Culture

If you live in a small community where fishing is your primary source of income and nutrition, it's tough to hear you might have to slow, stop or change your activities to more sustainably manage your fish stocks.

Sustainable fishing is even more difficult when the recovery takes a significant amount of time and this restraint puts you at a seeming economic disadvantage. Such limitations and uncertainty are enough that would-be sustainable fishers may slip back into unsustainable practices.

"I think it is always hard to convince people to do things differently than they have in the past, especially when it might incur some short-term cost," said Gavin McDonald, a researcher at UC Santa Barbara's Environmental Market Solutions Lab (emLab), a subsidiary of the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. "It is certainly hard for a fisher when they can no longer fish in a certain area, or when they can no longer use a particular gear type."

And yet widespread changes to fishing practices are necessary if the ocean is to remain a viable source of food and income for coastal communities. For some it may mean fishing less aggressively to allow stocks to replenish; for others it may mean using different gear to avoid unnecessary bycatch and damaging valuable habitat. Still others might need to adhere to new reporting requirements to track the amount of fish being extracted from their waters. These new behaviors challenge the standard practices and even the social norms of small fishing communities. So how can the necessary changes be encouraged, even in the face of the initial drawbacks?

This was the question that McDonald, fellow Bren School and emLab researchers Molly Wilson, Michaela Clemence and Steve Gaines, and collaborators from other partner institutions sought to answer. And, in a paper published in the journal Conservation Biology, they've found an effective strategy to help fill the gap: social marketing.

Not to be confused with social media marketing or sustainable marketing, social marketing emphasizes the public good first. You may have encountered such messages in ads featuring Smokey the Bear or those that call attention to the dangers of drunk driving. According to the researchers, social marketing techniques "can be employed in these cases to help managers overcome the short-term challenges associated with implementing new resource management regimes by adjusting social norms and improving community perception of management interventions."

Specifically, the researchers investigated the impact of a program called Fish Forever, which aims to help small-scale coastal fishers sustain and manage their own resources. Forty-one Fish Forever sites in Indonesia, the Philippines and coastal Brazil, operating between 2014 and 2017, were assessed.

"The program's strategy involved 'pride' campaigns aimed at increasing pride and encouraging stewardship of unique local natural resources, and shifting the social perception of fishing from competitive to cooperative," said coauthor Wilson. The campaign took the form of community focused messages, including parades, banners, radio and TV. The community-led program also provided managers with decision-support tools to help their communities establish TURF-reserves -- areas endowed with Territorial Use Rights for Fishing -- in combination with No-Take Zones, both of which were meant to improve the local biological and socioeconomic conditions.

The team surveyed households in the communities to determine whether support for sustainable fishing practices had changed during program implementation, and how well the communities adopted these practices.

While measures for specific indicators differed by country, study results showed generally positive results across all the communities in terms of their support for sustainable fishing.

"This suggests that Fish Forever is creating the social conditions needed for shifting behaviors toward more sustainable fishing practices," said coauthor Clemence. Importantly, even when the values of ecological and livelihood indicators were negative or neutral compared to the initial measurements (in line with the short-term losses that are expected by the shift to sustainable fishing strategies), the researchers found increased community support.

The researchers credit the scalable and customizable approach that the Fish Forever program offers each community, which gives locals a chance to identify their specific goals and the management practices they will use to meet these goals.

"For example, the mascots used in each pride campaign differ between sites to represent an important target species," McDonald said. Additionally, he noted, sites may choose to implement different types of management controls depending on what is most appropriate for their fishery, and to establish TURF-reserve boundaries based on community objectives and the biological movement of the target species.

"The intervention engages fishers throughout the entire design process to ensure that new regulations are designed to help them eventually meet their goals," McDonald said.

Despite longstanding popular belief, bicycle lanes can actually improve business. At worst, the negative impact on sales and employment is minimal, according to a new study from Portland State's Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC).

The report is part of a larger National Street Improvements Study, conducted by Portland State University, with support from consulting firm Bennett Midland and the cycling-advocacy nonprofit PeopleForBikes. The study was funded by The Summit Foundation and the National Institute for Transportation and Communities.

Researchers studied 14 corridors in 6 cities -- Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Memphis, Minneapolis and Indianapolis -- and found such improvements had either positive or non-significant impacts on sales and employment. Essentially, adding improvements like bike lanes largely boosted business and employment in the retail and food service sectors.

"I think that it is very significant that we found that positive business outcomes to the food service and retail industries on these corridors are persistent, even when we looked at different data metrics on employment or sales or when different analytical methods are utilized," said Jenny Liu, associate professor in the Toulan School of Urban Studies & Planning.

Past studies examined the effects of street improvement corridors within specific cities, but this study is among the first to apply consistent and robust analytical approaches across multiple corridors and multiple cities.

The findings also provide policymakers and planners with an analytical framework and further evidence to support investment in non-motorized transportation infrastructure.

"The Street Improvement Study supports with data what we have seen in many communities: adding bicycle infrastructure boosts a neighborhood's economic vitality," said Zoe Kircos, director of grants and partnerships at PeopleForBikes. "Our collaboration with Portland State University and Bennett Midland on this research gives us more resources to share with cities across the U.S. that are eager to make bicycling safer and easier for everyone."

Liu added that the partnership between PSU, PeopleForBikes and Bennett Midland contributed significantly to the end products that are directly targeted to planners and policymakers. The study produced in-depth reports for Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Memphis, Minneapolis and Indianapolis.

Nationally, the study found the food service industry benefits most often from the addition of transportation infrastructure.

Even in cases where a motor vehicle travel lane or parking was removed to make room for a bike lane, food sales and employment tended to go up, according to the report.

"There is tremendous potential to expand on what we learned in this research project to additional cities and corridors, and to provide policymakers with the opportunity to evaluate street improvement projects before implementation or to collect additional economic/business metrics before and after implementation," Liu said.

Grown around the world, sweet potatoes are an important source of nutrition particularly in sub-Saharan African and Asian diets. Sweet potatoes are especially significant to sub-Saharan Africa as a source of Vitamin A, a nutrient commonly deficient in the region. While China currently produces the most sweet potatoes by country, sub-Saharan Africa has more land devoted to sweetpotatoes and continues to expand production. Farmers elsewhere are also increasingly growing sweetpotatoes.

Despite the importance of sweet potato, little is known about the sweet potato microbiome. "A plant's microbiome profoundly impacts its health and development," explains Brooke Bissinger, an entomologist who recently published a study on sweet potatoes in Phytobiomes Journal. "We sought to better understand the sweet potato microbiomes by characterizing it within and between actual working farms."

Bissinger and her colleagues work for AgBiome which was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to identify and develop beneficial microbes that would protect sweet potatoes in the developing world from insects. They used this opportunity to characterize the sweet potato microbiome in order to inform their project and provide information for other researchers interested in similar work.

They found that, similar to more popularly studied crops, the sweet potato microbiome follows the two-step model of development.

"We demonstrated a striking variability in the microorganisms that make up the sweet potato microbiome across a single farm. Despite this variability, we found commonalities in how the microbiome develops across fields within a single sweet potato farm and across two farms in the same region," says Charles Pepe-Ranney, microbial genomics data scientist and lead author of the paper.

This is the first study to characterize the sweet potato microbiome using modern, next-generation sequencing technology--an important first step towards leveraging the microbiome to improve sweet potato yield.

"Also of note, our study suggests that the sweet potato presents a strong ecological challenge to its endophytes (microbes that live inside a plant)," says Pepe-Ranney. "If we are going to develop a sweet potato endophyte that protects sweetpotatoes from pests, for example, this sweet potato-beneficial endophyte must be able to withstand the strong ecological pressure from the sweet potato itself."

For more information, read "Surveying the Sweetpotato Rhizosphere, Endophyte, and Surrounding Soil Microbiomes at Two North Carolina Farms Reveals Underpinnings of Sweetpotato Microbiome Community Assembly" published in the March issue of the open access Phytobiomes Journal.

Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this commentary article the authors Phei Er Saw and Shanping Jiang from Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, People's Republic of China consider the significance of interdisciplinary integration in academic research and application.

In the light of the rapid development of science and technology, the authors consider the lingering question of what does academia currently lack? The answer according to the authors may be "effective integration" of research. Scientific problems are complicated and often interdisciplinary, which suggests that in-depth collaboration among experts in various fields is vital. Interdisciplinary research is the essence of social development and innovation and so is gaining a broader perspective in current problem-solving practice. The mission of interdisciplinary integration is to break down barriers, reorient insights, and to produce significant breakthroughs in academic research.

Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, the authors conclude their commentary by noting that regardless of domain, effective integration of diverse scientific disciplines, incorporating perspectives of academia, industry, governmental organization, and rapid translation of these discoveries to clinics is essential for realizing the potential of the next era of biomedical research. Personalized medicine underlines the role of scientific collaboration as a major innovation driver in modern medical research, however, such scientific collaborations are also subject to relevant challenges because interests, values, and aims often significantly differ between academia and industry. What can be learned from outbreaks, such as COVID-19, are that the challenges in various domains require the cooperation of experts from multiple fields. Co-operation creates innovation, innovation increases significance, significance results in impacts and impacts shift the paradigms of life.
BIO Integration is fully open access journal which will allow for the rapid dissemination of multidisciplinary views driving the progress of modern medicine.

As part of its mandate to help bring interesting work and knowledge from around the world to a wider audience, BIOI will actively support authors through open access publishing and through waiving author fees in its first years. Also, publication support for authors whose first language is not English will be offered in areas such as manuscript development, English language editing and artwork assistance.

UT Southwestern Medical Center scientists have discovered a protein that works with others during development to put the brakes on cell division in the heart, they report today in Nature. The findings could eventually be used to reverse this developmental block and help heart cells regenerate, offering a whole new way to treat a variety of conditions in which heart muscle becomes damaged, including heart failure caused by viruses, toxins, high blood pressure, or heart attacks.

Current pharmaceutical treatments for heart failure - including ACE inhibitors and beta blockers - center on trying to stop a vicious cycle of heart muscle loss as strain further damages remaining heart muscle, causing more cells to die, explains UT Southwestern physician-researcher Hesham A. Sadek, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of internal medicine molecular biology, and biophysics. There are no existing treatments to rebuild heart muscle.

Nine years ago, Sadek and his colleagues discovered that mouse hearts can regenerate if they're damaged in the first few days of life, spurred by the division of cardiomyocytes, the cells responsible for a heart's contractile force. However, this capacity is completely lost by 7 days old, an abrupt turning point in which division of these cells dramatically slows and the cells themselves enlarge. The reasons why these cells gradually slow and stop dividing has been unclear.

Sadek and his team discovered in 2013 that a protein called Meis1, which falls into a category known as transcription factors that regulate the activity of genes, plays a key role in stopping heart cell division. However, he explains, although deleting this gene in mice extends the window of heart cell division, this effect is transient - heart cells missing this gene eventually slow and stop their multiplication.

Consequently, the researchers wondered whether there were redundant mechanisms in place that stop heart cell division even when Meis1 is absent. Toward that end, they looked to see what other transcription factors might track activity with Meis1 in heart cells as they rapidly divide and then slow to a halt in the days after birth. They quickly discovered one called Hoxb13 that fit the bill. Other proteins in the Hox family, Sadek notes, have been shown to act as chaperones to Meis1 in other types of cells, ferrying Meis1 into the cell nucleus.

To better understand Hoxb13's role in heart cells, the researchers genetically engineered mice in which the gene that codes for Hoxb13 was deleted. These mice behaved much like those in which just the gene for Meis1 was deleted - the window for heart cell rapid division was increased but still closed within a few weeks. When the researchers shut off Hoxb13 in adult mouse hearts, their cell division had a brief resurgence, enough to prevent progressive deterioration after an induced heart attack but not enough to promote significant recovery.

However, when the researchers deleted both the genes for Meis1 and Hoxb13, heart cells in these mice appeared to revert to an earlier stage in development, both decreasing in size and multiplying more. After an induced heart attack, these mice had a rapid improvement in the amount of blood each beat could expel from the heart. Their heart function had almost returned to normal.

With clear evidence that Meis1 and Hoxb13 work together to stop heart cell division in the days after birth, Sadek and his colleagues looked for what might in turn regulate these proteins. Their experiments suggest that the answer is calcineurin, a protein that's responsible for regulating the activity of other proteins by removing their phosphate groups.

Because calcineurin plays a key role in a variety of diseases and other medical conditions, such as rheumatic arthritis, schizophrenia, diabetes, and organ transplant, several drugs already exist on the market that target this protein. Conceivably, says Sadek, other drugs could be developed to directly target Meis1 and Hoxb13. Researchers may eventually be able to develop strategies to restart heart cell division through a single drug or combinations that target any part of this regulatory pathway, he adds.

"By building up the story of the fundamental mechanisms of heart cell division and what blocks it," Sadek says, "we are now significantly closer to being able to harness these pathways to save lives."

Over the course of their journey from the open fields to the produce displays at grocery stores, fresh vegetables and fruits can sometimes become contaminated by microorganisms. These items can then spoil other produce, spreading the contamination further and increasing the number of food items that can cause illnesses.

To prevent cross-contamination between fresh produce, researchers at Texas A&M University have created a coating that can be applied to food-contact surfaces like conveyor belts, rollers and collection buckets. In addition to being germicidal, the researchers have designed their coating to be extremely water-repellent. The researchers said without water, bacteria can't stick or multiply on surfaces, thereby drastically curbing contamination from one piece of produce to another.

"Consuming contaminated raw foods causes hundreds of people to get sick annually, and so food contamination is not only a huge health concern but is also a significant economic burden," said Mustafa Akbulut, associate professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering. "In our study, we show that our new dual-function coating -- one that can both repel and kill bacteria -- can greatly mitigate bacterial spread, averting cross-contamination."

The results of thestudy are in the February issue of the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

Foodborne illnesses can be caused by a whole swarm of pathogens that include multiple strains of viruses and bacteria. To remedy any infection after harvest, fresh produce is generally washed and then sanitized in powerful antimicrobials, like hydrogen peroxide or acetic acid.

However, bacteria can still escape unscathed if they manage to hide in hard-to-reach places on the skins of fruits and vegetables. Also, if the number of bacteria is large enough, they can form protective sheaths, called biofilms, that further protect them from the action of sanitizers.

Contaminated produce items can spread the pathogens either directly, by touching other food items, or indirectly, via food-contact surfaces. Currently, there are several ways to prevent indirect transmission ranging from antimicrobial surface coatings to antifouling polymer surfaces that act like springs to push bacteria away. But the researchers said these approaches, although efficient at first, can lose their effects over time for a variety of reasons.

To overcome the obstacles posed by the current technologies, Akbulut and his team proceeded to create an antimicrobial surface coating that is also extremely hydrophobic. They noted the coating's water-repelling property can help food-contact surfaces retain their germicidal action much longer.

"Most bacteria can only survive in an aqueous environment," said Akbulut. "If surfaces are superhydrophobic, then water, and along with it most of the bacteria will be repelled away. With fewer bacteria around, less germicides are used up, increasing the overall lifetime of the coating."

To make their dual-function coating, Akbulut and his team started with an aluminum sheet, a metal commonly used in the food industry for contact surfaces. Onto the surface of the metal, they chemically attached a thin layer of a compound called silica using high heat. Then, with this layer as a substrate, they added a mixture of silica and a naturally occurring germicidal protein found in tears and egg white called lysozyme.

Together, the silica-aluminum layer bound to the silica-lysozyme layer made a coating that had a rough texture when viewed at microscopic scales. The researchers noted that this submicroscopic roughness, or the tiny bumps and crevices on the coating, is key to superhydrophobicity.

"In general, if you increase roughness, the hydrophobicity of a material increases, but there is a limit," said Shuhao Liu, a graduate student in the College of Engineering and the primary author of the study. "If the coating is too rough, bacteria can once again hide behind crevices and contaminate. So, we tweaked the proportion of silica and lysozyme so that the roughness yielded the best possible hydrophobicity without compromising the coating's overall function."

When their superhydrophobic, lysozyme-infused coating was fine-tuned and ready, the researchers tested if it was effective at curbing the growth of two strains of disease-causing bacteria, Salmonella typhimurium and Listeria innocua. Upon examination, they found that the number of bacteria on these surfaces was 99.99% lesser than that on bare surfaces.

Despite the high efficacy of their coating in preventing bacterial spread, the researchers said that more investigation is needed to determine if the coating works equally well for mitigating viral cross-contamination. Although longer-lasting than other coatings, they noted that their coating too would need to be reapplied after a certain amount of use. Thus, as a next step, Akbulut and his team are working on developing more permanent, dual functionality coatings.

"Our goal is to create smart surfaces that can avert any kind of pathogen from attaching and multiplying," Akbulut said. "In this regard, we have developed surface coatings that can prevent bacteria from collecting on surfaces, which is one of the major reasons for cross-contamination. We are now working with researchers in agriculture to take our invention from bench to practice."

Most vehicles today come with their fair share of bells and whistles, ranging from adaptive cruise-control features to back-up cameras. These advanced driver-assistance systems, or ADAS, are in place to make driving easier and safer. However, increasing evidence shows that older seniors, who are also an age group at higher risk for motor vehicle crashes, do not use many of these driver-assistance technologies.

In a new study, research partners from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute and Texas A&M University have found that older adults are more likely to use ADAS if they are taught how to use these technologies through interactive videos rather than through manuals or live demonstrations. They also reported that once ADAS-trained, older adults find it easier to access and use driver-assistance technologies without compromising their attention on the road.

"Older adults have a higher rate of vehicle crashes because of degradations in physical, mental and motor capabilities," said Maryam Zahabi, assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and director of the human-system interaction (HSI) laboratory. "With ADAS, some of the mental workload related to driving can be taken off, and we've shown that instructional videos are the best way to introduce ADAS to seniors. We hope that this insight will lead to better video-based training materials for this age group so that senior safety while driving is enhanced."

Their findings were published in the January issue of the journal Applied Ergonomics.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in 2016, 18% of all motor vehicle crashes involved people 65 years and older. With the population of seniors expected to increase in the decades to come, the number of people vulnerable to vehicle crashes is also estimated to increase proportionately.

"Think of the risk for motor crashes as a U-shaped curve," Zahabi said. "Following the shape of the letter 'U', the chances of crashes among younger adults and teens is very high. Then with age, the risk for crashes lowers and remains at a small, relatively constant value until about 60 years, after which it shoots up once again."

Risk of a vehicle crash among seniors is largely related to the fact that they find it difficult to perform multiple activities while driving, for example, starting the adaptive cruise control while still paying attention to the road and looking up to see what is the acceptable speed limit. While ADAS is designed to relieve some of the driving-related tasks, these technologies need to be introduced to seniors in a manner that is conducive to learning at their age, Zahabi said.

Ashley Shortz, a graduate student researcher from the NeuroErgonomics Laboratory at Texas A&M, narrowed down four main ways to provide ADAS instructions -- manuals, videos, driving simulators and live demonstrations from an instructor, based on prior research and existing training best practices. However, little is known about which one of these methods best fit seniors.

"More importantly, while there is substantial evidence that men and women adopt different learning strategies, research on ADAS design and training delivery methods have largely overlooked such gender differences," saidRanjana Mehta, associate professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and director of the NeuroErgonomics Laboratory.

To address this, the researchers included 10 male and 10 female drivers, ages 58-68 for their study. For this age group, the team concentrated on video-based and demonstration-based ADAS training rather than manuals or driving simulators. Their choice was guided by prior studies showing that drivers don't read detailed instructions from manuals or have easy access to driving simulators.

After receiving training for either adaptive cruise control or the lane-keeping assist system, which are both popular ADAS technologies, the participants' driving performance was evaluated in a laboratory-housed driving simulator that provided an immersive experience of driving along a roadway.

Then, while the drivers switched between ADAS and manual control, the researchers kept track of where the drivers directed their gaze and the activity in the part of the brain that regulates attention and mental workload, among other things.

The team found that for both male and female drivers, video-based training was more effective than demonstration-based training for introducing ADAS technologies to seniors. However, the researchers also found some subtle gender differences.

"We were surprised to find that while male drivers were faster at activating ADAS, they were also the most distracted by it," Zahabi said. "So, from a neurological standpoint, older female drivers were more efficient at using ADAS technologies and reducing their mental workload after video-based training."

The researchers noted that more comprehensive studies involving a larger number of older adults, a broader age range of participants and a wider option of driving scenarios still need to be done. They said that these studies might shed light on other gender-based differences that may have not been uncovered in their present study.

"This finding is important as it not only emphasizes how training methods impact different groups of people, but also provides the foundation to develop more equitable, and thus more effective, training paradigms" Mehta said.

But even if preliminary, Zahabi said that their results still indicate why videos work best for teaching ADAS to seniors.

"Videos, we think, are effective because they can be paused, rewound and reviewed multiple times, giving seniors a sense of control over what they are learning and at what pace," Zahabi said. "Our work does not diminish the importance of manuals and other forms of instructional materials, instead our results challenge the way we normally think about communicating ADAS technology-related information to seniors."

The results of their work have important real-world implications.

"These results and others from the project have already been shared with driver education and training agencies throughout the United States and abroad to aid in the design of curriculum for all ages. This was a great opportunity for work conducted at Texas A&M to impact driver safety," said Michael Manser, senior research scientist for the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.

In a study published in Nature Sustainability, an ecosystem scientist and an agricultural economist outline how to develop a more sustainable land management system through data collection and stakeholder buy-in.

Bruno Basso, professor in the College of Natural Science at Michigan State University, and John Antle, professor of Applied Economics at Oregon State University, believe the path begins with digital agriculture -- or, the integration of big data into crop and farmland usage.

Digital agriculture, Basso says, is where agriculture, science, policy and education intersect. Putting that data to use requires an effective balancing of competing economic and social interests while minimizing trade-offs.

Technologies like genetic modification and crop production automation help produce more food than we need to survive. And while the modern food system is a monument to human ingenuity and innovation, it is not without problems.

"Agriculture's contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution and biodiversity loss show that major agricultural systems are on a largely unsustainable trajectory," Basso says. "And as the population increases, energy demands and pollution will scale accordingly."

Basso says that while policymakers, farmers and environmental groups are all speaking, they are not necessarily listening.

"There are too many barriers, too many competing interests," Basso says. "We need to bring people to the table and design a system that works for everyone -- farmers, lawmakers, society and future generations."

To meet this challenge, the researchers proposed a two-step process. The initial step focuses on the design of a sustainable framework -- with goals and objectives -- guided and quantified by digital agriculture technologies. Implementation, the second step, involves increased public-private investment in technologies like digital agriculture, and a focus on applicable, effective policy.

This paper links advancements in agronomic sciences to the critical role policymakers must play in implementation and setting the agenda for sustainability in agriculture.

"It does no good to design a policy that the farmer will ignore," Basso says. "Policymakers must make use of digital agriculture to help drive policy. Go to the farmers and say, 'we will help you make these transitions, and we will help you transform your poorly performing and unstable field areas with financial support.'"

He recommends targeted tax incentives and subsidies to support farmers working toward a more sustainable system.

If the objective is to increase biodiversity, to reduce nitrogen fertilizer use or to grow less resource-intensive bioenergy perennials, incentivization is key.

The researchers' analysis showed that if nitrogen fertilizer applications were based on demand and yield stability instead of uniform application, usage in the Midwest could be reduced by 36% with significant reductions in groundwater contamination and carbon dioxide emissions.

Basso says that we need to make these decisions as a society - and to brunt the cost as a society. What farmers do on their land today will affect their neighbor's grandchildren in 30 years.

"Making use of digital agriculture is about breaking bread and creating a sustainable agricultural system. Let's bring everyone together," Basso said.

Not long ago, the azure waters of the Caribbean contained healthy and pristine coral reef environments dominated by the reef-building corals that provide home to one-third of the biodiversity in the region.

But the Caribbean reefs of today pale in comparison to those that existed even just a generation ago. Since researchers began intensively studying these reefs in the 1970s, about one half of Caribbean corals have died. The iconic elkhorn and staghorn corals that once dominated Caribbean reefs have been hardest hit, with only 20% of their populations remaining today.

Although researchers believe climate change, fishing and pollution are to blame, the lack of baseline data prior to the 1970s has made it hard to determine the precise reasons for these coral die offs. ASU researcher Katie Cramer wanted to document when corals first began dying to better understand the root causes of coral loss.

Now, in a new paper in Science Advances, Cramer has combined fossil data, historical records, and underwater survey data to reconstruct the abundance of staghorn and elkhorn corals over the past 125,000 years. She finds that these corals first began declining in the 1950s and 1960s, earlier than previously thought. This timing is decades before climate change impacts, indicating that local human impacts like fishing and land-clearing set the stage for the widespread coral declines that are now accelerating in response to warming oceans.

"I am interested in going back to the scene of the crime when humans first began to significantly impact coral reefs centuries ago, to understand when, why and how much reefs have been altered by humans," said Katie Cramer, an assistant research professor at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University and an Ocean Science Fellow at the Center for Oceans at Conservation International.

The earlier, local roots of declines of elkhorn and staghorn corals in the 1950s and 1960s highlight the urgency of mitigating local human impacts on reefs to allow these corals to recover. "In an era where coral reefs are being hit with multiple human stressors at the same time, we need to resolve why and how much coral reefs have changed over human history to inform our responses to the current reef crisis."

"Recent studies are showing that reefs are better able to cope with climate change impacts when they are not also stressed from overfishing and land-based runoff. So let's get a handle on these tractable problems now to give reefs a better chance of weathering the current climate crisis," said Cramer.

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

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and Firearms in the United States: Will an Epidemic of Suicide Follow?

Since February 2020, as U.S. public health efforts have focused on containing the spread of COVID-19, gun sales in the country have skyrocketed, physical distancing necessary to curb transmission has disrupted social networks, and Americans have faced an unprecedented combination of a public health and economic disaster. The authors of a commentary from Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School express concern that this perfect storm could lead to a suicide epidemic and discuss ways to address the potential crisis. Read the full text: http://annals.org/aim/article/doi/10.7326/M20-1678.

DALLAS, April 22, 2020 -- Women who live in rural areas are dying of coronary artery disease prematurely, and living in a rural area is one of the factors impacting heart failure survival, according to the findings in two separate research studies published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association, an open access journal of the American Heart Association.

A Presidential Advisory issued by the American Heart Association last month, Call to Action: Rural Health: A Presidential Advisory from the American Heart Association and American Stroke Association, highlights the health inequities facing rural communities. According to the statement there is a three-year life expectancy gap, on average, between rural and urban populations, with people who reside in rural areas having higher death rates from cardiovascular disease and stroke compared to people living in urban areas.

Increasing Mortality from Premature Coronary Artery Disease in Women in the Rural United States

Despite a decades-long decline in heart disease deaths, there has been an alarming upswing in coronary artery disease deaths among rural women 65 or younger since 2009, according to a review of national data on coronary artery disease deaths between 1999-2017. About 60 million Americans - roughly 20% of the U.S. population reside in rural areas.

"Women living in rural areas of the United States have for the first time suffered an increase in premature deaths from coronary artery disease. This is in stark contrast to their urban counterparts, who have experienced a virtually uninterrupted reduction in premature coronary artery disease deaths," said Federico Moccetti, M.D., senior author of the study, a former research fellow at Oregon Health & Sciences University in Portland, Oregon, and now an interventional cardiologist at Heart Centre Lucerne in Switzerland.

Researchers analyzed and compared changes from 1999-2017 in premature deaths (before age 65) from coronary artery disease among women living in rural areas and women in more populated urban areas.

Among the findings:

Premature coronary artery disease deaths remain consistently higher in rural areas of the United States, regardless of sex, race or age group.

While deaths have not risen among men overall, the rate of coronary artery disease deaths in those aged 55-64 stopped improving in small to medium towns in 2011, and rural areas in 2008.

Among women in rural communities, coronary artery disease death rates have increased significantly in women aged 55-64 from 2010 to 2017 (estimated annual percentage change +1.4%, cumulatively +11.2%); as well as in women aged 45-54 from 1999 to 2017 (estimated annual percentage change +0.6%, cumulatively +11.4%).

Overall (including urban areas), premature coronary artery disease deaths have declined over time.

"This significant increase in coronary artery disease deaths among young women in the rural U.S. is shocking. Disparities in the prevention and control of cardiovascular disease risk factors in these communities are likely the reason for this upswing," said Dr. Moccetti. "Blockages in the heart don't happen overnight. They are the result of decades of exposure to cardiovascular risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, obesity, a sedentary lifestyle and poor diet. Since the increase in deaths is among younger women, this means that it is the result of exposure to risk factors that occurred during young adulthood, adolescence and even childhood."

Distinct aspects of rural life that might make a heart attack more deadly, such as the travel distance to an emergency room, may not account for the difference in death rates in rural women, according to the researchers. While researchers considered distance may cause the difference in outcomes, the increase in distance didn't affect men, as men are just as far from emergency departments as women.

"This leads to the inevitable conclusion that an intensification of the public health efforts aimed at increasing cardiovascular health of rural women, during young adulthood, adolescence and childhood are necessary," said Dr. Moccetti.

Researchers noted a limitation of the study is that it relied on the cause of death listed on death certificates, which can be inaccurate. In addition, this type of data does not allow to identify a clear cause for the adverse trend. A strength of this study is that it does not represent a limited sample of deaths, but rather the entirety of the deaths due to coronary artery disease in the U.S.

Co-authors are Matthias Bossard, M.D.; Yllka Latifi, M.D. (M.B. and Y.L. are shared first authors); Matteo Fabbri, M.D.; Reto Kurmann, M.D.; Miriam Brinkert, M.D.; Mathias Wolfrum, M.D.; Benjamin Berte M.D., Ph.D.; Florim Cuculi, M.D.; Stefan Toggweiler, M.D.; Richard Kobza, M.D.; and Alanna M. Chamberlain, Ph.D.

Social Determinants of Health and 90-Day Mortality after Hospitalization for Heart Failure in the REasons for Geographic and Racial differences in Stroke (REGARDS) Study

A separate study evaluated the impact of social factors, including living in a rural area, income, race and access to professional healthcare, on the health outcomes for people with heart failure. Researchers analyzed the electronic health records of 690 patients (44% female), age 65 or older, who had been hospitalized for heart failure while participating in a larger study about racial and geographic differences in the stroke belt.

Information on nine social factors influencing health (race, education, income, social isolation, social network, high-poverty residential area, health professional shortage area, rural residence, and state public health infrastructure), also known as social determinants of health, were available in the records. The study focused on investigating whether an individual's total number of social factors was associated with the likelihood of dying within 90 days after hospital discharge for heart failure.

After adjusting for age, the data analysis on mortality indicated:

79 people died within 90 days of hospital discharge;

Patients with one social determinant of health factor were nearly three times as likely to die as those who had no social factors; and

Patients with two or more social determinants of health were also about three times more likely to die as those who had none.

"I think the powerful influence of these social determinants of health is incredible and underappreciated," said Madeline R. Sterling, M.D., M.P.H., M.S., lead author of the study and assistant professor of medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and an internist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York. "Our findings add to a growing body of research that suggests social determinants matter. In fact, assessing them may serve as a new marker for identifying, intervening and providing supports to the most vulnerable heart failure patients after discharge."

The researchers were surprised that multiple social determinants of health did not proportionately increase mortality risk. "These findings are important because if people with more vulnerabilities did worse, interventions could target a narrower group of patients," said Sterling. "These results can still have a major impact on patient care. If a patient being discharged has one or more of the social determinants of health (for example, a lack of social support), a strategy might be to more closely monitor that person after discharge - for example by helping them receive community-based or home care services. We hope that social determinants will be considered more when discharging patients," said Sterling.

One limitation is that data on the social determinants of health were collected at the baseline of the study, which may have occurred years before the heart failure hospitalization of interest.

Co-authors are Joanna Bryan Ringel, M.P.H.; Laura C. Pinheiro, Ph.D., M.P.H.; Monika M. Safford, M.D.; Emily B. Levitan, Sc.D.; Erica Philips, M.D., M.S.; Todd M. Brown, M.D., M.S.P.H.; and Parag Goyal, M.D., M.Sc.

Bats play a huge but poorly understood role in humans' lives--they pollinate our crops, eat disease-carrying mosquitos, and carry diseases themselves. But we know next to nothing about most of these animals. There are more than 1,400 species of bats, and 25% of them have only been recognized by scientists in the last 15 years. For most bats, we don't really know how they evolved, where they live, and how they interact with the world around them. That lack of knowledge can be dangerous--the more we know about bats, the better able we are to protect them and defend ourselves against diseases that they can spread. In a new paper in a special issue of the journal ZooKeys focused on the coronavirus pandemic, researchers announced the discovery of at least four new species of African leaf-nosed bats--cousins of the horseshoe bats that served as hosts of the virus that caused COVID-19.

"With COVID-19, we have a virus that's running amok in the human population. It originated in a horseshoe bat in China. There are 25 or 30 species of horseshoe bats in China, and no one can determine which one was involved. We owe it to ourselves to learn more about them and their relatives," says Bruce Patterson, the Field Museum's MacArthur curator of mammals and the paper's lead author.

"None of these leaf-nosed bats carry a disease that's problematic today, but we don't know that that's always going to be the case. And we don't even know the number of species that exist," says Terry Demos, a post-doctoral researcher in Patterson's lab and a principal author of the paper.

The bats that Patterson and Demos studied are leaf-nosed bats in the family Hipposideridae. They get their common name from the elaborate flaps on skin on their noses that the bats use as radar dishes to focus their calls and help catch their insect prey. The family is spread throughout Africa, Asia, and Australasia but its African members are poorly known to science due to lack of research and political unrest in the areas where they're found.

To get a better understanding of how the leaf-nosed bats are distributed and how they're related to each other, Patterson, Demos, and their colleagues at Kenya's Maasai Mara University and the National Museums of Kenya, and the Field Museum undertook a genetic study of leaf-nosed bats in Africa almost entirely based on museum specimens collected in various parts of Africa over the last few decades. In several cases, supposedly widespread species proved to be several genetically distinct species that simply looked alike--new species hidden in plain sight. These "cryptic species" often look similar to established species, but their DNA hints at their distinct evolutionary histories.

The genetic research indicates at least four new and undescribed species of bats; these new species don't have official names yet, but they give us a glimpse at how much we still have to learn about Africa's bats.

Finding new species of animals is always cool, but Patterson and Demos say this discovery takes on special importance in the era of COVID-19. The new species of leaf-nosed bats didn't play a role in the coronavirus pandemic, but their sister family of horseshoe bats did. The horseshoe bats transmitted the novel coronavirus to another mammals (possibly the endangered, scale-covered pangolins), which then spread the disease to humans. It's not the first time humans have contracted a disease from bats--they seem more capable of transmission than most other mammals.

It's not that bats are uniquely dirty or covered in viruses. "All organisms have viruses. The roses in your garden have viruses," says Patterson. "We worry about viruses when it comes to flu and pandemics, but viruses are part of nature and have been as far back as we go. And many viruses are harmless." But while all animals carry viruses, bats seem especially good at passing them on to us. It might be because bats are some of the most social mammals, living in colonies of up to 20 million. "Because they huddle together and take care of each other, it doesn't take long for a pathogen to get passed from one end of the colony to the other," says Patterson.

The other possible reasons for bats being prone to spread disease can be traced to their ability to fly. "Flying is the most energetically expensive way to get around. If you skin a bat, it looks like Mighty Mouse, they have hardly any guts, they're all shoulders and chest muscle. They're incredible athletes," says Patterson. And since flying is such hard work, they have high metabolisms and strong immune systems, and their DNA is really good at repairing itself when damaged. This extra hardiness means bats can harbor disease-causing agents without getting sick themselves; that same dose can be harmful to humans who come into contact with the bats.

And while these bats don't normally have much contact with humans, the more that people destroy bats' habitats and expose themselves to bats through hunting and consuming bat meat, the more likely it is that bats will spread viruses to people. "Unless you try to seek out bats, either to harass them or kill them, it's very, very unlikely that they'll infect you," says Demos.

The researchers also note that while horseshoe bats, not their leaf-nosed cousins studied in this paper, have been tied to the spread of COVID-19, it's still important to study leaf-nosed bats to help prevent future outbreaks. "Leaf-nosed bats carry coronaviruses--not the strain that's affecting humans right now, but this is certainly not the last time a virus will be transmitted from a wild mammal to humans," says Demos. "If we have better knowledge of what these bats are, we'll be better prepared if that happens."

The researchers also emphasize that in addition to questions about how the bats could harm humans, we need to make sure that we humans don't harm bats in hopes of curbing disease. Patterson notes, "These bats have a place in nature and perform essential ecological functions, and we can't let our terror of COVID cause us to pull apart natural ecological systems."

NEWPORT, Ore. - Feeding at the ocean's surface appears to play an important role in New Zealand blue whales' foraging strategy, allowing them to optimize their energy use, Oregon State University researchers suggest in a new study.

Blue whales are the largest mammals on Earth. Because of their enormous size, the whales must carefully balance the energy gained through their food intake with the energetic costs of feeding, such as diving, holding their breath or opening their mouths, which slows their movement in the water. Adding to the challenge: their prey are tiny krill and they must find and eat large volumes of them to make any energetic headway.

"People think about whales having to dive deep to get to the densest prey patches, but if they can find their prey in shallow waters, it's actually more energetically profitable to feed near the surface," said Leigh Torres, an assistant professor and director of the Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Laboratory at OSU's Marine Mammal Institute. "In this population of whales in New Zealand, they foraged more in areas where their prey was dense and shallow.

"Their dives were relatively short, and they were feeding more at the surface, which requires less energy."

The findings were published today in the journal PeerJ. Co-authors of the study include Dawn Barlow, a doctoral student in Torres' lab; Todd Chandler, who captured drone footage used in the study; and Jonathan Burnett of OSU's Aerial Information Systems Laboratory.

Much of what researchers know about blue whale foraging comes from tags placed on whales, which can record travel and diving patterns, including acceleration, or lunging, toward patches of food. But surface feeding is not as well understood, in part because it is harder to analyze tag data and quantify the size of prey patches at the water's surface, Barlow said.

During a field research trip to study blue whales off the coast of New Zealand in 2017, Torres and her team observed surface feeding from their boat on multiple occasions. They also noted that the density of krill patches was greater closer to the water's surface.

The researchers collected data that showed blue whales had relatively short dive times overall, about 2.5 minutes, compared to other blue whale populations, such as those off the coast of California, which average dives of about 10 minutes. When surface foraging was observed, the dive time of New Zealand blue whales dropped even more, to 1.75 minutes.

Using a drone, the researchers captured video of a blue whale surface feeding on a patch of krill. The footage illustrates a blue whale's feeding process, including decision-making about whether or not to eat patches of krill near the ocean's surface. The video, which was first shared publicly shortly after the research trip, went viral online. It also gave researchers another source of data to describe surface feeding behavior.

"The drone footage fills a gap in our understanding of surface feeding," Barlow said.

Through the footage, the researchers were able to see how the whale used its right eye to target the prey. They were able to quantify the recognition distance from the whale to the prey and could measure how widely the whale opened its mouth to feed. The footage also showed the whale's decision to rotate from one side to the other to better capture the krill.

"The video allows us to describe a lot of really cool kinematics and body movement coordination by the whale that we haven't been able to see before," Torres said.

"The footage also allowed us to see the prey response in new way. We can see when the krill begin to flee as the whale approaches, which is really amazing. At the whale's fastest speed and acceleration, the krill begin to jump away just eight tenths of a second before the whale strikes at the krill patch."

Though the researchers had surface feeding footage from just one whale, the footage included four encounters between that whale and surface prey patches, providing insight into decision-making processes by the whale in response to the size and orientation of the prey patches, Torres said.

"This footage highlights the value of using drones for study and observation of whales," she said. "Drone footage could be a good complement to data collected from tags for studying surface behaviors of whales."

Bottom Line: A risk prediction model that combined genetic and clinical factors with circulating biomarkers identified people at significantly higher than normal risk of pancreatic cancer.

Journal in Which the Study was Published: Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research

Author: Peter Kraft, PhD, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.

Background: "Pancreatic cancer is a particularly deadly cancer, with about 80 percent of patients diagnosed with advanced, incurable disease," said Kraft. "Catching it at an earlier stage makes it more likely that surgery will be an option, increasing the chances of survival."

Kraft explained that existing screening techniques, such a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), are not recommended for the general public because they may generate excessive rates of false positives. They are most appropriate for people at higher risk of pancreatic cancer, and therefore, improving identification of the high-risk population could improve tailored prevention and screening efforts, he said.

Risk factors for pancreatic cancer include family history, chronic conditions like diabetes and pancreatitis, and smoking. Kraft said prospective studies have shown that certain circulating biomarkers tied to insulin resistance have also been shown to influence risk. "These factors have been investigated individually, and in this study, we wanted to examine the combined effect of clinical factors, common genetic predisposition variants, and circulating biomarkers."

How the Study was Conducted:
The study examined data from four large prospective cohort studies: the Health Professionals Follow-up Study; the Nurses' Health Study; the Physicians' Health Study; and the Women's Health Initiative. They analyzed data from 500 patients diagnosed with primary pancreatic adenocarcinoma between 1984 and 2010, as well as 1,091 matched controls. The study enrolled only U.S. non-Hispanic white participants, because genomic risk variants have been confirmed in the white population but not in other groups, Kraft said.

The researchers collected data on lifestyle and clinical characteristics from patient questionnaires; blood samples; and genomic DNA from peripheral blood leukocytes of the participants. They calculated a weighted genetic risk score based on data from two large genome-wide association studies.

The researchers developed three relative risk models for men and women separately. One featured only clinical factors; one added the weighted genetic risk score to the clinical factors; and the third added biomarkers proinsulin, adiponectin, IL-6, and total branched-chain amino acids.

Results: Kraft said that each new level of data improved "model fit," allowing for more accurate identification of pancreatic cancer risk.

Ultimately, the models identified subsets of participants who were at three-fold or higher increased risk of pancreatic cancer than the general population. The model that featured only clinical characteristics identified 0.2 percent of men and 1.5 percent of women who were at three-fold or higher increased risk. The model that combined clinical and genetic factors identified 0.3 percent of men and 2.3 percent of women at three-fold or greater risk. The model that added weighted genetic risk score and circulating biomarkers identified 1.8 percent of men and 0.7 percent of women who were at three-fold or higher increased risk. The final integrated model identified 2.0 percent of men and 2.3 percent of women who had at least three times greater than average risk in 10 years of follow-up. The individuals in the top 1 percent of risk carried a 4 percent lifetime risk of pancreatic cancer.

Author's Comments: While this model would have to be confirmed and studied in other populations, Kraft said the study indicates that combining biomarkers with clinical and genetic factors can result in better identification of the people who could benefit from screening and early detection of pancreatic cancer.

"Like most cancers, pancreatic cancer is multifactorial," Kraft said. "The more we are able to combine information from multiple domains, the better we will become at identifying those who could benefit from screening."

Study Limitations: The study's key limitation is that family history of pancreatic cancer was not collected from most participants, making it difficult to estimate the relative risk of this important factor. The impact of smoking status also could not be directly estimated, as the contributing studies matched patients with pancreatic cancer to cancer-free individuals based on their smoking status.

More than 1% of Canadians have been dependent on cannabis at some point in their lives. Despite the fact that marijuana use is expected to grow with the recent legalization of recreational cannabis in Canada, little research has focused on factors associated with recovery from addiction.

New research published online this month in the journal Advances in Preventive Medicine found that Canadians with a history of cannabis dependence are much less likely to be in excellent mental health and much more likely to have some form of mental illness or substance dependence compared to those who have never been dependent on cannabis.

The study compared 336 Canadians with a history of cannabis dependence to 20,441 who had never been addicted to the substance. The data were drawn from Statistics Canada's 2012 Canadian Community Health Survey-Mental Health.

"Our findings illustrate that for many adults, a history of cannabis dependence casts a very long shadow, with a wide range of associated negative mental health outcomes" says lead author Esme Fuller-Thomson, professor at the University of Toronto's Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work (FIFSW) and Director of the Institute for Life Course and Aging.

More than a quarter (28%) of those with a history of cannabis dependence were still dependent on cannabis, while almost one-half (47%) had some form of mental illness or substance dependence, compared to only 8% among those without a history of cannabis dependence.

Overall, 74% of those without a history of dependence were in excellent mental health, while only 43% of those with a history of dependence were. To be considered in excellent mental health, subjects had to report: 1) almost daily happiness or life satisfaction in the past month, 2) high levels of social and psychological well-being in the past month, and 3) freedom from all forms of substance dependence, depressive and generalized anxiety disorder and serious suicidal thoughts for at least the preceding full year.

Social support was strongly associated with remission from cannabis attendance and achieving excellent mental health.

"It is important to consider ways to best facilitate social integration and social support for clients who are recovering from cannabis addiction," says co-author Janany Jayanthikumar, a Master of Social work graduate from U of T. "Clinicians may be more effective if they expand the focus of their treatment for substance dependence to include strategies to assist clients in creating and maintaining healthy social connections."

In addition, women with a history of cannabis dependence were more likely than men to be in remission and to have excellent mental health.

"Women may experience more acutely negative physical, mental, and social consequences of substance use than men which may motivate them to discontinue use," says co-author Melissa Redmond, Assistant Professor of Social Work at Carleton University. "Women may also decrease substance use during pregnancy or periods of child-rearing due to side effects and associated feelings of responsibility or guilt."

The study also found that with each decade of age, adults had double the likelihood of achieving both remission and excellent mental health.

"Decreases in impulsivity, increased role responsibility, awareness of the impact of drug use on health as well as negative social consequences are thought to play a role in remission among older individuals." says co-author Senyo Agbeyaka, a recent Master of Social Work graduate from U of T.

While the Statistics Canada survey used for the study did not gather information on what interventions, if any, those with cannabis dependence received, other research indicates that combined treatments, such as motivational enhancement therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, are quite successful in reducing cannabis use as well as dependence related symptoms.

Previous research indicates that among cannabis users, dependence is high. A 2013 nationally representative US study found that almost one-third (31%) of current cannabis users were cannabis dependent.

"It is important to remember that the legalization of cannabis is not solely about a profitable new business," warned Fuller-Thomson who is also cross-appointed to the Department of Family and Community Medicine and the Faculty of Nursing at U of T. "With more users and subsequently more people who are cannabis dependent, there will be very serious long-term mental health repercussions that individuals, families and the health care systems must address."