Culture

Air pollution is responsible for shortening people's lives worldwide on a scale far greater than wars and other forms of violence, parasitic and vector-born diseases such as malaria, HIV/AIDS and smoking, according to a study published in Cardiovascular Research [1] today (Tuesday).

Professors Jos Lelieveld and Thomas Münzel, of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Department of Cardiology of the University Medical Centre Mainz in Mainz, Germany, who led the research, say the findings suggest the world is facing an air pollution "pandemic".

Using a new method of modelling the effects of various sources of air pollution on death rates, the researchers estimated that globally air pollution caused an extra 8.8 million premature deaths a year in 2015. This represents an average shortening of life expectancy of nearly three years for all persons worldwide.

In comparison, tobacco smoking shortens life expectancy by an average of 2.2 years (7.2 million deaths), HIV/AIDS by 0.7 years (1 million deaths), diseases like malaria that are carried by parasites or insects such as mosquitoes, ticks and fleas by 0.6 years (600,000 deaths), and all forms of violence (including deaths in wars) by 0.3 years (530,000 deaths). [2]

The researchers looked at the effect of air pollution on six categories of disease: lower respiratory tract infection, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer, heart disease, cerebrovascular disease leading to stroke, and other, non-communicable diseases, which include conditions such as high blood pressure and diabetes. They found that cardiovascular diseases (heart disease and cerebrovascular disease combined) are responsible for the greatest proportion of shortened lives from air pollution: 43% of the loss in life expectancy worldwide.

They also found that air pollution had a greater effect on shortening lives in older people, with the exception of deaths in children aged under five in low income countries, such as Africa and South Asia. Globally, about 75% of deaths attributed to air pollution occur in people aged over 60 years.

This is the first study to show the effects of air pollution on deaths according to age, type of disease and also its effect on life expectancy at the level of individual countries and regions.

Professor Jos Lelieveld, who is also from the Cyprus Institute Nicosia, Cyprus, said: "It is remarkable that both the number of deaths and the loss in life expectancy from air pollution rival the effect of tobacco smoking and are much higher than other causes of death. Air pollution exceeds malaria as a global cause of premature death by a factor of 19; it exceeds violence by a factor of 16, HIV/AIDS by a factor of 9, alcohol by a factor of 45, and drug abuse by a factor of 60."

Prof Münzel said: "Since the impact of air pollution on public health overall is much larger than expected, and is a worldwide phenomenon, we believe our results show there is an 'air pollution pandemic'. Policy-makers and the medical community should be paying much more attention to this. Both air pollution and smoking are preventable, but over the past decades much less attention has been paid to air pollution than to smoking, especially among cardiologists.

"In this paper we distinguished between avoidable, human-made air pollution and pollution from natural sources such as desert dust and wildfire emissions, which cannot be avoided. We show that about two-thirds of premature deaths are attributable to human-made air pollution, mainly from fossil fuel use; this goes up to 80% in high-income countries. Five and a half million deaths worldwide a year are potentially avoidable.

"It is important that policy-makers and the medical community realise that air pollution is an important risk factor for heart and blood vessel disease. It should be included as risk factor, along with smoking, diabetes and high blood pressure and cholesterol, in the guidelines of the European Society of Cardiology and the American Heart Association on the prevention of acute and chronic heart syndromes and heart failure."

The researchers estimate that if air pollution was reduced by removing fossil fuel emissions, the average life expectancy worldwide would increase by just over a year, and by nearly two years if all human-made emissions were removed.

However, there are large differences between regions due to the diversity in emissions. In East Asia, which has the highest loss of life expectancy due to avoidable air pollution, three of the average of four years of lost life expectancy could be prevented by the removal of human-made emissions; whereas in Africa, where population growth is rapid and pollution from dust predominates, only 0.7 of 3.1 years lost could be prevented. In Europe, there is an average of 2.2 years of lost life expectancy, 1.7 of which could be prevented, and in North America there is an average of 1.4 years of lost life expectancy, of which 1.1 could be prevented, mostly by phasing out fossil fuels.

Prof Lelieveld said: "In Africa, air pollution represents a health risk that is comparable to HIV/AIDS and malaria. However, in most of the rest of the world air pollution is a much greater health risk. When we looked at how pollution played a role in several diseases, its effect on cardiovascular disease was by far the largest - very similar to the effect of smoking. Air pollution causes damage to the blood vessels through increased oxidative stress, which then leads to increases in blood pressure, diabetes, stroke, heart attacks and heart failure."

The researchers used exposure data from a model that simulates atmospheric chemical processes and the way they interact with land, sea and chemicals emitted from natural and human-made sources such as energy generation, industry, traffic and agriculture. They applied these to a new model of global exposure and death rates [3] and to data from the Global Burden of Disease [2], which included information on population density, geographical locations, ages, risk factors for several diseases and causes of death. They estimated the death rates and loss of life expectancy from different causes of air pollution compared to other causes of premature death for countries and regions around the world.

Limitations of the study include the fact there is uncertainty surrounding the estimates, so the size of the effect of air pollution on deaths could be larger or smaller. Nevertheless, such uncertainty also applies to other health risk factors, including smoking. More research is needed to understand fully the mechanisms involved in the associations seen between air pollution and a variety of diseases.

As the Affordable Care Act turns 10 years old, a new study shows it has narrowed racial and ethnic gaps in access to health insurance and health care - but definitely not eliminated them.

Just before the ACA's insurance programs took effect, nearly 25% of African-American adults under 65 and 40% of Hispanic adults in the same age group lacked health insurance, compared with 15% of white adults under 65.

But over the next three years, those numbers had dropped dramatically. So did the size of the gap in insurance rates between whites and the other two groups, according to the new University of Michigan analysis. From 2013 to 2017, the insurance gap between blacks and whites narrowed 45%, and the difference between Hispanics and whites narrowed 35%.

In states that expanded Medicaid, the insurance gap between whites and blacks closed completely when population differences were taken into account.
Even so, more than 27 million Americans still lacked health insurance by 2017. The researchers show this includes 14% of blacks, 25% of Hispanics and 8.5% of whites in the 19-64 age range.

Writing in the March issue of the journal Health Affairs, the researchers also report smaller changes over time in the percentage of adults who said they had gone without health care because of cost. The gaps between whites, blacks and Hispanics in this measure also began to close, but still remained by 2017.

"This is a glass half-full, glass half-empty story," says Thomas Buchmueller, Ph.D., one of two U-M health economists who authored the study. "The half full aspect is that coverage increased and disparities declined, and those with the greatest need tended to benefit. But we still have large disparities, particularly for Hispanic non-citizens. And lack of insurance means lower access to care and poorer health outcomes."

Buchmueller, a professor in U-M's Ross School of Business, and Helen Levy, Ph.D., a research professor at the U-M Institute for Social Research, did the study as a follow-up to their 2016 work tracking the effects of the ACA's programs on insurance disparities after its first year. Buchmueller will present the results March 10 at an ACA anniversary event in Washington, D.C. organized by the journal.

More about the study and the ACA

The new paper is based on data from 2008 to 2017, from nationally representative federal surveys. The researchers focused on adults aged 19 to 64, the age group most affected by the ACA coverage expansions, and limited their analysis to white, black and Hispanic adults due to smaller sample sizes for Asian-Americans and Native Americans.

The ACA was signed into law in March 2010, but its provisions for individuals and businesses to buy insurance directly on state or federal Marketplaces, for individuals to get financial assistance to buy insurance, and for states to choose to expand Medicaid programs for low-income adults, didn't take effect until 2014.

The researchers note that if Medicaid work requirements survive legal challenges, they will disproportionately affect blacks and Hispanic citizens who could potentially lose coverage if they do not meet the requirement. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court may decide the fate of the ACA as a whole, including its insurance programs.

Further results: Medicaid expansion and adjusted data

The new study shows that disparities between groups changed at about the same pace in states that did or didn't implement the ACA Medicaid expansion.

"Medicaid expansion made a big difference for low-income Americans in the states that chose to opt in, but it did so for all racial and ethnic groups, so it did not make a significant difference in how much the gap between whites and blacks or Hispanics closed," says Levy.

She points to work by other U-M researchers including the team that is evaluating Michigan's Medicaid expansion, and U-M's Sarah Miller, Ph.D., who showed a decline in disease-related deaths in Medicaid expansion states.

The study also looks at what percentage of adults in each group said they had gone without some form of medical care in the past year because of its cost, and what percentage said they had a health care provider they considered their usual source of care.

Consistent with differences in health insurance status, whites were less likely to have skipped care because of cost, and more likely to have a usual source of care than blacks or Hispanics before the ACA went into effect.

Starting soon after the ACA's main provisions began taking effect, the gaps between whites and the two other groups began to close, though this trend was modest compared to insurance gains. The percentage of black American adults who reported cost-related avoidance of care actually ticked up slightly from 2016 to 2017.

Older adults with irregular sleep patterns--meaning they have no regular bedtime and wakeup schedule, or they get different amounts of sleep each night--are nearly twice as likely to develop cardiovascular disease as those with more regular sleep patterns, according to a new study funded in part by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the National Institutes of Health.

The five-year study suggests that an irregular sleep pattern may be a novel and independent risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD), and that maintaining regular sleep patterns could help prevent heart disease just as physical activity, a healthy diet, and other lifestyle measures do, the researchers said.

Findings from the prospective study--the first believed to link sleep irregularity to the development of CVD--were published online on March 2 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

"We hope that our study will help raise awareness about the potential importance of a regular sleep pattern in improving heart health. It is a new frontier in sleep medicine," said lead study author Tianyi Huang, Sc.D, an epidemiologist with the Channing Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

"Research has linked irregular sleep schedules to a constellation of disease-causing abnormalities in body function, including changes in blood sugar and inflammation," said Michael Twery, Ph.D., director of the NHLBI's National Center on Sleep Disorders Research. "This study is Important because it is among the largest of its kind, and it specifically associates these irregular sleep patterns with an increased risk for cardiovascular disease."

Previous studies have linked insufficient amounts of sleep to a higher risk of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, which is among the reasons doctors emphasize the importance of getting seven to eight hours of sleep per night. Although researchers have suspected that high day-to-day variability in sleep duration and timing might also have negative effects on heart health, its effect remained unclear.

In the current study, the researchers followed 1,992 men and women, 45-84 years old, who did not have CVD at the start of the study. The participants, who were part of the NHLBI-funded Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), lived in communities across the United States. Of the participants, about 38% were white, 28% African American, 22% Hispanic, and 12% Chinese American. They were followed for about five years (2010-2016) after having a sleep examination.

To measure sleep irregularity, the participants wore actigraph devices on their wrists to closely track sleep and wake activity for seven consecutive days, including weekends. The actigraphs resemble smart watches but are designed to specifically measure whether a person is active or at rest, which correlates to wakefulness and sleep. They also underwent a one-night at-home polysomnography--a comprehensive sleep test--at the beginning of the study and took a questionnaire-based sleep assessment.

During the five-year follow-up period, 111 participants developed CVD events, including heart attack and stroke, or died from CVD-related causes. The researchers found that participants with the most irregular sleep duration or timing had more than double the risk of developing a CVD event over the follow-up period compared to those with the most regular sleep patterns. The associations remained strong even after adjusting for known cardiovascular risk factors and other sleep variables such as obstructive sleep apnea and average sleep duration, the researchers said.

The association between irregular sleep and CVD appeared stronger among racial/ethnic minority populations, particularly African Americans, than among whites, the researchers said. This finding is consistent with recent studies that show racial minorities tend to have a higher risk of sleep disorders than whites. Although past studies suggest that women are more likely than men to be affected by unhealthy sleep, the current study did not find significant gender differences.

The researchers said they are still unclear about the exact biological mechanisms behind the sleep irregularity and CVD link, but they suspect that multiple factors, including harmful disturbances in the body's circadian rhythm--the 24-hour internal body clock which controls the sleep-wake cycle--may be in play. Recent studies by the same researchers linked irregular sleep patterns to harmful metabolic changes associated with obesity, diabetes, and high cholesterol, and they suspect similar processes might also influence CVD risk.

In future studies, the researchers said they will look for blood biomarkers that may help explain the apparent link. Larger studies with longer follow-up will also be important to confirm these findings. A better understanding of the root causes could lead to new interventions that could help people better regulate their sleep patterns, such as wearing devices or using specialized mobile apps designed to reduce irregular sleep, the researchers said. Medicinal interventions also may be possible, they noted.

People may count sheep when they cannot sleep, but when they do finally drift off their brains generate the same type of brain wave as their ovine counterparts, according to new research published in eNeuro. Monitoring how a sheep's sleep changes during the progression of a brain disease may one day translate to sleep-based diagnosis in humans.

Sleep is essential for consolidating memories and maintaining brain health. During sleep, a specific brain wave occurs - the sleep spindle. They are associated with converting short-term memories into long-term memories. Spindles may also predict brain health.

Schneider et al. recorded the brain activity in sheep over one day and two nights using electroencephalography. The sheep generated sleep spindles falling within the frequency range typical of human sleep spindles. Like humans, each sheep maintained their own pattern of spindles that stayed consistent during both nights of sleep. During sleep, spindles occur all over the brain. However, a unique type of sleep spindle appeared in specific brain areas while the sheep were awake. These spindles may be connected to thinking and remembering during the day. Because they possess similar brain structure, sleep patterns, and even brain disorders, sheep are an excellent model for studying human sleep and brain disorders.

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Biology can be murky, and medicine involves dealing with very complex mixtures of molecules. A new technology developed at Northwestern University now offers some clarity to scientists with precision measurements of proteins down to their atoms.

The powerful new approach, called individual ion mass spectrometry, or I2MS, can determine the exact mass of a huge range of intact proteins. It weighs each and every molecule on an individual basis. This ability promises to aid the understanding of disease and infection and accelerate the design of vaccines for deadly viruses, such as the coronavirus.

Details on this fundamentally new way to weigh single molecules of proteins or their assemblies, such as whole viruses, will be published March 2 by the journal Nature Methods.

The researchers show their method, which uses the commercially available Orbitrap mass analyzer system, can be used on super complex mixtures of intact proteins, and even whole virus particles carrying diverse cargo within them. This power and versatility will enable a new wave of molecular precision to be brought to diverse problems in vacinnology, virology, neurodegenerative plaques and disease biology in general.

"Quickly characterizing the masses of viruses and their infectious cargo over time may help scientists understand mutations that are occurring," said Neil L. Kelleher, who led the research.

"Whether directly characterizing different strains of viruses or profiling different vaccine formulations, our new technology now can be deployed directly on these protein-containing samples to pursue the most urgent challenges of the day," he said.

Kelleher is a pioneer in top-down proteomics with one of the leading groups in the world that studies intact proteins. He is the Walter and Mary Elizabeth Glass Chair in Life Sciences in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences' departments of chemistry and molecular biosciences.

The technology will help scientists further understand the composition of the exterior of a virus (called the capsid) and the infectious cargo held within the capsid, Kelleher said. Because the researchers can analyze a handful of single virus particles at a time, they can extract information about precise variations in each particle.

"Many research groups are studying the use of viral capsids filled with cargo as a means to deliver life-saving drugs to patients," said Jared O. Kafader, the study's first author. "Our technology provides a practical way to determine if the cargo contains the correct drug or to find out what is actually within each virus particle."

Kafader is a senior research associate in Northwestern's Proteomics Center of Excellence. (Proteomics is the study and analysis of protein structure and function.)

A related study by the Kelleher group, published recently in the Journal of Proteome Research, extends analysis of I2MS to fragmentation of intact species. By fragmenting intact proteins, important information about where modifications or mutations on the protein can be identified, the researchers said. These modifications have implications for understanding how proteins change or mutate in cancer patients.

Baltimore, MD-- They say a picture is worth 1,000 words. But what about a real-time window into the complexity of the gastrointestinal system?

A new research tool allowed biologists to watch in real time the cell renewal process that keeps gut tissue healthy, as well as the interactions between bacterial species that make up the microbiome. Their work, led by Lucy O'Brien and KC Huang of Stanford University and Carnegie's Will Ludington, was recently published by PLOS Biology.

The system, dubbed Bellymount, allowed researchers to peer into the live tissue of the fruit fly gut and better understand the many complex, overlapping processes occurring there.

O'Brien developed it to understand how stem cells in the gastrointestinal system drive the tissue renewal process that gets rid of sick cells and replaces them with new, healthy ones. When this process is disrupted, it has an aging effect. Understanding it could drive improvements in precision medicine and guide the development of regenerative therapies.

"Before now, no one has ever watched how gut renewal progresses because it occurs over many days and happens deep inside the body," O'Brien explained.

Using Bellymount, the researchers were able to watch stem cells coordinating during the organ renewal process and discovered that the rate at which individual stem cells generate adult replacement cells varies greatly. No one had seen the gut renewal process play out in real time before this.

"Each stem cell seems to work at its own pace," said lead author Leslie Koyama of Stanford.

Beyond the gut, Bellymount will allows researchers to spy on other visceral organs in fruit flies, watching how organs communicate with each other during whole-body processes.

It also enabled Ludington, who specializes in understanding the interactions between species in the microbiome, to better understand how the gut's bacteria contribute to many of its functions by watching them unfold.

"Bellymount let us observe the dynamic interactions of gut bacterial populations with the host for the first time," he said.

They found that there are regional differences in microbiome stability that actually mimic the regionality of the stem cell activity. Some parts of the microbiome are continuously turned over and others are more like a reservoir.

"It makes you wonder how gut stem cells and gut bacteria are talking to each other and possibly coordinating their actions," said co-author K.C. Huang, also of Stanford. "Now we have the power to actually eavesdrop on their conversations."

Because Bellymount allows investigators to peek at the activity of all of the flies' visceral organs, this crosstalk can be monitored across tissues and inform how they understand whole-body processes, such as immune surveillance, reproduction, aging, and cancer.

Washington, DC-- Could pumping oxygen-rich surface water into the depths of lakes, estuaries, and coastal ocean waters help ameliorate dangerous dead zones? New work led by Carnegie's David Koweek and Ken Caldeira and published open access by Science of the Total Environment says yes, although they caution that further research would be needed to understand any possible side effects before implementing such an approach.

When excessive nutrients from agriculture and other human activities wash into waterways, it can create a dangerous phenomenon called eutrophication. This can lead to low-oxygen dead zones called hypoxia.

"Low-oxygen dead zones are one of the most-pervasive problems plaguing both marine and freshwater systems around the world and a major problem for communities that depend on fishing," Koweek said.

Efforts to fight hypoxia often focus on reducing agricultural runoff and on preventing nutrients from being overloaded into waterways. But this is a very slow process that involves changing farming practices, upgrading wastewater treatment facilities, and altering home fertilizer usage.

Koweek and Caldeira led a team that investigated a proposed technological remedy, called downwelling, which could complement nutrient-reduction programs. This involves pumping naturally more-oxygenated water from the surface down into the depths of the affected body of water.

"In theory, downwelling would create vertical mixing in the water, distributing oxygen and preventing hypoxic conditions from taking hold," Koweek explained. "We wanted to test this idea and see if it would really work."

The team built models to compare downwelling to the two most-commonly used technological techniques for preventing dead zones--bubbling oxygen from the bottom and spraying fountain water across the surface. Their models indicate that downwelling would be three to 100 times more efficient than bubbling and 10,000 to a million times more efficient than fountains.

They then did a field experiment at the Searsville Reservoir in Woodside, California, which demonstrated that downwelling could increase oxygen saturation in the immediate area surrounding the pumps by between 10 and 30 percent, enough to alleviate hypoxic stress for many marine organisms. However, this did not extend for more than a handful of meters beyond the vicinity of the pipes through which the surface water was pumped. This means that an extensive network would be necessary for any major effort to fight dead zones in an economically important or ecologically sensitive area.

According to the researchers, their work indicates that downwelling technology may show potential to scale up to larger areas in which annual dead zones create great ecological and economic distress, such as the Chesapeake Bay or the Gulf of Mexico. They estimate that the energy required to power the pumps could cost tens of millions of dollars each year. Operating downwelling pumps year-round in the Chesapeake could cost between $4 and $47 million; In the Gulf, the same could cost between $26 and $263 million.

But these price tags are relatively small compared to the costs of upgrades to wastewater treatment facilities and fertilizer-reduction programs that limit nutrient inputs to the water bodies. This suggests that downwelling technology could be used alongside longer-term plans to reduce nutrient pollution.

"Reducing nutrient pollution is the only way to eliminate hypoxia permanently," Calderia said. "However, our work shows that downwelling is a technological solution that could mitigate the risk of low-oxygen dead zones while nutrient management strategies are put in place."

On Super Tuesday, Democratic voters from Colorado and across the United States will face a serious decision: Sanders or Warren? Biden, Klobuchar or Bloomberg? Then, afterward, what kind of wine to drink.

Now, a new study taps into mathematics to probe how people make those kinds of fraught choices--in particular, how hypothetical, and completely rational, individuals might select between two options as they navigate through a noisy social environment.

It turns out that not making a choice can sometimes be as revealing as picking a side, report researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Houston. When the people around you are indecisive, for example, that can have a big influence on your own choices.

"Say you have a friend who has been a staunch Sanders supporter in the past," said Zachary Kilpatrick, a coauthor of the new study and an assistant professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics at CU Boulder. "It's the night before the primary, and they still have not made a decision about who they're going to vote for. That suggests that they have received some evidence that's in conflict with voting for Sanders."

Kilpatrick will present his team's results remotely at a meeting of the American Physical Society. (The physical conference has been canceled due to public health concerns).

The group's findings, while theoretical, could still inform how we should address real-world problems--for example, the spread of misinformation on the internet, he said.

"If we want to combat the hijacking of our social information networks, we need to understand in a quantitative way how peoples' beliefs are swayed by their social connections."

Dreaded decisions

His team's research zeroes in on a major question in a field of study called decision-making theory: How people make choices based both on their own, private research--such as watching televised debates--and through their social interactions--say, checking out their friends' posts on social media.

Kilpatrick compared that goal to the classic battle of wits between Vizzini and the Dread Pirate Roberts in the 1987 film The Princess Bride. In that scene, the pirate claims to have poisoned one of two glasses of wine. Vizzini, a scofflaw of supposedly vast intellect, must choose the one he thinks is safe to drink.

It gets complicated.

"What Vizzini says is that he knows what the Dread Pirate Roberts knows that he knows," Kilpatrick said. "But he takes multiple loops through what we call a 'common knowledge' exchange before he makes the decision on the wine glasses."

In other words, when you make such an exchange, you need to not only consider what you know about your opponents, but what they know you know about them--and on and on.

To explore similar kinds of intellectual spirals, Kilpatrick and his colleagues used a series of equations, or mathematical models, to simulate social interactions of varying complexity. Their models didn't revolve around real-life voters, or even pirates, but "rational agents"--theoretical deciders who always make the right choices based on the evidence available to them.

The researchers discovered that, when time is of the essence, two fictional voters might go through mental loops akin to Vizzini's thought process.

"We're both watching the same news show, for example, and I look over to you to see if you've made a decision or not," Kilpatrick said. "We have to account for our common knowledge multiple times until we've adequately squeezed all of the information that we can out of the fact that you haven't made a decision yet, and I haven't made a decision yet."

Eventually, it stops. One voter or group of voters in a network might finally receive enough information to feel confident about their choice. And when that happens, other voters might get the impetus they need to quite dithering, too.

The researchers report their findings in a preprint publication online.

Messy humans

Kilpatrick is quick to note that, of course, no voter is perfectly rational. But scientists can still learn a lot by studying where real-life humans fall in line with what theory suggests they should do--and where they don't.

People should also always try to be aware of the baggage that others in their social networks carry, he added.

"When we're determining how political leaders or people in our networks make decisions," Kilpatrick said, "we should think hard about how those individuals are biased in order to figure out what we should take away from their decisions."

As for your Super Tuesday decision, learn from Vizzini's example and steer clear of the wine.

Pasadena, CA--Some of the extremely low-density, "cotton candy like" exoplanets called super-puffs may actually have rings, according to new research published in The Astronomical Journal by Carnegie's Anthony Piro and Caltech's Shreyas Vissapragada

Super-puffs are notable for having exceptionally large radii for their masses--which would give them seemingly incredibly low densities. The adorably named bodies have been confounding scientists since they were first discovered, because they are unlike any planets in our Solar System and challenge our ideas of what distant planets can be like.

"We started thinking, what if these planets aren't airy like cotton candy at all," Piro said. "What if the super-puffs seem so large because they are actually surrounded by rings?"

In our own Solar System, all of the gas and ice giant planets have rings, with the most well-known example being the majestic rings of Saturn. But it has been difficult for astronomers to discover ringed planets orbiting distant stars.

The radii of exoplanets are measured during transits--when the exoplanet crosses in front of its host star causing a dip in the star's light. The greater the size of the dip, the larger the exoplanet.

"We started to wonder, if you were to look back at us from a distant world, would you recognize Saturn as a ringed planet, or would it appear to be a puffy planet to an alien astronomer?" Vissapragada asked.

To test this hypothesis, Piro and Vissapragada simulated how a ringed exoplanet would look to an astronomer with high-precision instruments watching it transit in front of its host star. They also investigated the types of ring material that could account for observations of super-puffs.

Their work demonstrated that rings could explain some, but not all, of the super-puffs that NASA's Kepler mission has discovered so far.

"These planets tend to orbit in close proximity to their host stars, meaning that the rings would have to be rocky, rather than icy," Piro explained. "But rocky ring radii can only be so big, unless the rock is very porous, so not every super-puff would fit these constraints."

According to Piro and Vissapragada, three super-puffs are especially good candidates for rings--Kepler 87c and 177c as well as HIP 41378f.

Follow-up observations to confirm their work won't be possible until NASA's James Webb Space Telescope launches next year, because existing land- and space-based telescopes lack the precision to confirm the presence of rings around these distant worlds.

If some of the super-puffs could be confirmed as ringed, this would improve astronomers' understanding of how these planetary systems formed and evolved around their host stars.

A FRESH, clean water supply will be a reality in Pakistan, particularly in South Punjab, following the announcement of an international partnership spearheaded by the Pakistan government, alongside other key stakeholders, and driven by the University of Huddersfield.

The initiative, led by University of Huddersfield Senior Research Fellow Dr Muhammad Usman Ghori, will transform the water supplies in the region into affordable drinking water for the benefit of the whole population and also will provide a sustainable option of raw material to fabricate healthcare products.

It is an initiative that is much needed by a considerable population of Pakistan. In a recent study, the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) found that a sizeable portion of the supplied water was not suitable for human consumption. The contaminated water was contributing to significant number of deaths every year and a large part of Pakistan's GDP was spent on health care of people who suffer from water borne diseases.

However, a solution to providing a clean water supply is present in abundance in the region's Koh-e-Suleiman mountain range in the form of a raw nanoclay with properties that can be targeted for a number of health-giving applications.

A recent University of Huddersfield-led research article, published in NATURE: Scientific Reports, explored a new source of montmorillonite in the Koh-e-Suleiman mountain range located in South Punjab, Pakistan.

The project lead Dr Ghori explained that this raw clay required a sophisticated purification protocol to remove any undesirable substances from the clay, such as lead, arsenic and crystalline silica, which could impede industrial potential and have adverse health effects.

The area of South Punjab has a large dependence on agriculture and relatively low levels of industrialisation and consequently currently faces higher levels of poverty and unemployment compared with the rest of the province. An abundant supply of this largely untouched raw clay could help with economic conditions in the region so, in addition to physicochemical characterisation, this study investigated the practicality and economic feasibility of its extraction and purification for large-scale industrial applications by comparing the properties of the small-scale extracted clay to the large-scale extracted clay, and by conducting a techno-economic analysis. It is anticipated that the findings in this study will improve the economic condition of the region by providing employment opportunities to locals and a valuable resource for exportation.

Further work in collaboration with Pakistani universities and research institutes is now under way to use this natural resource for the benefit of the local people, not just in purifying the water supply, but for further industrial applications that would expand the economy of the region and provide work and industry for its people.

To establish this strategic partnership, Dr Ghori first shared his vision and initiative with the High Commissioner of Pakistan to the United Kingdom His Excellency Mohammad Nafees Zakaria, who played an instrumental role in establishing research links in Pakistan.

Now, a Memorandum of Understanding has been signed that will initiate a strategic partnership to develop a network led by the University of Huddersfield with the support of the Pakistan government which will also include universities in Pakistan.

The High Commissioner Mohammad Nafees Zakaria expressed his pride at the work and congratulated Dr Ghori and the team on their achievement and expressed gratitude to University of Huddersfield's leadership.

Dr Ghori had met with the Foreign Minister of Pakistan, through the good offices of High Commissioner Zakaria, during the Foreign Minister's official visit to the United Kingdom. Dr Ghori briefed the Foreign Minister on the on-going research activities, who welcomed the potential of the research project.

Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi congratulated Dr Ghori, the team and University's senior management. He said that the Government was cognisant of Pakistanis' talent abroad and therefore many of Government's policy initiatives are aimed at galvanising and providing direction to young scientists and tech professionals for their constructive engagement in the country's mainstream economic activities.

"The UK is among Pakistan's very close friends," said Mr Qureshi. "The relationship has its roots in pre-independence period and the 1.5 million Pakistani Diaspora in the UK is a strong bridge between the two countries. Cultivating deeper and diverse partnership with the UK is a priority in our foreign policy. I am delighted to learn that the University of Huddersfield's researchers and scientists have taken such an initiative. "The Government welcomes them and will extend every support in their endeavours in Pakistan, the University of Huddersfield's engagement with Pakistan has come at the most propitious time" he added.

Pakistan's Minister for Science and Technology, Mr Fawad Hussain Chaudhry applauded the Huddersfield team over attaining a milestone in the field of industrial science.

He expressed his "contentment and happiness at the signing of the memorandum by University with Pakistan Council for Research on Water Resources (PCRWR) and five Pakistani universities. He sees it as a significant step towards collaboration between educational institutions of Pakistan and the United Kingdom involving research. While commending Dr Ghori's work, Minister Fawad urged Pakistani scientists, technology professionals and scholars to look towards Pakistan, which holds enormous opportunities in diverse areas. "Under Prime Minister Imran Khan, high importance has been attached to the emerging technologies and many policy initiatives have been taken," he said.

An analysis of a bird species' unique rasps shows how sound fluctuations in birds' songs might reveal details about birds' body sizes.

The white-tipped plantcutter is a reddish, small bird, that emits a distinct hoarse groaning sound. It is not a vocal learner, meaning it has little motor control over the sounds it makes. Instead, the bird relies mostly on biomechanics to sing its rasp. Now, researchers studying the biomechanics of the white-tipped plantcutter's rasp have determined how to gauge the bird's size through its vocalizations. Uribarri et al. analyzed recorded bird songs and employed computational models to assess song segments. They found a relationship between the frequency of resonating sounds from birds' oro-esophageal cavities and birds' sizes. The scientists also checked the correlation between song and size by testing museum specimens. The results suggest that the biomechanics of bird sounds could potentially be used to predict bird size.

Fitness trackers like Fitbit and Garmin watches make it easy for anyone to collect data about health and performance.

Now college athletic programs are moving toward implementing more data-driven trackers -- devices or apps that can monitor students' heart rates, sleep or even class attendance -- into their own programs to help keep their athletes as competitive and healthy as possible.

Researchers at the University of Washington were concerned that this shift toward more data collection might encroach on college athletes' autonomy. The team interviewed 22 athletes and staff members from three college athletics programs to see what data they collect and how they use it. The researchers highlighted potential tensions that might arise and made suggestions for increasing transparency to help implement tracking systems in a way that supports both athletes and staff. The team presented these findings Jan. 6 at the ACM Conference on Supporting Group Work in Florida.

"We're at this place where this technology is still in its early stages," said co-author Sean Munson, a UW associate professor of human centered design and engineering. "People are adopting it with a lot of good intentions but not a good understanding of the technology's limitations or how to balance the goals the technology supports with the other goals the team has or that individuals have."

While both professional and college athletic programs track their athletes' fitness, the researchers decided to focus on college athletes.

"They're still learning how to manage their bodies and their sports. And then they've got all this other stuff to do, too," said lead author Samantha Kolovson, a UW doctoral student in human centered design and engineering who rowed as an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "As a computer science major, I had really tough classes. It was a lot to balance with 20 or so hours of rowing each week. I think the dual demands on student-athletes are one of the things that makes this research really interesting for us."

The researchers contacted 11 athletes and 11 staff members -- sports coaches, athletic trainers, and strength and conditioning coaches -- across three universities that were either Division I or Division III schools. The students and staff participated in multiple sports, including basketball, lacrosse, ice hockey, swimming and rowing. From the interviews, the researchers identified several types of data that coaches collected and determined potential tensions between staff and athletes.

Some of the findings include:

Students weren't always aware they were providing data. For example, coaches might acquire "wellness data" by striking up informal conversations with athletes and sharing that information with other staff members.

Coaches didn't always communicate how they were using the data they collected. The researchers found that their own perspectives mirrored this finding. "At the time, our swim team tracked three kinds of data: weight training data, heart rate data and time data," said co-author Calvin Liang, a UW doctoral student in human centered design and engineering who was on the swim team as an undergraduate student at Tufts University. "We got to see our data, but it was less clear how our coaching staff used it. During practice, if your heart rate was really low when it was supposed to be really high, a coach would probably tell you to work harder."

While athletes want to see their performance data, it might not show the whole picture of how they're physically feeling. "I didn't wear a tracker throughout college sports," said Kolovson, who found her own experiences reflected in the reports from current college athletes. "But I would have loved to see that sort of information from when I was at peak rowing fitness. How stressful was it to do a 2K or a 6K? At the same time though, I feel like I was really in tune with my body as a college athlete, and perhaps as much as I would have liked to see that information, it might have taken away from my experience or my ability to be present."

Tracker data could infringe on an athlete's personal sense of autonomy. "Right now the students are able to say, 'I feel fine and I'm ready to perform today,' even if they got three hours of sleep, which is maybe not in their best interest, but they have the choice," Kolovson said.

Athletic staff members feel a lot of pressure to use tracker data to get a competitive edge, the researchers said. But this technology is so new that there are no best practices to follow when implementing new methods. To relieve tensions for now, the researchers suggested that staff members and athletes have conversations about tracking to figure how to support athletes without taking away their autonomy.

The researchers also suggested that tracker designers could help by changing the interface of their data management software.

"Often the coaches get a portal where they can see their athletes' data, but the athletes don't have a portal on their side. Or if they do, it's to input something: They'll get a ping about a wellness survey every morning where they have to say 'I got X hours of sleep, I feel sore or don't feel sore,'" Kolovson said. "But if designers could build out that portal on the athletes' side, there is more potential for athletes to learn through self-reflection or communicate about data with the staff."

Now the research team is working on finding ways to avoid potential pitfalls and help coaches identify reasonable goals for collecting and managing their data.

"In this context, the source of the data is the athlete's body. It's not like the number of points you score or your time to run a mile. All this stuff these devices can collect is more personal," Kolovson said. "And while this process is not intending to be malicious, it's set up in a way that augments the staff members' position of power -- they are determining how the data is collected and how the system is set up. We're trying to make sure that people can use these systems in a way that works for everyone."

Proteins, the workhorse of the human cell, help digest our food, carry oxygen through the body, fight off invading microbes, and so much more -- but they only function when folded properly into specific, three dimensional structures.

Misfolded proteins contribute to a number of diseases -- including cystic fibrosis, juvenile cataracts, Alzheimer's disease and many forms of cancer.

Scientists have long ignored half of all mutations in the genetic sequences of our DNA, called synonymous or "silent" mutations, because these mutations were thought to not affect the process by which amino acid sequences lead proteins to fold properly. Now, new research from the University of Notre Dame shows these silent mutations are worth a closer look.

"Synonymous mutations were long considered to be genomic background noise, but we found they do indeed lead to altered protein folding, and in turn impair cell function," said Patricia Clark, the Rev. John Cardinal O'Hara professor of biochemistry at the University of Notre Dame, and lead author of the study. "Our results show that synonymous variations in our DNA sequences -- which account for most of our genetic variation -- can have a significant impact on shaping the fitness level of cellular proteins."

Clark and her team studied the genetic sequence of a naturally occurring antibiotic-resistant gene of the bacteria, E. coli. The bacterium presented researchers with a manageable field of study, consisting of just 4,000 genes -- compared to more than the 20,000 genes in humans. The team focused on how synonymous mutations altered the rate of protein synthesis by the ribosome, the molecular machine present within all cells, including human cells, that carries out the process of protein synthesis.

This study provides an answer to a hypothesis that has been floating around the field for more than 50 years, Clark said.

"It's been extremely challenging to test this hypothesis rigorously in live cells," she added. "The fact that we decided to work with a bacterium rather than a human cell, really helped. It enabled us to make mutations in a specific gene and determine to what extent those mutations were affecting folding."

Further study is needed to understand just how widespread protein misfolding is due to synonymous variations. "We're ignoring half of the DNA mutations that are out there, because we've decided that they're not going to cause a problem," said Clark. "Our study just showed they can cause a problem."

PHILADELPHIA (March 2, 2020) - Healthcare provider burnout is a mounting public health crisis with up to half of all physicians and one in three nurses reporting high burnout, data show. Burnout rates among nurses also correlate with lower patient satisfaction. While both factors are recognized, little is known about how effective interventions in nurse working conditions, managerial support, or resource enhancement can lessen burnout and improve patient satisfaction.

A new study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing has examined how hospital organizational factors influence nurse burnout and patient satisfaction. Using data from 463 hospitals in four states, researchers learned that hospitals with the best work environments were also those with the lowest burnout and highest patient satisfaction.

"Our examination of patient satisfaction and nurse burnout is particularly timely as satisfaction is increasingly viewed as a quality indicator and directly linked to reimbursement through the Value Based Purchasing Program (VBP)," says Penn Nursing's J. Margo Brooks Carthon, PhD, APRN, FAAN, Associate Professor and lead investigator of the study. "Improving patient satisfaction scores via improved nurse work environments could also translate to increased hospital revenue by tens of thousands of dollars for those in the VBP program."

The researchers suggest that one way to improve nurse work environments and lower burnout is to attain Magnet designation or institute Magnet-like initiatives. "This includes fostering relationships between nurses, administrators, and physicians, and ensuring that nurses have decision-making authority in their practice and adequate resources and time to do their work," says Brooks Carthon.

PHILADELPHIA - Surgeons at the Sidney Kimmel Medical College at Thomas Jefferson University are pioneering the use of robotics in neuroendovascular procedures, which are performed via the blood vessels of the neck and brain.

A study by Pascal Jabbour, MD, Chief of the Division of Neurovascular Surgery and Endovascular Neurosurgery, demonstrated that the use of these robots to aid surgeons during diagnostic cerebral angiograms and transradial carotid artery stenting was both safe and effective. The research was published March 1st in the Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery

"This technology could be groundbreaking, acting as a precursor for remote stroke interventions," Dr. Jabbour said.

When a patient suffers from a stroke, time is of the essence because the blocked vessel must be opened as quickly as possible to prevent permanent damage. Patients living in remote geographic areas have further to travel for stroke intervention, and, often, by time they arrive at a stroke center, it is too late, explains Dr. Jabbour.

"These robots would allow us to intervene remotely on those patients," he said. "The patient would still be in the community and I would be sitting here at Jefferson controlling the robot."

In the study, Dr. Jabbour and colleagues tested the use of a next-generation robotic-assisted surgical platform on 10 patients undergoing either a diagnostic cerebral angiogram or carotid artery stenting. All of the procedures were successful with no complications encountered.

Jefferson is the first center in the country to perform robotic transradial carotid stenting. Currently, robots are only approved by the FDA for use in certain general surgery procedures and in interventional cardiology procedures.

Use of robots in neuroendovascular procedures would give surgeons more precise control over the microcatheter and the microwire, two tools threaded through a patient's blood vessels during these procedures.

In addition, physicians who do these procedures regularly will have less exposure to radiation from the X-rays used during the procedure because they can operate the robot from a separate room just outside the surgical suite. Eliminating exposure to radiation would allow surgeons to forgo wearing the heavy personal protective equipment, such as lead aprons, that is typically needed during these procedures.

"The next generation of robots are ready to be launched and as soon as they are approved by the FDA we will be able to move to the next step, which is performing interventions inside the brain," says Dr. Jabbour. "Jefferson will be on the front line of this technology, training the new generation of fellows on how to use these robots before any one else in the country."