -- often incorrectly characterized as cow flatulence -- has been the subject of considerable derision within the U.S. However, it is taken seriously in other countries, Hristov pointed out, because the average dairy cow belches approximately 350 pounds of the potent greenhouse gas each year.

"But greenhouse gases from animal agriculture are just 5% of the total greenhouse gases produced in the United States -- much, much more comes from the energy and transportation sectors," he said. "So, I think it's a fine line with the politics surrounding this subject. Do we want to look at this? I definitely think that we should, and if there is a way to reduce emissions without affecting profitability on the farm, we should pursue it."

It is also a matter of improving the overall efficiency of producing milk or meat, he added.

For farmers to use 3-NOP, it must be economical, Hristov noted, so the research showing that relatively low dosages are effective indicates it may be, although DSM has not set a price on the feed supplement yet.

But the question remains -- will the public accept it? "It's a very small synthetic molecule that is metabolized quickly and falls apart into compounds that are naturally present in the rumen of the cow," he said.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has more and more people asking about our food supply, how agriculture is moving forward, and where agriculture is going in this country. Based on the long term work of James MacDonald, a new research professor in Agricultural & Resource Economics at the University of Maryland, he is a firm believer in the Maya Angelou quote, "You can't really know where you are going until you know where you have been." In MacDonald's latest publication in Applied Economics Perspectives and Policies, he presents a detailed history of the consolidation of agriculture in the U.S. based on 35 years of data from the U.S. Census of Agriculture and surveys from the United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (USDA-ERS), where MacDonald was employed for nearly four decades. As branch chief in the Structure, Technology, and Productivity Branch at USDA-ERS focused on agriculture, MacDonald was able to build out a program to analyze these trends in agriculture, characterizing the steady shift to fewer and larger farming operations across the country in all sectors of agriculture.

"My background is in the field of industrial organization, so it's about competition, how industries are organized, and how they evolve," explains MacDonald. "Fundamentally with this work, I was interested in how and why production is shifting to bigger farms, because basic statistics don't give you a clear picture."

As MacDonald describes in his latest paper, the trends are much more complicated than what just average acreages and farm size statistics can tell you. In order to characterize these trends, MacDonald looked at data from 1982 through 2017, showing a large aggregate shift in farming operations that hasn't been captured before in this level of detail, going beyond just industry-level data.

"What's been happening is a steady shift of acreage and production to larger operations that covers almost all crop and livestock commodities and that occurs steadily over three or four decades. A large part of what I was trying to do was capture that story, and then draw conclusions about what that widespread, persistent, and large pattern of consolidation meant," says MacDonald.

Results show that production has in fact significantly shifted to larger farms in 60 of the 62 crop and livestock commodities analyzed over the 35-year period. This shift means fewer distinct farming operations, with smaller farms going out of business and ultimately becoming unsustainable. And with larger operations comes more acreage as well. Farms with at least 2,000 acres of cropland only operated 15% of all cropland in 1987, but now these larger farms operate 37% of all cropland. While this shift is steady across all farming industries, there are some distinctions in how it manifests.

"This shift happens everywhere, in fruits and vegetables as well as field crops," explains MacDonald. "But with crops, we see a more steady evolution, whereas with livestock, you get spurts of dramatic change."

An example of this can be seen in dairy farming. In 1987, half of all dairy cows in the U.S. were in herds of 80 or fewer cows. But by 2017, that midpoint herd size shifted to 1,300 cows. "Consolidation in dairy is just dramatic," says MacDonald, "with shifts to much bigger farms and smaller farms going out of business. The last two years, 15% of the dairy farms in the country went out of business. The very large farms have lower costs than midsize and smaller ones, and while those lower costs reflect productivity growth and result in lower prices for the consumer, it is also pretty heartbreaking for people who have been small or midsize dairy farmers who are going out of business. In 1980 when I started this work, there were probably about 250 thousand dairy farms in the country. Today, we have 30 thousand, and it's going to keep shrinking."

Despite this finding, MacDonald found that family farms still account for the vast majority of farms and farm production, with no significant movement of production toward non-family operations. According to MacDonald, consolidation encompasses shifts of production to larger family businesses, but these are still predominantly family businesses. "Every farm you see is different, and there are things that are very difficult to capture in a survey," says MacDonald. "And not only are they different, but they all have this family history that matters for how they are organized and run."

So what's behind these trends? According to MacDonald, the widespread and persistent pace of this shift in the data suggests that technology plays an important role in the consolidation process. For instance, new labor-saving equipment, materials, and organizational changes now allow a single farmer or farm family to manage more acres or more livestock. Advances in technology are often expensive to implement, but cheaper in the long run, so larger operations are at an advantage and have lower overall operating costs.

MacDonald thinks that we may be on the cusp of continuing technological changes, particularly in crop agriculture, through the application of precision agriculture technologies in farming. Precision agriculture technologies allow farmers to collect, analyze, and apply finely detailed information from field and herd operations. Some precision agriculture applications may favor smaller operations, but others could provide advantages to very large farming organizations. At USDA-ERS, MacDonald managed farm surveys designed to track the adoption of such technologies, and he hopes to use that survey data in the future to assess how farmers can use precision technologies, and how these technologies will affect the business of farming.

Most reptiles move slower when temperatures drop, but venomous rattlesnakes appear to be an exception. The cold affects them, but not as much as scientists expected.

"Many reptiles and other animals that rely on external sources of heat have muscles that don't contract as well when temperature drops. We wanted to know if that was the case with rattlesnakes," explained UC Riverside biologist Tim Higham.

To answer their question, Higham and a team from San Diego State University examined the speed at which rattlers struck out at perceived threats in temperature-controlled containers. The team's work is detailed in a new paper published this week in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

The team investigated how quickly the snakes struck out to defend themselves when faced with predators, as this speed can make the difference between life and death in nature.

"Although humans often fear snakes, it is important to realize that snakes are vulnerable to predation by animals such as birds, mammals, and other snakes," Higham said. "Defensive strikes are important for protecting them against predation."

When placed in the experimental containers, the research team found that rattlers continued to strike quickly at a balloon filled with warm water that played the role of an intruder.

"By far, the hardest part of the study was working with snakes in the 35 C treatment," said San Diego State University doctoral student Malachi Whitford, first author of the new study. "The snakes were extremely fast, making them very difficult to corral."

The strike speed was affected when the temperature dropped, but not as much as the team thought it would be.

"We expected their strike to be about half as fast for every 10-degree drop in temperature, but they're still able to uncoil and strike fairly rapidly, even at our lowest test temperatures," said SDSU ecologist and research team member Rulon Clark.

At most, the snakes were about 25 percent slower at the lowest temperature. The finding means that pit vipers, the type of rattlesnake studied, are slightly more vulnerable to real or perceived threats in colder temperatures but not by a lot.

This might help explain how rattlesnakes can thrive even in cooler climates like southern Canada. It also suggests that the snakes are using a mechanism other than just muscles in order to strike, as muscle movement becomes more difficult in the cold.

Kangaroos use tendons like elastic bands to bounce and hop without using much energy, the way that humans use a bow and arrow. The findings suggest that snakes may also be storing elastic energy somehow.

"Striking in any way is important to do quickly," Higham said. "As global temperatures increase, it's possible that snakes will become even more effective predators."

University of Maryland (UMD) researchers across multiple colleges collaborated with other international leaders in wildlife conservation to produce an expert assessment and recommendations for vulture poisoning control efforts in Southern Africa. Vultures act as nature's most critical scavengers, working as ecosystem garbage disposals and disinfectors to maintain animal, environmental, and human health alike. With global vulture populations declining, diseases that have previously been under control can potentially reemerge as threats and contribute to the spread of global disease (a top-of-mind issue during the COVID-19 pandemic), while also negatively impacting overall biodiversity. To address rapidly declining African vulture populations, the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC, funded by the National Science Foundation through UMD) has gathered an interdisciplinary and international group of scientists with the goal of saving Africa's vultures. Findings from their latest publication highlight the issue of illegal vulture poisonings in Southern Africa from a conservation and criminology perspective, recommending a more coordinated and holistic approach to regulation, education, and enforcement to engage local communities and maximize conservation efforts.

"This work is vital," says William Bowerman, chair of Environmental Science and Technology in the College of Agriculture & Natural Resources (AGNR) at UMD and a lead organizer for the SESYNC effort. "We could lose African vultures completely in just a few years. But we have faculty from across UMD and Cornell University, Birdlife International, the Peregrine Fund, Endangered Wildlife Trust, and many others working to solve this international problem collaboratively. We have issues of chemical poisoning, but also lead and other contaminants, habitat loss, poaching and vulture trade for belief and medicinal use, and other factors that contribute to why populations are declining so quickly and why we need so many different experts."

Focusing on vulture poisoning with this new paper published in Global Ecology and Conservation, the team at UMD includes faculty members in Environmental Science and Technology, Agricultural and Resource Economics, Anthropology, and a new faculty member in Geographical Sciences (College of Behavioral & Social Sciences, BSOS). Meredith Gore, currently with Michigan State University, is the lead author on this paper and will officially join UMD in August. "I call myself a conservation social scientist - humans are my species, and my habit is to collaborate," says Gore. "When I was invited to work on this SESYNC project, I had no previous exposure to vultures, but I do a lot of work in Africa, and the human factors in vulture conservation are very complex and dynamic. As a group of experts, we could really leverage our diversity to think about this problem in a different way."

While expert elicitation and "desk assessment" exercises like this paper are common practices in both criminology and conservation, these thought processes had never before been combined and applied in the context of African vulture poisoning to try to make recommendations and ultimately improve control and conservation efforts.

"The use of a criminology framework is relatively new for conservation," says Jen Shaffer, assistant professor in Anthropology, BSOS. "Conservation policies have long focused on identifying direct causes for species loss, culminating in the creation of protected areas for species, as well as policies with incentives and punishments. More recently, there have been efforts to assess and address indirect or underlying causes of species loss, such as poverty, food insecurity, and lack of access to necessary resources. In our research, we captured both direct and indirect causes of African vulture loss, but extended this work to identify a wider range of cultural and physical factors in the environment that promote poisoning. This allowed our group to identify specific tactics that would discourage people from participating in the crime of vulture poisoning."

"We formulated a range of strategies and tactics to prevent poisoning from occurring in the first place, along with limiting the impacts if a poisoning event occurred," adds Jennifer Mullinax, assistant professor in Environmental Science and Technology, AGNR. "For example, we suggested an education campaign on the human health risks from the common poisons used, and a Wildlife Poisoning Response Planning and Training intervention. This effort is a great example of having a large stakeholder group, including local constituents, come up with simple to complex ideas that could be implemented by local agencies or non-profits to directly impact vulture poisoning."

The need for more coordinated education and training efforts was a key finding from the study, since according to Gore, many people, particularly locals, don't always see poisoning as a crime. Often, this is done to protect livestock from larger animals and predators, with the poison not even intended for vultures. However, intentional poisoning by poachers can also be a factor.

"Bringing vulture population declines from intentional poisoning to light in the scientific community raises a heightened awareness of poaching, not only from the targeted animals (such as elephants) that are killed, but the secondary impact on other species such as vultures, and how all that impacts the socio-ecological-economic health of many peoples and nations," says Reggie Harrell, professor in Environmental Science and Technology, AGNR.

In addition to bringing awareness and recommendations to the scientific community, the information from this paper is already on the ground and in the hands of those who can use it, says Gore, being disseminated by Andre Botha, co-author and Vultures for Africa program manager at the Endangered Wildlife Trust, also a major organizer of the SESYNC initiative. "A key finding from this work is that there are a lot of existing solutions on the ground, they just aren't being combined, coordinated, or used holistically to maximize the benefit. In addition to thinking about ways we can incentivize and enable compliance, for example by restricting access to chemicals being used illegally while still providing access to those who need them for legal reasons, we were able to help identify the places where resources could be implemented first and make recommendations on how to prioritize existing efforts."

Given the complicated nature of vulture poisonings in Africa, combining criminology with community engagement was paramount to this work, Gore adds. "Criminology uses situational crime prevention to prevent terrorist attacks on airplanes and riots in sports stadiums. We used those same situational crime techniques and applied them to vulture conservation. However, we added an additional dimension - engaging communities - based on participatory action research and conservation, which we know and do really well at land grant universities."

Gore and the team emphasize the importance of this information being adapted to local communities and used on the ground for real change. "At the end of the day, we're just experts," says Gore. "That's important, but we look at problems differently than local people do, so the work that we did needs to be interpreted on the ground in a local context."

Shaffer adds, "From an anthropological perspective, I think that our findings underscore how sustainable strategies to reduce and eliminate wildlife crime require local cultural context and community involvement. Our work also serves as a model of how the problem of African vulture poisoning can be addressed elsewhere on the African continent."

"This is a really serious problem," stresses Gore. "Vultures are ecosystem engineers, and as their population decreases, the second order impacts can harm ecosystems and people. It's urgent, dynamic, and also really complex. Why should people in Maryland care about what's happening in Southern Africa? Because it all relates to environmental health. And socio-environmental health relates to socio-environmental security. And global security is national security as the [COVID-19] pandemic has shown us. What starts someplace else impacts us here in the U.S. and in Maryland."

However, Gore and the team are inspired by the collaborative nature of the work, with all team members emphasizing the power of and role of collaborative team science in addressing these major global concerns. "I do think there is a role for scientists to play," says Gore. "We do have something to offer here, and we should be engaging on global issues the way we are through SESYNC."

Lars Olson, professor in Agricultural & Resource Economics, AGNR, adds, "This project is an excellent example of how interdisciplinary team science can produce collaborations that are greater than the sum of the parts and help address the conservation of endangered species subject to multiple threats."