Culture

The stock market is a staple of business news, but it is unclear how meaningful stock prices are to the larger economy. Do changes in stock prices directly affect shorter-term consumption, or are they just leading indicators for subsequent economic activity? The U.S. Federal Reserve, for its part, usually seems to act as if stock-based wealth does help drive spending and employment. But is this correct?

A new study co-authored by an MIT economist brings data to the discussion and finds that increased stock market wealth has moderate but clear economic effects. After looking at the U.S. on a county-by-county basis, the study finds that after large market shifts, people spend about 3.2 cents per year out of each increased dollar of stock wealth they possess. There are also distinct employment effects in "nontradable" -- that is, place-situated -- industries.

"We found that the empirical effect is clear," says Alp Simsek, an associate professor of economics at MIT and a co-author of a new paper detailing the study's results. "Nontradable industry activities go up, including labor compensation in these nontradable industries. That provides direct evidence policymakers should care about."

The paper, "Stock Market Wealth and the Real Economy: A Local Labor Market Approach," appears in this month's issue of the American Economic Review. The authors are Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, an associate professor of economics at Harvard University; Plamen T. Nenov, an associate professor at the Norwegian Business School in Oslo; and Simsek, the Rudi Dornbusch Career Development Associate Professor in MIT's Department of Economics.

To conduct the study, the scholars examined multiple data sources, including IRS records from 1989 to 2015; stock market data from the Center for Research in Security Prices, affiliated with the University of Chicago Booth School of Business; county-level demographic and wealth information from the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances; and county-level employment and payroll information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The paper's county-level analysis helps disentangle whether the relationship between increased stock wealth and economic activity is to an extent causal, or whether stock-price increases are merely foretelling economic activity occurring independently.

Because not all counties have the same levels of stock wealth, tracking the differences in their levels of economic activity after the same changes in the markets helps pinpoint how much of that activity is driven by portfolio changes.

"Take Florida as an example," Simsek says. "There are counties like Palm Beach and Miami that have very high stock wealth, and others, like those in the Florida panhandle, that do not. The stock wealth effect predicts that in Miami and Palm Beach, after a stock market boom, activity should be above average. ... And that's what we find in the data."

Simsek, Chodorow-Reich, and Nenov also found this change almost entirely in nontradable industries, where location matters. The restaurant industry is nontradable, as are construction and many services; a lot of manufacturing activity, however, can be tradable.

Combining their county-level empirical analysis with a theoretical model of the U.S. economy, the scholars concluded that -- absent countervailing actions by the U.S. Federal Reserve -- a sustained 20 percent increase in stock valuations increases the nationwide labor bill by around 1.7 percent and increases nationwide hours worked by around 0.7 percent within two years.

The research also shows that it takes time for stock-market wealth to translate into spending, with changes starting to occur within a quarter of the market event but tending to peak from one to two years afterward.

"We do find a time lag," Simsek says. "Which is natural, because financial markets move fast, but the real economy is slower. Perhaps it takes time for people to realize their wealth has changed or for their consumption habits to adjust. Or, once people start spending, restaurants take a while to adjust labor hours or compensation. It's a demand-driven mechanism."

Simsek suggests the current finding has clear policy implications, especially for central bankers, since it helps reinforce the idea that lowering interest rates not only makes business borrowing more feasible but also boosts spending through stock wealth.

"One of the things the Fed can do, if they want to stimulate economic activity, is cut the rate and increase stock wealth, and that will support economic activity," Simsek says. To be sure, the U.S. Federal Reserve has seemingly acted to shore up market wealth many times in the past. The so-called "Greenspan put" or "Fed put" was the name given to U.S. Federal Reserve rate cuts halting market slides. (Alan Greenspan is a former Fed chair, and a "put" is a financial hedge designed to limit portfolio losses.)

Those moves drew some criticism from observers who felt Federal Reserve policies may have been too investor-friendly, although, as Simsek says, "It's not so obvious that it's a bad thing. If you don't do that, according to our evidence, it would be a negative economic shock, and the Fed is not [necessarily] doing it to bail out the stockholders, but is doing it to support economic activity."

To be sure, Simsek notes, there are still-larger moral debates about whether or not society has too much wealth tied up in stocks as opposed to other kinds of assets, or whether, just in terms of growth, too much wealth goes to stockholders as opposed to workers, who might spend more of their income relative to well-off investors. But whether the object of analysis is central-bank policy or structural issues about wealth, he notes, "We are providing empirical evidence for that."

PHOENIX, Ariz. -- May 13, 2021 -- In the largest study of the associations between smoking and cardiovascular disease on cognitive function, researchers at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope, found both impair the ability to learn and memorize; and that the effects of smoking are more pronounced among females, while males are more impaired by cardiovascular disease.

The results appear today in the journal Scientific Reports.

Previous attempts to quantify cognitive function among smokers and assess sex differences produced mixed results. The TGen researchers attribute this to the limited size of previous data sets. By analyzing data representing more than 70,000 individuals worldwide -- generated through TGen's online cognitive test called MindCrowd -- the current study produced results that indicate definitive trends.

"These results suggest that smoking and cardiovascular disease impact verbal learning and memory throughout adulthood, starting as early as age 18," said Matt Huentelman, Ph.D., TGen Professor of Neurogenomics, a MindCrowd founder, and the study's senior author. "Smoking is associated with decreased learning and memory function in women, while cardiovascular is associated with decreased learning and memory function in men."

Besides Alzheimer's disease, the most significant cause of cognitive decline is known as "vascular contributions to cognitive impairment and dementia" or VCID, which arises from stroke and other vascular brain injuries that cause significant changes to memory, thinking and behavior: smoking and cardiovascular disease exacerbate VCID.

"The reasons for these sex-modification effects are not entirely understood," said Candace Lewis, Ph.D., a Postdoctoral Fellow in Dr. Huentelman's Lab, and the study's lead author. "Our findings highlight the importance of considering biological sex in studying vascular contributions to cognitive impairment and dementia."

This study's findings are important, Dr. Lewis said, since cigarette smoking is the nation's leading cause of preventable disease and death, accounting for nearly 1 in 5 deaths, and cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of disease and death worldwide, and is an important predictor of cognitive decline and VCID. Vascular diseases also are associated with increased risk of Alzheimer's, which is the nation's 6th leading cause of death.

Because the study included a wide range of adults, 18-85, it allowed researchers to assess the relationship between smoking, cardiovascular disease, and verbal memory in the broadest single study age range used to date.

The researchers noted that few studies have previously assessed the effects of cardiovascular disease in younger adults, and that understanding the relationship between cardiovascular disease and cognitive function in young adults may be necessary for understanding possible treatment and intervention opportunities.

"This study points out some unpredicted but important differences between the sexes relating to cognitive decline," said Brian Tiep, M.D., City of Hope director of pulmonary rehabilitation and smoking cessation. "The impact on mental acuity seems progressive over time -- some more rapid than others. Living habits related to diet, exercise and smoking certainly are consequential and may differ between men and women. People undergoing cancer care may be cognitively effected by the cancer and its treatment."

"This study supports the importance of maintaining cardiovascular health and quitting smoking not only in support of their cancer care but to improve brain function," Dr. Tiep added.

College Park, Md. - Companies have often considered app adoption among their customers to have a positive impact on customer spending. According to new research from marketing professor P.K. Kannan at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, higher app adoption among hotel chains could be linked to lower spending among lower-level loyalty customers, who are more likely to use apps to get the best deals.

Kannan worked with Xian Gu, an assistant professor of marketing at Indiana University, for the research, published as "The Dark Side of Mobile App Adoption: Examining the Impact on Customers' Multichannel Purchase," in the Journal of Marketing Research.

They studied how a customer's spending over various channels changes after downloading a major hotel chain's app. Through several studies, they found that downloading the app had a significant and negative impact on customer spending, especially among low-level loyalty customers.

"Typically, companies launch mobile apps as a way to have a direct touchpoint with the customers and encourage them to make reservations through their channels as opposed to that of a third party," says Kannan. "However, they often don't realize that customers who have downloaded their app have likely downloaded apps from other hotel chains as well."

The research involved using a regression model to compare spending of customers who adopted the app at a specific point in time with the spending of a group of control customers who had not adopted the app at that time. The study tracked the total and channel-specific spending of each customer. Overall, the research team found that not only were customers who download the app from the hotel chain in focus more likely to have downloaded apps from other hotel chains, they were also more likely to shop around for the best rates and deals. This ended up decreasing the share of wallet of the focal hotel group.

"Customers are becoming increasingly aware of the value of mobile apps in purchase decisions," Kannan says. "When customers download multiple hotel apps, they become more of a searcher, which can have a negative impact on spending."

Kannan and his colleague's research is unique in that they studied the effect of mobile app adoption on spending in a highly competitive industry.

"There haven't been any prior studies that have examined the effect of mobile app adoption on spending in highly competitive industries like the hospitality industry," says Kannan. "Because of the highly competitive nature of the industry, people become more shoppers as opposed to loyal customers due to the ease of mobile shopping."

As technology becomes more prevalent and the entry point for new customers becomes easier, hotels are having to work harder to maintain customers. Kannan hopes that this research will help hotel chains optimize their mobile apps to include service functions that will help build loyal customers.

"In hyper competitive industries, apps are part of the cost of doing business," Kannan says. "Therefore, companies should optimize the service features of their app such as mobile check-in, room service requests and keyless entry to their room. Every additional service element added will help hotels strengthen their relationships with customers and develop more loyal customers in the process. Showing customers the value of the app beyond booking is essential."

Viruses require the resources of an infected cell to replicate and then infect further cells, and transfer to other individuals. One essential step in the viral life cycle is the production of new viral proteins based on the instructions in the viral RNA genome. Following these construction plans, the cell's own protein synthesis machine, called the ribosome, produces the viral proteins.

In the absence of viral infection, the ribosome moves along the RNA in strictly defined steps, reading three letters of RNA at a time. This three-letter code defines the corresponding amino acid that is being attached to the growing protein. It almost never happens that the ribosome slips one or two RNA letters forward or backward instead of following the regular three-letter steps. When such a slip of the ribosome occurs, it is called "a frameshift," and it leads to an incorrect reading of the genetic code.

Frameshifting almost never happens in our cells. It would lead to dysfunctional cellular proteins; however, certain viruses, such as coronaviruses and HIV, depend on a frameshifting event to regulate levels of viral proteins. For example, SARS-CoV-2 - the virus that causes COVID-19 - is critically dependent on frameshifting promoted by an unusual and intricate fold in the viral RNA.

Therefore, since frameshifting is essential for the virus but it almost never happens in our organism, any compound that inhibits frameshifting by targeting this RNA fold could potentially be useful as a drug to combat infection. However, so far, there is no information on how the viral RNA interacts with the ribosome to promote frameshifting, which would be important for drug development.

Detailed image of an essential process for coronavirus replication

A team of researchers from ETH Zurich and the Universities of Bern, Lausanne (in Switzerland) and University College Cork (UCC in Ireland) has for the first time managed to reveal the interactions between the viral genome and the ribosome during frameshifting. Their results have just been published in the journal Science.

Using sophisticated biochemical experiments, the researchers managed to capture the ribosome at the frameshifting site of the SARS-CoV-2 RNA genome. They could then study this molecular complex using cryo-electron microscopy.

The results provided a molecular description of the process at unprecedented detail and revealed a number of novel unanticipated features. The frameshifting event causes the usually dynamic ribosome machine to adopt a strained conformation, which helped provide one of the sharpest and most accurate images of a mammalian ribosome, visualized in the process of frameshifting while reading the information from the viral genome. The researchers then followed up on their structural findings with in vitro and in vivo experiments including exploring how this process can be targeted with chemical compounds. Nenad Ban, Professor for Molecular Biology at ETH Zurich and co-author of the study, emphasizes that "The results presented here on SARS-CoV-2 will also be useful for understanding the frameshifting mechanisms in other RNA viruses".

Possible target for antiviral drug development

The dependence of SARS-CoV-2 on this ribosomal frameshifting event could be used to develop antiviral drugs. Previous studies reported that several compounds are able to inhibit frameshifting in coronaviruses, however, this study now provides information about the effects of these compounds on levels of SARS-CoV-2 in infected cells.

In their experiments, both compounds reduced viral replication by three to four orders of magnitude and were not toxic for the treated cells. However, one of the two reduced viral replication by inhibiting ribosomal frameshifting, while the other might act through a different mechanism.

Although these compounds are currently not potent enough to be used as therapeutic drugs, this study demonstrates that inhibition of ribosomal frameshifting has a profound effect on viral replication, which paves the way for the development of better compounds. Due to the fact that all coronaviruses depend on this conserved frameshifting mechanism, a drug that targets this process may even be useful to treat infections by more distantly related coronaviruses. "Our future work will focus on understanding the cellular defense mechanisms that suppress viral frameshifting, as this could be useful for development of small compounds with similar activity," says Ban.

First co-author, Junior Research Associate of the Rheological and Thermochemical Research Lab Richard Djimasbe, comments, "To obtain bitumen as a half-solid product from heavy oil, you have to extract light fractions, and the rest is non-oxidized bitumen. Because of the relatively low ratio of light fractions in heavy oil, it's a simple and cheap way of bitumen production. The method allows for rational use of both heavy oil and light oil."

Lab Head Mikhail Varfolomeev adds, "One of the priorities of our World-Level Research Center in Liquid Hydrocarbons is the use of heavy oils, which constitute the majority of reserves both in Russia and in the world. One of the most important parts of this is extraction and refining of heavy petroleum reserves. The paper makes steps in that direction."

Non-traditional reserves, such as heavy oil, natural bitumen, and shale oil, have been found in Canada, Venezuela, Brazil, Russia, Chad, Madagascar and many other countries.

The research team hopes that non-oxidized bitumen can become another popular product obtained from heavy oil in Russia.

"The researchers focused on the use of a specially packed oxidizing column to increase the contact surface between the feedstock and the injected compressed air in order to reduce production costs, followed by a comparison of oxidized and unoxidized bitumen obtained by steam distillation," says co-author, Junior Research Associate Ameen A. Al-Muntaser.

A large-scale randomised trial of annual screening for ovarian cancer, led by UCL researchers, did not succeed in reducing deaths from the disease, despite one of the screening methods tested detecting cancers earlier.

Results from the UK Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer Screening (UKCTOCS) have been published in a report in the medical journal The Lancet.

In the UK, 4,000 women die from ovarian cancer each year. It is not usually diagnosed until it is at a late stage and hard to treat. UKCTOCS was designed to test the hypothesis that a reliable screening method that picks up ovarian cancer earlier, when treatments are more likely to be effective, could save lives.

The latest analysis looked at data from more than 200,000 women aged 50-74 at recruitment who were followed up for an average of 16 years. The women were randomly allocated to one of three groups: no screening, annual screening using an ultrasound scan, and annual multimodal screening involving a blood test followed by an ultrasound scan as a second line test.

The researchers found that, while the approach using multimodal testing succeeded in picking up cancers at an early stage, neither screening method led to a reduction in deaths.

Earlier detection in UKCTOCS did not translate into saving lives. Researchers said this highlighted the importance of requiring evidence that any potential screening test for ovarian cancer actually reduced deaths, as well as detecting cancers earlier.

Professor Usha Menon (MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL), lead investigator of UKTOCS, said: "UKCTOCS is the first trial to show that screening can definitely detect ovarian cancer earlier. However, this very large, rigorous trial shows clearly that screening using either of the approaches we tested did not save lives. We therefore cannot recommend ovarian cancer screening for the general population using these methods.

"We are disappointed as this is not the outcome we and everyone involved in the trial had hoped and worked for over so many years. To save lives, we will require a better screening test that detects ovarian cancer earlier and in more women than the multimodal screening strategy we used."

Women aged between 50 and 74 were enrolled in the trial between 2001 and 2005. Screening lasted until 2011 and was either an annual blood test, monitoring changes in the level of the protein CA125, or a yearly vaginal ultrasound scan. About 100,000 women were assigned to the no screening group, and more than 50,000 women to each of the screening groups.

Blood test screening picked up 39% more cancers at an early stage (Stage I/II), while detecting 10% fewer late-stage cancers (Stage III/IV) compared to the no screening group. There was no difference in the stage of cancers detected in the ultrasound group compared to the no screening group.

The initial analysis of deaths in the trial occurred in 2015, but there was not enough data at that time to conclude whether or not screening reduced deaths. By looking at five more years of follow up data from the women involved, researchers are now able to conclude that the screening did not save lives.

Professor Mahesh Parmar, Director of the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL and a senior author on the paper, said: "There have been significant improvements in the treatment of advanced disease in the last 10 years, since screening in our trial ended. Our trial showed that screening was not effective in women who do not have any symptoms of ovarian cancer; in women who do have symptoms early diagnosis, combined with this better treatment, can still make a difference to quality of life and, potentially, improve outcomes. On top of this, getting a diagnosis quickly, whatever the stage of the cancer, is profoundly important to women and their families."

Professor Ian Jacobs, from the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney), a co-investigator who has led the ovarian cancer screening research programme since 1985 and who was lead investigator of UKCTOCS from 2001-2014, said: "My thanks to the thousands of women, healthcare professionals and researchers who made this trial possible. The multimodal screening strategy did succeed in detection of ovarian cancer at an earlier stage, but sadly that did not save lives. This is deeply disappointing and frustrating given the hope of all involved that we would save the lives of thousands of women who are affected by ovarian cancer each year."

Professor Jacobs noted: "Population screening for ovarian cancer can only be supported if a test is shown to reduce deaths in a future randomised controlled trial. I remain hopeful that a new effective screening test will be found eventually, but it will take many years to conduct a large trial of the test. Realistically, this means we have to reluctantly accept that population screening for ovarian cancer is more than a decade away."

A huge wealth of samples and data from the trial has been donated by the participants for future research. This resource, referred to as the UKCTOCS Longitudinal Women's Cohort (UKLWC), is now being used by researchers worldwide, helping to improve understanding of ovarian cancer as well as other cancers and other diseases such as cardiovascular disease.

Researchers say that the study has also generated insights into how best to design, conduct and analyse a large-scale randomised clinical trial particularly in individuals who have no signs of disease. These insights will be helpful to future trials in all areas of health. It has also contributed to advances in risk assessment, prevention and diagnosis of ovarian cancer.

The UKCTOCS trial was funded by the NIHR Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Programme and the charities Cancer Research UK and The Eve Appeal.

Michelle Mitchell, Cancer Research UK's Chief Executive, said: "Trials don't always find the result we had hoped for, but we need long-term studies like this to know whether new tests save lives. Cancer Research UK will continue to fund vital research into aggressive forms of ovarian cancer so we can reduce the impact of this disease.

"Screening is for people without symptoms, so it's still important that if you notice unusual or persistent changes to talk to your doctor. Symptoms of ovarian cancer can be quite vague and similar to symptoms caused by less serious conditions, which can make spotting the disease tricky. Whether it's needing to go to the toilet more often, pain, bloating, or something else, raise it with your GP - in most cases it won't be cancer but it's best to get it checked out."

Professor Nick Lemoine, Medical Director, NIHR Clinical Research Network, said: "These important findings from a large-scale trial, involving 200,000 participants, show that annual screening did not succeed in reducing deaths from ovarian cancer.

"However, it's important to note that negative results can be as important as positive. The study has provided important new evidence and insights into how to conduct and analyse future large-scale randomised clinical trials into ovarian cancer, in the hope that this will prevent and diagnose this disease more effectively in the future.

"We thank every single person who took part."

Athena Lamnisos, CEO, The Eve Appeal, said: "The threshold for introducing a national cancer screening programme is a mortality benefit. Of course this is key - saving lives. It's disappointing that this research programme did not show a reduction in mortality from ovarian cancer and so can't be recommended as a national screening programme. However, the impact it had on earlier diagnosis is impressive and important.

"Ovarian cancer is so often diagnosed at stage 3 or 4 and shifting diagnosis one stage earlier makes a huge difference to both treatment options and quality of life. Earlier diagnosis will often reduce the amount and intensity of treatment, and this makes all the difference to women and their families who are living with cancer. It may have also given them more precious time with their loved ones."

AURORA, Colo. (May 13, 2021) - Researchers at the University of Colorado College of Nursing found that many of its graduate students suffered from increased stress after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 90% of students worked during the pandemic on average nearly 34 hours per week. Juggling school, a varied work-load and changes to their schedules all significantly influenced stress levels.

Graduate nursing students are registered nurses pursuing a Master's degree in Nursing (MS), Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP), or Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). A total of 222 graduate nursing students completed the survey. The vast majority of students were employed before the pandemic and a significant decrease in employment occurred during the pandemic (97.3% to 90.1%, p?.001). Overall stress increased (p?.001). The increased total stress was associated with students participating in clinical rotations (q?=?0.024) and having a change in work hours (q?=?0.022).

Study findings, published recently in the Journal of Professional Nursing, also reveal that graduate school plans changed due to the pandemic for 18.2% of students.

"The past year brought challenges so unique that it's critical to understand how our students - who juggle clinical work and studies - are faring," says Priscilla Nodine, PhD, CNM, associate professor at the University of Colorado College of Nursing and study author. "Nursing schools need to address graduate student concerns during the pandemic, including having clear communication platforms and offering support services," says Nodine.

"These study results are crucial in understanding how to take care of our future workforce who are already on the front lines," says Nodine. "More federal funding for nurses going back to school to become advanced practice nurses is needed to ease their financial burden and help increase the primary care workforce."

BOSTON - B cells are the immune cells responsible for creating antibodies, and most B cells, known as B2 cells, produce antibodies in response to a pathogen or a vaccine, providing defense and immunity against infections. But a small subset of long-lived B cells, known as B1 cells, are quite different from their short-lived cousins, the B2 cells. Instead of producing antibodies in response to invaders, they spontaneously make antibodies that perform vital housekeeping functions, such as removing waste like oxidized LDL cholesterol from the blood.

Like all the cells in the body, B1 and B2 cells have the same DNA, and therefore the same starting set of instructions. It is through epigenetic modifications, which open and close different areas of the genome to the machinery that reads the genetic instructions, that the same genome can be used to create unique instructions for each cell type. Understanding how the different epigenetic landscapes - the changes in instructions - allows for these differences in such similar cells is both an important fundamental question in immunology and can help scientists better understand diseases linked to B cells' dysregulation.

Shiv Pillai, MD, PhD, a core member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, studied the DNA modifications present in both cell types during different stages of development to identify an epigenetic signature that may determine whether a cell becomes a B1 or a B2 cell. This work was published recently in the journal Nature Communications.

"Through our analysis, we found the fate of a B cell is determined by epigenetic modifications driven by a protein called DNMT3A," says Vinay Mahajan, MD, PhD, an instructor in Pathology at the Ragon Institute and the paper's first author. "Genetic studies in humans link the genomic regions with these markers to a variety of immune-mediated disorders."

The team studied CpG methylation, a type of epigenetic modification that opens up specific areas of DNA and marks regulatory elements that can turn genes on or off. They discovered a set of regulatory elements with unique features in these B1 and B2 cells. In most cases, CpG methylation is permanent and, once added, is even passed on when the cell replicates. But in B cells, the protein DNMT3A had to continually work to maintain these epigenetic modifications. If DNMT3A was removed from B1 cells, the epigenetic modifications were lost, and chronic lymphomic leukemia (CLL), a cancer caused by the uncontrolled replication of B1 cells, would arise.

"These unique B1 cells are vitally important to our ability to stay healthy," says Pillai. "The antibodies they create help prevent clots and heart attacks. At the same time, understanding what genetic factors regulate them can help us better understand what happens when their regulation goes awry and leads to CLL and other diseases."

LA JOLLA, CA--A family of proteins that sense mechanical force--and enable our sense of touch and many other important bodily functions--also are essential for proper root growth in some plants, according to a study led by scientists at Scripps Research and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).

The discovery, published in the points to an ancient evolutionary origin for the PIEZO proteins, which until now had mainly been characterized in animals. This advance in basic biology may also lead to new strategies for improving crop yields, the researchers say.

"Our finding that PIEZO proteins work as transducers of mechanical forces in plants, as well as animals, suggests the broad importance of these proteins for living organisms on Earth," says lead author Seyed Ali Reza Mousavi, PhD, a postdoctoral research associate in the Scripps Research laboratory of Ardem Patapoutian, PhD.

"It's remarkable that evolution has utilized the same type of molecule for us to sense touch and for plant roots to sense the hardness of soil," says Patapoutian, professor and Presidential Endowed Chair in Neurobiology at Scripps Research and an investigator at HHMI.

Patapoutian, the senior author of the study, is credited with the discovery of PIEZO proteins about a decade ago--an accomplishment that earned him the 2020 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience and many other awards. The discovery led to a host of additional findings that have shed light on how to a range of medical conditions, from heart failure to chronic pain.

Sensing physical force

PIEZO proteins have little resemblance to any other family of biological proteins. In mammals--the only large class of animals in which they have been studied much--they form striking, propeller-like structures in the outer membranes of cells.

When stretched or pressed beyond a threshold, these structures allow charged molecules, called ions, to flow into or out of their host cells.

The two PIEZO proteins in mammals, PIEZO1 and PIEZO2, underlie a wide variety of functions that require this conversion of mechanical force to cellular signals--functions including the sense of touch, the sense of body and limb positions that enables balance, the sense of bladder fullness and the regulation of blood pressure.

Patapoutian's lab and others have found PIEZO-type proteins, with apparent mechanical sensor functions, in other animals including Drosophila fruit flies.

An important role in the plant kingdom

When in the long history of life on Earth did these unique, versatile proteins evolve? To help address that question, Mousavi and other members of Patapoutian's team examined Arabidopsis thaliana, a weedy relative of the mustard plant that's a standard lab model for plant biology research. Arabidopsis's genome includes a gene encoding a PIEZO-type protein, hinting that these proteins work as mechanosensors in the plant kingdom, too.

The scientists first examined the locations in the plant where the protein, PZO1, is made, and found it concentrated in the root tips. Deleting the PZO1 gene, they observed that the Arabidopsis plants grew shorter roots. In a lengthy set of further experiments, they found that PZO1 in root tip cells responds to mechanical stimuli with ion flows--which establishes it as a mechanosensor like its mammalian counterparts.

Exactly how PZO1's mechanosensing abilities help roots grow remains a mystery. But Mousavi, Patapoutian and colleagues suspect that it helps root tip cells sense and adjust themselves to the potentially strong mechanical forces they encounter as the root tries to penetrate soils--especially drier, harder soils.

"If the activity of PZO1 increases, it might help plants expand their root systems in dry conditions and get better access to water," Mousavi says. If that proves to be the case, boosting PZO1 activity could be a way of increasing crop yields in difficult soil conditions, he says.

Mousavi is now trying to clarify PZO1's precise function in Arabidopsis with experiments in real-world conditions. He also hopes to study the role of PIEZO-type proteins in food crops including maize and rice.

DALLAS, May 13, 2021 -- Higher body mass index (BMI) in adolescence is associated with a significantly higher risk of first ischemic stroke in adults under age 50 regardless of whether they had Type 2 diabetes, according to new research published today in Stroke, a journal of the American Stroke Association, a division of the American Heart Association.

While rates of adolescent obesity and stroke among adults under the age of 50 years continue to rise around the world, the precise link between the two conditions is still not fully understood.

"Adults who survive stroke earlier in life face poor functional outcomes, which can lead to unemployment, depression and anxiety," said study co-author Gilad Twig, M.D., M.P.H., Ph.D., an associate professor in the Medical Corps of the Israel Defense Forces and the department of military medicine, Faculty of Medicine of The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. "The direct and indirect costs attributed to stroke prevention and care are high and expected to keep increasing since the rate of stroke continues to rise."

This study specifically analyzed adolescent BMI and first stroke before the age of 50 among 1.9 million men and women (ages 16 to 20; 58% men; 84% born in Israel) from two nationwide databases: the Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli National Stroke Registry. All the participants in the database had undergone one complete medical exam between 1985 and 2013.

Standard BMI groups are underweight (less than 5th percentile), low-normal BMI (5th to 49th percentile), high-normal BMI (50th to 84th percentile), overweight (85th to 94th percentile), and obese (greater than 95th percentile). Details on percentile BMI measures by gender are in the article.

During the follow-up period, for all 1.9 M participants between 2014 and 2018, researchers found:

Overall, 1,088 strokes occurred (921 ischemic strokes, 167 hemorrhagic strokes), and the average age at the time of the stroke was 41. Adolescent BMI was directly related to the risk of first ischemic stroke.

Compared to participants in the low-normal BMI group, adolescents who were in the overweight category had a 2-times higher stroke risk before the age of 50, and adolescents with obesity had a 3.4-times higher risk.

Even adolescents with BMIs in the high-normal range were more likely to have a stroke before age 50 compared to those in the low-normal BMI group.

After accounting for Type 2 diabetes, adolescents who were in either the overweight or obesity category still had a higher risk of stroke (1.6-times and 2.4-times, respectively) compared to people who had BMI values within the normal range.

Despite overweight and obesity during adolescence being a common problem, researchers were surprised to find that Type 2 diabetes did not explain the higher risk for ischemic stroke, which occurred even before the age of 30 in some cases. Current medical literature has shown that having a stroke early in life may lead to recurrent stroke, heart attack, long-term care and premature death, Twig noted.

"Our findings underscore the importance of effective treatment and prevention of high normal and excessively high BMI during adolescence," Twig said. "Our study is also the first to show that the risk of stroke associated with higher BMI values is the same for both men and women."

A major limitation of the study is that BMI data at follow-up were not available for all participants, which meant that researchers were unable to assess the contribution of obesity over time to stroke risk and to determine the independent risk of BMI during adolescence.

It's a tough time to be a shark. Pollution, industrialized fishing, and climate change threaten marine life, and the populations of many top ocean predators have declined in recent years. In addition to studying sharks in the wild, scientists working to save sharks rely on ones living in zoos and aquariums so that they can help build breeding programs and learn more about the conditions sharks need to thrive. One important way the scientists do that is by playing matchmakers to the sharks, pairing up individuals in ways that increase genetic diversity. In a new study in Scientific Reports, scientists undertook the largest-ever effort to artificially inseminate sharks.Their work resulted in 97 new baby sharks, including ones whose parents live on opposite sides of the country and a few that don't have fathers at all.

"Our goal was to develop artificial insemination as a tool that could be used to help support and maintain healthy reproducing populations of sharks in aquariums," says Jen Wyffels, the paper's lead author who conducted the research for this paper with the South-East Zoo Alliance for Reproduction & Conservation and is currently a researcher at the University of Delaware.

"Moving whole animals from one aquarium to another to mate is expensive and can be stressful for the animal, but now we can just just move genes around through sperm," says Kevin Feldheim, a researcher at Chicago's Field Museum and a co-author of the study who led the DNA analysis of the newborn sharks to determine their parentage.

Figuring out shark parentage can be tricky because shark reproduction isn't always straightforward. In some species, female sharks can store sperm for months after mating and they use it for fertilization "on demand", so the father of a newborn shark isn't necessarily the male the mother most recently had contact with. Some female sharks are even capable of reproducing with no male at all, a process called parthenogenesis. In parthenogenesis, the female's egg cells are able to combine with each other, creating an embryo that only contains genetic material from the mother.

To study shark reproduction, the researchers focused on whitespotted bamboo sharks. "When people think of sharks, they picture great whites, tiger sharks, and bull sharks--the big, scary, charismatic ones," says Feldheim. "Whitespotted bamboo sharks are tiny, about three feet long. If you go to an aquarium, they're generally just resting on the bottom." But while bamboo sharks' gentleness and small size make them unlikely candidates for Hollywood fame, those qualities make them ideal for researchers to try to artificially inseminate.

Before attempting artificial insemination, researchers have to make sure that the potential mothers aren't already carrying sperm from a previous rendezvous. "Candidate females are isolated from males and the eggs they lay afterwards are monitored to make sure they are infertile," says Wyffels. Egg-laying sharks regularly lay eggs on a regular schedule, much like chickens, says Wyffels, to the point that they're nicknamed "chickens of the sea." To determine if the eggs are infertile, scientists shine an underwater light through the leathery, rectangular egg cases (called "mermaid's purses") to see if there's a wriggling embryo on top of the yolk. If there are no fertilized eggs for six weeks or more, the shark is ready to be inseminated.

Scientists collected and evaluated 82 semen samples from 19 sharks in order to tell the difference between good and bad samples. Some of the good samples went to nearby females for insemination, while others were kept cold and shipped around and across the country. Once the semen reached Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies or Aquarium of the Pacific, where a female was waiting, researchers sedated her and placed the semen in her reproductive tract--the procedure took less than ten minutes. All in all, 20 females were inseminated as part of the study.

Baby sharks hatched from fertilized eggs after 4 months of incubation. "The hatchlings are about the size of your hand, and they have distinctive spot patterns that help to tell them apart," says Wyffels. Tissue samples were taken from all the babies, along with their parents, so Feldheim could analyze their DNA at the Field Museum's Pritzker Laboratory for Molecular Systematics and Evolution.

Feldheim developed a suite of genetic markers to determine parentage. "We sequenced the DNA and found sections where the code repeats itself," says Feldheim. "These repeating bits of code serve as signatures, and when we see them in the babies, we match them up to the potential dads." The team found that freshly collected semen was effective in fertilizing eggs in 27.6% of cases; semen that had been cold-stored for 24 or 48 hours had 28.1% and 7.1% success rates, respectively. In the genetic analysis of the offspring, the team also found two instances of parthenogenesis, where the mother reproduced on her own without using the sperm she'd been inseminated with. "These cases of parthenogenesis were unexpected and help illustrate how little we know about the basic mechanisms of sexual reproduction and embryo development among sharks," says Wyffels.

From these preliminary results, the scientists hope to help aquariums expand and manage their shark breeding programs. "There have been other reports on artificial insemination of sharks, but they include very few females. In this study, we're in the double digits and as a result we could investigate different methods for preparing and preserving sperm for insemination" says Wyffels. "And a hatchling from shark parents that live almost 3,000 miles apart from sperm collected days in advance, that's definitely a first."

"One of the goals of this pilot project was to just see if it worked," says Feldheim. "Now, we can extend it to other animals that actually need help breeding, from other species in aquariums to sharks under threat in the wild."

The researchers also note that if studies like these contribute to the conservation of sharks in the wild, it will be largely thanks to aquariums. "We wouldn't know about parthenogenesis in sharks if it wasn't for aquariums," says Feldheim.

"Aquariums allow you to observe the same individual animals over time, and that's very difficult to do in the wild," says Wyffels. "Aquarists have eyes on their animals every day. They pick up on subtle changes in behavior related to reproduction, and they tell us what they see. Research like this depends on that collaboration. We are already taking what we learned from this study and applying it to other species, especially the sand tiger shark, a protected species that does not reproduce often in aquariums."

It is difficult for us to succeed in whatever we set out to do if we lack motivation. We usually need it as a driving force to achieve both short- and long-term goals, from household chores to getting a degree. However, because of the ongoing pandemic, our lifestyles have been subjected to drastic and dynamic changes, and many work- and study-related activities are now carried out online exclusively. This, among other complex factors, have made it difficult for some people to stay focused and motivated, and psychology researchers are trying to find effective and widely applicable solutions to address such problems.

In a recent study published in BMC Psychology, researchers from Ritsumeikan University and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan, have explored a simple strategy to increase motivation in college students by nurturing a positive emotion: gratitude. Many studies have shown that even short "gratitude interventions," which are activities that increase an individual's awareness of feelings of gratitude, can have a lasting positive effect on that person's mood, satisfaction, and well-being. However, based on previous studies, the available evidence on the effect of such interventions on academic motivation is somewhat inconclusive. This prompted the researchers to test the effects of a different type of gratitude intervention: daily gratitude journaling.

"Our main hypothesis was that engaging in an online gratitude journal by writing down up to five things one felt grateful for each day could make students be more aware of their academic opportunities--their 'blessings'--and help them re-evaluate their motives and goals, ultimately improving their motivation," explains Dr. Norberto Eiji Nawa from NICT, first author of the study. They recruited 84 participants, all Japanese college students, and divided them into a control group and an intervention group. Over the course of two weeks, students in both groups had to evaluate aspects of their daily life through online questionnaires each day, but only the intervention group had to keep the online daily gratitude journal. At the start of the intervention and after 1, and 2 weeks, and 1 and 3 months, the participants had to complete the Academic Motivation Scale (AMS), a tried-and-tested tool for measuring different aspects of academic motivation.

The results were certainly promising; through statistical analyses, the researchers found that the gratitude intervention through daily journaling significantly increased the students' academic motivation. Most notably, this robust positive effect was not restricted only to the two-week period of the intervention, as the increased level of academic motivation was maintained even after three months. In addition, through an exploratory analysis, the researchers established that the enhancement in academic motivation was mostly driven by a decrease in "amotivation scores." Amotivation, in this context, refers to the state in which a person perceives that their own actions are irrelevant to the resulting outcomes, leading to feelings of helplessness and incompetence.

Academic motivation can be one of the primary determinants of both academic achievements and satisfaction with school life, and developing widely applicable intervention strategies is critical to foster student growth. "Online interventions have the advantage of being more accessible, scalable and affordable to large portions of the population. Gathering solid evidence to support their deployment will be essential to unleash their true potential in the future," concludes Professor Noriko Yamagishi from Ritsumeikan University. Fortunately, it appears that the positive impact of gratitude interventions extends well beyond the already-documented effects on individual well-being.

This study was partly supported by a research grant from the Ritsumeikan Inamori Philosophy Research Center. This Center aims to promote multidisciplinary research on the management philosophy advocated by Dr. Kazuo Inamori, a prominent Japanese entrepreneur and renowned philanthropist. With this major goal in mind, Professor Yamagishi, alongside Dr. Nawa, have been working on the scientific elucidation of the emotions of "altruism" and "gratitude" from the perspective of cognitive psychology and neuroscience. This particular study was conducted as part of this more overarching research. Until the day these human emotions become clearer, we can safely give this piece of advice: remember to count your blessings.

Scientists have begun the search for extraterrestrial life in the Solar System in earnest, but such life may be subtly or profoundly different from Earth-life, and methods based on detecting particular molecules as biosignatures may not apply to life with a different evolutionary history. A new study by a joint Japan/US-based team, led by researchers at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, has developed a machine learning technique which assesses complex organic mixtures using mass spectrometry to reliably classify them as biological or abiological.

In season 1, episode 29 ("Operation: Annihilate!") of Star Trek, which aired in 1966, the human-Vulcan hybrid character Spock made the observation "It is not life as we know or understand it. Yet it is obviously alive; it exists." This now 55-year old pop-culture meme still makes a point: how can we detect life if we fundamentally don't know what life is, and if that life is really different from life as we know it?

The question of "Are we alone?" as living beings in the Universe has fascinated humanity for centuries, and humankind has been looking for ET life in the Solar System since NASA's Viking 2 mission to Mars in 1976. There are presently numerous ways scientists are searching for ET life. These include listening for radio signals from advanced civilisations in deep space, looking for subtle differences in the atmospheric composition of planets around other stars, and directly trying to measure it in soil and ice samples they can collect using spacecraft in our own Solar System. This last category allows them to bring their most advanced chemical analytical instrumentation directly to bear on ET samples, and perhaps even bring some of the samples back to Earth, where they can be carefully scrutinised.

Exciting missions such as NASA's Perseverance rover will look for life this year on Mars; NASA's Europa Clipper, launching in 2024, will try to sample ice ejected from Jupiter's moon Europa, and its Dragonfly mission will attempt to land an "octacopter" on Saturn's moon Titan starting in 2027. These missions will all attempt to answer the question of whether we are alone.

Mass spectrometry (MS) is a principal technique that scientists will rely on in spacecraft-based searches for ET life. MS has the advantage that it can simultaneously measure multitudes of compounds present in samples, and thus provide a sort of "fingerprint" of the composition of the sample. Nevertheless, interpreting those fingerprints may be tricky.

As best as scientists can tell, all life on Earth is based on the same highly coordinated molecular principles, which gives scientists confidence that all Earth-life is derived from a common ancient terrestrial ancestor. However, in simulations of the primitive processes that scientists believe may have contributed to life's origins on Earth, many similar but slightly different versions of the particular molecules terrestrial life uses are often detected. Furthermore, naturally occurring chemical processes are also able to produce many of the building blocks of biological molecules. Since we still have no known sample of alien life, this leaves scientists with a conceptual paradox: did Earth-life make some arbitrary choices early in evolution which got locked in, and thus life could be constructed otherwise, or should we expect that all life everywhere is constrained to be exactly the same way it is on Earth? How can we know that the detection of a particular molecule type is indicative of whether it was or was not produced by ET life?

It has long troubled scientists that biases in how we think life should be detectable, which are largely based on how Earth-life is presently, might cause our detection methods to fail. Viking 2 in fact returned odd results from Mars in 1976. Some of the tests it conducted gave signals considered positive for life, but the MS measurements provided no evidence for life as we know it. More recent MS data from NASA's Mars Curiosity rover suggest there are organic compounds on Mars, but they still do not provide evidence for life. A related problem has plagued scientists attempting to detect the earliest evidence for life on Earth: how can we tell if signals detected in ancient terrestrial samples are from the original living organisms preserved in those samples or derived from contamination from the organisms which presently pervade our planet?

Scientists at the Earth-Life Science Institute at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (The National MagLab) in the US decided to address this problem using a combined experimental and machine learning computational approach. The National MagLab is supported by the US National Science Foundation through NSF/ DMR-1644779 and the State of Florida to provide cutting-edge technologies for research. Using ultrahigh-resolution MS (a technique known as Fourier-Transform Ion Cyclotron Resonance Mass Spectrometry (or FT-ICR MS)) they measured the mass spectra of a wide variety of complex organic mixtures, including those derived from abiological samples made in the lab (which they are fairly certain are not living), organic mixtures found in meteorites (which are ~ 4.5 billion-year-old samples of abiologically produced organic compounds which appear to have never become living), laboratory-grown microorganisms (which fit all the modern criteria of being living, including novel microbial organisms isolated and cultured by ELSI co-author Tomohiro Mochizuki), and unprocessed petroleum (or raw natural crude oil, the kind we pump out of the ground and process into gasoline, which is derived from organisms which lived long ago on Earth, providing an example of how the "fingerprint" of known living organisms might change over geological time). These samples each contained tens of thousands of discrete molecular compounds, which provided a large set of MS spectra that could be compared and classified.

In contrast to approaches that use the accuracy of MS measurements to uniquely identify each peak with a particular molecule in a complex organic mixture, the researchers instead aggregated their data and looked at the broad statistics and distribution of signals. Complex organic mixtures, such as those derived from living things, petroleum, and abiological samples present very different "fingerprints" when viewed in this way. Such patterns are much more difficult for a human to detect than the presence or absence of individual molecule types.

The researchers fed their raw data into a computer machine learning algorithm and surprisingly found that the algorithms were able to accurately classify the samples as living or non-living with ~95% accuracy. Importantly, they did so after simplifying the raw data considerably, making it plausible that lower-precision instruments, spacecraft-based instruments are often low power, could obtain data of sufficient resolution to enable the biological classification accuracy the team obtained.

The underlying reasons this classification accuracy is possible to remain to be explored, but the team suggests it is because of the ways biological processes, which modify organic compounds differently than abiological processes, relate to the processes which enable life to propagate itself. Living processes have to make copies of themselves, while abiological processes have no internal process controlling this.

"This work opens many exciting avenues for using ultra-high resolution mass spectrometry for astrobiological applications," says co-author Huan Chen of the US National MagLab.

Lead author Nicholas Guttenberg adds, "While it is difficult if not impossible to characterise every peak in a complex chemical mixture, the broad distribution of components can contain patterns and relationships which are informative about the process by which that mixture came about or developed. If we're going to understand complex prebiotic chemistry, we need ways of thinking in terms of these broad patterns - how they come about, what they imply, and how they change - rather than the presence or absence of individual molecules. This paper is an initial investigation into the feasibility and methods of characterisation at that level and shows that even discarding high-precision mass measurements, there is significant information in peak distribution that can be used to identify samples by the type of process that produced them."

Co-author Jim Cleaves of ELSI adds, "This sort of relational analysis may offer broad advantages for searching for life in the Solar System, and perhaps even in laboratory experiments designed to recreate the origins of life." The team plans to follow up with further studies to understand exactly what aspects of this type of data analysis allows for such successful classification.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - A new study's findings dispel the misconception that patients and providers are at high risk of catching COVID-19 at the dentist's office.

SARS-CoV-2 spreads mainly through respiratory droplets, and dental procedures are known to produce an abundance of aerosols - leading to fears that flying saliva during a cleaning or a restorative procedure could make the dentist's chair a high-transmission location.

Ohio State University researchers set out to determine whether saliva is the main source of the spray, collecting samples from personnel, equipment and other surfaces reached by aerosols during a range of dental procedures.

By analyzing the genetic makeup of the organisms detected in those samples, the researchers determined that watery solution from irrigation tools, not saliva, was the main source of any bacteria or viruses present in the spatter and spurts from patients' mouths.

Even when low levels of the SARS-CoV-2 virus were detected in the saliva of asymptomatic patients, the aerosols generated during their procedures showed no signs of the coronavirus. In essence, from a microbial standpoint, the contents of the spray mirrored what was in the office environment.

"Getting your teeth cleaned does not increase your risk for COVID-19 infection any more than drinking a glass of water from the dentist's office does," said lead author Purnima Kumar, professor of periodontology at Ohio State.

"These findings should help us open up our practices, make ourselves feel safe about our environment and, for patients, get their oral and dental problems treated - there is so much evidence emerging that if you have poor oral health, you are more susceptible to COVID," Kumar said.

The study was published Wednesday, May 12, in the Journal of Dental Research.

Previous research has shown that dental-procedure aerosols tend to land on providers' faces and the patient's chest, and can travel as far as 11 feet. But the studies, catching the spray in petri dishes placed on people, equipment and around the room, found only that bacteria existed - they rarely identified the organisms and never determined where they came from. Saliva has been the presumptive source for a long time.

When saliva was considered potentially deadly at the start of the pandemic, Kumar decided a long-term answer was needed to settle the question of whether saliva is the source of dental aerosols.

For the study, the team enrolled 28 patients receiving dental implants and restorations using high-speed drills or ultrasonic scaling procedures in Ohio State's College of Dentistry between May 4 and July 10, 2020. Researchers collected samples of saliva and irrigant (the water-based cleaning solutions used to flush out the mouth) before each procedure and, 30 minutes after the procedure, aerosol remnants - condensate - from providers' face shields, the patient's bib and an area 6 feet away from the chair.

Kumar and colleagues then put genome sequencing technology to use that wasn't available in the petri-dish days. This allowed them to first characterize the microbial mix in pre-procedure saliva and irrigants, which they could then compare to organisms in the aerosol samples collected later.

With the analytical method they used, the researchers did not need to characterize the microbes - they instead looked for variations in sequences that provided enough information to identify the family of bacteria or viruses to which they belonged.

"Some species that live in your mouth can closely resemble those in water and the environment. Using this method, we don't even have to know the names of these organisms - you can tell whether they are exactly genetically identical or genetically different," Kumar said. "If you use this granular approach to see these very nuanced differences in the genetic code, you can very accurately identify where they're coming from."

No matter the procedure or where the condensate had landed, microbes from irrigants contributed to about 78% of the organisms in aerosols while saliva, if present, accounted for 0.1% to 1.2% of the microbes distributed around the room.

Salivary bacteria were detected in condensate from only eight cases and of those, five patients had not used a pre-procedural mouth rinse. The SARS-CoV-2 virus was identified in the saliva of 19 patients, but was undetectable in aerosols in any of the cases.

The findings are reassuring, but also make sense, Kumar said: Irrigant dilutes saliva - a "thick, viscous" substance - by an estimated 20- to 200-fold, and the research is validated by a 2020 study that reported a less than 1% COVID-19 positivity rate among dentists.

Kumar noted that dentistry has long been at the forefront of infection-control practices in health care. During the pandemic, new protocols have included strengthened ventilation systems, extra aerosol suction equipment, N95 masks and face shields on top of goggles, and extended downtime between patients. She is hopeful this study's findings will make practitioners and patients feel at ease about being in the dentist's office - with continued stringent protection in place.

"Dental surgeons and hygienists are always at the forefront of the war against bacteria in the mouth, and they of course did not feel safe because they are front-line workers surrounded by aerosol," said Kumar, who has a periodontology practice of her own and was one of the procedure operators in the study.

"Hopefully this will set their mind at rest because when you do procedures, it is the water from the ultrasonic equipment that's causing bacteria to be there. It's not saliva. So the risk of spreading infection is not high," she said. "However, we should not lose sight of the fact that this virus spreads through aerosol, and speaking, coughing or sneezing in the dental office can still carry a high risk of disease transmission."

Touchscreens are notoriously difficult to type on. Since we can't feel the keys, we rely on the sense of sight to move our fingers to the right places and check for errors, a combination of efforts we can't pull off at the same time. To really understand how people type on touchscreens, researchers at Aalto University and the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence (FCAI) have created the first artificial intelligence model that predicts how people move their eyes and fingers while typing.

The AI model can simulate how a human user would type any sentence on any keyboard design. It makes errors, detects them -- though not always immediately -- and corrects them, very much like humans would. The simulation also predicts how people adapt to alternating circumstances, like how their writing style changes when they start using a new auto-correction system or keyboard design.

'Previously, touchscreen typing has been understood mainly from the perspective of how our fingers move. AI-based methods have helped shed new light on these movements: what we've discovered is the importance of deciding when and where to look. Now, we can make much better predictions on how people type on their phones or tablets,' says Dr. Jussi Jokinen, who led the work.

The study, to be presented at ACM CHI on 12 May, lays the groundwork for developing, for instance, better and even personalized text entry solutions.

'Now that we have a realistic simulation of how humans type on touchscreens, it should be a lot easier to optimize keyboard designs for better typing -- meaning less errors, faster typing, and, most importantly for me, less frustration,' Jokinen explains.

In addition to predicting how a generic person would type, the model is also able to account for different types of users, like those with motor impairments, and could be used to develop typing aids or interfaces designed with these groups in mind. For those facing no particular challenges, it can deduce from personal writing styles -- by noting, for instance, the mistakes that repeatedly occur in texts and emails -- what kind of a keyboard, or auto-correction system, would best serve a user.

The novel approach builds on the group's earlier empirical research, which provided the basis for a cognitive model of how humans type (watch the new four-minute video How to type faster on your phone). The researchers then produced the generative model capable of typing independently. The work was done as part of a larger project on Interactive AI at the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence.

The results are underpinned by a classic machine learning method, reinforcement learning, that the researchers extended to simulate people. Reinforcement learning is normally used to teach robots to solve tasks by trial and error; the team found a new way to use this method to generate behavior that closely matches that of humans -- mistakes, corrections and all.

'We gave the model the same abilities and bounds that we, as humans, have. When we asked it to type efficiently, it figured out how to best use these abilities. The end result is very similar to how humans type, without having to teach the model with human data,' Jokinen says.

Comparison to data of human typing confirmed that the model's predictions were accurate. In the future, the team hopes to simulate slow and fast typing techniques to, for example, design useful learning modules for people who want to improve their typing.

The paper, Touchscreen Typing As Optimal Supervisory Control, will be presented 12 May 2021 at the ACM CHI conference.