Culture

Smoking high-potency marijuana concentrates boosts blood levels of THC more than twice as much as smoking conventional weed, but it doesn't necessarily get you higher, according to a new study of regular users published today by University of Colorado Boulder researchers.

"Surprisingly, we found that potency did not track with intoxication levels," said lead author Cinnamon Bidwell, an assistant professor in the Institute of Cognitive Science. "While we saw striking differences in blood levels between the two groups, they were similarly impaired."

The paper, published June 10 in JAMA Psychiatry, is the first to assess the acute impact of cannabis among real-world users of legal market products. It could inform everything from roadside sobriety tests to decisions about personal recreational or medicinal use.

But the study also raises concerns that using concentrates could unnecessarily put people at greater long-term risk of side-effects.

"It raises a lot of questions about how quickly the body builds up tolerance to cannabis and whether people might be able to achieve desired results at lower doses," said Bidwell.

While 33 states have legalized medicinal marijuana use, and 11 have legalized recreational use, both uses remain illegal at the federal level. Researchers are also prohibited from handling or administering marijuana. Some previous studies have used strains supplied by the government, but those strains contain far less THC than real-world products.

In order to study what people really use, Bidwell and her colleagues utilize two white Dodge Sprinter vans, also known as the "cannavans," as mobile laboratories. They drive the vans to the residences of study subjects who use cannabis they purchase on their own inside their homes and then walk out for tests.

"We cannot bring legal market cannabis into a university lab, but we can bring the mobile lab to the people," she said.

For the current study, the team assessed 121 regular cannabis users. Half typically used concentrates (oils and waxes that include the active ingredients without the leaves and stems). The other half typically used flower from the plant. Flower users purchased a product containing either 16% or 24% [tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)], the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. Concentrate users were assigned to a product containing either 70% or 90% THC.

On test day, researchers drew the subjects' blood, measured their mood and intoxication level and assessed their cognitive function and balance at three time points: before, directly after and one hour after they used.

Those who used concentrates had much higher THC levels at all three points, with levels spiking to 1,016 micrograms per milliliter in the few minutes after use, while flower users spiked at 455 micrograms per milliliter. (Previous studies have shown that THC levels hover around 160 to 380 micrograms per milliliter after marijuana use).

Regardless of what type or potency of cannabis participants used, their self-reports of intoxication, or "feeling high," were remarkably similar, as were their measures of balance and cognitive impairment.

"People in the high concentration group were much less compromised than we thought they were going to be," said coauthor Kent Hutchison, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at CU Boulder who also studies alcohol addiction. "If we gave people that high a concentration of alcohol it would have been a different story."

The study also found that, among all users, balance was about 11% worse after using cannabis, and memory was compromised. But within about an hour, that impairment faded.

"This could be used to develop a roadside test, or even to help people make personal decisions," said Bidwell.

The researchers aren't sure how the concentrate group could have such high THC levels without greater intoxication, but they suspect a few things are at play: Regular users of concentrates likely develop a tolerance over time. There may be genetic or biological differences that make some people metabolize THC more quickly. And it may be that once compounds in marijuana, called cannabinoids, fill receptors in the brain that spark intoxication, additional cannabinoids have little impact.

"Cannabinoid receptors may become saturated with THC at higher levels, beyond which there is a diminishing effect of additional THC," they write.

The authors caution that the study examined regular users who have learned to meter their use based on the desired effect, and does not apply to inexperienced users. Those users should still be extremely cautious with concentrates, said Hutchison.

Ultimately, the researchers hope to learn what, if any, long-term health risks concentrates truly pose.

"Does long-term, concentrated exposure mess with your cannabinoid receptors in a way that could have long-term repercussions? Does it make it harder to quit when you want to?" said Hutchison. "We just don't know yet."

June 10, 2020 -- The interaction of COVID-19 with co-existing non-communicable diseases (NCDs) is a perfect storm, particularly for communities of poverty, according to a new opinion piece published by Columbia Mailman School of Public Health researchers in the journal British Medical Journal. While primarily targeting the elderly, NCDs and underlying metabolic conditions- obesity, hypertension, kidney disease, and diabetes in younger people, are all associated with higher risk of severe illness, hospitalization and death from COVID-19.

Of particular concern, note the authors, is the association with obesity -- a disease of poverty. In the U.S. and Mexico, more than one third of people 15 years and older are obese. South Africa, Costa Rica, Colombia, Brazil, Hungary, and Chile report rates of more than 20 percent.

"The global response has been to treat COVID-19 as a vertical disease rather than addressing the full ecosystem of the COVID-19 response or its interaction with the NCD pandemic or poverty," said Nina Schwalbe, an adjunct professor in the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health at Columbia Mailman School. "This is particularly urgent given that poverty is now both a driver of COVID-mortality and an outcome of the response. Rather than relying on a vertical approach, it is time to switch gears -- assess risks, target prevention, and engage community in the response and to build synergies across care platforms."

Lockdown and social distancing have caused health service disruptions resulting in an overall worsening of health outcomes, noted Juan Pablo Gutierrez, professor at the Center for Policy, Population Health and Research at the National Automous Unviersity of Mexico School of Medicine "For the poor, in particular, these measures further exacerbated food insecurity and reduced access to social services. Instead of applying blunt tools such as lockdowns to the entire population, we must urgently target those at risk."

"With nearly half a billion people projected to fall into extreme poverty due to the COVID-response, loss of income, high out-of-pocket costs for health care, food insecurity, increased unemployment levels, and lower educational attainment will all have a direct effect on morbidity and mortality worldwide," noted Schwalbe, who is also visiting fellow at the United Nations University - International Institute for Global Health.

To address the interaction between COVID-19 mortality and the NCD pandemic will require adhering to the tenets of "precision public health," and the authors recommend the following:

Use data and better data sharing to focus interventions on risk reduction for those most susceptible.

Move from a vertical approach to build synergies across care platforms, in particular between NCDs and infectious diseases.

Provide the socioeconomically vulnerable with the means to mitigate the pandemic response effects on poverty. An example of such a strategy is underway in Pakistan, where the government has provided over 80 million people with emergency cash transfers.

"In the global response to COVID to date, we have witnessed mass fear and confusion as well as a tremendous misallocation of resources as a result of targeting the entire population rather than those most at risk," said Schwalbe. "However, as COVID-19 continues to spread and there is talk of a second wave, it is not too late to apply the tools of precision, evidence-based public health to address the underlying drivers of morbidity and mortality - and this means focusing prevention efforts on people suffering from NCDs."

Current experiments support the controversial hypothesis that a well-known concept in physics - a "critical point" - is behind the striking behaviour of collective animal systems. Physicists from the Cluster of Excellence "Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour" at the University of Konstanz showed that light-controlled microswimming particles can be made to organize into different collective states such as swarms and swirls. By studying the particles fluctuating between these states, they provide evidence for critical behaviour--and support for a physical principle underlying the complex behaviour of collectives. The research results were published in the scientific journal "Nature Communications".

Animal groups exhibit the seemingly contradictory characteristics of being both robust and flexible. Imagine a school of fish: hundreds of individuals in perfect order and alignment can suddenly transition to a convulsing tornado dodging an attack. Animal groups benefit if they can strike this delicate balance between being stable in the face of "noise" like eddies or gusts of wind, yet responsive to important changes like the approach of a predator.

Critical transition

How they achieve this is not yet understood. But in recent years, a possible explanation has emerged: criticality. In physics, criticality describes systems in which a transition between states - such as gas to liquid - occurs at a critical point. Criticality has been argued to provide biological systems with the necessary balance between robustness and flexibility. "The combination of stability and high responsiveness is exactly what characterizes a critical point," says the study's lead author Clemens Bechinger, Principal Investigator in the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour and Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Konstanz, "and so it made sense to test if this could explain some of the patterns we see in collective behaviour."

The hypothesis that collective states are hovering near critical points has been studied in the past largely through numerical simulations. In the new study published in Nature Communications, Bechinger and his colleagues have given rare experimental support to the mathematical prediction. "By demonstrating a close link between collectivity and critical behaviour, our findings not only add to our general understanding of collective states but also suggest that general physical concepts may apply to living systems," says Bechinger.

Experimental evidence

In experiments, the researchers used glass beads coated on one side by a carbon cap and placed in a viscous liquid. When illuminated by light, they swim much like bacteria, but with an important difference: every aspect of how the particles interact with others - from how the individuals move to how many neighbours can be seen - can be controlled. These microswimming particles allow the researchers to eschew the challenges of working with living systems in which rules of interaction cannot be easily controlled. "We design the rules in the computer, put them in an experiment, and watch the result of the interaction game," says Bechinger.

But to ensure that the physical system bore a resemblance to living systems, the researchers designed interactions that mirrored the behaviour of animals. For example, they controlled the direction that individuals moved in relation to their neighbours: particles were programmed either to swim straight towards others in the main group or to deviate away from them. Depending on this angle of movement, the particles organized into either swirls or disordered swarms. And incrementally adjusting this value elicited rapid transitions between a swirl and a disordered but still cohesive swarm. "What we observed is that the system can make sudden transitions from one state to the other, which demonstrates the flexibility needed to react to an external perturbation like a predator," says Bechinger, "and provides clear evidence for a critical behaviour."

"Similar behaviour to animal groups and neural systems"

This result is "key to understanding how animal collectives have evolved," says Professor Iain Couzin, co-speaker of the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour and Director of the Department of Collective Behavior at the Konstanz Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. Although not involved with the study, Couzin has worked for decades to decipher how grouping may enhance sensing capabilities in animal collectives.

Says Couzin: "The particles in this study behave in a very similar way to what we see in animal groups, and even neural systems. We know that individuals in collectives benefit from being more responsive, but the big challenge in biology has been testing if criticality is what allows the individual to spontaneously become much more sensitive to their environment. This study has confirmed this can occur just via spontaneous emergent physical properties. Through very simple interactions they have shown that you can tune a physical system to a collective state - criticality - of balance between order and disorder."

Application areas

By demonstrating the existence of a link between collectivity and critical behaviour in living systems, this study also hints at how the intelligence of collectives can be engineered into physical systems. Beyond just simple particles, the finding could assist with designing efficient strategies of autonomous microrobotics devices with on-board control units. "Similar to their living counterparts, these miniature agents should be able to spontaneously adapt to changing conditions and even cope with unforeseen situations which might be accomplished by their operation near a critical point," says Bechinger.

Key facts:

Physicists from the University of Konstanz show a link between collective behaviour and a concept in physics known as criticality.

Through experiments using tiny glass particles, they create collective states of swarms and swirls.

Showing that the particles can make sudden transitions from one state to the other provides clear evidence for a critical behaviour

Original publication: Bäuerle, T., Löffler, R.C. & Bechinger, C. Formation of stable and responsive collective states in suspensions of active colloids. Nat Commun 11, 2547 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16161-4

Authors include Tobias Bäuerle (lead author) and Robert Löffler, both doctoral students at the University of Konstanz. Senior author Clemens Bechinger is Professor of Physics at the University of Konstanz

Clemens Bechinger is also part of the University of Konstanz's Cluster of Excellence "Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour", which has been funded in the Excellence Strategy of the German Federal and State Governments since 2019.

The research was supported by an ERC Advanced Grant ASCIR and the Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy - EXC 2117 - 42203798.

campus.kn is the University of Konstanz's online magazine. We use multimedia approaches to provide insights into our research and science, study and teaching as well as life on campus.

PHILADELPHIA - As the coronavirus pandemic forces so many to reckon with growing food insecurity and increased health challenges, the Building Wealth and Health Network program of Drexel University's Center for Hunger-Free Communities is reducing food insecurity and improving mental health - without distributing any food or medicine. How? By focusing on group experiences that promote healing and help people save money and take control over their own finances.

Parents of young children, who completed the Center's 16-session, trauma-informed program, are 55 percent less likely to experience household food insecurity than those who did not complete the program, known as "The Network." The study included 372 Philadelphia parents of children under six years old enrolled in the four-to-eight-week-long program.

In addition to the course, all participants were either receiving cash assistance through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and/or support from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. The findings were recently published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior.

At present, one in five United States households is currently experiences food insecurity, according to an April Brookings report, with that number expected to increase due to COVID-19.

"As the coronavirus ravages communities across the United States, a failure to stop the spread is causing unprecedented amounts of food insecurity," said senior author Mariana Chilton, PhD, a professor of Health Management and Policy and director of Center for Hunger-Free Communities at Drexel's Dornsife School of Public Health. "This pandemic continues to expose how fundamentally broken our country's social support systems are and how poorly some of our most vulnerable citizens are often treated. As it becomes clearer that public officials are not rapidly improving basic income supports for families, our findings suggest innovative ways to increase people's ability to care for themselves and each other."

Drexel's Building Wealth and Health Network combines a financial self-empowerment curriculum, matched savings account program (up to $20/month for a year) that includes coaching and peer support to help members heal from adversity, gain stronger connections and build economic security.

Participants were asked questions via computer survey before the study, and every three months for up to a year, about their health and economic well-being - including banking habits, whether they are employed, and their ability to afford food. Those completing all four sessions and the baseline survey were considered full participants.

By addressing the underlying social, behavioral, and emotional issues that frequently accompany food insecurity, previous studies show The Network helps participants heal from adversity, reduce symptoms of depression and feel less isolated. The recent study shows these outcomes also translate into reduced food insecurity, regardless of members' participation in public assistance programs and their employment status.

"For far too long policymakers have left social, physical and mental health out of the food insecurity equation. But we know these factors very frequently go hand-in-hand," said Chilton. "Now we have data to show that the program's comprehensive financial education and support helps families put food on the table not just for today, but far into the future."

The researchers caution that the Network is not a replacement for federal food assistance, which provides critical, life-sustaining nutrition while families move toward economic security. While the study worked with people who live in the City of Philadelphia, the authors suggest these trauma-informed approaches may provide benefit in other areas of the United States by increasing focus on health, well-being and financial savvy, in addition to promoting work or ensuring food access.

Most cannabis poisoning incidents involving children resulted from the intentional use of cannabis combined with alcohol, illicit drugs and/or medication, new research suggests.

Researchers studied incidents of cannabis poisonings among children and youth from BC Children's Hospital in Vancouver for the three-year-period prior to recreational cannabis legalization in Canada.

The findings, published today in Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Prevention in Canada: Research, Policy and Practice, are important for informing cannabis safety guidelines and helping keep children safe.

"We need to know how the legalization of recreational cannabis impacts children's health," says the study's senior author Dr. Shelina Babul, an investigator at BC Children's, clinical associate professor in the department of pediatrics at the University of British Columbia (UBC), associate director of the BC Injury Research and Prevention Unit (BCIRPU) and director of the Canadian Hospitals Injury Reporting & Prevention Program (CHIRPP). "This is especially important now that cookies, chocolates and gummies containing cannabis have been legalized in Canada. We need to do whatever we can to keep kids safe."

Common signs of cannabis poisoning include vomiting, dizziness, slurred speech and an altered level of consciousness. Although cannabis poisoning does not often result in long-term harm, these symptoms can require emergency department care.

For the study, researchers from BC Children's and UBC extracted records from the CHIRPP database specific to cannabis poisonings treated in the emergency department at BC Children's between Jan. 1, 2016 and Dec. 31, 2018. Scientists studied medical reports and health records to review patients' characteristics and determine where and when the consumption of cannabis, and any other substances, had occurred.

They found that, of the 911 poisonings treated at BC Children's over three years, 12.5 per cent, or 114, were a result of cannabis consumed intentionally. The majority of cannabis-related poisonings resulted from the intentional use of cannabis combined with alcohol, illicit drugs and/or medication (71.1 per cent). The proportion of poisonings from intentional cannabis use only was 28.9 per cent. The median patient age was 15.

Cannabis poisonings were reported most often on weekdays. In most cases, youth smoked cannabis and drank alcohol in private residences with their friends. Nearly half of cannabis-only poisonings were reported by the patient's family or friends, whereas poisonings resulting from the ingestion of cannabis along with other psychoactive substances were most often reported by bystanders (39.5 per cent).

Fewer than 10 poisonings resulted from inadvertent ingestions by children with a median age of three. All inadvertent ingestions occurred at home and involved cannabis belonging to the patient's parents or siblings. Products inadvertently ingested by the patient included edibles, topicals and cannabis cigarettes. The researchers say these lower numbers should be taken seriously, as early research suggests that children of this age group are at greater risk of more serious side effects.

In Canada, the federal government legalized the use of recreational cannabis in October 2018 and edibles, topicals and extracts in October 2019.

The researchers are continuing to examine the incidence of cannabis poisoning now that recreational cannabis has been legallized. They will be using this study's findings as a baseline for future research.

Scientists at Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (skoltech), together with colleagues from the Karl-Franzens University of Graz and the Kanzelhoehe Observatory (Austria) developed an automatic method for detecting "coronal dimmings", or "traces" of coronal mass ejections at the Sun, and also proved that they are reliable indicators of the early diagnosis of powerful emissions of energy from the atmosphere of the Sun, traveling to Earth at great speed.

Coronal mass ejections are among the most striking manifestations of solar activity. Huge plasma clouds pierced by magnetic lines are ejected from the atmosphere of the Sun into the surrounding space at speeds of 100-3500 km/s. If a stream of charged particles reaches the Earth, auroras and magnetic storms arise in its atmosphere. This can lead to serious problems in the operation of electrical equipment and signal loss, and spacecraft and astronauts in outer space are most exposed to danger.

Coronal mass ejections occur in the atmosphere of the Sun, the solar corona, which is very sparse and does not shine as bright as the solar disk. Therefore, the evolution of these ejections can be observed only with the help of special tools - coronagraphs, creating an artificial solar eclipse and blocking the bright Sun with a dark disk. Coronagraphs installed on Earth do not provide accurate results due to the bright glow of the sky, therefore they are usually installed on spacecraft. To date, there are only two coronagraphs in space: aboard the STEREO-A and SOHO satellites; new missions are expected no earlier than in a few years. However, coronagraph observations have a significant drawback: blocking the solar disk by several radii makes it impossible to discern the early evolution of the ejection, but only its shape at a developed stage.

But one can approach the solution of this problem from another angle and study the "trace" directly on the Sun - coronal dimmings, rather than the coronal ejection itself. If you observe the solar corona in the ultraviolet, then you can see the gaps in the intensity - dark spots that are associated with the loss of substance in the corona during the ejection of plasma, - these are dimmings. Due to the unique position of the STEREO-A, STEREO-B and SDO satellites, it was for the first time possible to compare the size and brightness of coronal dimming from different observation points. The obtained results confirm the earlier work of the co-authors of the study from the University of Graz, where the same dimmings were studied on the solar disk using images of the SDO satellite.

"We showed that by observing dimmings on the Sun, it is possible to estimate the mass and speed of the coronal mass ejection at early stages - key parameters that allow us to predict the scale of the event and the time of its expected consequences on Earth. This is of great applied importance for the development of operational space weather services, as well as for future space missions to the Lagrange point L5. Spacecraft will be located in the orbit, always retaining the same position with respect to the Earth. This will make it possible to detect traces of coronal mass ejections directly on the Sun, as well as to predict the parameters of powerful ejections before they are seen from Earth, "says a graduate student at the Skoltech Space Center and the first author of the study, Galina Chikunova.

"Humanity is entering a new era in the exploration of outer space, the creation of new space technologies that are gradually moving into our daily lives. At present, it is very important to study the nature of explosions on the Sun, to develop methods for their early forecasting, in order to protect our society and technologies from the dangers of space weather, to turn off equipment in satellites in time, to move astronauts to a protected area, to cancel satellite maneuvers, air travel through the polar regions, report possible navigation problems. And whatever storms may rage, we wish everyone a good weather in space," says Tatyana Podladchikova, professor at the Skoltech Space Center, research co-author.

Better data on marijuana use in the U.S. is needed to support critical public health research, according to a review of relevant surveys conducted by University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers.

Eleven states, including Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C., have legalized the adult recreational use of marijuana, and about a dozen others are studying the issue. Yet understanding the associations between state and federal policy changes and cannabis use remains somewhat elusive, say Kimberley Geissler and Jennifer Whitehill, assistant professors of health policy and management, whose research was published June 10 in JAMA Network Open.

"A challenge for public health monitoring and research is significant variation in data availability related to cannabis use behaviors and perceptions across and within states and over time, including the availability of pre-legalization versus post-legalization data," the researchers write.

"If we have good statewide data, we can understand the impact of legalization better," Geissler adds.

Examining state and national public health surveys, including the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and Youth Behavior Surveillance System, the researchers evaluated the availability of eight key indicators over time: lifetime cannabis use; age of initiation; frequency, location and method of use; source of cannabis; perceptions of cannabis and reason for use (medical versus nonmedical).

"The most basic of these indicators in thinking about cannabis legalization is how much do people use cannabis and are people changing the way in which they use - are they using more edibles versus smoking? Are there changes in how often they're using it? And one thing that's important from a public health perspective, who is using and how is that changing? For example, are adolescents using cannabis more frequently?" Geissler says. "We found a lot of gaps for monitoring adolescent use."

The surveys that go beyond yes-or-no questions provide better data for public health strategies to prevent harmful consequences. "This paper will allow other researchers monitoring cannabis public health surveillance to know what data is actually out there," says Whitehill, an injury prevention researcher. "We may be missing key details that could inform policy and efforts to prevent harm."

Existing surveys can be changed to improve the data, which may be especially useful for states that have not legalized adult use of marijuana because they still have an opportunity to gather pre-legalization data.

"We don't need to launch new national surveys but ask better questions in some of these surveys that already exist - asking more detailed questions for people who do use cannabis," Geissler says.

"Enhanced surveillance across the country regardless of the states' legalization status makes sense based on our findings," Whitehill concludes.

Skoltech scientists and their industry colleagues have found a way to use machine learning to accurately predict rock thermal conductivity, a crucial parameter for enhanced oil recovery. The research, supported by Lukoil-Engineering LLC, was published in the Geophysical Journal International.

Rock thermal conductivity, or its ability to conduct heat, is key to both modeling a petroleum basin and designing enhanced oil recovery (EOR) methods, the so-called tertiary recovery that allows an oil field operator to extract significantly more crude oil than using basic methods. A common EOR method is thermal injection, where oil in the formation is heated by various means such as steam, and this method requires extensive knowledge of heat transfer processes within a reservoir.

For this, one would need to measure rock thermal conductivity directly in situ, but this has turned out to be a daunting task that has not yet produced satisfactory results usable in practice. So scientists and practitioners turned to indirect methods, which infer rock thermal conductivity from well-logging data that provides a high-resolution picture of vertical variations in rock physical properties.

"Today, three core problems rule out any chance of measuring thermal conductivity directly within non-coring intervals. It is, firstly, the time required for measurements: petroleum engineers cannot let you put the well on hold for a long time, as it is economically unreasonable. Secondly, induced convection of drilling fluid drastically affects the results of measurements. And finally, there is the unstable shape of boreholes, which has to do with some technical aspects of measurements," Skoltech PhD student and the paper's first author Yury Meshalkin says.

Known well-log based methods can use regression equations or theoretical modelling, and both have their drawbacks having to do with data availability and nonlinearity in rock properties. Meshalkin and his colleagues pitted seven machine learning algorithms against each other in the race to reconstruct thermal conductivity from well-logging data as accurately as possible. They also chose a Lichtenecker-Asaad's theoretical model as a benchmark for this comparison.

Using real well-log data from a heavy oil field located in the Timan-Pechora Basin in northern Russia, researchers found that, among the seven machine-learning algorithms and basic multiple linear regression, Random Forest provided the most accurate well-log based predictions of rock thermal conductivity, even beating the theoretical model.

"If we look at today's practical needs and existing solutions, I would say that our best machine learning-based result is very accurate. It is difficult to give some qualitative assessment as the situation can vary and is constrained to certain oil fields. But I believe that oil producers can use such indirect predictions of rock thermal conductivity in their EOR design," Meshalkin notes.

Scientists believe that machine-learning algorithms are a promising framework for fast and effective predictions of rock thermal conductivity. These methods are more straightforward and robust and require no extra parameters outside common well-log data. Thus, they can "radically enhance the results of geothermal investigations, basin and petroleum system modelling and optimization of thermal EOR methods," the paper concludes.

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns have led to a record crash in emissions. But it will be emission levels during the recovery--in the months and years after the pandemic recedes--that matter most for how global warming plays out, according to a new Nature commentary from researchers at the University of California San Diego.

While the skies have been noticeably cleaner, countries like the U.S., Mexico, Brazil, South Africa and others have recently relaxed laws controlling pollution and vehicle energy efficiency standards.

"This trend is worrisome because policy decisions being made now about how to save economies will determine how much CO2 enters the atmosphere over the coming decade," said Ryan Hanna, lead author of the Nature piece and assistant research scientist at UC San Diego.

Some economies are already ticking upward, and so too emissions. Coal consumption in China, for example, has already returned to pre-pandemic levels.

History shows that recoveries can spur green or dirty industrial turning points

Key in determining post-pandemic emissions is how governments choose to spend stimulus monies--whether they use it to prop up fossil fuel incumbents or bolster clean energy transitions already underway, according to Hanna and co-authors David Victor, professor of international relations at UC San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy, and Yangyang Xu, assistant professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University.

Economic shocks, the authors note, can be critical industrial turning points. Past shocks have led to both increases and decreases in the growth of CO2 emissions. After the 1998 Asian financial crisis, emissions doubled largely due to growth of China's heavy manufacturing and exports, all fueled by coal. By contrast, after the global financial crash of 2008, emissions growth halved over the next decade, aided by stimulus for green technologies--up to $530 billion in 2020 USD, or 15 percent of the total global stimulus. That's promising as it shows that structural change and lower emissions are possible if governments provide support.

Whether the coming recovery is green or dirty will have an outsized effect on climate. According to the authors' analysis, this year's crash in emissions, by itself, would lead to levels of atmospheric CO2 in 2050 about 10 PPM lower than the trajectory the world was on before the pandemic. By comparison, whether the recovery is green or dirty amounts to a difference of 19 PPM in the atmosphere by 2050--nearly double the impact on the climate.

Ensuring a green recovery will require government action. Yet, government responses have so far been mixed. The European Union and South Korea remain largely committed to their respective "Green New Deals," while other governments are falling short.

The Trump Administration in March rolled back U.S. auto fuel economy rules, committing the nation to higher transport emissions--now the largest source of warming gases in the U.S. In the same month, China authorized more coal power plants than it did in all of 2019.

Indeed, many governments have signaled a narrow focus on immediate concerns of the pandemic, such as securing health, jobs and the economy, rather than protecting the planet.

That's bad news for planetary warming. As the authors note, meeting the goals of the Paris agreement--limiting warming to well below 2ºC above pre-industrial levels--would require cutting emissions by an amount similar to that delivered by the current economic catastrophe every year for the next decade.

Charting a course that protects both jobs and the climate

How do you align the public's urgent needs with the need to also limit warming? "Political leaders--and climate activists who want to help them succeed--should filter policy actions for the climate by what's politically viable," said Hanna. "In short, that means coming up with projects that deliver jobs and revenues quickly."

Investing in sectors like renewables, energy efficiency and preserving the existing feat of zero emission nuclear plants can set the economy on track and deepen cuts to future emissions. Bolstering these sectors can deliver and save hundreds of thousands of jobs.

At the start of this year, more than 250,000 people worked in solar energy in the U.S. The pandemic has since wiped out five years of job growth in that sector -- jobs that could return quickly if credible investment incentives were in place.

Investing in energy efficiency and infrastructure construction, such as erecting power lines and conducting energy retrofits for buildings and public transportation, is another large potential employer.

"The trillions devoted to stimulus, so far, have been about stabilizing economies and workers," said Victor. "With a fresh focus that looks further into the future, the next waves of spending must also help to protect the climate."

The EU Green Deal as a model for stimulus

Hanna, Victor and Xu write, "The European Green Deal is a good model for stimulus packages. It is a massive, €1-trillion (U.S. $1.1-trillion) decade-long investment plan that combines industrial growth with deep decarbonization and efficiency and has maintained political support throughout the pandemic."

Existing firms will need to be involved in a green recovery because they are ready to restart, the authors recommend. And a savvy political strategy would isolate only those companies whose actions egregiously undermine climate goals, such as conventional coal, and would ensure their workers are treated justly and retrained in new areas of employment.

The authors also recommend a sector by sector approach to decarbonizing the economy, as the policies needed to rein in the largest emitters in each sector differ.

"On our current path, emissions are likely to tick upwards, as they have after each recession since the first oil shock of the early 1970s," said Victor. "The historic drop in recent months was too hard won to be so easily lost."

In the June 11 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, a team of UCLA physicians and scientists describes the first case of immune modulation being used to cure a severe and often fatal fungal infection. The team "retuned" a 4-year-old's immune system so that it could fight off disseminated coccidioidomycosis.

The case, originally reported by UCLA in 2019, could pave the way for a new treatment for the infection, which affects hundreds of Americans each year, primarily in the Southwest, and kills approximately 40% of the people who contract it.

The technique described in the study could also suggest a new paradigm for treating other severe fungal infections, bacterial infections such as tuberculosis, and severe viral infections such as influenza and COVID-19.

"Immune modulation isn't currently part of the strategy with any of these severe infections," said Dr. Manish Butte, the report's senior author, who holds the E. Richard Stiehm Endowed Chair in Pediatric Allergy, Immunology and Rheumatology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "Our case suggests that rather than hoping to get the upper hand with more and more antibiotics or antifungals, we can have some success by combining these established approaches with the new idea of programming the patient's immune response to better fight the infection."

Each year, more than 100,000 people are infected with Coccidioides fungi, which reside in the soils of California, Arizona and West Texas. Most people who are infected are asymptomatic, and about 20,000 experience the minor respiratory illness commonly known as Valley fever. The vast majority of people with Valley fever respond well to antifungal medications, but approximately 1% of the infections progress to disseminated coccidioidomycosis, in which the infection spreads rapidly throughout the body, leading to bone and tissue damage, and in many cases death.

"Historically, severe infections have been seen as 'bad luck,'" Butte said. "Doctors haven't looked at how we can harness the immune systems of these patients to fight the infection."

According to a 2019 study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, California spends between $700 million and $900 million a year in direct and indirect costs related to the care of people infected by the cocci fungus, including more than $300 million to care for the approximately 200 people with disseminated coccidioidomycosis.

The boy who was treated by Butte and his team had previously been treated with high doses of multiple antifungal medicines, but by the time he arrived at UCLA, he could barely walk or talk and required a feeding tube to eat. When UCLA physicians homed in on the patient's immune system, they concluded that his T cells -- the white blood cells that play a key role in the body's immune response -- were failing to properly recognize the invading fungus. The T cells were responding as though the infection was a parasitic infection rather than a fungal one.

That prompted the team to supplement the boy's antifungal medications with an immune stimulator called interferon-gamma. And Dr. Maria Garcia-Lloret, a pediatric allergist and immunologist, suggested adding yet another medication, dupilumab, which was developed as a medication for allergic diseases and had never before been used to treat infections. Dupilumab is a prescription drug that has not been approved by the FDA as a treatment for disseminated coccidioidomycosis.

The combination of immune modulators restored the proper programming to the patient's T cells -- and the boy's infection went away in a month.

Chemical engineers from UNSW Sydney have developed new technology that helps convert harmful carbon dioxide emissions into chemical building blocks to make useful industrial products like fuel and plastics.

And if validated in an industrial setting and adopted on a large scale, the process could give the world breathing space as it transitions towards a green economy.

In a paper published today in the journal Advanced Energy Materials, Dr Rahman Daiyan and Dr Emma Lovell from UNSW's School of Chemical Engineering detail a way of creating nanoparticles that promote conversion of waste carbon dioxide into useful industrial components.

OPEN FLAME

The researchers, who carried out their work in the Particles and Catalysis Research Laboratory led by Scientia Professor Rose Amal, show that by making zinc oxide at very high temperatures using a technique called flame spray pyrolysis (FSP), they can create nanoparticles which act as the catalyst for turning carbon dioxide into 'syngas' - a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide used in the manufacture of industrial products. The researchers say this method is cheaper and more scalable to the requirements of heavy industry than what is available today.

"We used an open flame, which burns at 2000 degrees, to create nanoparticles of zinc oxide that can then be used to convert CO2, using electricity, into syngas," says Dr Lovell.

"Syngas is often considered the chemical equivalent of Lego because the two building blocks - hydrogen and carbon monoxide - can be used in different ratios to make things like synthetic diesel, methanol, alcohol or plastics, which are very important industrial precursors.

"So essentially what we're doing is converting CO2 into these precursors that can be used to make all these vital industrial chemicals."

CLOSING THE LOOP

In an industrial setting, an electrolyser containing the FSP-produced zinc oxide particles could be used to convert the waste CO2 into useful permutations of syngas, says Dr Daiyan.

"Waste CO2 from say, a power plant or cement factory, can be passed through this electrolyser, and inside we have our flame-sprayed zinc oxide material in the form of an electrode. When we pass the waste CO2 in, it is processed using electricity and is released from an outlet as syngas in a mix of CO and hydrogen," he says.

The researchers say in effect, they are closing the carbon loop in industrial processes that create harmful greenhouse gases. And by making small adjustments to the way the nanoparticles are burned by the FSP technique, they can determine the eventual mix of the syngas building blocks produced by the carbon dioxide conversion.

"At the moment you generate syngas by using natural gas - so from fossil fuels," Dr Daiyan says. "But we're using waste carbon dioxide and then converting it to syngas in a ratio depending on which industry you want to use it in."

For example, a one to one ratio between the carbon monoxide and hydrogen lends itself to syngas that can be used as fuel. But a ratio of four parts carbon monoxide and one part hydrogen is suitable for the creation of plastics, Dr Daiyan says.

CHEAP AND ACCESSIBLE

In choosing zinc oxide as their catalyst, the researchers have ensured that their solution has remained a cheaper alternative to what has been previously attempted in this space.

"Past attempts have used expensive materials such as palladium, but this is the first instance where a very cheap and abundant material, mined locally in Australia, has been successfully applied to the problem of waste carbon dioxide conversion," Dr Daiyan says.

Dr Lovell adds that what also makes this method appealing is using the FSP flame system to create and control these valuable materials.

"It means it can be used industrially, it can be scaled, it's super quick to make the materials and very effective," she says.

"We don't need to worry about complicated synthesis techniques that use really expensive metals and precursors - we can burn it and in 10 minutes have these particles ready to go. And by controlling how we burn it, we can control those ratios of desired syngas building blocks."

SCALING UP

While the duo have already built an electrolyser that has been tested with waste CO2 gas that contains contaminants, scaling the technology up to the point where it could convert all of the waste carbon dioxide emitted by a power plant is still a way down the track.

"The idea is that we can take a point source of CO2, such as a coal fired power plant, a gas power plant, or even a natural gas mine where you liberate a huge amount of pure CO2 and we can essentially retrofit this technology at the back end of these plants. Then you could capture that produced CO2 and convert it into something that is hugely valuable to industry," says Dr Lovell.

The group's next project will be to test their nanomaterials in a flue gas setting to ensure they are tolerant to the harsh conditions and other chemicals found in industrial waste gas.

Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) have identified how certain gene mutations cause amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. The pathway identified by the researchers may also be responsible for a certain form of dementia related to ALS. The finding could offer potential new approaches for treating this devastating condition, which causes progressive, fatal paralysis and sometimes mental deterioration similar to Alzheimer's disease. Their discovery was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and included collaborators from Harvard University, University of Auckland, King's College London, and Northwestern University.

More than 5,000 Americans are diagnosed with ALS every year, a condition that is usually fatal and has no cure. Patients with ALS slowly lose the ability to move their muscles, leading to problems with basic functions such as breathing and swallowing. About half of ALS patients also develop dementia. Genetic studies of families with a predisposition to develop ALS have shown that the condition can be associated with certain gene mutations. Some of these mutations involve the gene UBQLN2 which regulates the disposal of misfolded "garbage" from the body's cells. Until now, researchers did not fully understand how UBQLN2 mutations interfere with this pathway and cause ALS.

"We mapped out the process by which ubiquilin-2 (UBQLN2) gene mutations disrupt an important recycling pathway that cells use to get rid of their trash," said Mervyn Monteiro, PhD, Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology, who is affiliated with the UMSOM's Center for Biomedical Engineering and Technology (BioMET) at UMSOM. "Without this recycling, misfolded proteins build up in the nerve cell and become toxic, eventually destroying the cell. This destruction could lead to neurodegenerative disorders like ALS."

To investigate how UBQLN2 mutations cause ALS, Dr. Monteiro's group used both human cells and UBQLN2-mutant mouse models for their investigations. The mouse models, which they described in a 2016 PNAS publication, mimic the progression of the disease in people who inherit these gene mutations.

Dr. Monteiro's group first removed the UBQLN2 gene from human cells and found it completely stalled the recycling pathway. They then reintroduced either the normal gene or one of five gene mutations into the cells. They found that reintroduction of normal UBQLN2 restored the recycling pathway while all five of the gene mutations failed to restart the pathway.

Using the mouse model, Dr. Monteiro and his colleagues outlined the reason for the pathway disruption in the presence of gene mutations. They found that the mice with the gene mutations had reduced levels of a certain protein called ATP6v1g1, which is an essential part of a pump that acidifies the cell's trash container in order to initiate the breakdown and recycling process.

"Our new findings are exciting because similar acidification defects have been found in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Down syndrome," Dr. Monteiro said. "This suggests that restoration of the defect could have broad implications for not only treating ALS, but possibly other neurodegenerative diseases as well."

The research study was supported by grants from the Packard Center for ALS Research at Johns Hopkins, the ALS Association, and the National Institutes of Health (grant number: R01-NS100008).

"The BioMET research team led by Dr. Monteiro continues to make important advances in understanding the mechanisms that give rise to ALS," said Dean E. Albert Reece, MD, PhD, MBA, who is also Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, UM Baltimore, and the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor, University of Maryland School of Medicine. "Future treatments and preventive measures for this devastating disease would not be possible without this foundational work."

San Antonio, Texas (June 8, 2020) - Scientists at Texas Biomedical Research Institute's (Texas Biomed) Southwest National Primate Research Center (SNPRC) recently published findings indicating the baboon could prove to be a relevant model to test therapeutics and interventions for neurodegenerative diseases, such as early stage Alzheimer's and related dementias. The scientists observed a steep age-related cognitive decline in baboons about 20-years-old, which is the equivalent of a 60-year-old human. The team of scientists, led by Dr. Marcel Daadi, Associate Professor at Texas Biomed's SNPRC, published their findings in the May issue of Aging . These studies are a first step in developing the baboon as an appropriate animal model for early stage Alzheimer's disease.

According to the Alzheimer's Association, more than five million Americans are living with Alzheimer's, and one in three seniors die from the disease or related dementias. Dr. Daadi explained that early detection of age-associated cognitive dysfunction is crucial and may provide an understanding of the breakdown of brain systems, leading to better interventions.

"We don't know how Alzheimer's disease starts, and if you are trying to treat a patient already with advanced disease, it is nearly impossible to treat them because of the significant loss in brain cells" said Dr. Daadi. "If we detect early on pathology in the brain then we can target interventions to prevent it from progressing, and we are in a better position to help. This is the first time a naturally-occurring model for early-stage Alzheimer's has been reported. This model could be relevant to test promising drugs, to better understand how and why the disease develops and to study the areas of the brain affected in order to determine how can we impact these pathways."

Aging is currently irreversible and a significant reason for the gradual deterioration of general health and function. Neurodegenerative diseases, in particular, are related to the aging of brain cells and synaptic loss, which is a loss of the lines of communications inside the brain. As noted in the paper, humans and nonhuman primates (NHP) share many similarities, including age-dependent changes in gene expression and a decline in neural and immune functions. Previous studies have pinpointed the prefrontal cortex (PFC) of the brain as one of the regions most affected by age. The PFC plays an important role in working memory function, self-regulatory and goal-directed behaviors, which are all vulnerable to aging. To observe whether these PFC functions are impacted by aging in baboons and determine whether the baboons at varying ages could discern and learn new tasks, Dr. Daadi and his team separated the baboons into two groups based on age (adult group and aged group). Four cognitive tests were performed to observe novel learning, motor function and memory and shape association.

"What we found is that aged baboons lagged significantly in performance among all four tests for attention, learning and memory" Dr. Daadi said. "The delay or inability to collect rewards (response latency) also increased in older baboons, suggesting a decline in motivation and/or motor skills. The team then used a more complex task requiring integration of several cognitive processes and demonstrated that aged subjects actually have deficiencies in attention, learning and memory. Human studies have suggested a precipitous decline in brain systems function and cognition with 60 years as the potential breakpoint. These findings are consistent with our results."

Rodents have been the primary lab model to test therapeutic interventions for neurodegenerative diseases. However, mice do not always reflect human processes, so while this animal model has been integral to understanding neurodegenerative disease processes, it has not proven as effective in translating promising therapies to the clinic.

"The failure rate in clinical trials of Alzheimer's disease therapeutics is extremely high at about 99.6%, and we need to change that" said Dr. Daadi.

A nonhuman primate, or monkey, which is more similar to humans in terms of genetics, physiology, cognition, emotion and social behavior, could prove to be a more effective model to test therapeutic interventions.

Dr. Daadi and his team are moving forward and plan to submit a National Institutes of Health grant to allow for further research. This published study was funded by the Marmion Family Fund, the Worth Family Fund, The Perry and Ruby Stevens Charitable Foundation and The Robert J., Jr. and Helen C. Kleberg Foundation, The William and Ella Owens Medical Research Foundation, the NIH Primate Center Base grant (Office of Research Infrastructure Programs/OD P51 OD011133), the National Institute on Aging R56 AG059284.

"Our next step is to investigate the neuropathologies behind this cognitive decline and perform imaging to understand what happens to the neural connections and determine where defects may be," he said. "We will also look at biomarkers that can give us an idea of why this steep decline is happening. All this data will enable us to further characterize the baboon as a naturally-occurring model that may prove useful for testing early therapeutic interventions."

A new study shows that surface disturbance from energy development can hinder mule deer migrations when it exceeds 3 percent.

Researchers from the University of Wyoming and Western Ecosystems Technology used 15 years of movement data collected from GPS-collared mule deer in western Wyoming to evaluate how much disturbance mule deer could withstand during migration. The study was conducted in the Pinedale Anticline -- the sixth-largest natural gas field in the nation and home to one of the largest deer herds in West.

The findings were published in the Journal of Wildlife Management.

Researchers used 145 migrations from 56 individual deer to examine disturbance effects at various scales. Results consistently showed that mule deer use of migration corridors steeply declined when surface disturbance from roads and well pads surpassed 3 percent. Mule deer were able to migrate through areas where surface disturbance was lower.

"Better understanding the relationship between surface disturbance and migratory behavior can help managers identify trade-offs and potential mitigation measures associated with mineral leasing and energy development that overlap with the migratory routes of big game," research biologist and co-author Hall Sawyer says.

The authors note that similar disturbance thresholds likely vary across development types -- such as wind, solar and residential - as well as geographic regions and species.

"There is a growing need to understand and predict how our migratory animals respond to disturbed landscapes, so we hope to expand this type of work in the future," says Jerod Merkle, who is the Knobloch Professor of Migration and Conservation Ecology at UW.

Mallory Lambert, a UW graduate student and study co-author, says the next steps will be identifying disturbance thresholds for migrating pronghorn and wintering mule deer.

In breeding programs aimed at conserving animals from small or isolated populations, scientists must balance the competing needs of adding genetic diversity and avoiding the introduction of harmful genes. This makes for a delicate task of boosting diversity in the endangered Pacific pocket mouse, the focus of a long-running conservation breeding program undertaken by San Diego Zoo Global. There are just three remaining populations of this species in the wild, all of which are small and isolated from each other on the Southern California coast--preventing beneficial interbreeding and making inbreeding more likely.

Drawing on genetic data from six generations of Pacific pocket mice in this program, a new study has tracked reproductive success relative to a mouse's ancestral population. The findings, published this month in the journal Conservation Genetics, indicate that genetic diversity should be introduced from the larger, genetically healthier populations of Pacific pocket mice into a smaller, less healthy population--and not the reverse.

"These results reinforce the idea that, when there is a large difference in fitness of populations, gene flow should be unidirectional from the more fit to less fit population, in order to avoid the introduction of deleterious alleles into healthier populations," said Aryn Wilder, Ph.D., a senior researcher in Conservation Genetics at San Diego Zoo Global, who is the study's lead author.

The damaging effects of genetic load--the total of harmful mutations in the genome--are too rarely considered in management planning, said Wilder, but should be a central concern.

Using the number of offspring as a measure of fitness, the study examined the reproductive success of more than 300 Pacific pocket mice. Descendants of the smallest and least genetically diverse population had the lowest reproductive success, the researchers found. Interbreeding with the larger, more diverse populations increased the fitness of their offspring relative to this small population, but came at a cost to the larger population.

Weighing about the same as three pennies, Pacific pocket mice are the smallest mouse species in North America. They get their name from pouches in their cheeks, used to carry food and nesting materials. Endemic only to coastal scrublands, dunes and rivers within about 2 miles of the ocean, the Pacific pocket mouse's range once stretched from Los Angeles to the Tijuana River Valley. Because of human encroachment and habitat degradation, their numbers dropped sharply after 1932. In their native habitat, they disperse the seeds of native plants, and their underground burrows encourage plant growth.

Although the species was believed to be extinct for two decades, Pacific pocket mice were rediscovered in the early 1990s. By then, their range had been reduced to just three populations: one on the Dana Point headlands in Orange County, California and two on Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton. Two of the populations rarely exceed 50 individuals.

In 2011, the Pocket Mouse Conservation Breeding Facility was created at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park to increase their numbers. In 2017, San Diego Zoo Global and partner organizations established a new population of Pacific pocket mice in Orange County's Laguna Coast Wilderness Park, where they began to breed without human assistance.

In addition to bolstering the species and maintaining high genetic diversity, the breeding program provides the added benefit of increasing the understanding of how to better manage genetic diversity of populations in the wild.

"This study provides direct data to help us understand how populations will respond to assisted migration," said Wilder. "Boosting genetic diversity by introducing genes from outside populations may help prevent inbreeding and increase fitness, to better enable wild populations to be self-sustaining."