Culture

If you are reading this, chances are you have several other tabs open in your browser that you mean to get to eventually.

Internet browser tabs are a major source of friction on the internet. People love them. People hate them. For some users, tabs bring order and efficiency to their web browsing. For others, they spiral out of control, shrinking at the top of the screen as their numbers expand.

A research team at Carnegie Mellon University recently completed the first in-depth study of browser tabs in more than a decade. They found that many people struggle with tab overload, an underlying reason being that while tabs serve a variety of functions, they often do so poorly.

"Browser tabs are sort of the most basic tools that you use on the internet," said Joseph Chee Chang, a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Computer Science's Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and a member of the research team. "Despite being so ubiquitous, we noticed that people were having all sorts of issues with them."

The team will present their paper, "When the Tab Comes Due: Challenges in the Cost Structure of Browser Tab Usage," at the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2021), May 8-13.

For the study, the team conducted surveys and interviews with people about their tab use. The study details why people kept tabs open, including using them as reminders or fearing they would have to search for the information again. It also looked at why people closed tabs, knowing that tab overload can strain a person's attention and computer resources. About 25% of the participants in one aspect of the study reported that their browser or computer crashed because they had too many tabs open.

The researchers found that people felt invested in the tabs they had open, making it difficult for them to close the tabs even as they started to feel overwhelmed or ashamed by how many they had open.

Tabs first showed up in web browsers in 2001 and haven't changed much since. The internet, however, has. There is about a billion times more information on the web now than there was 20 years ago. Today, one tab could house an email inbox. Another could be used for a music or video player. Articles stashed away to read later could be in other tabs, as could restaurant reviews or information for an upcoming trip. Add in social media sites, news or other pages used for work or play, and it is easy to have a dozen or more tabs or windows open at any given time.

Tabs, it turns out, aren't the best tool for assisting with complex work and life tasks that people perform on the internet. Their simple list structure makes it difficult for users to jump between sets of tasks throughout the day. And despite people using tabs as an external form of memory, they do not capture the rich structure of their thoughts. Researchers found that while users complained about being overwhelmed by the number of tabs they queued up to work on later, they also didn't want to move them out of sight, as they worried about never going back to them.

"People feared that as soon as something went out of sight, it was gone," said Aniket Kittur, a professor in the HCII and head of the research team. "Fear of this black hole effect was so strong that it compelled people to keep tabs open even as the number became unmanageable."

Tab overload also arises from sense-making and decision tasks that require a person to absorb information from many sources, stitch it together and come to a conclusion. For instance, if someone is researching what camera to buy, that person may search several different reviews, how-to guides and shopping sites to compare models.

"Managing this sort of task is really one of the most important aspects of productivity in our lives," Kittur said. "And the number one tool that everyone uses for it is tabs, even though they don't do a good job."

The team believes that today's browsers do not offer a good tool for managing all the information and tasks people head to the internet for. To fix this, they created Skeema, an extension for the Google Chrome browser that reimagines tabs as tasks.

The extension helps users group their tabs into tasks and then organize, prioritize and switch between them. Skeema uses machine learning to make suggestions for grouping open tabs into tasks and supports nested tasks and complex decision-making.

Users of an early version of the tool significantly reduced the number of tabs and windows they kept open, reported much less stress connected to tabs, and remained more focused on the task at hand. Many of the early beta testers started using the tool daily to manage the tabs and tasks in their lives.

"Our task-centric approach allowed users to manage their browser tabs more efficiently, enabling them to better switch between tasks, reduce tab clutter and create task structures that better reflected their mental models," Chang said. "As our online tasks become increasingly complex, new interfaces and interactions that can merge tab management and task management in a browser will become increasingly important. After 20 years of little innovation, Skeema is a first step toward making tabs work better for users."

Which wound cuts deeper: the loss of an only child or loss of a spouse? A new study led by researchers at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing and Fudan University suggests that Chinese parents find the loss of an only child to be approximately 1.3 times as psychologically distressing than the loss of a spouse. The findings are published in the journal Aging & Mental Health.

Older adults in China rely heavily on family support, particularly from their adult children. Filial piety--the Confucian idea describing a respect for one's parents and responsibility for adult children to care for their parents as they age--is a central value in traditional Chinese culture.

In the 1970s, China introduced a one-child policy to slow the population growth, resulting in hundreds of millions of families with only children. While the policy ended in 2016, its consequences will be felt for decades, particularly for families who experience the loss of a child.

"The death of a child has been recognized as one of the most challenging and traumatic events for a parent," said Bei Wu, PhD, Dean's Professor in Global Health at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing and co-director of the NYU Aging Incubator, as well as the study's senior author. "Within the cultural context of China, the death of an only child is devastating not only due to the emotional loss, but also the loss of financial and instrumental support that is critical to older adults."

The death of a spouse is also recognized as a distressing life event, forcing older adults to navigate both the emotional loss and the shattering of a married couple's social and economic circumstances. In this study, Wu and her colleagues wanted to examine whether the loss of a spouse had a similar impact on psychological well-being as the loss of an only child, and whether the presence of one mitigated the absence of the other.

The researchers analyzed data from a 2013 survey conducted in Shanghai involving more than 1,100 adults, including 128 parents who lost their only child. The survey evaluated the impact of the loss of a spouse or child on participants' psychological well-being, including depression, loneliness, and life satisfaction.

They found that adults who lost their only child but have a living spouse had more psychological distress than those who lost their spouse but have a living child. This effect appeared to be stronger in women than in men.

Losing an only child resulted in 1.37 times the level of loneliness and 1.51 times the level depression as losing a spouse, and life satisfaction was 1.14 times worse for those who lost an only child vs. their spouse. Adults whose children and spouse were both alive had better psychological well-being than those who experienced loss.

"Our findings demonstrate that the loss of an only child carries more psychological weight than the loss of a spouse in Chinese culture," said Wu.

Wu and her colleagues recommend increasing access to professional mental health services for adults who experience loss, as well as developing culturally relevant interventions to address social isolation and loneliness among older Chinese adults.

A new University of Iowa study challenges the idea that gray matter (the neurons that form the cerebral cortex) is more important than white matter (the myelin covered axons that physically connect neuronal regions) when it comes to cognitive health and function. The findings may help neurologists better predict the long-term effects of strokes and other forms of traumatic brain injury.

"The most unexpected aspect of our findings was that damage to gray matter hubs of the brain that are really interconnected with other regions didn't really tell us much about how poorly people would do on cognitive tests after brain damage. On the other hand, people with damage to the densest white matter connections did much worse on those tests," explains Justin Reber, PhD, a UI postdoctoral research fellow in psychology and first author on the study. "This is important because both scientists and clinicians often focus almost exclusively on the role of gray matter. This study is a reminder that connections between brain regions might matter just as much as those regions themselves, if not more so."

The new study, published in PNAS, analyzes brain scans and cognitive function tests from over 500 people with localized areas of brain damage caused by strokes or other forms of brain injury. Looking at the location of the brain damage, also known as lesions, the UI team led by Reber and Aaron Boes, MD, PhD, correlated the level of connectedness of the damaged areas with the level of cognitive disability the patient experienced. The findings suggest that damage to highly connected regions of white matter is more predictive of cognitive impairment than damage to highly connected gray matter hubs.

Network hubs and brain function

Research on cognition often focuses on networks within the brain, and how different network configurations contribute to different aspects of cognition. Various mathematical models have been developed to measure the connectedness of networks and to identify hubs, or highly connected brain regions, that appear to be important in coordinating processing in brain networks.

The UI team used these well accepted mathematical models to identify the location of hubs within both gray and white matter from brain imaging of normal healthy individuals. The researchers then used brain scans from patients with brain lesions to find cases where areas of damage coincided with hubs. Using data from multiple cognitive tests for those patients, they were also able to measure the effect hub damage had on cognitive outcomes. Surprisingly, damage to highly connected gray matter hubs did not have a strong association with poor cognitive outcomes. In contrast, damage to dense white matter hubs was strongly linked to impaired cognition.

"The brain isn't a blank canvas where all regions are equivalent; a small lesion in one region of the brain may have very minimal impact on cognition, whereas another one may have a huge impact. These findings might help us better predict, based on the location of the damage, which patients are at risk for cognitive impairment after stroke or other brain injury," says Boes, UI professor of pediatrics, neurology, and psychiatry, and a member of the Iowa Neuroscience Institute. "It's better to know those things in advance as it gives patients and family members a more realistic prognosis and helps target rehabilitation more effectively."

UI registry is a unique resource for neuroscientists

Importantly, the new findings were based on data from over 500 individual patients, which is a large number compared to previous studies and suggests the findings are robust. The data came from two registries; one from Washington University in St. Louis, which provided data from 102 patients, and the Iowa Neurological Registry based at the UI, which provided data from 402 patients. The Iowa registry is over 40 years old and is one of the best characterized patient registries in the world, with close to 1000 subjects with well characterized cognition derived from hours of paper and pencil neuropsychological tests, and detailed brain imaging to map brain lesions. The registry is directed by Daniel Tranel, PhD, UI professor of neurology, and one of the study authors.

Reber notes that the study also illustrates the value of working with clinical patients as well as healthy individuals in terms of understanding relationships between brain structure and function.

"There is a lot of really excellent research using functional brain imaging with healthy participants or computer simulations that tell us that these gray matter hubs are critical to how the brain works, and that you can use them to predict how well healthy people will perform on cognitive tests. But when we look at how strokes and other brain damage actually affect people, it turns out that you can predict much more from damage to white matter," he says. "Research with people who have survived strokes or other brain damage is messy, complicated, and absolutely essential, because it builds a bridge between basic scientific theory and clinical practice, and it can improve both.

I cannot stress enough how grateful we are that these patients have volunteered their time to help us; without them, a lot of important research would be impossible," he adds.

Training the artificial intelligence models that underpin web search engines, power smart assistants and enable driverless cars, consumes megawatts of energy and generates worrying carbon dioxide emissions. But new ways of training these models are proven to be greener.

Artificial intelligence models are used increasingly widely in today's world. Many carry out natural language processing tasks - such as language translation, predictive text and email spam filters. They are also used to empower smart assistants such as Siri and Alexa to 'talk' to us, and to operate driverless cars.

But to function well these models have to be trained on large sets of data, a process that includes carrying out many mathematical operations for every piece of data they are fed. And the data sets they are being trained on are getting ever larger: one recent natural language processing model was trained on a data set of 40 billion words.

As a result, the energy consumed by the training process is soaring. Most AI models are trained on specialised hardware in large data centres. According to a recent paper in the journal Science, the total amount of energy consumed by data centres made up about 1% of global energy use over the past decade - equalling roughly 18 million US homes. And in 2019, a group of researchers at the University of Massachusetts estimated that training one large AI model used in natural language processing could generate around the same amount of CO2 emissions as five cars would generate over their total lifetime.

Concerned by this, researchers at the University of Cambridge set out to investigate more energy-efficient approaches to training AI models. Working with collaborators at the University of Oxford, University College London, and Avignon Université, they explored the environmental impact of a different form of training - called federated learning - and discovered that it had a significantly greener impact.
Instead of training the models in data centres, federated learning involves training models across a large number of individual machines. The researchers found that this can lead to lower carbon emissions than traditional learning.

Senior Lecturer Dr Nic Lane explains how it works when the training is performed not inside large data centres but over thousands of mobile devices - such as smartphones - where the data is usually collected by the phone users themselves.

"An example of an application currently using federated learning is the next-word prediction in mobile phones," he says. "Each smartphone trains a local model to predict which word the user will type next, based on their previous text messages. Once trained, these local models are then sent to a server. There, they are aggregated into a final model that will then be sent back to all users."

And this method has important privacy benefits as well as environmental benefits, points out Dr Pedro Porto Buarque De Gusmao, a postdoctoral researcher working with Dr Lane.

"Users might not want to share the content of their texts with a third party," he explains. "In federated learning, we can keep data local and use the collective power of millions of mobile devices together to train AI models without users' raw data ever leaving the phone."

"And besides these privacy-related gains," says Dr Lane, "in our recent research, we have shown that federated learning can also have a positive impact in reducing carbon emissions.

"Although smartphones have much less processing power than the hardware accelerators used in data centres, they don't require as much cooling power as the accelerators do. That's the benefit of distributing the training of models across a wide pool of devices."

The researchers recently co-authored a paper on this called 'Can Federated Learning save the planet?' and will be discussing their findings at an international research conference, the Flower Summit 2021, on 11 May.

In their paper, they offer the first-ever systematic study of the carbon footprint of federated learning. They measured the carbon footprint of a federated learning setup by training two models -- one in image classification, the other in speech recognition - using a server and two chipsets popular in the simple devices targeted by federated methods. They recorded the energy consumption during training, and how it might vary depending on where in the world the chipsets and server were located.

They found that while there was a difference between CO2 emission factors among countries, federated learning under many common application settings was reliably 'cleaner' than centralised training.

Training a model to classify images in a large image dataset, they found any federated learning setup in France emitted less CO2 than any centralised setup in both China and the US. And in training the speech recognition model, federated learning was more efficient than centralised training in any country.

Such results are further supported by an expanded set of experiments in a follow-up study ('A first look into the carbon footprint of federated learning') by the same lab that explores an even wider variety of data sets and AI models. And this research also provides the beginnings of necessary formalism and algorithmic foundation of even lower carbon emissions for federated learning in the future.

Based on their research, the researchers have made available a first-of-its-kind 'Federated Learning Carbon Calculator' so that the public and other researchers can estimate how much CO2 is produced by any given pool of devices. It allows users to detail the number and type of devices they are using, which country they are in, which datasets and upload/download speeds they are using and the number of times each device will train on its own data before sending its model for aggregation.

They also offer a similar calculator for estimating the carbon emissions of centralised machine learning.

"The development and usage of AI is playing an increasing role in the tragedy that is climate change," says Dr Lane, "and this problem will only worsen as this technology continues to proliferate through society. We urgently need to address this which is why we are keen to share our findings showing that federated learning methods can produce less CO2 than data centres under important application scenarios.

"But even more importantly, our research also shines a light as to how federated learning should evolve towards being even more broadly environmentally friendly. Decentralized methods like this will be key in the invention of future sustainable forms of AI in the years ahead."

WASHINGTON -- Researchers have demonstrated a record-high laser pulse intensity of over 1023 W/cm2 using the petawatt laser at the Center for Relativistic Laser Science (CoReLS), Institute for Basic Science in the Republic of Korea. It took more than a decade to reach this laser intensity, which is ten times that reported by a team at the University of Michigan in 2004. These ultrahigh intensity light pulses will enable exploration of complex interactions between light and matter in ways not possible before.

The powerful laser can be used to examine phenomena believed to be responsible for high-power cosmic rays, which have energies of more than a quadrillion (1015) electronvolts (eV). Although scientists know that these rays originate from somewhere outside our solar system, how they are made and what is forming them has been a longstanding mystery.

"This high intensity laser will allow us to examine astrophysical phenomena such as electron-photon and photon-photon scattering in the lab," said Chang Hee Nam, director of CoReLS and professor at Gwangju Institute of Science & Technology. "We can use it to experimentally test and access theoretical ideas, some of which were first proposed almost a century ago."

In Optica, The Optical Society's (OSA) journal for high impact research, the researchers report the results of years of work to increase the intensity of laser pulses from the CoReLS laser. Studying laser matter-interactions requires a tightly focused laser beam and the researchers were able to focus the laser pulses to a spot size of just over one micron, less than one fiftieth the diameter of a human hair. The new record-breaking laser intensity is comparable to focusing all the light reaching earth from the sun to a spot of 10 microns.

"This high intensity laser will let us tackle new and challenging science, especially strong field quantum electrodynamics, which has been mainly dealt with by theoreticians," said Nam. "In addition to helping us better understand astrophysical phenomena, it could also provide the information necessary to develop new sources for a type of radiation treatment that uses high-energy protons to treat cancer."

Making pulses more intense

The new accomplishment extends previous work in which the researchers demonstrated a femtosecond laser system, based on Ti:Sapphire, that produces 4 petawatt (PW) pulses with durations of less than 20 femtoseconds while focused to a 1 micrometer spot. This laser, which was reported in 2017, produced a power roughly 1,000 times larger than all the electrical power on Earth in a laser pulse that only lasts twenty quadrillionths of a second.

To produce high-intensity laser pulses on target, the generated optical pulses must be focused extremely tightly. In this new work, the researchers apply an adaptive optics system to precisely compensate optical distortions. This system involves deformable mirrors -- which have a controllable reflective surface shape -- to precisely correct distortions in the laser and generate a beam with a very well-controlled wavefront. They then used a large off-axis parabolic mirror to achieve an extremely tight focus. This process requires delicate handling of the focusing optical system.

"Our years of experience gained while developing ultrahigh power lasers allowed us to accomplish the formidable task of focusing the PW laser with the beam size of 28 cm to a micrometer spot to accomplish a laser intensity exceeding 1023 W/cm2," said Nam.

Studying high-energy processes

The researchers are using these high-intensity pulses to produce electrons with an energy over 1 GeV (109 eV) and to work in the nonlinear regime in which one electron collides with several hundred laser photons at once. This process is a type of strong field quantum electrodynamics called nonlinear Compton scattering, which is thought to contribute to the generation of extremely energetic cosmic rays.

They will also use the radiation pressure created by the ultrahigh intensity laser to accelerate protons. Understanding how this process occurs could help develop a new laser-based proton source for cancer treatments. Sources used in today's radiation treatments are generated using an accelerator that requires a huge radiation shield. A laser-driven proton source is expected to reduce the system cost, making the proton oncology machine less costly and thus more widely accessible to patients.

The researchers continue to develop new ideas for enhancing the laser intensity even more without significantly increasing the size of the laser system. One way to accomplish this would be to figure out a new way to reduce the laser pulse duration. As lasers with peaks power ranging from 1 to 10 PW are now in operation and several facilities reaching 100 PW are being planned, there is no doubt that high-intensity physics will progress tremendously in the near future.

Middle Triassic ichthyosaurs are rare, and mostly small in size. The new Besanosaurus specimens described in the peer-reviewed journal PeerJ – the Journal of Life and Environmental Sciences – by Italian, Swiss, Dutch and Polish paleontologists provide new information on the anatomy of this fish-like ancient reptile, revealing its diet and exceptionally large adult size: up to 8 meters, a real record among all marine predators of this geological epoch. In fact, Besanosaurus is the earliest large-sized marine diapsid - the group to which lizards, snakes, crocodiles, and their extinct cousins belong to – with a long and narrow snout.

Besanosaurus leptorhynchus was originally discovered near Besano (Italy) three decades ago, during systematic excavations led by the Natural History Museum of Milan. The PeerJ article re-examines its skull bones in detail and assigns five additional fossils to this species: two previously undescribed fossil specimens, and two fossils previously referred to a different species (Mikadocephalus gracilirostris), which turns out to be not valid due to lack of significant anatomical differences with Besanosaurus.

The six specimens vary mainly in size and likely represent different growth stages. According to this re-analysis, Besanosaurus is the oldest and basal-most representative of a group of ichthyosaurs known as shastasaurids.

All specimens, housed in museums in Milan, Zurich, and Tübingen were collected in the last century from the bituminous black shales of the Monte San Giorgio area (Italy/Switzerland, UNESCO World Heritage), which were deposited some 240 million years ago at the oxygen-depleted bottom of a peculiar marine basin. The locality is famous worldwide for its rich fossil fauna that, besides ichthyosaurs, includes many other marine and semiaquatic reptiles, a variety of fish, and hard-shelled invertebrates.

“The extremely long and slender rostrum suggests that Besanosaurus primarily fed on small and elusive prey, feeding lower in the food web than an apex predator: a novel ecological specialisation never reported before this epoch of the Triassic in a large diapsid reptile. This might have triggered an increase of body size and lowered competition among the diverse ichthyosaurs that co-existed in this part of the Tethys Ocean”, says Gabriele Bindellini of the Earth Science Dept. of Milan University, first author of this study.

“Studying these fossils was a real challenge. All Besanosaurus specimens have been extremely compressed by deep time and rock pressure, so we used advanced medical CT scanning, photogrammetry techniques and comparisons with other ichthyosaurs to reveal their hidden anatomy and reconstruct their skulls in 3D, bone by bone”, remarks Cristiano Dal Sasso of the Natural History Museum of Milan, senior author of the PeerJ article, who in 1996 originally described and named Besanosaurus.

Interestingly, the Italian researchers started re-studying the Milan Besanosaurus roughly at the same time an international team including Andrzej Wolniewicz (IP PAS, Warsaw), Feiko Miedema (SMNS, Stuttgart), and Torsten Scheyer (UZH, Zurich) started working on the Swiss specimens. “Rather than doing parallel studies, we pooled our data and efforts and pulled on the same string, to enhance our understanding of these fascinating extinct animals”, adds Torsten Scheyer.

Among younger adults visiting the emergency department for chest pain, women may be getting the short end of the stick. Compared with men of similar age, women were triaged less urgently, waited longer to be seen, and were less likely to undergo basic tests or be hospitalized or admitted for observation to diagnose a heart attack, according to new research being presented at the American College of Cardiology's 70th Annual Scientific Session.

The study is the first to examine emergency room management of chest pain specifically among younger adults (age 18-55 years). Heart disease is the leading cause of death in women and is becoming more common in younger adults. About one-third of women who were hospitalized for a heart attack in the past two decades were under the age of 55, a proportion that has grown in recent years.

"Women should trust their instincts," said Darcy Banco, MD, an internal medicine resident at NYU Langone Health and the study's lead author. "Women should seek care right away if they experience new chest discomfort, difficulty breathing, nausea, vomiting, fatigue, sweating or back pain, as these could all be signs of a heart attack. The most important thing a woman can do is to seek medical care if she is worried and to ask specific questions of her doctor."

Chest discomfort is the most common symptom of a heart attack in both men and women, but research shows that women can have a broader range of accompanying symptoms that may not initially be recognized as a sign of a heart attack. Chest discomfort caused by a heart attack can be perceived as pain, pressure, tightness or another uncomfortable sensation.

The study is based on data collected by the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey between 2014-2018. Researchers extrapolated the data to represent an estimated 29 million emergency department visits for chest pain in the U.S. among adults aged 18-55; women comprised nearly 57% of those visits.

Researchers found that women reporting chest pain were equally likely to arrive at the hospital by ambulance but significantly less likely than men to be triaged as emergent. On average, women waited about 11 minutes longer to be evaluated by a clinician. Women were also significantly less likely to undergo an electrocardiogram (EKG), the standard initial test used to diagnose a heart attack, or to receive cardiac monitoring or be seen by a consultant, such as a cardiologist.

Medical guidelines recommend that all patients with possible heart attack symptoms receive an EKG within 10 minutes of arrival in the emergency department to minimize the time to treatment.

"Time is very important when you're treating heart attacks," Banco said. "The longer people wait, the worse their outcomes can be."

The study did not examine the reasons why women with chest pain were treated differently than men. Banco suggested that pre-conceived notions of risk--rather than overt discrimination--likely play a role. Historically, heart attacks have been most common in older men, and clinicians may be less likely to suspect a heart attack among patients outside of that demographic. Banco suggested clinicians should appreciate that younger women represent a growing portion of heart attack patients.

"We, as health care providers, should continue to learn about how best to triage and diagnose patients with heart attacks, particularly among those who have historically been under-diagnosed or under-treated," Banco said. "We are learning that heart attacks take many forms. We need to continue to raise awareness and make sure all patients are diagnosed and treated properly, even if they're not the 'classic' demographic for a heart attack. [This knowledge] will help us improve care for all."

Social factors such as education, financial stability, food security and the neighborhood where someone resides were strongly correlated with whether or not individuals with heart disease adopted measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19, including wearing masks and working from home, according to a study presented at the American College of Cardiology's 70th Annual Scientific Session. The researchers say the findings draw attention to longstanding challenges related to social determinants of health.

"Unless we look at COVID-19 through the lens of social determinants of health, we may not optimize our yield from interventions, and we might not be reaching the group of individuals who need these interventions the most," said Kobina Hagan, MD, a postdoctoral fellow at Houston Methodist Research Institute and the study's lead author.

The research is based on data from the COVID-19 Household Impact Survey, which assessed COVID-19 preventive strategies along with health and sociodemographic factors among more than 25,000 U.S. adults. The researchers analyzed responses from just over 2,000 survey respondents who reported a history of heart disease, heart attack or stroke. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heart disease increases the risk of severe illness from COVID-19. The researchers grouped survey respondents into quartiles reflecting social risk factors based on income and financial security, employment, education, health insurance status, food insecurity and neighborhood quality.

The largest gap was seen in the degree to which respondents reported having flexibility in their work arrangements--defined as being able to work from home or cancel or postpone work activities. Compared to those with the most favorable social risk profile, those with the greatest social adversity were 46% less likely to report flexibility at work. Individuals with the greatest social adversity were also 31% less likely to engage in all social distancing measures (canceling or postponing social activities and avoiding crowded public places, restaurants and contact with high-risk people) and 17% less likely to engage in all personal protective measures (wearing a face mask, washing hands and keeping a 6-foot distance from those outside their household) compared to those with the most favorable social risk profile. These differences remained significant even after accounting for demographics and comorbidities.

The study was conducted before COVID-19 vaccines were available, at a time when public health experts primarily recommended social distancing and other measures to slow the disease's spread. However, similar trends are likely at play in the context of vaccine access, researchers said.

"I think we are repeating the same mistakes and expecting better results," Hagan said. "I hope we can come to a point where we as a society take social disparities into account in our decision making. We have to prioritize these socially disadvantaged individuals in our public policy programs, including vaccine delivery, to reduce the disparities in COVID-19 risk and outcomes."

Although the survey did not assess the reasons why respondents did or did not adopt COVID-19 mitigation measures, Hagan said many of the factors reflect circumstances that are often outside of a person's control, such as their ability to work from home. For measures that involve more personal choice, he suggested that low health literacy may play a role in the lower uptake of mitigation measures among disadvantaged groups.

"We as a society have ignored all the disparities and inequities that were happening during calmer times, even in cardiovascular disease," Hagan said. "2020 was a time when we could no longer ignore the disparities. We need to focus on holistic strategies to effectively fight this pandemic and ensure those not afforded the privilege of personal protection, social distancing and work flexibilities are prioritized with vaccine outreach to avoid further compounding existing health inequalities."

LUGANO, 6 May, 2021- Researchers have discovered a novel biomarker to identify male COVID-19 patients most at risk for ICU admission. The findings presented today at EADV's 2021 Spring Symposium, suggest that men with genetic characteristics (phenotypes) sensitive to the male sex hormone androgen, are more likely to experience severe COVID-19 disease.

Researchers were driven to study the association between the androgen receptor (AR) gene and COVID-19, after observing the disproportionate number of men hospitalised with COVID-19 presenting with androgenetic alopecia (a common form of hair-loss) compared to the expected number in a similar age-matched population (79% vs. 31-53%).

Androgenetic alopecia is known to be controlled by variations in the AR gene, which affects how sensitive the body is to androgens (hormones such as testosterone). In addition, an enzyme implicated in COVID-19 infection (TMPRSS2) is regulated by an androgen response element - meaning that it too may be affected by variations in the AR gene. As the polyglutamine repeat (CAG repeat) region located in the AR gene is associated with both androgen sensitivity and androgenetic alopecia; this research sought to identify the connection between CAG repeat region length and predisposition to increased COVID disease severity.

A prospective study of 65 hospitalised COVID-19 positive men measured the AR CAG repeat length of each man. Researchers found that male covid patients with a CAG repeat below 22 nucleotides (CAG

Dr. Andy Goren, Chief Medical Officer, Applied Biology, Inc., Irvine, California, USA, explains: "Our data show that longer AR CAG scores are associated with more severe COVID?19 disease and indicate that AR CAG repeat length could be used as a biomarker to help identify male COVID?19 patients most at risk for ICU admissions."

He continues, "The identification of a biomarker connected with the androgen receptor is another piece of evidence highlighting the important role of androgens in COVID-19 disease severity."

Further research conducted by Dr Andy Goren and his team, reported at the EADV Spring Symposium, explores a promising new therapy for COVID-19 using a novel androgen receptor antagonist to regulate TMPRSS2 expression and possibly treat COVID-19 patients. The results of this study were submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

"This research demonstrates the scientific value of dermatology by offering key insights into the role of genetics and its link to COVID disease. It is an excellent example of some of the pioneering abstracts being showcased at The EADV Spring Symposium this year," says Prof. Lidia Rudnicka, EADV Board Member and Professor at the Medical University of Warsaw.

Proteins are the workhorses of cells, responsible for almost all biological functions that make life possible.

Understanding how specific proteins work is key to disease prevention and treatment, allowing us to lead longer, healthier lives.

Yet scientists still know nothing or very little about thousands of proteins that exist in our bodies and their role in keeping us alive.

Now researchers from Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University have uncovered a new protein analysis tool - coined the Bacterial Growth Inhibition Screen (BGIS) - that could fast-track the process of assessing proteins. The tool allows for quick and efficient basic characterisation of protein function with no special equipment or cost involved.

Dr Ferdinand Kappes of XJTLU's Department of Biological Sciences says while it won't replace more complex and established protein analysis methods, the BGIS tool offers a viable 'pre-screening' method that could save scientists significant time in the lab, in turn accelerating basic science and medical discoveries.

"Many proteins have multiple 'business areas', and finding out these different functions and how they are regulated is essential to understanding how biological processes work," he says.

"Identifying and then manipulating the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, for example, was crucial in the development of a Covid-19 vaccine.

"We know misfunction or mis-regulation of proteins often results in diseases, but a large portion of human proteins still remain a mystery to us.

"One of the main reasons for this is that proteins are often difficult to study, as each new protein is like exploring a foreign city without a map for the first time - there are often no similar proteins to offer clues or even a starting point.

"The work is time-consuming, and results can be hard to come by, so many researchers avoid studying unknown proteins altogether.

"The tool we have developed provides researchers with a 'compass' of sorts. It allows them to quickly work out if they are on the right path by determining whether a protein has a function worth exploring."

The new tool could substantially facilitate the study of many proteins, according to Dr Kappes, and makes use of an unpopular side effect common in biology labs.

"Our tool uses recombinant protein toxicity, a well-known effect that happens when bacteria are used for the production of human proteins, such as insulin for medication," he says.

"Essentially, we force the bacteria to produce a foreign protein, but this often interferes with the natural biology of the bacteria and causes a number of stress scenarios.

"As we usually only use bacteria as a surrogate for protein production - the negative 'stress scenarios' on the bacteria are considered a burden and are typically not looked at further.

"What we have highlighted is that these negative effects can be harnessed and used as an easy way to gain fundamental functional information by seeing how the bacteria responds to the expression of foreign proteins.

"If bacteria growth is affected by the foreign protein, we know there is some sort of function coded in the protein that warrants further investigation. The BGIS also allows for quick manipulation of the protein at hand exploring the same principle.

"After our initial discovery, we applied this technique to every protein we could find in our labs. It worked every time. It really is like turning lemons into lemonade - it's a byproduct of biological experiments researchers dreaded, but we've been able to turn into a tool to aid discovery.

"In addition, the BGIS allowed us to substantially advance our own research on the oncoprotein DEK, which is a longstanding interest in our own laboratory."

In Alzheimer's disease, neurons in the brain die. Largely responsible for the death of neurons are certain protein deposits in the brains of affected individuals: So-called beta-amyloid proteins, which form clumps (plaques) between neurons, and tau proteins, which stick together the inside of neurons. The causes of these deposits are as yet unclear. In addition, a rapidly progressive atrophy, i.e. a shrinking of the brain volume, can be observed in affected persons. Alzheimer's symptoms such as memory loss, disorientation, agitation and challenging behavior are the consequences.

Scientists at the DZNE led by Prof. Michael Wagner, head of a research group at the DZNE and senior psychologist at the memory clinic of the University Hospital Bonn, have now found in a study that a regular Mediterranean-like dietary pattern with relatively more intake of vegetables, legumes, fruit, cereals, fish and monounsaturated fatty acids, such as from olive oil, may protect against protein deposits in the brain and brain atrophy. This diet has a low intake of dairy products, red meat and saturated fatty acids.

A nationwide study

A total of 512 subjects with an average age of around seventy years took part in the study. 169 of them were cognitively healthy, while 343 were identified as having a higher risk of developing Alzheimer's disease - due to subjective memory impairment, mild cognitive impairment that is the precursor to dementia, or first-degree relationship with patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. The nutrition study was funded by the Diet-Body-Brain competence cluster of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and took place as part of the so-called DELCODE study of the DZNE, which does nationwide research on the early phase of Alzheimer's disease - that period before pronounced symptoms appear.

"People in the second half of life have constant eating habits. We analyzed whether the study participants regularly eat a Mediterranean diet - and whether this might have an impact on brain health ", said Prof. Michael Wagner. The participants first filled out a questionnaire in which they indicated which portions of 148 different foods they had eaten in the past months. Those who frequently ate healthy foods typical of the Mediterranean diet, such as fish, vegetables and fruit, and only occasionally consumed foods such as red meat, scored highly on a scale.

An extensive test series

The scientists then investigated brain atrophy: they performed brain scans with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners to determine brain volume. In addition, all subjects underwent various neuropsychological tests in which cognitive abilities such as memory functions were examined. The research team also looked at biomarker levels (measured values) for amyloid beta proteins and tau proteins in the so-called cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of 226 subjects.

The researchers, led by Michael Wagner, found that those who ate an unhealthy diet had more pathological levels of these biomarkers in the cerebrospinal fluid than those who regularly ate a Mediterranean-like diet. In the memory tests, the participants who did not adhere to the Mediterranean diet also performed worse than those who regularly ate fish and vegetables. "There was also a significant positive correlation between a closer adherence to a Mediterranean-like diet and a higher volume of the hippocampus. The hippocampus is an area of the brain that is considered the control center of memory. It shrinks early and severely in Alzheimer's disease," explained Tommaso Ballarini, PhD, postdoctoral fellow in Michael Wagner's research group and lead author of the study.

Continuation of nutrition study is planned

"It is possible that the Mediterranean diet protects the brain from protein deposits and brain atrophy that can cause memory loss and dementia. Our study hints at this," Ballarini said. "But the biological mechanism underlying this will have to be clarified in future studies." As a next step, Ballarini and Wagner now plan to re-examine the same study participants in four to five years to explore how their nutrition - Mediterranean-like or unhealthy - affects brain aging over time.

Ultrasound is an indispensable tool for the life sciences and various industrial applications due to its non-destructive, high contrast, and high resolution qualities. A persistent challenge over the years has been how to increase the resolution of an acoustic endoscope without drastically increasing the footprint of the probe, or risking the robustness of the ultrasonic transducer. In recent years, a host of all-optical ultrasonic imaging techniques have emerged - which generally utilise pulsed lasers and optical cavities to excite and detect ultrasound waves - without sacrificing device footprint, sensitivity, or the integrity of the transducer. Thus far these powerful techniques have achieved imaging resolutions on microscopic-mesoscopic length scales, however there is great interest in creating an ultrasonic fibre-probe which can probe disease on the nanoscopic-microscopic length scales inhabited by biological cells and tissue.

In a new paper published in Light: Science & Application, a team of scientists, led by Professor Matt Clark at the University of Nottingham, UK, has developed the first optical fibre ultrasonic imaging device which operates in the GHz range of the acoustic spectrum. At these frequencies the wavelength of sound becomes comparable to ultraviolet optical wavelengths and therefore provides an opportunity for high resolution imaging. Their phonon probe device makes use of a pump-probe technique called time-resolved Brillouin scattering, which pumps GHz frequency ultrasound from the tip of a 125 μm diameter optical fibre into a specimen, and uses a pulsed laser to "watch" one of the ultrasound waves (with a frequency of approximately 5 GHz) as it travels through the specimen. This time-of-flight acoustic signature simultaneously encodes two types of information about the specimen: its local mechanical properties and spatial profile. By scanning the device, these properties can be resolved in 3D with optical lateral resolution, and with axial resolution dictated by the sub-micrometre acoustic wavelengths.

Prof. Clark's team applied this new technology to the parallel elastography-profilometry of objects as small as 10 x 2 μm (radius and height). The device was capable of 2.5 μm lateral resolution and could measure object height with 45 nm precision, which is over an order of magnitude smaller than the system's optical wavelength. The team also demonstrated that the technology is fully compatible with optical fibre imaging bundles - containing tens of thousands of imaging pixels - which shows the scalability of the technique and its compatibility with standard endoscopy equipment.

According to the team, the development and application towards biological metrology and healthcare is most exciting. "The phonon probe is poised to supplement state-of-the-art bench-top profilometry equipment such as atomic force microscopy (AFM), stylus profilometry, and optical profilometry. It offers a combination of non-contact operation, label-free contrast, and high resolution, which is unique compared with the state-of-the-art. However, we believe that its ability to measure sub-surface mechanical properties, its bio-compatibility, and its endoscopic-potential are what set it apart. These features set the technology up for future in vivo measurements towards the ultimate goal of minimally invasive point-of-care diagnostics. The building blocks of disease can be traced down to the sub-cellular level, and are closely intertwined with mechanical properties. Having an endoscopic device that can access this regime will accelerate the development of elasticity-based diagnostics."

Researchers at the University of Eastern Finland have discovered previously unknown non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) involved in regulating the gene expression of vascular endothelial growth factors (VEGF), the master regulators of angiogenesis. The study, conducted by the research groups of Associate Professor Minna Kaikkonen-Määttä and Academy Professor Seppo Ylä-Herttuala, provides a better understanding of the complex interplay of ncRNAs with gene regulation, which might open up novel therapeutic approaches in the future. The results were published in the Molecular and Cellular Biology Journal.

Over the past years, the development of next generation sequencing techniques has revealed that around 97% of the human transcriptome is transcribed as non-coding RNAs, and although the role of the vast majority remains uncharacterized, many functions such as gene regulation have been proven.

On the other hand, endothelial growth factors VEGF-A and VEGF-C are the main regulator of angiogenesis, i.e., new blood vessel formation. Due to their important role in vasculature development, they constitute a potential target for the treatment of several diseases, such as atherosclerosis. Therapeutic angiogenesis has been developed as a promising strategy to rescue ischemic tissues by induction of new blood vessels sprouting from existing vasculature but so far, very few results with clinical significance have been achieved. Therefore, a deeper understanding of the regulatory mechanisms underlying the expression of these key angiogenic factors is needed for the future therapeutic avenues.

In this study, researchers performed in-depth characterization of the genomic loci around the VEGFA and VEGFC genes and identified novel non-coding RNAs, in particular enhancer RNAs (eRNAs) and long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs). While the enhancers clearly upregulated gene expression, lncRNAs demonstrated various functions. Interestingly, lncRNAs were also regulating other targets including factors related to endothelial functions, such as angiogenesis and cell proliferation.

A new study has shown that most patients discharged from hospital after experiencing severe COVID-19 infection appear to return to full health, although up to a third do still have evidence of effects upon the lungs one year on.

COVID-19 has infected millions of people worldwide. People are most commonly hospitalised for COVID-19 infection when it affects the lungs - termed COVID-19 pneumonia. Whilst significant progress has been made in understanding and treating acute COVID-19 pneumonia, very little is understood about how long it takes for patients to fully recover and whether changes within the lungs persist.

In this new study, published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, researchers from the University of Southampton worked with collaborators in Wuhan, China, to investigate the natural history of recovery from severe COVID-19 pneumonia up to one year after hospitalisation.

83 patients were recruited after they were discharged from hospital following severe COVID-19 pneumonia and were followed up after three, six, nine and twelve months. At each time point they underwent clinical assessment as well as measures of how well the lungs function, a CT scan of their chest to take a picture of the lungs, and a walking test.

Over 12 months in most patients there was an improvement in symptoms, exercise capacity, and COVID-19 related CT changes. By 12 months the majority of patients appeared to have fully recovered although about 5% of patients still reported breathlessness. A third of patients' measures of lung function were still reduced - in particular how efficiently oxygen is transferred in the lungs into the blood - and this was more frequently found in women than in men. In around a quarter of patients CT scans showed there were still small areas of change in the lungs, and this was more common in patients with more severe lung changes at time of hospitalisation.

Dr Mark Jones, Associate Professor in Respiratory Medicine at the University of Southampton and NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre who co-led the study said, "the majority of patients with severe COVID-19 pneumonia appeared to fully recover, although for some patients this took many months. Women were more likely to have persistent reductions in lung function tests and further investigation is needed to understand if there is a sex specific difference in how patient's recover. We also don't yet know what happens beyond 12 months and this will need ongoing study."

The researchers acknowledged that this study only involved a small number of patients and the findings will require confirmation in additional studies, however they have identified a number of important implications.

Dr Yihua Wang, Lecturer in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Southampton and NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre who co-led the study explained, "firstly, our research provides evidence that routine respiratory follow-up of patients hospitalised with COVID-19-pneumonia is required. Secondly, given the length of time it takes for some patients to recover it suggests that research into whether exercise programmes help patients recover more quickly is required. Finally, it highlights the need for treatment strategies to prevent the development of long term COVID-19 related lung changes."

Oxygen is essential for the development of higher life. However, it was hardly present in the oceans of the young Earth. It was not until the evolution of photosynthetic bacteria that the oceans saw a significant increase in oxygen levels. By measuring tungsten isotope composition, an international research team with the participation of scientists from the University of Cologne's Institute of Geology and Mineralogy has now laid the foundation for a more precise determination of the development of oxygen levels in the early oceans over time. Prospectively, they expect more precise insights into the evolution of life. In cooperation with scientists from ETH Zurich, the Universities of Bern and Tübingen, and the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde (IOW), geologists led by Dr Florian Kurzweil at the University of Cologne analysed the chemical element tungsten, which could act as an indicator element for oxygen, in today's seawater. The results have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) under the title 'Redox control on the tungsten isotope composition of seawater'. The research is part of the German Research Foundation's priority programme 'Building a Habitable Earth'.

Tungsten is present only in very small amounts in the oceans, making it difficult to accurately determine its concentration. It is even more difficult to determine the abundance of individual tungsten isotopes in seawater. Isotopes of an element have the same number of protons, but different numbers of neutrons. Hence, there are heavy tungsten isotopes with many neutrons and lighter tungsten isotopes with fewer neutrons. The analytical methods developed at the University of Cologne enable the most precise measurement of relative tungsten isotope abundances currently available worldwide.

In a basin more than 400 metres deep in the Baltic Sea, the research team took various water samples, both in the oxygen-rich surface water and in the oxygen-deficient deep water. Oxide minerals form along the boundary of both water layers, preferentially binding the light tungsten. The tungsten remaining in the seawater thus becomes relatively heavier. Oxygen is required to form oxide minerals, so the oxygen concentration of the oceans ultimately correlates with the tungsten isotope composition of the seawater.

'Increasing oxygen concentrations in the oceans of the early Earth should have led to increased formation of the oxide minerals, and thus to isotopically heavier marine tungsten,' said the head of the research expedition Dr Florian Kurzweil. The scientists now want to show that this development has been preserved in marine sediments. The composition of tungsten isotopes of the oldest sediments on Earth could then trace the development of marine oxygen levels over the course of Earth's history like a genetic fingerprint.