Culture

Journal of International Marketing launched its 2020 volume with a special issue examining new implications of the digital environment related to the study of international marketing. Featured in the special issue are both senior and emerging experts in this space exploring a range of issues that offer a powerful platform to guide future research.

The first three articles focus on how international marketing is broadly being transformed across the field as well as specifically at the firm and customer levels. The last two articles explore how highly innovative marketing practices are being created and influenced in international marketing spaces:

"Borderless Media: Rethinking International Marketing"

Storied thought leader Jagdish Sheth (Emory University) offers a broad view of the evolution of social media and its influence on marketing use a value creation framework with five dimensions: access, affordability, acceptance, awareness, and activation.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1069031X19897044

"Global Brand Building & Management in the Digital Age"

Jan-Benedict E.M. Steenkamp (University of North Carolina) provides guidance for global brand building and management via five core trends: (1) digital sales channels, (2) cocreation of brand strategy, (3) transparency, (4) connectivity among consumers, and (5) Internet of Things.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1069031X19894946

"Digital Environment in Global Markets: Cross-Cultural Implications for Evolving Customer Journeys"

Global marketers are under incredible pressure to keep up with dramatic shifts in customer journeys, observe Hyoryung Nam, (University of Washington) and P.K. Kannan (University of Maryland).
https://doi.org/10.1177/1069031X19898767

"Narrowband Influencers and Global Icons: Universality and Media Compatibility in the Communication Patterns of Political Leaders Worldwide"

A team led by Renana Peres (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) studies the social and traditional media strategies of over 60 world leaders categorizing them along universality and media compatibility.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1069031X19897893

"The Digital and Physical Footprint of Dark Net Markets"

Felipe Thomaz (Oxford University) establishes one of the first articles explaining the relationship between dark net markets and international marketing.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1069031X19898678

This issue marks the first under editor in chief Kelly Hewett. Hewett is on the faculty of the Haslam College of Business at the University of Tennessee and began her term as editor in chief in July 2019.

In the past, there has been much excitement over research that purported to show a link between changes in a woman's cycle and how attracted she was to men behaving in different ways. However, research at the University of Göttingen using the largest sample size to date questions these results. The new research showed that shifts in women's cycles did not affect their preferences for men's behaviour. The researchers found, however, that when fertile, women found all men slightly more attractive and, irrespective of their hormone cycle, flirtier men were evaluated as being more attractive for sexual relationships but less attractive for long-term relationships. The results were published in Psychological Science

According to the good genes ovulatory shift hypothesis (known as GGOSH), women's preferences for certain behaviours, presumed to indicate men's genetic fitness, should differ according to their fertility. To test this, the researchers studied 157 female participants who met strict criteria - including being 18 to 35 years old, heterosexual and having a natural, regular cycle. The participants watched videos showing a man getting to know a woman who was out of shot. In four separate testing sessions, the female participants rated the men both on sexual attractiveness for a short-term relationship without commitment, and on attractiveness for a long-term relationship. The participants were asked to focus on the way the men behaved. The researchers used saliva samples to analyse current hormone levels and highly sensitive urine ovulation tests for validating the ovulation date, and in particular the fertile period.

They found there was no evidence that a woman's mate preference changes across the ovulatory cycle. Rather, women seem to perceive or evaluate every man as slightly more attractive when fertile compared to other cycle phases. They also found that men who act in a more competitive manner and show more courtship behaviour (for instance flirting) were evaluated as being more attractive for short-term sexual relations but less attractive for long-term relationships, independent of cycle phase or hormone levels.

First author Dr Julia Stern from the University of Göttingen's Institute of Psychology said, "There is a lot of research on women's mate preferences, so at first we were surprised that we didn't see the same effects. However, our new results are in line with other recent studies using more rigorous methods than previous studies." Stern added, "The finding that ratings of attractiveness increase in the fertile phase, independent of men's behaviour, is new and indicates that women's mating motivation is likely to be higher in the fertile phase."

Apart from using well a large sample that met strict criteria, the researchers followed rigorous methods, for instance by preregistering their study before data collection and employing "open science" practices such as making their data and analyses publicly available.

A new study by a research team including scientists from the Prevention Research Center of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation provides a systematic review of research that examines relationships between exposure to alcohol marketing and alcohol use behaviors among adolescents and young adults.

The researchers identified 38 cross-sectional studies that examined the relationship between alcohol marketing and alcohol use behaviors over a 40-year period.

Across types of alcohol use outcomes, such as lifetime alcohol use and alcohol problems, exposure to marketing such as alcohol advertising, alcohol-related merchandise, and alcohol promotion and media sources, such as television and billboards, the researchers concluded that alcohol marketing exposure was positively associated with young peoples' alcohol use.

In general, relationships for alcohol promotion, such as alcohol-sponsored events, and owning alcohol-related merchandise were more consistently positive than for other advertising exposures such as seeing alcohol advertising.

These positive associations were observed across the past four decades, in countries across continents, and with small and large samples.

Dr. Sharon Lipperman-Kreda, an author on the study, notes that: "Although we cannot make causal inferences because of the cross-sectional nature of the studies, they do provide evidence that alcohol industry marketing may be one factor contributing to drinking and alcohol-related problems among young people." This review of research literature over forty years indicates that future policies should regulate alcohol marketing to a greater extent than they do currently, and this may have important short- and long-term public health implications for reducing underage or problematic alcohol use among youth.

Astronauts in space live on processed, pre-packaged space rations such as fruits, nuts, chocolate, shrimp cocktails, peanut butter, chicken, and beef to name a few. These have often been sterilized by heating, freeze drying, or irradiation to make them last and key a challenge for the US Space Agency NASA has been to figure out how to grow safe, fresh food onboard.

In a new study in Frontiers in Plant Science, Dr. Christina Khodadad, a researcher at the Kennedy Space Center, and co-authors report the successful cultivation of a salad crop - red romaine lettuce of the 'Outredgeous' cultivar - on board the International Space Station (ISS). They show that space-grown lettuce is free of disease-causing microbes and safe to eat, and is at least as nutritious as Earth-grown plants. This is despite being grown under lower gravity and more intense radiation than on Earth.

Apart from a welcome change in diet, fresh produce would provide astronauts with additional potassium as well as vitamins K, B1, and C - nutrients that are less abundant in pre-packaged rations and tend to degrade during long-term storage. Additionally, growing crops would be especially useful on long-distance space missions, like the upcoming Artemis-III missions (scheduled to land humans on the lunar South pole by 2024), the current SpaceX programme, and NASA's first crewed mission to Mars, planned for the late 2020s.

"The ability to grow food in a sustainable system that is safe for crew consumption will become critical as NASA moves toward longer missions. Salad-type, leafy greens can be grown and consumed fresh with few resources," says Khodadad.

Between 2014-2016, lettuce was grown on board the ISS from surface-sterilized seeds within Vegetable Production Systems (nicknamed "Veggie"), growth chambers equipped with LED lighting and a watering system, specifically designed to grow crops in space. The crops grew undisturbed inside the Veggie units for 33 to 56 days, until crew members ate part of the mature leaves (with no ill effects!). The remainder was deep-frozen until transport back to Earth for chemical and biological analysis.

As a control, the scientists grew control plants on Earth under the same conditions, which was possible because temperature, carbon dioxide, and humidity data were logged on board the ISS, and replicated in the Kennedy Space Center's laboratories with a 24-48 hour delay.

Space-grown lettuce was similar in composition to the Earth-grown controls, except that in some (but not all) trials, space-grown plant tissue tended to be richer in elements such as potassium, sodium, phosphorus, sulphur, and zinc, as well as in phenolics, molecules with proven antiviral, anticancer, and anti-inflammatory activity. Space- and Earth-grown lettuce also had similar levels of anthocyanin and other antioxidants, which can protect cells from damage by free, reactive oxygen radicals.

The researchers also examined the microbial communities growing on the plants. Typical Earth-grown plants harbour a diverse set of microbes. These may include specialized, beneficial guests called commensals (which neither harm nor benefit their host), or haphazard associates. Because these can affect the health of plants and their suitability as food, the researchers used next-generation DNA sequencing technology to characterize the communities of fungi and bacteria growing on the lettuce.

They identified the 15 most abundant microbial genera on the leaves and 20 in the roots, and found that the diversity and identity of these microbes was similar for space- and Earth-grown lettuce. This similarity was surprising, given the unique conditions in the ISS: the scientists had instead expected that these would favour the development of distinct microbial communities.

Importantly, none of the detected bacteria genera are known to cause disease in humans. Further tests confirmed that the leaves never carried any dangerous bacteria known to occasionally contaminate crops, such as coliform E. coli, Salmonella, and S. aureus, while the numbers of fungal and mould spores on them was also in the normal range for produce fit for human consumption.

The authors conclude that lettuce grown in space-borne Veggie units is safe to eat. These encouraging results open the door for experiments with other nutritious and tasty crops onboard the space station, to help propel astronauts further into space.

"The International Space Station is serving as a test bed for future long-duration missions, and these types of crop growth tests are helping to expand the suite of candidates that can be effectively grown in microgravity. Future tests will study other types of leafy crops as well as small fruits like pepper and tomatoes, to help provide supplemental fresh produce for the astronaut diet," concludes co-author Dr Gioia Massa, project scientist at Kennedy Space Center.

Philadelphia, March 6, 2020 - Parents may let their children consume more sugar from their breakfast cereal than intended due to insufficient industry nutritional guidelines. A new study in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, published by Elsevier, finds little improvement in the nutritional value of breakfast products marketed to children despite 12 years of self-imposed industry regulations intended to improve child health.

"Consumers often confuse what they consider to be a single serving and what is listed as the product's suggested serving size, generally eating more than what is recommended for a healthy diet," said author Matthew B. Ritter, PhD, of High Point University, High Point, NC, USA. "Many parents may be misled by the sugar content contained in the nutrition panel of many ready-to-eat cereal boxes, potentially leading to a higher sugar intake among children than intended."

The study focused on the Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI), an industry self-regulation program introduced in 2007 that, in part, guides companies in promoting food and beverages to children under the age of 12. The CFBAI includes 18 companies that together produce 70 to 80 percent of all children's television advertising.

CFBAI regulations require breakfast cereals advertised to children to meet certain nutritional standards such as fewer than 200 calories and fewer than 13 grams of added sugar per serving. Researchers found companies participating in the CFBAI also limited the use of packaging features appealing to children, such as mascots and games, to cereals with less than 13 grams of sugar per serving.

However, cereals listed as meeting CFBAI requirements had more sugar per ounce on average compared to those that did not claim to meet those guidelines. In fact, more than half of the cereals with moderate sugar per serving (9-12 grams) had high sugar per ounce (defined as more than 9 grams per ounce).

"Cereals explicitly listed as meeting CFBAI requirements overwhelmingly contain more than 9 grams of sugar per ounce -- well above the nutrition limits for eligible purchase through the WIC federal food assistance program," said study author Sarah E. Vaala, PhD, of High Point University.

CFBAI-compliant companies have improved nutrition in their products, but previous studies have found they still market lower-nutrition products more heavily to children than their healthier alternatives.

"Cereals with the highest sugar content often display child-driven marketing gimmicks on their boxes, like mascots. This validates similar findings in earlier research," Dr. Vaala said. "Based on prior research, we suspect the frequency of these promotional tools on relatively sugary cereals leads to more children being attracted to cereals with higher sugar content."

Dr. Ritter said their research comes down to two main points: a standardized metric would empower parents to make better purchase decisions for their children, and "the manufacturers are really making almost no effort to promote lower sugar options."

Overall, breakfast cereal is marketed directly to children more than any other food category, and many of these cereals fail to meet WIC nutritional standards.

NEW YORK, March 6, 2020 -- Researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY (CUNY ASRC) and Northwestern University have created a 4D printer capable of constructing patterned surfaces that recreate the complexity of cell surfaces. The technology, detailed in a newly published paper in Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-14990-x), allows scientists to combine organic chemistry, surface science, and nanolithography to construct precisely designed nanopatterned surfaces that are decorated with delicate organic or biological molecules. The surfaces will have a wide variety of uses, including in drug research, biosensor development, and advanced optics. Importantly, this technology can create surfaces with different materials, and these materials can be patterned across the surface without the use of expensive photomasks or tedious clean room processes.

"I am often asked if I've used this instrument to print a specific chemical or prepare a particular system," said the study's primary investigator Adam Braunschweig, a faculty member with the CUNY ASRC Nanoscience Initiative and The Graduate Center and Hunter College Chemistry Departments. "My response is that we've created a new tool for performing organic chemistry on surfaces, and its usage and application are only limited by the imagination of the user and their knowledge of organic chemistry."

The printing method, called Polymer Brush Hypersurface Photolithography, combines microfluidics, organic photochemistry, and advanced nanolithography to create a mask-free printer capable of preparing multiplexed arrays of delicate organic and biological matter. The novel system overcomes a number of limitations present in other biomaterial printing techniques, allowing researchers to create 4D objects with precisely structured matter and tailored chemical composition at each voxel--a capability the authors refer to as "hypersurface lithography".

"Researchers have been working toward using lithographic techniques to pattern surfaces with biomolecules, but to date we haven't developed a system sophisticated enough to construct something as complicated as a cell surface," said Daniel Valles, a Graduate Center, CUNY doctoral student in Braunschweig's lab. "We envision using this system to assemble synthetic cells that allow researchers to replicate and understand the interactions that occur on living cells, which will lead to the rapid development of medicines and other bioinspired technologies."

As proof-of-concept, the researchers printed polymer brush patterns using precise doses of light to control the polymer height at each pixel. As illustrated by the Lady Liberty image, coordination between the microfluidics and the light source control the chemical composition at each pixel.

"Polymer chemistry provides such a powerful set of tools, and innovations in polymer chemistry have been major drivers of technology throughout the last century," said the paper's co-author Nathan Gianneschi, who is the Jacob & Rosaline Cohn Professor of Chemistry, Materials Science & Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University. "This work extends this innovation to the interfaces where arbitrary structures can be made in a highly controlled way, and in a way that allows us to characterize what we have made and to generalize it to other polymers."

"This paper is a tour-de force demonstration of what can be done with massively parallel lithography tools," said Chad Mirkin, George B. Rathmann, Professor of Chemistry and the director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, who is not a coauthor of the study. "The co-authors have created a powerful set of capabilities that should be heavily utilized across the chemistry, material science, and biological communities."

The researchers plan to continue development of this novel printing platform to increase system speed, reduce pixel dimensions, and develop new chemistries for increasing the scope of materials that can be patterned. Currently, they are using the patterns created by this platform to understand the subtle interactions that dictate recognition in biological systems.

The Imperial College London and UCL researchers say their proof-of-concept study, published today in npj Digital Medicine, paves the way for the development of high-fidelity clinical imaging of the human brain that could be superior to existing technology.

Unlike existing brain imaging methods like MRI, CT and PET scanning, the technology could be applied to imaging any patient, and could be suitable for the continuous monitoring of high-dependency patients. It could be delivered by a relatively small device, which would also potentially make it portable via ambulance and enable fast investigation in advance of arrival to hospital.

The researchers are confident the technology will be safe as sound waves are already used for ultrasound scanning and this technology uses similar sound intensities. Ultrasound cannot easily penetrate through bone, whereas the new device, which is designed to be worn like a helmet, is able to overcome this barrier.

The new approach is of special value in patients investigated for stroke - the second commonest cause of death and commonest cause of adult neurological disability - where rapid, universally applicable, high-fidelity imaging is essential.

Lead author Dr Lluís Guasch, of Imperial's Department of Earth Science and Engineering, said: "An imaging technique that has already revolutionised one field - seismic imaging - now has the potential to revolutionise another - brain imaging."

Professor Bryan Williams Director NIHR UCL Hospitals Biomedical Research Centre, which partly funded the research, said: "This is an extraordinary and novel development in brain imaging which has huge potential to provide accessible brain imaging in routine clinical practice to evaluate the brain in head trauma, stroke and a variety of brain diseases.

"If this lives up to its promise it will be a major advance. It is also a fabulous illustration of how the collaboration between engineers and clinicians, using methods from another sphere of science, can bring ground-breaking innovation into medical care."

Transcending disciplines

Earth scientists use seismic data and a computational technique called full waveform inversion (FWI) to map the inside of the earth. Seismic data from earthquake detectors (seismometers) are plugged into FWI algorithms that extract 3D images of the Earth's crust that can be used to predict earthquakes and search for reservoirs of oil and gas.

Now Imperial researchers have adapted this approach to medical imaging, developing a method that uses sound waves with the ultimate aim of producing high-resolution images of the brain.

They built a helmet lined with an array of acoustic transducers that each sends sound waves through the skull. The ultrasound energy that propagates through the head is recorded and fed via the helmet into a computer. FWI is then used to analyse the reverberations of the sound throughout the skull, constructing a 3D image of the interior.

The researchers tested their helmet on a healthy volunteer and found that the quality of the recorded signals was sufficient for the algorithm to generate a detailed image, and they are confident the scattered energy from the brain will be interpretable.

Using computer modelling, they also found they could obtain high-resolution images with sound frequencies low enough to penetrate the skull at safe intensities.

They created detailed computer simulations based on the properties of different types of human brain tissue to establish that sound waves would be effective for composing high-resolution images of the brain.

Dr Guasch said: "This is the first time FWI has been applied to the task of imaging inside a human skull. FWI is normally used in geophysics to map the structure of the Earth, but our collaborative, multidisciplinary team of earth scientists, bioengineers and neurologists are using it to create a safe, cheap and portable method of generating 3D ultrasound images of the human brain."

Potential clinical use

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is generally the best method for obtaining high-resolution images of the brain, and its use is currently essential to the investigation of many neurological disorders including stroke, brain cancer, and brain injury.

Nonetheless, MRI requires large, complex, expensive, non-portable machines cooled to three degrees above absolute zero, and it cannot be used on patients for whom the presence of metallic implants or foreign bodies cannot be scrupulously ruled out. This makes emergency use in patients with potentially altered consciousness, such as those suspected of stroke, difficult or impossible.

The researchers say that if it proves successful in human trials, their device will overcome these obstacles.

Study co-author Professor Parashkev Nachev, of UCL, said: "This is a vivid illustration of the remarkable power of advanced computation in medicine. Combining algorithmic innovation with supercomputing could enable us to retrieve high-resolution images of the brain from safe, relatively simple, well-established physics: the transmission of soundwaves through human tissue.

"The practicalities of MRI will always limit its applicability, especially in the acute setting, where timely intervention has the greatest impact. Neurology has been waiting for a new, universally applicable imaging modality for decades: full-waveform inversion could well be the answer."

Next, the researchers will build a new prototype for live imaging of normal human brains as the first step to a device that could be evaluated in clinical contexts.

A groundbreaking study will enable scientists to better predict future warming of the world's lakes due to climate change, and the potential threat to cold-water species such as salmon and trout.

Pioneering research led by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) has devised the first system that classifies lakes globally, placing each of them in one of nine 'thermal regions' (see map).

Lakes are grouped depending on their seasonal patterns of surface water temperatures, with the coldest thermal region including lakes in Alaska, Canada, northern Russia and China, and the warmest covering lakes in equatorial South America, Africa, India and south-east Asia.

By incorporating climate change models, the scientists predict that by the year 2100, for the most extreme climate change scenario, average lake temperature will be around 4 degrees Celsius warmer and that 66 per cent of lakes globally will be classified in a warmer thermal region than they are now.

The study - carried out by UKCEH, the Universities of Dundee, Glasgow, Reading and Stirling, plus the Dundalk Institute of Technology - was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

Professor Stephen Maberly of UKCEH, lead author of the study, explains: "Thanks to cutting-edge analysis using satellite images of more than 700 lakes, taken twice a month over 16 years, we produced the first global lake temperature classification scheme. By combining this with a lake model and climate change scenarios we were able to identify that northern lakes, such as those in the UK, will be particularly sensitive to climate change."

Even relatively small changes in temperature can have a significant negative impact on aquatic wildlife, affecting the speed at which organisms grow and feed, and when they reproduce. As species do not react in the same way, prey and predators have increasingly different breeding and feeding cycles, reducing the amount of potential food available.

Warming also increases the risk of harmful algal blooms, which can have a negative impact on aquatic plants and fish.

Professor Maberly says: "Cold-water fish species in particular can be stressed by warmer temperatures. The potential negative impact on salmonids such as salmon, trout and Arctic charr, for example, is concerning because they play a central ecological role within food webs and also have great economic importance."

The research is aimed at scientists interested in freshwater ecology, climate change, greenhouse gas emissions and biogeochemical cycles.

Professor Andrew Tyler of the University of Stirling, who led the overall project, GloboLakes, says: "This is an example of pioneering UK-led research that has delivered the capability to monitor our inland waters at the global scale from satellite based platforms.

"This is not only yielding new insights into the impacts of climate change, but also the evidence base from which to better manage these ecologically sensitive environments and mitigate against the effects of change."

An app to classify lakes into the nine thermal regions is available in the R programming language at GitHub - https://github.com/ruth-odonnell/LakeThermalRegions/

Older parents are less flexible when it comes to raising their offspring, according to a new study of beetles.

University of Exeter scientists studied a species of burying beetle which raises its young on carcasses of small animals such as mice or birds.

They found that younger females adapted the number and total weight of offspring, and the effort they put into caring for them, based on the size of the carcass (smaller carcasses mean less food is available).

Meanwhile, older females largely ignored the conditions and put consistently high effort into reproduction.

"Being flexible can help organisms adapt to rapid changes in their environment," said Dr Nick Royle, of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall.

"It makes sense to produce more offspring when food is plentiful, and less when it's scarce.

"However, such flexibility takes effort and energy.

"So, for older beetles that may not get the chance to breed again, the best strategy might be to invest everything you have, regardless of the situation."

Like baby birds, young burying beetles beg to their parents for food and are fed by regurgitation in return.

The researchers varied the size of carcass available to the beetles to see how mothers responded.

Young mothers showed restraint - when less food was available, they saved resources for future reproduction - while the effort put in by older mothers was largely unaffected by the size of the carcass available.

Dr Royle said: "Parental care is hard work - it is costly - so it makes sense not to expend more energy than is necessary if there is a good chance you will get an opportunity to breed again.

"That is what the younger mothers are doing here - protecting assets for future reproductive opportunities by not engaging in high-risk behaviours.

"Flexibility is the key to this.

"But for older mothers, the chance of them breeding again is less likely so it is better to just go for it now as they might not have a future."

He added: "To our knowledge, this is the first time such age-dependent plasticity (flexibility) in parental care has been shown.

"It helps us to understand why there is such variation in plasticity in the natural world and how this can help organisms adapt to changes in their environment.

"Being plastic is good for burying beetles, but only when they are young."

Caltech and JPL have been successful partners in space exploration since the mid-1930s. In their tradition of intermixing in unique ways fundamental science, technology and engineering they develop a collaborative multi-disciplinary cross-agency research program to advance and accelerate scalable hybrid quantum networking and communications technologies.

To support the increasing data bandwidth requirement of deep space exploration, NASA tasked JPL with implementing the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) project--a mission to establish a laser communication link over the

JPL's Cold Atom Lab (CAL) has reliably produced Bose-Einstein Condensates (BECs) in orbit on board the International Space Station on a daily basis since June 2018, leading to profound advances of our understanding of quantum processes in the microgravity environment [4]. In December 2019, the CAL-Upgrade Module was installed onboard the International Space Station. CAL-UM is the first atomic interferometer in orbit: major milestone is to demonstrate the utility and flight impact of quantum sensing technology through precision sensing of gravity and inertial forces and probing fundamental physics at large.

JPL's Deep Space Atomic Clock [5] (DSAC), launched in June 2019, applies mercury-ion clock technology pioneered at JPL to precision time and frequency synthesis in space. Operating with greater stability and precision compared to GPS, DSAC is a pathfinder on quantum clock technologies improving spacecraft autonomous navigation, formation flying, and probing general relativity. On Earth, Caltech and JPL recently demonstrated novel clock technology using strontium atoms in an architecture that lends itself to enhanced performance via quantum entanglement [6].

These developments in space and ground based quantum technologies propel Caltech and JPL towards the next set of demonstators and pathfinders in the hybrid quantum networking frontier. As a first step Caltech and JPL have designed a practical, high rate high-fidelity quantum communication system over fiber and free space. The team is on track to deploy, commission and demonstrate both concepts, including a free-space, municipal quantum link between JPL and Caltech, in 2020-21. In the next phase the team plans to develop and implement FPGA-based, real-time quantum communications and use the adaptive optics system at JPL's Table Mountain Facility (TMF) one meter telescope to optimize the communication rate--thereby qualifying TMF for future space-ground quantum links using small-sats & other platforms. This can be used to establish a space-based quantum optical connection between the Caltech-JPL quantum network and quantum networks in the midwest (Fermlab’s FQNET and IEQNET together with ANL), the south (Oak Ridge National Laboratory), the northeast (Lincoln Labs, BNL), the northwest (SLAC, LBNL) as well as other research nodes and potential industrial testbeds in development nationally and internationally. This effort, combined with Caltech's quantum research ecosystem [7] and JPL's successes in quantum flight and ground systems, will bolster NASA's space exploration and fundamental science mission, NIST's mission to establish precision time and frequency standards and DOE's mission and strategic vision for America's Quantum Networks [8].

Late last year, news broke that the star Betelgeuse was fading significantly, ultimately dropping to around 40% of its usual brightness. The activity fueled popular speculation that the red supergiant would soon explode as a massive supernova.

But astronomers have more benign theories to explain the star's dimming behavior. And scientists at the University of Washington and Lowell Observatory believe they have support for one of them: Betelgeuse isn't dimming because it's about to explode -- it's just dusty.

In a paper accepted to Astrophysical Journal Letters and published on the preprint site arXiv, Emily Levesque, a UW associate professor of astronomy, and Philip Massey, an astronomer with Lowell Observatory, report that observations of Betelgeuse taken Feb. 14 at the Flagstaff, Arizona, observatory allowed them to calculate the average surface temperature of the star. They discovered that Betelgeuse is significantly warmer than expected if the recent dimming were caused by a cooling of the star’s surface.

The new calculations lend support to the theory that Betelgeuse -- as many red supergiant stars are prone to do -- has likely sloughed off some material from its outer layers.

"We see this all the time in red supergiants, and it's a normal part of their life cycle," said Levesque. "Red supergiants will occasionally shed material from their surfaces, which will condense around the star as dust. As it cools and dissipates, the dust grains will absorb some of the light heading toward us and block our view."

It is still true: Astronomers expect Betelgeuse to explode as a supernova within the next 100,000 years when its core collapses. But the star's dimming, which began in October, wasn't necessarily a sign of an imminent supernova, according to Massey.

One theory was that newly formed dust was absorbing some of Betelgeuse's light. Another posited that huge convection cells within Betelgeuse had drawn hot material up to its surface, where it had cooled before falling back into the interior.

"A simple way to tell between these possibilities is to determine the effective surface temperature of Betelgeuse," said Massey.

Measuring a star's temperature is no straightforward task. Scientists can't just point a thermometer at a star and get a reading. But by looking at the spectrum of light emanating from a star, astronomers can calculate its temperature.

"Emily and I had been in contact about Betelgeuse, and we both agreed that the obvious thing to do was to get a spectrum," said Massey. "I already had observing time scheduled on the 4.3-meter Lowell Discovery Telescope, and I knew if I played around for a bit I would be able to get a good spectrum despite Betelgeuse still being one of the brightest stars in the sky."

The light from bright stars is often too strong for a detailed spectrum, but Massey employed a filter that effectively "dampened" the signal so they could mine the spectrum for a particular signature: the absorbance of light by molecules of titanium oxide.

Titanium oxide can form and accumulate in the upper layers of large, relatively cool stars like Betelgeuse, according to Levesque. It absorbs certain wavelengths of light, leaving telltale "scoops" in the spectrum of red supergiants that scientist can use to determine the star's surface temperature.

By their calculations, Betelgeuse's average surface temperature on Feb. 14 was about 3,325 degrees Celsius, or 6,017 F. That's only 50-100 degrees Celsius cooler than the temperature that a team -- including Massey and Levesque -- had calculated as Betelgeuse's surface temperature in 2004, years before its dramatic dimming began.

These findings cast doubt that Betelgeuse is dimming because one of the star's massive convection cells had brought hot gas from the interior to the surface, where it had cooled. Many stars have these convection cells, including our own sun. They resemble the surface of a pot of boiling water, said Levesque. But whereas the convection cells on our sun are numerous and relatively small -- roughly the size of Texas or Mexico -- red supergiants like Betelgeuse, which are larger, cooler and have weaker gravity, sport just three or four massive convection cells that stretch over much of their surfaces.

If one of these massive cells had risen to Betelgeuse's surface, Levesque and Massey would have registered a substantially greater decrease in temperature than what they see between 2004 and 2020.

"A comparison with our 2004 spectrum showed immediately that the temperature hadn't changed significantly," said Massey. "We knew the answer had to be dust."

Astronomers have observed clouds of dust around other red supergiants, and additional observations may reveal similar clutter around Betelgeuse.

Over the past few weeks, Betelgeuse has actually started to brighten again, albeit slightly. Even if the recent dimming wasn't an indication that the star would soon explode, to Levesque and Massey, that's no reason to stop looking.

"Red supergiants are very dynamic stars," said Levesque. "The more we can learn about their normal behavior -- temperature fluctuations, dust, convection cells -- the better we can understand them and recognize when something truly unique, like a supernova, might happen."

VANCOUVER, Wash. - Research at Washington State University has linked chronic depression with increased health problems for moms and children in poor rural communities, revealing the need for better treatment based on teamwork and trust.

Using data from the ongoing, multi-state Rural Families Speak project, a team led by Yoshie Sano, associate professor in WSU's Department of Human Development, examined the experiences of 23 mothers with clinical depression across three years.

The findings, recently published in the Journal of Family Social Work, revealed that mothers who were constantly depressed experienced more health problems, distrusted doctors and had a worse outlook on their lives, compared with moms whose symptoms improved. The mothers' depression also affected those closest to them.

"Mothers are one of the main supports of the family," said Sano, the lead author on the paper. "They're raising children, paying bills, and organizing events. When they're depressed, the entire family is impacted."

More than one in five adults deal with depression, a mood disorder that causes persistent sadness, exhaustion and loss of interest, affecting relationships, work, and emotional and physical health. Women are twice as likely to have depression as men, and people in poverty are three times more likely to experience it.

"Depression affects everything--employability, parenting, how we deal with daily life," said Sano. "Mental health is the core of a productive life."

As part of her research into family relationships through Rural Families Speak, Sano kept encountering mothers from rural, low-income families who were dealing with depression.

While much prior research has found how depression affects childhood development, she sought to understand the broader context of maternal depression.

Both groups of moms, those who were depressed but improving as well as those who had chronic depression, had similar struggles in dealing with their children's health. But chronically depressed moms faced greater challenges in dealing with their children's emotional and behavioral issues, which were often compounded by a lack of childcare options, employment, concerns for delinquent behaviors and day-to-day behavioral management issues.

"We found that children's health--particularly their emotional and behavioral health--is one of the most challenging contributors to maternal depression," Sano said. "Depression doesn't happen in isolation. It happens in a family, community, and cultural context."

Policy makers often focus on physical health as a direct obstacle to self-sufficiency for low-income families, said Sano.

"But especially for moms, mental health is the major obstacle," she said. "There's a huge stigma around mental health, especially in rural areas. Women try to deal with it alone."

The scientists found that chronically depressed mothers expressed strong distrust of health-care professionals and their prescribed treatments.

"It's critical for mothers to find at least one provider with whom they can build a trusting relationship--someone who knows their overall health histories, understands their family histories, and listens to their concerns," Sano said.

For rural communities with limited care providers, Sano underlined the importance of coordination between doctors, mental health professionals and social workers as well as the need to incorporate mental health screening into existing support systems, such as schools and public assistance.

"We hope our results will inspire new conversations among health care providers, and raise awareness that this is a hidden but deep problem for low-income mothers," she said. "Once people recognize this issue, the stigma attached to mental health will decrease."

Okazaki, Japan - Although a number of techniques are able to track changes in pH in the brain, precise measurements have not previously been possible. Now, however, researchers in Japan have developed a novel method for examining brain pH that may lead to new information about the role of pH in brain signaling.

In a study published this month in Nature Communications, researchers from the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Okazaki and Toyohashi University of Technology in Toyohashi revealed their new design for a probe to measure brain pH with increased spatial and temporal accuracy compared with previous techniques.

The recent finding that pH plays a role in neurotransmission indicates that pH changes may have important consequences for normal brain function and pathological brain conditions. However, existing methods for measuring brain pH either have low spatial and temporal resolution, such as magnetic resonance imaging, or are limited in that they are only able to measure pH at a single point, i.e., microelectrodes. As a result, the detailed involvement of pH in neurotransmission remains unexamined. To address this, researchers at the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Okazaki and Toyohashi University of Technology in Toyohashi developed a special sensor to examine pH activity at a neural circuitry level.

"The new proton image sensor device was based on our previous sensor, but was speci?cally optimized for in vivo brain analyses in mice," says Hiroshi Horiuchi, one of the lead authors of the study. "This enabled us to examine changes in brain pH, which is measured according to proton concentration, during exposure to stimuli in a visual experience task," adds Masakazu Agetsuma, the other lead author of the study.

The new device was designed to be smaller than the previous probe so that it would cause minimal damage to the brain regions surrounding the probe. When the researchers tested the device, they found that the modifications did not appear to impair functionality.

"The data indicate that our biosensor can measure changes in pH that occur on a scale of micrometers and milliseconds across a wide area," explains Kazuaki Sawada, co-corresponding author. "As a result, it was possible to use the probe to correlate distinct spatial patterns of pH changes in the mouse primary visual cortex with specific visual stimulus patterns."

The proton image sensor was able to uncover distinct patterns of pH changes in the primary visual cortex that were induced by each of eight different stimulus patterns.

"That we found alterations in pH at a micrometer-scale resolution suggests that pH changes may be involved in ?ne-tuning brain activity," says Junichi Nabekura, senior author. "This may be clinically important given that patients with psychological disorders, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, have been found to have abnormal brain pH levels."

That the probe was successfully used to observe the biological dynamics of pH indicates that it may have potential applications in a wide range of biological investigations. Particularly, the proton image sensor may be useful for examining the relationship between cellular pH dysfunction and various pathologies.

New research has found that music therapy sessions have a positive effect on the neurorehabilitation of acute stroke patients, as well as their mood.

The study - the first large-scale investigation into the feasibility of delivering these exercises - was led by Dr Alex Street, of Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), and was carried out on a 26-bed stroke and rehabilitation unit at Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge.

In total, 177 patients took part in 675 Neurologic Music Therapy (NMT) sessions over a two-year period. The researchers investigated its success among patients, their relatives, and health professionals, and the results are published in the journal Topics in Stroke Rehabilitation.

Music therapy is understood to help stroke patients through mood regulation, improved concentration, and promoting changes in the brain to improve function, known as neural reorganisation. Physical benefits include better arm function and gait.

Lots of repetition, or 'massed practice', is central to neurorehabilitation. In addition to playing physical instruments (keyboard, drums and hand-held percussion), iPads featuring touchscreen instruments were used in the trial to help patients with hand rehabilitation, through improving finger dexterity, and cognitive training.

NMT sessions were run alongside existing stroke rehabilitation treatment, including physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and clinical psychology.

Of the 139 patients, relatives and hospital staff who completed questionnaires, the average response was that NMT was "helpful" or "very helpful". And of the 52 patients who completed mood scale questionnaires, there was a reduction in "sad" and an increase in "happy" responses immediately following a session.

Speech and language therapists observed a positive impact on patient arousal and engagement, and reported that it may help patients overcome low mood and fatigue - both common following stroke - and therefore be beneficial for their rehabilitation.

Following the success of the trial, the Cambridge Institute for Music Therapy Research at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) and Addenbrooke's hospital are developing a proposal to establish a permanent NMT post on the stroke ward, funded by the NHS.

Dr Alex Street, Senior Research Fellow within the Cambridge Institute for Music Therapy Research at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), said: "Our study found that Neurologic Music Therapy was received enthusiastically by patients, their relatives, and staff.

"The fact 675 sessions were carried out in two years is in itself an indication of the success of the treatment. It shows that staff are referring patients because they understand the mechanisms of the exercises and can see how it can benefit their patients. It also shows that patients are willing to do the exercises, with each one participating in an average of five sessions.

"Staff felt that using music and instruments allowed patients to achieve a high amount of repetition to help achieve their goals. They felt that the exercises appear less clinical, because the patients are playing music with the music therapist, and they are receiving immediate feedback from the exercises, through the sounds they create. Further research is necessary to establish potential effects of music therapy on recovery rate and length of hospital stay."

Baltimore, MD--Antibiotics can make easy work of infections. But how do they affect the complex ecosystems of friendly bacteria that make up our microbiome?

"When a doctor prescribes antibiotics, it sets up a multi-faceted experiment in your gastrointestinal system," explains Carnegie's Will Ludington "What can this teach us about the molecular principles of species interactions in nature?"

New work led by Ludington and Stanford University's K.C. Huang set out to answer this challenging question and discovered a new form of antibiotic tolerance. Their findings, which have important health implications, are published by eLife.

This is one of several research fronts on which Ludington uses the fruit fly microbiome to understand interactions between species in a bacterial community. It poses an ideal environment for probing both natural bacterial populations and the human microbiome.

The human microbiome is an ecosystem of hundreds to thousands of microbial species living within our guts. It affects our health and even our longevity. But it's difficult to elucidate the myriad ways that the different species that comprise our microbiome interact with and influence each other, even under normal conditions. Once antibiotics are introduced, little is understood about how these vital communities are impacted on a biochemical level.

This is why the fruit fly makes such an excellent model. Unlike the human microbiome, it consists of only a handful of bacterial species.

"We really wanted to understand how an antibiotic's targeting of specific physiological processes impacts the metabolic interactions and sharing of resources that occurs between bacterial species within a community," said lead author Andrés Aranda-Díaz of Stanford. "This is especially important because in nature bacteria live in diverse communities."

The simplicity of the fruit fly microbiome makes it the perfect vehicle for revealing how this multi-species biochemical interplay is altered by the introduction of antibiotics.

"We found that interactions between species in the gut microbiome ecosystem influence the effectiveness of antibiotics at killing off an individual species within this community, as well as the entire community's metabolism," said Huang.

The researchers demonstrated that when a type of bacterium from the fruit fly microbiome, called Lactobacillus--which are also found in yogurt--is grown together with a vinegar-producing fly bacterium called Acetobacter, it is less susceptible to death by antibiotics.

This is a newfound category of a phenomenon called antibiotic tolerance, meaning that cells die much more slowly when found together than they would on their own. Tolerance can be dangerous, because this delay increases the risk that full-on resistance to the antibiotic could evolve.

"Normally, tolerance occurs when a cell slows its metabolism in response to antibiotic exposure," explained Ludington. "But in this case, the tolerance is actually associated with increased metabolism."

It turns out that the Acetobacters consume the lactic acid that is excreted as a waste product by neighboring Lactobacillus, providing a fitness advantage to both species and triggering the tolerance the team discovered.

"We don't know exactly how it happens yet, but we think the two bacterial species both 'know' when the other type of cell is there and respond appropriately," said Benjamin Obadia of UC Berkeley. "These mechanisms are probably evolved from living together, and we wouldn't have seen them if we studied the two species in isolation."

The team's work shows that the microbiome can be an important tool for understanding the relationships within communities of bacteria in the natural world on a biochemical level.

"It also illustrates that gut microbiome health should be considered whenever antibiotics are prescribed," added Ludington.

Studying the principles governing species-species interactions are key to understanding so much about ecosystems large and small and the microbiome is a critical tool for exploring these questions.

Another recently published collaboration between Ludington, Huang, and a different Stanford researcher--biologist Lucy O'Brien--developed new technology to visualize the guts of living fruit flies. Called Bellymount, it allowed them to observe individual bacterial cells in the gut of a living fruit fly for the first time.

"By observing the microbiome in real time, we were able to measure its dynamics," said Ludington of their paper, which appeared in PLOS Biology.

The research team found that specific regions of the gut have high microbiome stability and others have continuous turnover. This indicates that there are structures in the fruit fly gut that maintain colonization and opens the door to the possibility that fruit flies may have evolved these structures to keep their microbiomes.

"Now we have the power to actually eavesdrop on the 'conversations' occurring between microbiome bacteria, and the gut cells in their surrounding environment," said Huang