Culture

OAK BROOK, Ill. - A new study published in the journal Radiology has found that the advantages of digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) over digital mammography (DM), including increased cancer detection and fewer false positive findings, are maintained over multiple years and rounds of screening. In addition, research showed that DBT screening helped detect a higher proportion of poor prognosis cancers than DM.

DBT, sometimes called 3D mammography, emerged in the last decade as a powerful tool for breast cancer screening. The procedure uses an X-ray tube that moves in an arc and takes low radiation-dose projections of the breast from different angles. Varying the angle allows for multiple data points that can be reconstructed in different ways.

"As a radiologist, tomosynthesis allows viewing of the breast in multiple layers or slices," said study lead author Emily F. Conant, M.D., professor and chief of breast imaging in the Department of Radiology, Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. "This ability to scroll through slices of otherwise overlapping breast tissue helps us not only detect more cancers but also better characterize benign or normal areas of the breast."

Numerous studies have shown that DBT is superior to DM for cancer detection and reducing recall rate, or the rate at which women were called back for additional imaging based on suspicious initial findings. However, most of the published data on DBT screening have been from first round of screening, an instance when cancer detection rates and recall rates are expected to be higher than with subsequent rounds of screening. Less is known about the performance of DBT over time.

For this study, the research team looked at outcomes for patients over a five-year stretch after they began imaging all their screening patients with DBT in the fall of 2011. The study set included more than 56,000 DBT exams, along with 10,500 prior DM exams. The researchers compared imaging findings with results from local cancer registries.

Cancer detection rates were 6 per 1,000 for DBT, compared with 5.1 per 1,000 for DM alone. Screening recall rates were 8% for DBT, compared with 10.4% for DM alone. The numbers held steady across all five years of tomosynthesis screening. Almost a third of cancers detected with DBT screening were associated with a poorer prognosis, compared with a quarter of those detected with digital mammography alone.

"We showed that the improved performance with DBT was maintained over multiple years," Dr. Conant said. "This is the longest follow-up with cancer registry matching that has been published thus far."

Dr. Conant attributed the improved outcomes achieved with tomosynthesis to better visualization of both benign and malignant lesions and a reduction in tissue superimposition.

"With tomosynthesis you can remove some of the overlapping or obscuring breast tissue so that both normal and abnormal findings are better seen," she said. "That provides both improved cancer detection and decreased false positives."

One of the key strengths of the study was its reliance on a diverse population of women. For instance, African American women, who are known to develop more aggressive breast cancer subtypes at an earlier age, made up about half of the study group.

"We found different types of biology in the cancers detected across our diverse population and that's an important takeaway of this paper," Dr. Conant said. "Our results show that we can improve our screening outcomes for younger women with DBT by finding clinically important cancers earlier with fewer false positives."

While more studies with diverse populations and long-term follow-up are needed, the initial findings underscore the strength of tomosynthesis in breast cancer screening.

"This is very promising and important data that certainly can be used to model larger trials," Dr. Conant said.

OAK BROOK, Ill. - The low-dose chest CT scans used in lung cancer screening do not appear to damage human DNA, according to a study appearing in the journal Radiology. The results could help allay fears that such screenings will lead to an increase in radiation-induced cancer.

Low-dose CT screening for lung cancer in high-risk patients such as longtime smokers gained favor after the National Lung Screening Trial. The trial reported that use of low-dose chest CT scans could significantly reduce deaths from lung cancer compared to screening with chest X-rays. CT was able to identify cancers at an earlier, more treatable stage.

Along with the promise of CT screening came worries over the effects of radiation exposure on patients, as even the low-dose exam delivers more radiation than an X-ray--radiation that could affect DNA and potentially lead to cancer. Studies of these potential effects that rely on epidemiology, or the analysis of diseases in the population at large, have limitations, according to study senior author Satoshi Tashiro, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Research Institute for Radiation Biology and Medicine at Hiroshima University in Hiroshima, Japan. A biological approach that looks at the effects of exposure on DNA has more power, he said.

"The National Lung Screening Trial suggested the value of low-dose CT screening in high-risk population for developing lung cancer," he said. "There were, however, no studies investigating the biological effect of low-dose CT scans on large numbers of patients. These findings led us to investigate these effects."

Dr. Tashiro and colleagues developed a system to look for damage and abnormalities in chromosomes, strands of DNA wound into a double helix structure inside the cell. In a previous study, the technology showed increases in chromosomal aberrations after standard CT scans.

For the new study, the researchers compared the DNA in 107 patients who underwent low-dose chest CT with that of 102 who had standard-dose chest CT. They obtained blood samples before and 15 minutes after CT. The median effective radiation dose of low-dose CT was 1.5 millisieverts (mSv). The standard CT dose was 5.0 mSv.

Analysis of the DNA found significant differences between the group that had a standard-dose chest CT scan and those who had a low-dose chest CT.

"We could clearly detect the increase of DNA damage and chromosome aberrations after standard chest CT," Dr. Tashiro said. "In contrast, no significant differences were observed in these biological effects before and after low-dose CT."

Although low-dose CT is now commonly used for screening exams, standard CT is an effective diagnostic tool that is appropriate when the benefits outweigh any potential risk.

While the study did not endorse lung cancer screening with low-dose CT, its results appear to ease concerns over a potential increase in radiation-related cancer risk related to screening programs.

"Even using these sensitive analyses, we could not detect the biological effects of low-dose CT scans," Dr. Tashiro said. "This suggests that application of low-dose CT for lung cancer screening is justified from a biological point of view."

Beyond lung cancer screening, Dr. Tashiro said the DNA analysis could be used to study the biological effects of other types of imaging.

"We are interested in the biological effects of various types of radiological diagnosis, including PET/CT, to establish a better system for the management of medical radiation exposure," he said.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- According to Brendan Morris, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, treehoppers are the wackiest, most astonishing bugs most people have never heard of. They are morphological wonders, sporting bizarre protuberances that look like horns, gnarled branches, antlers, fruiting fungi, brightly colored flags or dead plant leaves. Treehoppers suck on plant juices. They sing to each other by vibrating plant stems. And they are an important food source for other forest creatures.

"I love outrageous forms and colors," said Morris, who studies entomology at the U. of I. "It blows my mind that a group that is roughly 40 million years old has so much diversity of form - diversity, I would argue, that we don't see in any other family of insects."

To draw attention to this group, Morris named a newly discovered treehopper species after Lady Gaga, a musical performer who has her own flamboyant, shape-shifting style.

"If there is going to be a Lady Gaga bug, it's going to be a treehopper, because they've got these crazy horns, they have this wacky fashion sense about them," Morris said. "They're unlike anything you've ever seen before."

The insect, now known as Kaikaia gaga, also represents a new genus of treehopper, Morris and his coauthor, INHS entomologist Christopher Dietrich, reported in the journal Zootaxa. Her features - the bug is female - differentiate her from other treehoppers found with her nearly 30 years ago in a tropical forest near the Pacific coast of Nicaragua. She was one of about 1,000 specimens Morris borrowed from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh as part of his research.

Insect taxonomists look primarily at head and body shapes, leg and body hairs and genitalia to differentiate one bug group from another. When Morris looked at this particular specimen under a stereoscope, he noticed some unusual characteristics.

A part of the thorax - just behind the head - was horned, like many other specimens, but the leg hairs differentiated it from the other tribes of treehoppers he had seen.

"Also, the frontoclypeus, which is kind of like the face, was shaped totally different," Morris said. "And the genitalia looked more like treehoppers from the Caribbean or this Old-World group, Beaufortianini."

That last observation was strange, because treehoppers are believed to have originated in the Americas. More research - specifically genetic research - will begin to explain why K. gaga shares traits with Old-World treehoppers.

Morris has tried to extract DNA from his one, 30-year-old specimen, but so far has had no luck. He will travel to Nicaragua to see if he can find any living Kaikaia gaga specimens in the same forest where this one was collected.

In the meantime, he is working hard to share his enthusiasm for this largely overlooked bug group, which is found in most forested areas of the planet.

"Treehoppers are wacky, and I think that makes them especially suited to be spokesbugs for the wide range of habitats they use," Morris said.

There has been a dramatic increase in the incidence of bowel cancer in adults under the age of 50, according to new research from the University of Bristol, UWE Bristol and University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust (UH Bristol).

Using NHS patient data from the last 40 years, the research led by Adam Chambers at the University of Bristol and UH Bristol, looked at more than 55,000 cases of colorectal (bowel) cancer over 40 years in England.

Adam Chambers, Honorary Senior Research Associate in the School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Bristol and Colorectal Registrar at UH Bristol, said: "Age has always been a major risk factor for bowel cancer, with the majority of cases being diagnosed in patients over 60 and therefore bowel cancer screening has focused on older age groups. However, this study shows that over the past 30 years, there has been an exponential increase in the incidence of bowel cancer among adults under 50."

The research, published in the British Journal of Surgery (BJS), describes in detail the demographic changes in colorectal cancer incidence among this younger population.

The study highlights that the increase in bowel cancer incidence in young people is predominantly driven by an increase in tumours of the lowermost portion of the bowel, specifically the sigmoid colon and rectum. While this increase does not appear to be associated with gender or socioeconomic status, there are some marked geographical variations.

The fastest increase in bowel cancer incidence was observed in southern regions, with an increase of more than ten per cent per year in the South West.

The study supports the findings from recent European and American studies that also showed the incidence of bowel cancer to be increasing quickly in young adults and, importantly, provides far greater detail on how this relates to the characteristics of the young adult population.

David Messenger, Consultant Colorectal Surgeon at UH Bristol and corresponding author, added: "Bowel cancer is becoming increasingly common in younger adults. Future research needs to focus on understanding why this trend is occurring and how it might be reversed, potentially through the development of cost-effective testing strategies that detect tumours at an earlier stage or polyps before they become cancerous."

A new study, conducted to better understand the origin of the universe, has provided insight into some of the most enduring questions in fundamental physics: How can the Standard Model of particle physics be extended to explain the cosmological excess of matter over antimatter? What is dark matter? And what is the theoretical origin of an unexpected but observed symmetry in the force that binds protons and neutrons together?

In the paper "Axiogenesis," scheduled to be published in Physical Review Letters on March 17, 2020, researchers Keisuke Harigaya, Member in the School of Natural Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study, and Raymond T. Co of the University of Michigan, have presented a compelling case in which the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) axion, first theorized in 1977, provides several important answers to these questions.

"We revealed that the rotation of the QCD axion can account for the excess of matter found in the universe," stated Harigaya. "We named this mechanism axiogenesis."

Infinitesimally light, the QCD axion--at least one billion times lighter than a proton--is nearly ghost-like. Millions of these particles pass through ordinary matter every second without notice. However, the subatomic level interaction of the QCD axion can still leave detectable signals in experiments with unprecedented sensitivities. While the QCD axion has never been directly detected, this study provides added fuel for experimentalists to hunt down the elusive particle.

"The versatility of the QCD axion in solving the mysteries of fundamental physics is truly amazing," stated Co. "We are thrilled about the unexplored theoretical possibilities that this new aspect of the QCD axion can bring. More importantly, experiments may soon tell us whether the mysteries of nature truly hint towards the QCD axion."

Harigaya and Co have reasoned that the QCD axion is capable of filling three missing pieces of the physics jigsaw puzzle simultaneously. First, the QCD axion was originally proposed to explain the so-called strong CP problem--why the strong force, which binds protons and neutrons together, unexpectedly preserves a symmetry called the Charge Parity (CP) symmetry. The CP symmetry is inferred from the observation that a neutron does not react with an electric field despite its charged constituents. Second, the QCD axion was found to be a good candidate for dark matter, offering what could be a major breakthrough in understanding the composition of approximately 80 percent of the universe's mass that has never been directly observed. In their work on the early universe, Harigaya and Co have determined that the QCD axion can also explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem.

As matter and antimatter particles interact, they are mutually annihilated. In the first fraction of a second following the Big Bang, matter and antimatter existed in equal amounts. This symmetry prevented the predominance of one type of matter over the other. Today, the universe is filled with matter, indicating that this symmetry must have been broken. Harigaya and Co cite the QCD axion as the culprit. Kinetic energy, resulting from the motion of the QCD axion, produced additional baryons or ordinary matter. This slight tipping of the scale in favor of matter would have had a pronounced cascade effect, paving the way for the universe as it is known today.

Greater understanding of the newly discovered dynamics of the QCD axion could potentially change the expansion history of the universe and thus inform the study of gravitational waves. Future work on this topic could also provide further insight into other enduring questions of fundamental physics, such as the origin of the tiny neutrino mass.

"Since theoretical and experimental particle physicists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists began studying the QCD axion, great progress has been made. We hope that our work further advances these interdisciplinary research efforts," added Harigaya.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- While lifestyle choices and genetics go a long way toward predicting longevity, a new study shows that certain community characteristics also play important roles. American communities with more fast food restaurants, a larger share of extraction industry-based jobs, or higher population density have shorter life expectancies, according to researchers from Penn State, West Virginia, and Michigan State Universities. Their findings can help communities identify and implement changes that may promote longer lifespans among their residents.

"American life expectancy recently declined for the first time in decades, and we wanted to explore the factors contributing to this decline. Because of regional variation in life expectancy, we knew community-level factors must matter," said Elizabeth Dobis, a postdoctoral scholar at the Penn State-based Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development (NERCRD), and lead author of the study. "By analyzing place-based factors alongside personal factors, we were able to draw several conclusions about which community characteristics contribute most strongly to this variation in life expectancy."

Life expectancy refers to the length of time a person born in a given year can expect to live. Dobis and her colleagues analyzed on a county-by-county basis how life expectancy in 2014 has changed from a 1980 baseline, using data from more than 3,000 U.S. counties.

They developed a statistical model to determine the relationship between a dozen community variables and each county's 2014 life expectancy, while controlling for personal variables that are known to be important, such as sex, race, education, single-parent status, obesity, and alcohol use.

The community variables they examined included health care access, population growth and density, fast food restaurants, healthy food access, employment by sector, urbanization, and social capital, which measures the networks and bonds providing social cohesion among residents. They looked at each variable in isolation while holding others constant, allowing them to determine which variables independently exert the strongest effect on life expectancy.

The researchers found that a county's 1980 life expectancy value strongly predicted variations in the 2014 value, but it didn't account for all of the variation.

"When we controlled for historical life expectancy, we found three additional community factors that each exert a significant negative effect--a greater number of fast food restaurants, higher population density, and a greater share of jobs in mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction," Dobis said. "For example, for every one percentage point increase in the number of fast food restaurants in a county, life expectancy declined by .004 years for men and .006 years for women."

This represents a 15-20 days shorter life span for every man, woman and child in a community, for each 10 percentage point increase in fast food restaurants in a community--or a 150-200 day shorter life span if the number of fast food restaurants were to double.

Similarly, a one percentage point increase in a county's share of jobs in the mining, quarrying, oil and gas sectors was found to decrease average life expectancy by .04 years for men (or 15 days) and .06 years (22 days) for women.

The research, which was published recently in Social Science and Medicine, also revealed several community factors that are positively related to life expectancy, including a growing population, good access to physicians, and a greater level of social cohesion.

"We were surprised by the strong positive contribution of social capital to life expectancy within communities," said NERCRD Director Stephan Goetz, professor of agricultural economics and regional economics at Penn State and a co-author on the study. "Places with residents who stick together more on a community or social level also appear to do a better of job of helping people in general live longer."

"Another interesting finding was that lower population density, or living in more rural areas, is associated with higher life expectancy," Goetz said. "This suggests that living in large, densely-settled metropolitan areas, with all of their amenities and other advantages, comes at the expense of lower life expectancy, at least in a statistical sense."

In addition to being the first life-expectancy study to include community variables in a county-level analysis, this also was the first study to statistically analyze the extent to which disparities in life expectancy are geographically clustered. This analysis revealed some striking patterns.

"We found exceptionally low life expectancies in the areas of the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations in South Dakota," Dobis said. "We found similar 'cold spots' of low life expectancy in the arctic and interior portions of Alaska, the Deep South surrounding the Mississippi River, and in the Appalachian regions of Kentucky and West Virginia."

The research also revealed four "hot spots" of high life expectancy: a section of the Northeast spanning from Philadelphia to New England, southern Minnesota and the eastern Dakotas into Nebraska, an area in Colorado, and an area spanning central Idaho into the upper Rocky Mountains.

The team's findings have important policy implications, as they suggest that certain aspects of the built environment can be changed to enhance life expectancy. For example, public places that promote social interaction could increase a community's social capital levels, which in turn promote longer lifespans.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- The virus that causes barley yellow dwarf, the most widespread disease of cereal crops, manipulates its host plant and insect vector to promote its own survival, according to an international team of researchers. The group found that the virus raises the temperature of its host plants along with the heat-tolerance of its aphid vectors to create regions on the plants where aphids can feed free from competing insects. The findings could have implications for crop health as the global climate warms.

"The effects of viruses on the thermal biology of vectors may be of particular interest in light of global climate," said Mitzy Porras, postdoctoral scholar, Penn State. "Some species may be more successful under warming conditions, and this raises urgent questions about which insect vectors will cope and how they will impact ecological communities and our food crops."

To investigate the effects of BYDV on the thermal tolerance of aphids, the team used two strains of BYDV and two species of aphid -- BYDV-PAV, which is transmitted by Rhopalosiphum padi and BYDV-RMV, which is transmitted by a larger competing aphid species Rhopalosiphum maidis.

"We found that in the absence of competition both aphid species preferred the stems on the lower, cooler sections of the plants, even when infected with BYDV," said Porras. "But when both aphid species were present, the smaller R. padi was able to move to the upper leaves of the plants where it was warmer."

The findings appeared on March 4 in Nature Communications.

Looking more closely at the thermal tolerances of each of the aphid species, the scientists placed the insects, both with and without viruses, onto a critical temperature maxima setup and slowly increased the temperature until the aphids stopped moving. They recorded the maximum temperature as the point when the aphids turned upside down and could no longer return to an upright position. Afterward, they returned the aphids to their plants to recover. They found that when R. padi was infected with the virus it tolerated higher temperatures than it did without the virus, and it also tolerated higher temperatures than R. maidis.

An additional analysis provided further evidence that BYDV influences R. padi's thermal tolerance. It revealed higher expression of three heat-shock protein genes when R. padi was infected with the virus.

"This enhanced thermal tolerance -- which was associated with higher expression of three heat-shock protein genes -- allowed aphids to occupy the higher and warmer regions of infected host plants when displaced from cooler plant regions by competition with the larger aphid species, R. maidis," said Edwin Rajotte, professor of entomology. "In other words, the virus increased the vector's fitness, along with its own chances of being acquired and transmitted to new host plants."

Next, the team used infrared thermal imaging to examine the impacts of the viruses on the temperatures of the wheat plants. They found that infection by BYDV-PAV increased the temperature of both stem and leaf surfaces by 2 to 3 °C, while no similar effects were observed for infection by BYDV-RMV.

"Considering all of this data together, we show for the first time that a virus infection can increase both the host plant's temperature and the vector's heat tolerance, and that these changes allow certain aphids to occupy higher and warmer regions of infected host plants when displaced from cooler regions by competition with the larger aphid species," said Porras.

EAST LANSING, Mich. - The belief that "real men" must be strong, tough and independent may be a detriment to their social needs later in life. A study co-authored by a Michigan State University sociologist found that men who endorse hegemonic ideals of masculinity -- or "toxic masculinity" -- can become socially isolated as they age, impacting their health, well-being and overall happiness.

"When we age, there are certain ways that we can ensure we maintain our health and well-being," said stef shuster, MSU assistant professor in Lyman Briggs College and the Department of Sociology. "Having people with whom we can talk about personal matters is a form of social support. If people only have one person that they can share information with, or sometimes even no people, they don't really have an opportunity to reflect and share."

shuster said that when issues arise, like health or financial problems, it puts individuals in an incredibly disadvantaged position if they don't have anyone to share this with, which also might have negative consequences for their mental health.

"Social isolation is common among aging adults. Changes such as retirement, widowhood or moving to a new home can disrupt their existing friendships," said Celeste Campos-Castillo, one of shuster's co-authors and an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

"Older men who endorse the ideals of toxic masculinity can become siloed off as they age," shuster said. "Not all older men are at risk -- just those who favor a particular set of ideals."

The researchers analyzed nearly 5,500 U.S. older women and men from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey, which administered the Hegemonic Masculinity for Older Men Scale.

The study -- published in the journal Sex Roles -- is one of the first to treat masculinity as a spectrum rather than a simple yes-or-no binary category.

"A lot of gender research is based on simplistic binaries of women or men, feminine or masculine, either you're hegemonically masculine or you're not," shuster said. "Because of the data set that we're using, our study actually looks at masculinity on a spectrum."

The study also found that embracing toxic masculinity is self-harming.

"Often, toxic masculinity is a term that we use to describe how masculinity affects other people, especially women," shuster said. "But our study shows how toxic masculinity also has detrimental consequences for the men who subscribe to these ideals. The very premise of hegemonic masculinity in some ways is based on the idea of isolation because it's about being autonomous and not showing a lot of emotion. It's hard to develop friendships living this way."

As baby boomers prepare to retire from the workforce, they face challenges in finding and sustaining healthy friendships. The researchers suggest social isolation may be alleviated by embracing an alternative understanding of masculinity that doesn't rely on independence and toughness as the only way to be "real men," or at least easing up on the principles of hegemonic masculinity.

Still, shuster recognizes that the higher men score on the scale of hegemonic masculinity, the less likely they are to change their views or seek help.

"Can you change someone's ideological principles? I think that's a harder sell than trying to get people to believe that social isolation is incredibly detrimental to their health," shuster said. "It's about learning how to offer tools for people not to be socially isolated and helping them develop the capacity to recognize that all of the ways they have upheld being so-called 'real men' is not going to work for them as they age."

ANN ARBOR--A hypothetical particle called the axion could solve one of physics' great mysteries: the excess of matter over antimatter, or why we're here at all.

According to the Standard Model of particle physics, when our universe was born, the meeting of matter and antimatter should have annihilated each other. That means that nothing--no Earth, no sun, no galaxies, no humans--would exist. But we do.

"There's a clear contradiction with the Standard Model," said University of Michigan physicist and postdoctoral researcher Raymond Co. "Why is the whole universe filled with matter, and very, very little antimatter?"

The Standard Model of particle physics explains three fundamental forces in the universe: electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force. Electromagnetism is the force between any particles that have a charge. The weak force causes neutrons to break down, and the strong force explains why subatomic particles such as neutrons and protons hold together.

But there are a few contradictions within the Standard Model, one of them being the imbalance between matter and antimatter. The Standard Model also does not explain the existence of dark matter, nor does it explain an observed property of neutrons.

To solve the neutron problem, physicists in 1977 proposed a hypothetical particle called the axion. Five years later, the axion was found capable of solving the problem of dark matter as well. Now, Co and co-author Keisuke Harigaya, a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study, are suggesting that the axion may explain yet another problem: the imbalance between matter and antimatter. Their research will be published in Physical Review Letters on March 17.

The hypothetical particle axion is infinitesimally light--at least billions of times lighter than the proton, and almost does not interact with normal matter. This explains why they have not yet been detected, even with instrumentation that allows us to detect protons, neutrons and electrons.

The axion was first hypothesized to address a contradiction called the strong CP problem. As you may have learned in high school physics, electrons have a negative charge, protons have a positive charge and neutrons have no charge. However, neutrons are made up of more elementary particles called quarks, which do have charges. So physicists expect neutrons to interact with the electric field, Co says. But they don't. If the axion exists, it would turn off the interaction between the neutrons and the electric field, solving the strong CP problem.

The axion may also be a good candidate for dark matter, which is used to explain the rotational speed of galaxies, another contradiction of the Standard Model. If galaxies rotated at the speed at which they currently rotate, with the amount of gravity they have based on luminous matter--matter we can see because it emits light--they would fly apart. There's just not enough gravity to hold them together. Scientists suggest there must be a huge amount of matter--such as a vast field of axions--in galaxies we cannot see that explains galaxies' rotational speed.

Now, Co and Harigaya are suggesting that the axion can also account for the imbalance of matter and antimatter. Previously, physicists thought that in the early stages of the universe, just after the Big Bang, the axion field was initially static and started to oscillate as the universe cooled.

"You can imagine the axion as a ball in a plastic soda bottle, and the ball is doing some sort of oscillation back and forth around the lowest point of the plastic soda bottle," Co said.

Instead, the researchers suggest that the axion field had more interesting dynamics in this early stage. Picture the plastic soda bottle, Co says. Before rolling back and forth along the bottom of the bottle, the axion was spinning in a circular pattern around the bottle's body. Co and Harigaya suggest that through the interactions provided by the strong force and the weak force, the rotation of the axion creates just a tiny bit more matter than antimatter. When matter and antimatter come together, instead of annihilating completely, one in 10 billion parts of matter was left to form the world we see today.

"The axion was first proposed by theoretical particle physicists," Harigaya said. "Since then theoretical and experimental particle physicists, astrophysicists and cosmologists have been studying the axion all together. We have revealed a new cosmological role of the axion due to the rotation. We hope that our work further promotes interdisciplinary research effort."

"People always want to know why we're here and that's the matter-antimatter asymmetry--in the technical sense," Co said. "And what is exciting in our work is that the axion gives simultaneous explanation to all three problems in particle physics: dark matter, matter-antimatter asymmetry and the strong CP problem. Since these problems haven't been studied simultaneously in this axion framework, a lot of work needs to be done on this topic. Most remarkably of all, this axion framework will be put to experimental tests in the near future."

Future related work could include research on gravitational waves and the origin of the neutrino mass.

Washington, DC -Vaccines have reduced the global burden of disease by preventing an estimated 2 to 3 million deaths worldwide each year. In India, the reduction in annual under-five deaths, from 3.4 to 1.2 million between 1990 and 2015, was largely due to expansions in coverage of routine childhood vaccination. Vaccines have been linked to increased economic productivity as well as improved cognition, growth, and schooling among children. While the long-term health benefits of vaccination are well known, little evidence exists on the link between routine childhood vaccination and long-term schooling attainment among adults in low- and middle-income countries.

In this study, researchers analyzed levels of schooling attainment in years among adults born during or after the implementation of India's Universal Immunization Programme (UIP) (intervention) compared to adults born before the implementation (control). District-level data from the rollout of India's UIP between 1985 and 1990 was matched to schooling data from the National Family Health Survey of India, 2015-2016, a cross-sectional survey that collects information on health and family welfare indicators. The study included 109,908 non-migrant individuals who were born within five years of UIP rollout (1980-1995).

"We compared schooling attainment of individuals who were born after the introduction of UIP with that of those who were similar, i.e., they lived in the same household or community, but were born just before the UIP," says Arindam Nandi, study author and CDDEP Senior Fellow.

Utilizing fixed-effects linear regression models adjusted for socioeconomic and demographic factors, community-level infrastructure, amenities, and access to healthcare, the study found that India's UIP was associated with 0.2-0.3 additional schooling grades among adults. Specifically, in household, village or city ward, district, and state fixed-effects analysis, adults born during or after UIP rollout attained 0.18, 0.23, 0.29, and 0.25 additional schooling grades respectively compared to adults born before UIP rollout. All results were statistically significant (p

Overall, results indicate that routine childhood vaccination is associated with improved schooling attainment among adults in India, which adds to the literature on the long-term non-health benefits of vaccines.

"This study is an important addition to a small but growing literature on the broader cognitive and schooling benefits of routine childhood vaccines in low- and middle-income countries. The findings reinforce the need for universal vaccination coverage among children," adds Nandi.

The finding was by chance, when the scientists were working on the results from the first light of one of the four telescopes of the project, in Chile. Shortly after the building of the first SECULOOS telescopes, and during the test observations, the team pointed at a well kown brown dwarf 2MASSW J1510478-281817, since renamed 2M1510, in the constellation of Libra. The observations of SPECULOOS picked up an unusual signal which made the researchers suggest that 2M1510 could be two brown dwarfs instead of one, and in orbit around each other.

"Among the first test observations which we made -says Michaël Gillon, an astrophysicist at the University of Liège, and Principal Investigator on the SPECULOOS project-, we pointed our telescopes at a known brown dwarf. But, suddenly, the object appeared to darken for 90 minutes, which indicated that an occultation had just occurred.

The researchers could confirm their hypothesis using two of the most powerful telescopes, one of the two 10m Keck telescopes, in Hawaii, and one of the four 8m telescopes of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, the latter being on the same site as the SPECULOOS telescopes which took the initial observations. The Keck and the VLT have sensitive spectrometers which can be used to measure the velocities of celestial objects. The astronomers detected the velocities of both brown dwarfs of 2M1510 while they orbited around each other.

This discovery coincides with the 25th anniversary of the verification of the first brown dwarf, named Teide 1. This was made with the IAC-80 telescope at the Teide Observatory (Tenerife), by a group of IAC astrophysicists led by Rafael Rebolo López, together with María Rosa Zapatero Osorio, and Eduardo Martin Guerrero de Escalante.

"The first observations which led to the new discovery were made in summer of 2017, which shows the observing and data analysis effort needed. With the new Artemis telescope, inaugurated in the Teide Observatory and integrated in the SPECULOOS consortium, we hope to discover soon systems as interesting as this one", explains Roi Alonso, a memer of the Artemis research team, and an author of the article.

The detection of occulting brown dwarfs is extremely rare: until now only one other system of this type has been identified. These systems give the opportunity to astronomers to measure directly the radii and the masses of the brown dwarfs, which are basic quantities for theoretical models. 2M1510 is also special because it is one of the few brown dwarf systems which have known ages, because it belongs to a nearby group of young stars known as the Argo stellar association.

"Obtaining data on the mass, the radius, and the age is really rare for a star, and even rarer for a brown dwarf", explains Amaury Triaud, a researcher at the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Birmingham and the first author of the article. "Normally we lack one of more of these parameters. As we have all of them, we can verify the theoretical models about how brown dwarfs cool down, models which we have bad for over 30 years. We find that the models fit the observations very well, evidence of human ingenuity", he adds.

The SPECULOOS project

The mission of the SPECULOOS project (Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars) is to investigate planets orbiting ultra-cool dwarfs, which include the smallest stars as well as brown dwarfs. Brown dwarfs (also known as substellar objects) are less massive than stars but more massive than planets. They are too small to produce the fusion of hydrogen to helium in their centres, the process which produces the energy of normal stars such as the sun.

Astronomers predict that ultracool stars and brown dwarfs should have large populations of rocky planets, nearby and potentially habitable, offering many opportunitites to explore a variety of atmospheres and climates. One example is the system of 7 planets, TRAPPIST-1, discovered by members of the same team.

The data which led to this discovery were obtained at the Southern Observatory of SPECULOOS, one of the installations dedicated to the project. SPECULOOS South is in the Paranal Observatory, Chile, operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and funded by the European Research Council (ERC), as well as the Simons foundation, the MERAC foundation and the Science, Technology and Facilities Council. The SPECULOOS project also involves telescopes at the Teide Observatory (Tenerife, Spain), San Pedro Mártir (Mexico), Oukaïmden (Morocco) and the La Silla Observatory (Chile).

The team which made the discovery is made up of researchers from the University of Birmingham; the University of California, San Diego; the University of Liège; the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias; the American Museum of Natural History; the University of Cambridge, the University of Berne, Massachussetts Institut of Technology (MIT); the University of Göttingen; and the University of Warwick.

Caregivers in low-income settings will be able to respond to the challenges of bringing up children with disabilities, thanks to a new model created by the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI).

Caregivers experience multiple deprivations, including inadequate resources, lack of support, negative responses from others in the community, and poverty. Not surprisingly, many caregivers experience fatigue, distress and isolation.

The aim of the UEA-KEMRI three-year project was to empower the caregivers so they could take control of their lives and bring about positive changes to their existing situations. Caregivers were brought together to run their own meetings and self-help activities, which included shared livelihood projects, talking to each other about the difficulties of caregiving, sharing their ideas for improving the lives of their children with disabilities, and advocating for change in their local communities.

The researchers carried out monthly monitoring visits to the groups, facilitated group discussions and helped with activity planning.

Dr Karen Bunning, a reader in speech and language therapy in UEA's School of Health Sciences, led the project.

Dr Bunning said: "At the start of the project, caregivers spoke of their aloneness, the challenges and stigma and discrimination experienced in the community.

"At the end of the project, the caregivers had a greater sense of their own agency and talked of friendships with other members of the group, the development of new skills, acceptance of their child's disability and their own sense of well-being.

"In addition, there was significant growth in the social support around the caregiver and, despite the fact that the children with disabilities had received no targeted intervention, the caregivers rated their child's disability as less severe with fewer problems affecting their ability to provide care."

The model, including a set of practical guidelines, can be applied in other low-income settings and is currently being piloted across sub-Saharan Africa.

'Empowering self-help groups for caregivers of children with disabilities in Kilifi, Kenya: Impacts and their underlying mechanisms', is published March 9, 2020 in PLOS ONE.

Scientists at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) Munich and Denali Therapeutics (South San Francisco, CA, USA) have developed an approach to stimulate immune cells of the brain in such a way that they might possibly provide better protection against Alzheimer's disease. Their report has been published in the journal "EMBO Molecular Medicine". These findings could ultimately enable development of novel therapies to treat Alzheimer's disease.

The researchers identified a specific antibody that binds to the brain's immune cells, termed "microglia". This stimulates their activity in such a way that they live longer, divide more quickly and detect aberrant substances more easily. In mice with disease symptoms resembling those of Alzheimer's, studies revealed that deposits of proteins (called "plaques") were recognized and degraded more quickly. The notorious plaques are among the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease, and are suspected to cause neuronal damage.

"We found that the plaques were not removed in their entirety, but rather this happened to their periphery. It is assumed that it is precisely this border area that repeatedly releases proteins which cause damage to neurons. So we may have found a way to specifically remove particularly harmful forms of amyloid, which is the protein contained in the plaques," said Prof. Christian Haass, speaker of the DZNE's Munich site and a department head of the LMU's Biomedical Center Munich.

Immune cells of the brain

Haass and colleagues have been focusing on the immune cells of the brain for quite some time. Their research focuses on TREM2, a so-called receptor on the cell surface to which other molecules can attach. TREM2 can occur in different versions from person to person - some of these altered versions drastically increase the risk of developing Alzheimer's in old age. In previous studies, the Munich researchers found that these special variants put the microglia into an irreversible dormant state, which prevents the immune cells from functioning properly to recognize, absorb and break down plaques and dead cells. "Conversely, we suspect that activation of the microglia could help to eliminate plaques and thus combat Alzheimer's. TREM2 seems to play an important role in this process. The receptor apparently helps to switch the microglia from dormant to active mode," the Munich scientist said.

This is precisely the approach the Munich team and Denali are pursuing. The antibody identified, which is now generated using biotechnological methods, binds to TREM2, thereby triggering processes that enhance microglia activity.

However, the Munich-based biochemist cautioned that further studies are required prior to progressing this approach to clinical trials: "We have shown that immune cells can be stimulated to break down amyloid deposits more effectively. This demonstrates that our approach can work in principle. However, there is still a long way to go before it can be tested in humans and additional data is necessary to validate this approach."

Search for new therapeutic approaches

Current therapies can alleviate the symptoms of Alzheimer's to some extent, but they cannot stop the disease from progressing. "So far, all attempts to treat Alzheimer's effectively have been unsuccessful. Just recently, a clinical trial with two drugs failed. Although there is another experimental agent that seems to have a positive effect on memory, it remains to be seen whether this drug will be approved by regulatory authorities. In view of this situation, innovative therapeutic approaches are urgently needed. This is precisely the aim of our research", said Haass.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- For plants, sunlight can be a double-edged sword. They need it to drive photosynthesis, the process that allows them to store solar energy as sugar molecules, but too much sun can dehydrate and damage their leaves.

A primary strategy that plants use to protect themselves from this kind of photodamage is to dissipate the extra light as heat. However, there has been much debate over the past several decades over how plants actually achieve this.

"During photosynthesis, light-harvesting complexes play two seemingly contradictory roles. They absorb energy to drive water-splitting and photosynthesis, but at the same time, when there's too much energy, they have to also be able to get rid of it," says Gabriela Schlau-Cohen, the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Assistant Professor of Chemistry at MIT.

In a new study, Schlau-Cohen and colleagues at MIT, the University of Pavia, and the University of Verona directly observed, for the first time, one of the possible mechanisms that have been proposed for how plants dissipate energy. The researchers used a highly sensitive type of spectroscopy to determine that excess energy is transferred from chlorophyll, the pigment that gives leaves their green color, to other pigments called carotenoids, which can then release the energy as heat.

"This is the first direct observation of chlorophyll-to-carotenoid energy transfer in the light-harvesting complex of green plants," says Schlau-Cohen, who is the senior author of the study. "That's the simplest proposal, but no one's been able to find this photophysical pathway until now."

MIT graduate student Minjung Son is the lead author of the study, which appears today in Nature Communications. Other authors are Samuel Gordon '18, Alberta Pinnola of the University of Pavia, in Italy, and Roberto Bassi of the University of Verona.

Excess energy

When sunlight strikes a plant, specialized proteins known as light-harvesting complexes absorb light energy in the form of photons, with the help of pigments such as chlorophyll. These photons drive the production of sugar molecules, which store the energy for later use.

Much previous research has shown that plants are able to quickly adapt to changes in sunlight intensity. In very sunny conditions, they convert only about 30 percent of the available sunlight into sugar, while the rest is released as heat. If this excess energy is allowed to remain in the plant cells, it creates harmful molecules called free radicals that can damage proteins and other important cellular molecules.

"Plants can respond to fast changes in solar intensity by getting rid of extra energy, but what that photophysical pathway is has been debated for decades," Schlau-Cohen says.

The simplest hypothesis for how plants get rid of these extra photons is that once the light-harvesting complex absorbs them, chlorophylls pass them to nearby molecules called carotenoids. Carotenoids, which include lycopene and beta-carotene, are very good at getting rid of excess energy through rapid vibration. They are also skillful scavengers of free radicals, which helps to prevent damage to cells.

A similar type of energy transfer has been observed in bacterial proteins that are related to chlorophyll, but until now, it had not been seen in plants. One reason why it has been hard to observe this phenomenon is that it occurs on a very fast time scale (femtoseconds, or quadrillionths of a second). Another obstacle is that the energy transfer spans a broad range of energy levels. Until recently, existing methods for observing this process could only measure a small swath of the spectrum of visible light.

In 2017, Schlau-Cohen's lab developed a modification to a femtosecond spectroscopic technique that allows them to look at a broader range of energy levels, spanning red to blue light. This meant that they could monitor energy transfer between chlorophylls, which absorb red light, and carotenoids, which absorb blue and green light.

In this study, the researchers used this technique to show that photons move from an excited state, which is spread over multiple chlorophyll molecules within a light-harvesting complex, to nearby carotenoid molecules within the complex.

"By broadening the spectral bandwidth, we could look at the connection between the blue and the red ranges, allowing us to map out the changes in energy level. You can see energy moving from one excited state to another," Schlau-Cohen says.

Once the carotenoids accept the excess energy, they release most of it as heat, preventing light-induced damage to the cells.

Boosting crop yields

The researchers performed their experiments in two different environments -- one in which the proteins were in a detergent solution, and one in which they were embedded in a special type of self-assembling membrane called a nanodisc. They found that the energy transfer occurred more rapidly in the nanodisc, suggesting that environmental conditions affect the rate of energy dissipation.

It remains a mystery exactly how excess sunlight triggers this mechanism within plant cells. Schlau-Cohen's lab is now exploring whether the organization of chlorophylls and carotenoids within the chloroplast membrane play a role in activating the photoprotection system.

A better understanding of plants' natural photoprotection system could help scientists develop new ways to improve crop yields, Schlau-Cohen says. A 2016 paper from University of Illinois researchers showed that by overproducing all of the proteins involved in photoprotection, crop yields could be boosted by 15 to 20 percent. That paper also suggested that production could be further increased to a theoretical maximum of about 30 percent.

"If we understand the mechanism, instead of just upregulating everything and getting 15 to 20 percent, we could really optimize the system and get to that theoretical maximum of 30 percent," Schlau-Cohen says.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have shown that the Atox1 protein, found in breast cancer cells, participates in the process by which cancer cells metastasise. The protein could therefore be a potential biomarker for assessing the aggressiveness of the disease, as well as a possible target for new drugs. The research was recently published in the journal PNAS.

Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in women worldwide. Early diagnosis and treatment are crucial to the survival rate. Most deaths related to breast cancer are due to cancer cells leaving the primary tumour and metastasising in other parts of the body, such as the skeleton, liver or lungs. But the molecular mechanisms behind how cancer cells migrate to other parts of the body are not yet understood.

Previous studies have shown that, like other cancers, breast cancer coincides with higher levels of copper in the blood and in tumour cells, but the use of this extra copper in cancer cells is not known. Copper and other metal ions in our body are absorbed through food and are vital for many biological functions, in small, controlled quantities. Free copper ions are toxic and thus all copper in our body is bound to proteins.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology have now identified a copper-binding protein that clearly affects breast cancer cell migration.

"Using a database, we first identified all the different copper-binding proteins in humans and then we compared the amount of these proteins in cancerous to healthy tissues. Atox1 was one of the copper-binding proteins with a high concentration in breast cancer cells," says Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede, Professor of Chemical Biology at Chalmers.

Atox1 is a protein that transports copper to other proteins in our cells which require it for enzymatic functions. The Chalmers researchers recently found that Atox1 placed itself at the leading edge of moving cancer cells, indicating that the protein may be involved in cell movement. This observation was the starting point for the now published study.

Using advanced live-cell video microscopy, the researchers were able to track the pattern of movement of hundreds of individual cancer cells, with and without the presence of Atox1.

"We were able to demonstrate that the cells moved at higher speeds and over longer distances when Atox1 was present, compared to those same kinds of cells moving without the protein," says Stéphanie Blockhuys, a Postdoctoral Researcher in Chemical Biology at Chalmers, and first author of the study.

Further experiments revealed that Atox1 drives cell movement by stimulating a reaction chain consisting of another copper transport protein - ATP7A, and the enzyme lysyl oxidase (LOX). Atox1 delivers copper to ATP7A which in turn delivers the metal to LOX. LOX needs copper in order to function, and it is already known that LOX is involved in extracellular processes facilitating breast cancer cell movement.

"When Atox1 in the cancer cells was reduced, we found LOX activity to be decreased. Thus, it appears that without Atox1, LOX doesn't receive the copper required for its cell migration activity," says Stéphanie Blockhuys.

In parallel, the researchers analysed a database of reported Atox1 transcript levels in 1904 different breast cancer patients, along with survival times. They found that patients with tumours with high Atox1 levels have drastically lower survival times. They conclude therefore that the mechanism they identified in their cell culture experiments seems to play a role in the development of the disease in patients

This indicates that Atox1 could be a biomarker for assessing how aggressive a breast cancer is. Such information could be used, for example, to determine if treatment to remove copper from the body could be appropriate. Atox1 could also become a target for drugs to block metastasis and thereby increase survival times.

"What we have found could be important for all types of cancer. How cancer cells move is a fundamental process that we still don't understand well enough," says Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede.

The researchers will now transfer the experiments from cells to small animal models and investigate whether there are other copper-binding proteins involved.