Culture

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have analysed all cell types in the human ovary and found that the hotly debated so-called egg stem cells do not exist. The results, published in Nature Communications, open the way for research on improved methods of treating involuntary childlessness.

The researchers used single-cell analysis to study more than 24,000 cells collected from ovarian cortex samples of 21 patients. They also analysed cells collected from the ovarian medulla, allowing them to present a complete cell map of the human ovary.

One of the aims of the study was to establish the existence or non-existence of egg stem cells.

"The question is controversial since some research has reported that such cells do exist, while other studies indicate the opposite," says Fredrik Lanner, researcher in obstetrics and gynaecology at the Department of Clinical Science, Intervention and Technology at Karolinska Institutet, and one of the study's authors.

The question of whether egg stem cells exist affects issues related to fertility treatment, since stem cells have properties that differ from other cells.

"Involuntary childlessness and female fertility are huge fields of research," says co-author Pauliina Damdimopoulou, researcher in obstetrics and gynaecology at the same department. "This has been a controversial issue involving the testing of experimental fertility treatments."

The new study substantiates previously reported findings from animal studies - that egg stem cells do not exist. Instead, these are so-called perivascular cells.

The new comprehensive map of ovarian cells can contribute to the development of improved methods of treating female infertility, says Damdimopoulou.

"The lack of knowledge about what a normal ovary looks like has held back developments," she says. "This study now lays the ground on which to produce new methods that focus on the egg cells that already exist in the ovary. This could involve letting egg cells mature in test tubes or perhaps developing artificial ovaries in a lab."

The results of the new study show that the main cell types in the ovary are egg cells, granulosa cells, immune cells, endothelial cells, perivascular cells and stromal cells.

Want to learn to code? Put down the math book. Practice those communication skills instead.

New research from the University of Washington finds that a natural aptitude for learning languages is a stronger predictor of learning to program than basic math knowledge, or numeracy. That's because writing code also involves learning a second language, an ability to learn that language's vocabulary and grammar, and how they work together to communicate ideas and intentions. Other cognitive functions tied to both areas, such as problem solving and the use of working memory, also play key roles.

"Many barriers to programming, from prerequisite courses to stereotypes of what a good programmer looks like, are centered around the idea that programming relies heavily on math abilities, and that idea is not born out in our data," said lead author Chantel Prat, an associate professor of psychology at the UW and at the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. "Learning to program is hard, but is increasingly important for obtaining skilled positions in the workforce. Information about what it takes to be good at programming is critically missing in a field that has been notoriously slow in closing the gender gap."

Published online March 2 in Scientific Reports, an open-access journal from the Nature Publishing Group, the research examined the neurocognitive abilities of more than three dozen adults as they learned Python, a common programming language. Following a battery of tests to assess their executive function, language and math skills, participants completed a series of online lessons and quizzes in Python. Those who learned Python faster, and with greater accuracy, tended to have a mix of strong problem-solving and language abilities.

In today's STEM-focused world, learning to code opens up a variety of possibilities for jobs and extended education. Coding is associated with math and engineering; college-level programming courses tend to require advanced math to enroll and they tend to be taught in computer science and engineering departments. Other research, namely from UW psychology professor Sapna Cheryan, has shown that such requirements and perceptions of coding reinforce stereotypes about programming as a masculine field, potentially discouraging women from pursuing it.

But coding also has a foundation in human language: Programming involves creating meaning by stringing symbols together in rule-based ways.

Though a few studies have touched on the cognitive links between language learning and computer programming, some of the data is decades old, using languages such as Pascal that are now out of date, and none of them used natural language aptitude measures to predict individual differences in learning to program.

So Prat, who specializes in the neural and cognitive predictors of learning human languages, set out to explore the individual differences in how people learn Python. Python was a natural choice, Prat explained, because it resembles English structures such as paragraph indentation and uses many real words rather than symbols for functions.

To evaluate the neural and cognitive characteristics of "programming aptitude," Prat studied a group of native English speakers between the ages of 18 and 35 who had never learned to code.

Before learning to code, participants took two completely different types of assessments. First, participants underwent a five-minute electroencephalography scan, which recorded the electrical activity of their brains as they relaxed with their eyes closed. In previous research, Prat showed that patterns of neural activity while the brain is at rest can predict up to 60% of the variability in the speed with which someone can learn a second language (in that case, French).

"Ultimately, these resting-state brain metrics might be used as culture-free measures of how someone learns," Prat said.

Then the participants took eight different tests: one that specifically covered numeracy; one that measured language aptitude; and others that assessed attention, problem-solving and memory.

To learn Python, the participants were assigned 10 45-minute online instruction sessions using the Codeacademy educational tool. Each session focused on a coding concept, such as lists or if/then conditions, and concluded with a quiz that a user needed to pass in order to progress to the next session. For help, users could turn to a "hint" button, an informational blog from past users and a "solution" button, in that order.

From a shared mirror screen, a researcher followed along with each participant and was able to calculate their "learning rate," or speed with which they mastered each lesson, as well as their quiz accuracy and the number of times they asked for help.

After completing the sessions, participants took a multiple-choice test on the purpose of functions (the vocabulary of Python) and the structure of coding (the grammar of Python). For their final task, they programmed a game -- Rock, Paper, Scissors -- considered an introductory project for a new Python coder. This helped assess their ability to write code using the information they had learned.

Ultimately, researchers found that scores from the language aptitude test were the strongest predictors of participants' learning rate in Python. Scores from tests in numeracy and fluid reasoning were also associated with Python learning rate, but each of these factors explained less variance than language aptitude did.

Presented another way, across learning outcomes, participants' language aptitude, fluid reasoning and working memory, and resting-state brain activity were all greater predictors of Python learning than was numeracy, which explained an average of 2% of the differences between people. Importantly, Prat also found that the same characteristics of resting-state brain data that previously explained how quickly someone would learn to speak French, also explained how quickly they would learn to code in Python.

"This is the first study to link both the neural and cognitive predictors of natural language aptitude to individual differences in learning programming languages. We were able to explain over 70% of the variability in how quickly different people learn to program in Python, and only a small fraction of that amount was related to numeracy," Prat said. Further research could examine the connections between language aptitude and programming instruction in a classroom setting, or with more complex languages such as Java, or with more complicated tasks to demonstrate coding proficiency, Prat said.

An improved mobile phone app will help identify women who need special treatments at the right time and reduce emotional and financial burden on families and the NHS.

A team of researchers from the Department of Women & Children's Health, King's College London, supported by Guy's and St Thomas' Charity, the National Institute for Health Research and Tommy's have created a user-friendly mobile phone application, QUiPP v2, that will allow doctors to quickly calculate a woman's individual risk of preterm birth. This will help them to make sure women who need special treatments get them at the right time, but it also helps them to reassure women when their risk is low.

When babies are born early, before 37 weeks of pregnancy, they are more likely to die, or have physical, developmental and emotional problems. This can result in a huge emotional and financial burden for families and substantial cost for the NHS and care services.

Some women are known to be more likely to have their babies early, and some have symptoms of labour too early in pregnancy. If identified, these women can be given extra monitoring and/or special treatments that aim to prevent early delivery and ensure the infants have the best chance of surviving without long-term problems.

QUiPP v2 calculates the risk based on a woman's individual risk factors, such as previous preterm birth, late miscarriage or symptoms, along with clinical test results that help to predict preterm birth (i.e. fetal fibronectin tests and cervical length measurements). The app then produces a simple individual % risk score.

In two papers, published in Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology, the authors show how they developed and tested the complicated algorithms (mathematical calculations) incorporated in the app which calculate the simple % risk.

"We are delighted to be able to share the findings of our work which shows that the QUiPP app is very reliable in predicting preterm birth in women at risk. This should mean that women who need treatments are offered them appropriately, and also that doctors and women can be reassured when these treatments are not needed, which reduces the possibility of negative effects and unnecessary costs for the NHS," said lead author Dr Jenny Carter, Senior Research Midwife, Department of Women & Children's Health at King's College London.

The authors have recently completed the EQUIPTT trial, where they evaluated whether QUiPP improves appropriate targeting of care. Results of this trial are expected later on this year.

Patient Safety Minister, Nadine Dorries said: "The joy a newborn brings can be cruelly contrasted alongside the fear when a baby is born too soon. Being able to identify mothers at risk of a pre-term birth as early as possible can help clinicians to intervene sooner, improve safety and ultimately save lives.

"We want the NHS to be the safest place in the world to give birth and the harnessing of promising digital innovations such as this is another stepping stone on this shared journey."

The team will continue to collect data (which will be used to update the algorithms in the future) through the ongoing UK wide PETRA study, and through the Preterm Clinical Network Database which is a global clinical registry of care given to women at risk of preterm birth.

(San Antonio, TX -- March 2, 2020) The physical and mental sensations we associate with feeling sick are a natural biological response to inflammation within the body. However, the strength and severity of these sensations go beyond biology and may be affected by gender, ethnicity and various social norms we've all internalized. These are the latest research findings, according to social scientists at UTSA, who have discovered a link between a person's culture and how one classifies being ill.

Social scientists think that a person's values may shape internal views on "socially appropriate sickness." This has implications for how different individuals may take more action in dealing with illness rather than spreading further disease.

Eric Shattuck, a biological anthropologist with UTSA's Institute for Health Disparities Research; sociology professor Thankam Sunil, who is director of the IHDR; and Xiaohe Xu, chair of UTSA's Department of Sociology, found that sickness expression is affected by gender, income and cultural values.

Specifically, study participants who (1) earned less than the U.S. median household income, (2) claimed to be stoics with a high tolerance for pain or (3) had symptoms of depression were more likely to express being sick. In men with stronger family bonds, feeling sick was also more likely to be reported.

"It's ironic. You think that being a stoic would mean that you are more likely to be reserved, but according to our survey, it has the opposite effect," said Shattuck. "Stoics could own up to being ill as a bragging right and maintain a disease for longer than is necessary."

According to the researchers, stoics--regardless of gender--and individuals with household incomes lower than $60,000 were more likely to claim being ill.

"In regard to lower income levels, perhaps those individuals were more likely to claim to have been sick because they didn't necessarily have the means to seek medical attention and, therefore, symptoms became severe," added Shattuck. "This perhaps made them remember the illness."

The researchers also pointed that men with stronger family ties were more likely to report stronger sickness sensations over the past year.

"It could be that family support allows men to feel more cared for and therefore rely on that social safety net," said Shattuck.

The researchers analyzed the self-reported surveys of 1,259 respondents who claimed to have been sick with influenza or the common cold in the past year. Participants were also asked to rate their current feelings of sickness from "not sick" to "severely sick" using a Likert-type scale in order to control for any possible compounding effect.

Sickness behavior, including lethargy, social withdrawal and appetite changes, is "one of the responses that all living creatures from ants to bees to humans seem to have in common. Yet socioeconomic and cultural norms play a part with us," said Shattuck. "For example, other researchers have shown that the majority of individuals who work in many fields, including medicine, are often likely to show up to work while being sick. If you think about it, this is about work culture and it has consequences."

The next step for the researchers is to repeat the study with individuals who are actively sick versus those that had to recall an illness. Areas of future investigation will explore how the severity of an illness affects reporting being sick.

"Maybe people are more comfortable reporting being sick when it's a common cold," Shattuck said, "but what about those stigmatized infections, such as HIV. What about the coronavirus? How are infectious diseases claimed using a cultural or economic lens?"

It becomes annoyingly easy to knock over a shampoo bottle when it's nearly empty. This is an easily observed and curiosity-provoking phenomenon that, according to Lehigh University physics professor Jerome Licini, yields insights into center-of-mass and impacts.

"The physics of that is pretty interesting and easy to understand," says Licini who, along with first-year physics major Allen Zijun Yuan, wrote a paper on the phenomenon that was recently published in The Physics Teacher. In the paper, they find the center-of-mass of a shampoo bottle, discuss its stability on a tilted surface, and demonstrate its sensitivity to impacts using a simple experiment involving a tennis ball and a protractor.

They write: "An object placed on a tilted surface and released will tip over if the horizontal position of the center of mass lies outside the geometric outline of the base of the object. This means that an object with a low center of mass will be stable for larger incline angles. Students are often surprised to see that the altitude of the center of mass of a shampoo bottle is a nonlinear function of the fraction occupied by the contents. This can, however, be seen in a straightforward manner by recognizing that for a plastic bottle, the mass of the liquid contents is usually far greater than the mass of the bottle. When the bottle is either completely full or completely empty, the center of mass must be approximately at the geometric center of the bottle, but the center of mass gets significantly lower in altitude for small liquid levels in between those two extremes."

Yuan developed a demonstration to show the effect of impact and, it turns out, even more extreme than just looking at angle.

A five-minute video of this demonstration is available can be viewed here. The experiment that uses a tennis ball, protractor and shampoo bottles with varying degrees of fullness to show the effects of impact starts at 2:40.

As Licini explains in the video, using a full bottle of shampoo: "So, what we have here is a tennis ball mounted on a string that can draw back to different angles. You put a protractor over here to measure that launch angle. And watch what happens as it impacts this shampoo bottle. So, you can see that for an angle of ten degrees, nothing happens. For an angle of 15 degrees, the bottle's still stable. It takes an angle of about 23 degrees in order to give this bottle enough rotational energy or angular momentum, in order to raise the center of mass above the stability point, and topple [the bottle]."

Conducting the experiment with a shampoo bottle that is 30 percent full, Licini says: "When we have our bottle with the lowest center of mass about filled to 30 percent, again it's still fairly stable. At five degrees, it bounces off no problem. At ten degrees, there's impact but still it rocks and then comes back to stability. That's because the center of mass is low. It takes an angle of about thirteen degrees in order to finally knock that bottle over."

Then, finally, using the empty shampoo bottle, Licini explains: "But the empty bottle is much more annoying than all that. Because the mass is so light, that means it's going to have a large response to impact. And, because the center of mass is so high [above the base], it's going to topple over easily. So, in this case, it only takes an angle of about three degrees in order to knock that bottle over. So, much less stable than any of the other configurations."

"We constructed a demonstration to produce impacts from a pendulum bob," write the authors. "A tennis ball of mass 57.7 g striking the bottle at an altitude of 13.7 cm turned out to be a good match of mechanical impedance and center of percussion. A string was tied to the tennis ball so its center would travel in an arc of radius 37 cm, and a protractor was mounted to determine the release angle of the pendulum, with 0° indicating the point of impact when the string was vertical ...The launch angles required for the impact to tip the bottle could be determined to ±0.5°and were approximately 20.5° for a full bottle, 12.0° for the maximum stability level, and only 3.0° for the completely empty bottle. The initial potential energy of the tennis ball at these angles is given by mgl[1 ? cos(θ)] and yields corresponding values of 13.2 mJ, 4.6 mJ, and 0.3 mJ, illustrating the drastic decrease of energy required to tip the empty bottle."

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. (March 2, 2020)-- Using more than 30 years of earth satellite images, scientists at Tufts University and the non-profit conservation organization Defenders of Wildlife have discovered that habitat loss for imperiled species in the U.S. over this period was more than twice as great on non-protected private lands than on federally protected lands. As wildlife face a host of survival threats ranging from habitat destruction to global climate change, the study, published today in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, provides evidence that federal land protection and listing under the U.S. Endangered Species Act are effective tools for stemming losses in species habitat.

Habitat loss and modification are the primary drivers of global losses in biodiversity, leading to reductions in population size and reproductive rates for many common and endangered species. Scientists have worked to identify the most effective mechanisms for preventing future habitat loss around the globe, yet most studies have had limited geographic scope or focused on only one or a limited range of species.

With a goal of understanding on a national level how land jurisdictions and conservation policies translate to habitat protections on the ground, the study authors collected large scale data on habitat extent across the U.S. for 24 vertebrate species, chosen from among those listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) or the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List. The species examined have ranges that include both federal and non-federally owned lands, covering 49% of the country from coast to coast and including all major ecosystems in the continental U.S.

Using national databases of wildlife habitat, the researchers mapped out the 24 species' ranges, and tracked habitat change in those ranges over time using the Google Earth Engine LandTrendr algorithm. The data revealed that imperiled species lost the least habitat (3.6%) on federally protected lands and lost the most habitat (8.6%) on private lands lacking any protections. State lands and lands protected by non-governmental organizations had losses of species habitat similar to one another (4.6% and 4.5%, respectively), but still greater than losses on federal land.

Since the study covered more than 30 years of data (1986 to 2018), the researchers were also able to observe other residual effects over time, such as the relative impact of protected vs. non-protected lands before and after a species is placed on the ESA or Red List. The authors found evidence that the ESA contributed to habitat protections on federal lands, with species losing less habitat after they were listed than before.

"By zooming out to the national level, the study provided us with a unique opportunity to examine whether certain regulations and jurisdictions were more effective in protecting habitats of endangered species," said Michael Evans, senior conservation data scientist at the Center for Conservation Innovation at Defenders of Wildlife and co-author of the study. "For example, we found that habitat preservation was linked more closely to federal protected land status and ESA protection, regardless of agency-specific regulations. Regulations for protection are different outside of federal lands, where reporting of environmental impacts is required, but minimization of these impacts may not be required."

The authors noted that the differences in how conservation laws and protections are applied in different contexts may not ultimately serve the ESA's intended goal of species preservation. Species not only inhabit federally managed areas, but their ranges can also extend into state and privately-owned land, and even state-owned lands were not as effective as federal lands in protecting species from habitat loss.

Even if a species' range is contained within federally protected land, that protection can be compromised. "We know from research conducted by other scientists that development surrounding protected areas can reduce the effectiveness of those protections for animals," said Adam Eichenwald, biology graduate student in the laboratory of professor Michael Reed at Tufts and first author of the study. "Not only that, but global climate change can force species to move, which we worry may eventually result in areas designed to protect species without any of their protected occupants."

"At a time when the planet faces a looming extinction crisis, we need every tool available to protect species and their habitats," said Jacob Malcom, director of the Center for Conservation Innovation at Defenders of Wildlife and a co-author on the study. "This research illustrates the critical importance of America's federal lands system for conserving wildlife habitat and the urgent need for better protections on other land ownerships. Biodiversity and the services it provides to society can be conserved through concerted effort and transformative change; protecting habitats must be an essential part of that effort."

The threat to insects and other small creatures from rainforest clearance and the consequences for the environment in tropical regions are recognised. What has not been studied so far is whether, and how, the oil palm plantations are able to sustain the populations of tiny below-ground animals that work to keep the soil healthy. In a new study led by the University of Göttingen, scientists have discovered high levels of biological activity in regions above ground level that may serve as oases for soil organisms. They identified that the suspended soil in the gaps where the frond grows out of the palm trunk may in fact provide novel microhabitats where soil creatures can thrive. The research was published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

The rapid expansion of oil palm plantations throughout Southeast Asia due to increasing global food demand has knock-on effects for the environment. Rainforests may be cleared resulting in major losses of soil structure, fertility and biodiversity. In the soil, many creatures are important for ecosystem functions: making nutrients available, forming soil structures, and providing other services such as decomposition, pollination and pest-control. To find out about the biological activity in soil in oil palm plantations, researchers from the University of Göttingen examined soil communities in six different microhabitats in a 16-year-old oil palm plantation in Sumatra, Indonesia. Scientists from the Collaborative Research Centre EFForTS (Ecological and Socioeconomic Functions of Tropical Lowland Rainforest Transformation Systems) collected 9,205 individuals of macrofauna (earthworms and large arthropods such as ants, fly larvae and millipedes), 40,229 of mesofauna (small arthropods such as springtails and mites), 2,895 nematodes, and 4,467 testate amoebae (single-celled microorganisms that have a protective shell around them).

"Since many oil palm plantations may be with us to stay, it is imperative to get a better understanding of soil biodiversity across microhabitats," explains Dr Anton Potapov from the University of Göttingen. "This will help farmers and plantation-owners to develop more sustainable methods that can preserve ecosystem functioning." One of the microhabitats the researchers studied is formed from the accumulation of dead leaves and other detritus in the gaps at the base of palm fronds. The detritus forms soil-filled crevices suspended above the ground, which make little corners and recesses for soil life. The scientists' analysis showed there were far more active soil dwellers in these suspended soils than below ground.

"It is important to realize that high activity in the suspended soil does not compensate for the degradation of soil below ground," adds Dr Valentyna Krashevska. "But now we can take advantage of this knowledge and better preserve suspended soil during plantation management, which may partly offset the damage caused by oil palm agriculture to soil-borne processes and biodiversity."

Innovative, Indigenous-led health care partnerships and cultural healing practices have shown improved health outcomes and access to care, and have become important features of the medical landscape in Canada, according to a new analysis in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

Indigenous-led heath care partnerships incorporate traditional Indigenous knowledge as key in their approach to treatment and healing for Indigenous patients.

The article reflects a collaboration between Elders David Courchene and Burma Bushie, community physician Dr. Sabina Ijaz, and health researchers Dr. Andrew Hatala and Ms. Lindsay Allen from the University of Manitoba's Rady Faculty of Health Sciences.

"Addressing health inequities requires a deeper understanding of the diversity within and across First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities, as well as how different models of Indigenous-led health partnerships can respond to context-specific service needs," write the authors.

Canadian physicians often lack training in how to support the holistic cultural, emotional and spiritual dimensions of Indigenous patients' illnesses and well-being. Healers, Elders and others skilled in Indigenous cultural worldviews and experiences are therefore needed in medical partnerships, decision-making and patient care.

"A largely biomedical approach to health fails to address Indigenous patients' myriad, unique needs in an integrated, holistic manner," say Elders and coauthors David Courchene, founder of the Turtle Lodge Central House of Knowledge and cofounder and member of the Elders' council, along with Elder Burma Bushie and other community leaders, of Giigewigamig Traditional Healing Centre.

Turtle Lodge and the Giigewigamig Traditional Healing Centre have pioneered Indigenous-led approaches to health care, which are described along with examples of other health service partnerships in Canada and other countries.

"If the swell of efforts of Elders, Knowledge Keepers and healers can be supported by the larger medical community, and if barriers to full health care rights for Indigenous Peoples can be lessened or removed," the authors conclude, "then systemic racism can be overpowered and health equity can be more easily approached."

A practice article provides 5 things to know on how drugs can interact with cannabinoids in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

1. The antifungal drug ketoconazole was shown to nearly double cannabinoid levels. Similar effects might be seen with commonly used drugs, such as macrolide antibiotics, increasing the chance of cannabinoid-related adverse effects.

2. Cannabinoids can affect levels of other drugs, increasing levels and the risk of adverse effects.

3. Smoking marijuana regularly can increase clearance of some drugs.

4. Marijuana can have additive effects with certain drugs, and may cause tachycardia (rapid heartbeat), high blood pressure and depression of the central nervous system.

5. Although more research is needed, potentially serious interactions with marijuana can occur with the blood thinner warfarin and specific drugs used for asthma and seizure control.

Patients and physicians should be aware of these potential interactions and effects.

Cases of potentially deadly brain damage as a result of stroke could be reduced after new research identified a pathway in the brain that causes swelling, and which responds to an innovative treatment.

Research led by the University of Exeter, and published in Nature Communications, has discovered how a malfunction in the way key proteins are transported within the brain after a stroke can lead to swelling, which can cause severe damage.

The international team has developed a compound which effectively treats this pathway in laboratory tests, paving the way for a new treatment. This could potentially provide an alternative, more effective way to treat brain swelling, for which currently there are limited treatment options.

The work was developed by a consortium of experts in Signalling Transduction (Dr Jinwei Zhang, University of Exeter, UK), Medicinal Chemistry (Professor Xianming Deng, Xiamen University, China), Neurosurgery and Cellular and Molecular Physiology (Dr Kristopher T. Kahle, Yale School of Medicine, USA) and Neurology (Professor Dandan Sun, Veterans Affairs Pittsburgh Healthcare System and University of Pittsburgh, USA).

Stroke is typically caused by a blood clot in the brain and can lead to death within minutes. In the UK alone, more than 100,000 strokes occur each year, averaging one every five minutes. Currently. Two thirds of stroke survivors leave hospital with a disability, according to the Stroke Association.

A stroke can damage cell volume regulation in the brain, resulting in swelling, a complication that is severe and difficult to treat, currently addressed by the highly invasive surgical procedures of removing part of the skull or inserting a shunt of cerebral spinal fluid. Shunts are particularly susceptible to malfunction and infection, and therefore often require patients to endure a number of repeat operations.

The compound, called ZT-1a, targets a pathway that controls proteins that act as transporters of ions and water in and out of cells. It works by stopping enzymes that activate proteins which bring too much water into the brain. It was tested on mice and rats which had stroke or hydrocephalus, a condition which causes fluid on the brain. These studies indicate that the compound may be able to stop brain swelling, potentially reducing cases of brain injury and death.

Dr Jinwei Zhang, Lecturer at the University of Exeter Medical School, led a team including collaborators in China and the US, that has developed the compound. He said: "Brain swelling after a stroke is a common and devastating problem for individuals and their families. Our discovery could address the urgent need for treatment that could provide an effective alternative to invasive surgery. The drug is still in the laboratory and requires further development. So far it shows promise in effectively reducing brain swelling in stroke, and other brain injuries such as drowning, choking or heart attack."

Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have made a new contribution to the ongoing search into the possibility of life on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Using quantum mechanical calculations, they have shown that azotosomes, a proposed alternative to cell membranes, could not form under the conditions there. Their research is published in the journal Science Advances.

Titan, Saturn's largest moon, has a dynamic surface, with seasonal rainfall, and lakes and seas at its polar regions, as well as a dense, nitrogen-rich atmosphere. These similarities to Earth have led many to consider the possibility of life there. The liquids on Titan are not water, however, but seas of methane and ethane, and the surface temperature is around -180C. Lipid membranes, of the type common to life on Earth, could not function under such conditions. This has led researchers looking for signs of life on Titan to contemplate alternative forms of cell membrane that could tolerate these extremes. One such alternative form, suggested by a team from Cornell University, is called an 'azotosome'.

The idea of azotosomes has gained traction in the field of astrobiology, and it has been shown computationally that such structures would survive the conditions on Titan. The azotosome was proposed to be formed from the organic compound acrylonitrile - which was later confirmed to exist on Titan.

"Titan is a fascinating place to test our understanding of the limits of prebiotic chemistry - the chemistry that precedes life. What chemical, or possibly biological, structures might form, given enough time under such different conditions? The suggestion of azotosomes was a really interesting proposal for an alternative to cell membranes as we understand them," says Martin Rahm, Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology.

"But our new research paper shows that, unfortunately, although the structure could indeed tolerate the extremes of Titan, it would not form in the first place," he explains.

Using advanced quantum mechanical calculations, the researchers compared the energy of the proposed azotosome membrane embedded in methane with that of the molecular crystal form of acrylonitrile - its molecular ice. They discovered that each building block added to the azotosome increased its energy significantly, making its formation progressively less likely thermodynamically. They conclude therefore that while azotosomes could survive on Titan, they would not self-assemble under such conditions. Instead, acrylonitrile would crystallise into its molecular ice.

Despite the 'negative' results of their work, Martin Rahm sees the study, which was done together with PhD student Hilda Sandström, as providing highly valuable information for ongoing research in astrobiology.

"With this work we hope to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the limits of chemistry and biology in environmental extremes. Though we have shown that acrylonitrile is not a viable building block for workable cell membranes on Titan, we now have a better understanding of the environmental limits for cell membranes. Titan is a highly interesting and unique environment with many unanswered questions and possibilities left to explore," he explains.

Their work is also an important step forward in demonstrating the potential of computational astrobiology, which offers the chance to evaluate, prior to experiments or sampling, whether or not a particular structure or process might be a biosignature, a marker for potential biology.

Interest in astrobiology on Titan is very high in the scientific community - so much so that in 2026, NASA will launch the billion-dollar Dragonfly spacecraft, which will make the 8-year journey to Titan to investigate its surface. It will spend around 3 years flying to different locations around the moon, assessing the conditions for habitability, prebiotic chemistry, and looking for signs of past and present life.

Read the article "Can polarity-inverted membranes self-assemble on Titan?" in the journal Science Advances.

The likelihood of life on Titan and other similar worlds

While stressing that life under the extreme conditions found on Titan and other such worlds is highly unlikely, the researchers do, however, consider another possibility. They hypothesise that perhaps cell membranes are not a necessity for life everywhere, as we see they are on our Earth.

One crucial function of cell membranes on Earth is to protect the contents of a cell from being diluted and destroyed in larger bodies of liquid water. However, on the surface of Titan, any hypothetical life-bearing biomolecule would exist in the solid state, due to the low temperature, and never risk such destruction by dissolution.

Because hypothetical biomolecules on Titan would be immobile, they would need to rely on the diffusion of small energetic molecules, such as hydrogen gas or acetylene, to reach them before they could grow or replicate. Such molecules would need to be transported through the surrounding atmosphere or through liquid hydrocarbons, and a membrane would, in this case, hinder the desired diffusion. A membrane would likely be a similar obstacle in the opposite direction, for the necessary removal of waste products from the biomolecule's metabolism.

"One can therefore ask what the benefit would be from having cell membranes under such different conditions?" explains Martin Rahm.

DGIST announced on February 12 that the joint research team of Professor Jaewon Ko and Professor Ji Won Um in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences found a new candidate target to treat epilepsy by regulating GABAergic synaptic functions . This research achievement is expected to set a milestone to develop new treatments such as epilepsy, one of the intractable brain diseases.

Epilepsy is one of the intractable brain diseases with a high prevalence of 1% in South Korea's population, as more than 30% of the central nervous system does not respond well to the conventional medications. In particular, the number of patients with epilepsy convulsions that occur with high blood pressure, diabetes, hemorrhage, etc., due to various causes, account for 10-15% of the total population. However, no specific mechanisms have been known clearly on how epilepsy begins in which parts of the brain, how it spreads to other parts of the brain, and how its symptoms are controlled, are largely unknown.

Professor Um's research team had been steadily discovering and researching key molecules that mediate the development of GABAergic synapse associated with brain diseases and discovered IQSEC3, a GABAergic synapse-specific protein, for the first time in 2016. In this research, her research team uncovered a new molecular mechanism that mediates the GABAergic synaptic development by regulating neural circuit activity in the hippocampal dentate gyrus, in which IQSEC3 mediates higher brain functions such as memory and learning.

To determine this, the research team produced a knockdown virus which eliminates IQSEC3 and injected it into the hippocampal dentate gyrus of mice, which showed a decrease in GABAergic synapse numbers and neurotransmission with severe seizures. This revealed that IQSEC3 protein was a key factor in mediating the GABAergic synaptic structure and function.

The researchers found that the amount of somatostatin peptide, originally known to be secreted from hypothalamus, in the hippocampal dentate gyrus, was dramatically decreased. They confirmed that injecting somatostatin peptides into the specific type of GABAergic interneurons also completely restored the GABAergic synaptic deficits and increased frequency of seizures caused by IQSEC3 deficiency.

Professor Um said, "We found a key clue that somatostatin, which is a key for regulation of synaptic transmission between nerve cells, directly mediates the development of GABAergic synapses. This can be used as a novel treatment strategy for epilepsy and various refractory brain diseases caused by a breakdown of the excitatory-GABAergic balance at synapses and neural circuits."

A young planet located 150 light-years away has given UNSW Sydney astrophysicists a rare chance to study a planetary system in the making.

The findings, recently published in The Astronomical Journal, suggest that the planet DS Tuc Ab - which orbits a star in a binary system - formed without being heavily impacted by the gravitational pull of the second star.

"We expected the pull from the second star to tilt the rotating disk of gas and dust that once surrounded the main star - a process that would skew the orbit of the planet," says Dr Benjamin Montet, Scientia Fellow at UNSW Sydney and lead author of the study.

"Surprisingly, we found no evidence the planet's orbit was impacted. We also found the planet formed through relatively calm processes - which means it could be possible for Earth-like planets to survive in binary systems like this."

Dr Montet worked with an international team of researchers at the Magellan Telescopes located at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. They used the Planet Finder Spectrograph to measure the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect, which is the relative angle between the orbit of the planet and the spin of its star.

They discovered the planet DS Tuc Ab orbits its star in a relatively flat plane, at approximately 12 degrees incline from the star's rotational axis. This low incline - called obliquity - suggests that the pull from the companion star did not significantly tilt the orbit of the protoplanetary disk where DS Tuc Ab formed.

While planets in the solar system all have a low obliquity, it's unusual for planets like DS Tuc Ab.

"Most similar planets orbit their star at random angles, sometimes reaching up to 90 degrees above the axis of their star," Dr Montet says.

"The DS Tuc system is the first piece of evidence that higher orbital angles don't get defined early on in a star's life - they are an effect that happens only later on."

At 40 million years old, the gas giant DS Tuc Ab is considered a 'pre-teen' in planetary years. There are fewer than ten planets we know about that are this young.

Its age is a unique chance for astrophysicists to study a system in development before external influences interfere.

"To find out how long planetary systems last, we need systems that are too young to go through dynamical interactions, but old enough to have formed planets. The DS Tuc system is exactly in that niche," Dr Montet says.

DS Tuc Ab: a 'Hot Neptune'

The planet DS Tuc Ab is a Neptune-sized gas planet that orbits its star closely and quickly - one lap around its star takes only 8.1 days. These types of planets are known as 'Hot Neptunes' for their fast speeds and proximity to their stars.

Hot Neptunes are unlike anything we have in the solar system.

Even the smallest and closest planet to our Sun, Mercury, takes almost 100 days to complete its orbit. Our closest gas planet, Jupiter, takes over 4300 days.

Giant gas planets are unlikely to develop close to their stars. The current understanding is that they form further away and, over time, a force causes them to move closer to their stars.

Scientists want to know what that force is.

"There are two main theories about how Hot Neptunes came to be so close to their stars," says Dr Montet.

"One theory is that an external force - potentially a multi-body nearby collision - 'kicks' them closer in, where they wobble and eventually settle on a new orbit.

"Another theory is that smooth processes within the planetary disk create a force that gradually pulls the planet closer to the star."

Testing the obliquity can help scientists uncover which force was at play. Planets with low obliquities are understood to be formed by smooth disk processes, while more dramatic processes will lead to random or high obliquities.

However, astrophysicists have recently been intrigued by the suggestion that wide binary stars can tilt the orbit of young planets around their stars - while this process would be smooth, it would result in planets with high orbital inclinations.

"If true, this would upend our theory of planet formation!" says Dr Montet.

While that theory was not supported by the low obliquity of DS Tuc Ab, scientists are looking to the skies for more young binary systems to test.

The next generation of planetary systems

When it comes to learning from star systems, many of the systems we can observe today provide an inaccurate history of the system's past.

"Present-day systems are not pure laboratories," says Dr Montet.

"Over billions of years, planet-planet and planet-star interactions can scatter, torque, migrate, and disturb orbits, making what we see today very different to how they initially formed."

Planets take between 10 and 100 million years to form, but most of the planets visible from Earth are much older. The DS Tuc system is 45 million years old - only 1% the age of the Sun.

"DS Tuc Ab is at an interesting age," says Dr Montet. "The protoplanetary disk has dissipated, and we can see the planet, but it's still too young for the orbit of other distant stars to manipulate its path.

"It gives us the chance to understand planet formation dynamics in a way that a five billion-year-old star doesn't."

DS Tuc A is the youngest star for which the spin-orbit alignment has ever been measured.

Searching the skies

DS Tuc Ab is only visible from the Southern Hemisphere. It was discovered last year through NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission - an all-sky surveying mission that aims to discover thousands of exoplanets near bright stars.

Montet worked closely with researchers at Harvard and Carnegie universities, who also measured DS Tuc Ab's obliquity but used the Doppler tomography method.

"The first exoplanet searches were done in facilities in the Northern Hemisphere, and so they missed a lot of the planets far south," says Dr Montet.

"NASA's TESS mission is changing that. It's finding all these planets around stars that previously hadn't been searched."

Dr Montet and his team are leading an effort to find and characterise more planets around young stars. They hope to study how stellar activity, such as stellar flares and starspots, could affect planet detection and habitability.

"Finding young planets is challenging. We really need to understand the behaviour of the parent star to be able to find the shallow signals of these planets which can be overwhelmed by starspots and flares," says Adina Feinstein, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow at the University of Chicago and co-author of the study.

"There's no reason why Earth-like planets couldn't form and survive in Hot Neptune systems like this one," Dr Montet says.

"We just have to go out and find them."

DOI

10.3847/1538-3881/ab6d6d

SMU Office of Research & Tech Transfer - In the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 10-K annual report filing for its financial year ending July 31, 2008, American jewellery retailer Zale Corporation ('Zales') mentioned the words 'advertising' or 'advertisement' 17 times. A year later, those same words showed up more than twice as often at 41 times.

By then, the SEC had begun investigations after the company delayed posting fourth-quarter results. Zales was subsequently found to have improperly capitalised television advertising costs from 2004 to 2009 although few had noticed what was going on.

In a method featured in new research by SMU Assistant Professor of Accounting Richard Crowley, this intentional misreporting would have sent alarm bells ringing well before the SEC started asking questions.

"They're 97th percentile or higher in our model in every single year from the second year of misreporting onwards," says Professor Crowley, referring to the machine learning technique featured in the paper "What are You Saying? Using Topic to Detect Financial Misreporting". "97th percentile here means that their score on our misreporting detection model was higher than 97 percent of U.S. public companies."

He adds: "The model is run yearly, so that means that for each year of 2005, 2006, ... 2009, Zales scored a higher misreporting detection score than 97 percent of public companies that year."

What's the word?

Professor Crowley explains that the research completely ignores the numbers - "If managers are going to misreport the numbers, they're going to do it in a believable fashion" - and instead looks at what is written instead, which the research refers to as the 'topic'.

Together with Professors Nerissa Brown and Brooke Elliott from Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Professor Crowley analysed over 3 billion words in 10-K filings from 1994-2012 to see how reliably certain topics predicted intentional misreporting. In certain samples, the research improved prediction of intentional misreporting by 59 percent.

"The one key difference when you're discussing things when you're lying is that you're very intentional on the topics you pick to discuss," he elaborates, pointing to the example of Enron.

"They just talk about increases in income and they have an enormous amount of discussion about that," Professor Crowley observes. Enron's 1999 annual report serves as a prime example, citing "acceleration of Enron's staggering pace of commercial innovation" for a 28 percent revenue increase to US$40 billion from a year ago, as well as a 37 percent jump in net income before non-recurring items to US$957 million.

Professor Crowley singles out a phrase that Enron used often in their 10-K's: "compared with". He explains:

"Companies are always saying things like, 'This is our income in 2011 compared with income in 2010,' and they're always giving forecasts about income, gross margins etc.

"But then you have income taxes, non-interest income, profit, those are just the general phrases that show up. When we picked out the most representative sentences for each of these topics, we found phrases such as 'operating profit was $122.1 million in 2011 compared with $113.9 million to 2010, an increase of 7.8 percent.' This is an extremely common structure to see in these documents.

"So when we talk about Enron, they have sentences like that, but they have a lot more of them than anybody else has ever done, both in 1999 and across the entire history of our sample."

Given the purported number of deals Enron had that generated all that revenue, it might make more sense to read in its annual reports things such as acquiring sources for its energy contracts, Professor Crowley notes. Instead, it largely "talked about revenue figures and income figures", he observes.

So is there a tipping point of the number of times a topic appears that is a red flag? Or the kinds of words used?

"There is no constant sort of barometer for this," Professor Crowley tells the Office of Research and Tech Transfer. "I can't just say if they talked about it X percent of the time, we got them. It depends on a lot of factors. And a lot of these factors are industry-specific, and some are firm-specific.

"[It also depends on whether] you're in a recession versus if you're not in a recession. Likewise, if you're a financial company versus a healthcare company, or a phone company versus a steel manufacturer, [the topics to look for] should all be different."

You can't game what you don't know

Professor Crowley and his collaborators employed over 20 different text-based variables in their predictive model, including the use of the Fog Index for readability.

While intuition would suggest an easy to read 10-K to be transparent, Professor Crowley counters by saying "it could be because they left out all the details". Similarly, positive sentiments like those expressed by Enron could be signals of intentional misreporting, although it is impossible to be 100 percent sure.

"It takes just six seconds to run through a 10-K with our model," Professor Crowley says while noting that the SEC has adopted parts of his model to uncover intentional misreporting. But the question must be asked: Can firms looking to mislead the market study the algorithm to beat the SEC at its own game?

"The one nice thing about this algorithm is that it changes every year," he elaborates, pointing to the combination of words that make up the topics that the algorithm works on. "Companies don't know what the regulator's target would be, even if they're using our algorithm."

"The benefit of that is that if you're a company trying to manipulate, you don't know what the target is either."

MINNEAPOLIS - Older people who experience daytime sleepiness may be at risk of developing new medical conditions, including diabetes, cancer and high blood pressure, according to a preliminary study released today that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 72nd Annual Meeting in Toronto, Canada, April 25 to May 1, 2020.

The condition called hypersomnolence is defined as excessive daytime sleepiness even after having seven or more hours of sleep. It can be debilitating for some people, affecting the way that they perform at work and in other daily activities.

"Paying attention to sleepiness in older adults could help doctors predict and prevent future medical conditions," said study author Maurice M. Ohayon, M.D., Ph.D., DSc, of Stanford University in Stanford, Calif., and a member of the American Academy of Neurology. "Older adults and their family members may want to take a closer look at sleeping habits to understand the potential risk for developing a more serious medical condition."

The study involved 10,930 people; 34% of participants were 65 years or older.

Researchers interviewed participants over the phone two times, three years apart. In the first interview, 23% of people over 65 met the criteria for excessive sleepiness. In the second interview, 24% reported excessive sleepiness. Of those, 41% said the sleepiness was a chronic problem.

The study found that people who reported sleepiness in the first phone interview had a 2.3 times greater risk of developing diabetes or high blood pressure three years later than those who did not experience sleepiness. They were also twice as likely to develop cancer. Of the 840 people who reported sleepiness at the first interview, 52 people, or 6.2%, developed diabetes compared to 74 people, or 2.9% of those who were never sleepy during the day. Also, of the 840 people who reported sleepiness, 20 people, or 2.4%, developed cancer compared to 21 people, or 0.8% of those who were never sleepy during the day.

The results remained the same after researchers adjusted for other factors that could affect daytime sleepiness, such as gender and sleep apnea.

People who reported daytime sleepiness during both interviews had a 2.5 times greater risk of developing heart disease.

People who reported sleepiness only in the second interview were 50% more likely to also have diseases of the musculoskeletal system and connective tissue, such as arthritis, tendinitis and lupus, than those who did not have daytime sleepiness.

A limitation of the study was that it relied on participants' memories, rather than monitoring their sleep length and quality and daytime sleepiness in a sleep clinic.