Culture

When access to free and low-cost birth control goes up, the percentage of young women who leave high school before graduating goes down by double-digits, according to a new CU Boulder-led study published May 5 in the journal Science Advances.

The study, which followed more than 170,000 women for up to seven years, provides some of the strongest evidence yet that access to contraception yields long-term socioeconomic benefits for women. It comes at a time when public funding for birth control is undergoing heated debate, and some states are considering banning certain forms.

"One of the foundational claims among people who support greater access to contraception is that it improves women's ability to complete their education and, in turn, improves their lives," said lead author and Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Stevenson, noting that those claims have been based largely on anecdotal evidence. "This study is the first to provide rigorous, quantitative, contemporary evidence that it's true."

The study centers around the Colorado Family Planning Initiative (CFPI), a 2009 program that widely expanded access to more forms of contraception in the state.

Funded by a $27 million grant from a private donor, the program augmented funding for clinics supported by Title X, a federal grant program formed n the 1970s to help provide low-income women with reproductive services.

The grant enabled Title X clinics to provide not only inexpensive forms of birth control, like condoms and oral contraceptives, but also more costly long-acting reversible contraception (LARC), including intrauterine devices (IUDs) and implants.

Over the span of the program from 2009 to 2015, birth and abortion rates in Colorado both declined by half among teens aged 15 to 19 and by 20% among women aged 20 to 24, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

But how else did this greater access to contraception benefit women?

With help from a five-year, $2.5 million grant from the Eunice Kennedy National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Stevenson and collaborators at CU Denver sought to find out.

"This was the biggest policy experiment ever conducted in contraception in the U.S. and its impacts had not been fully assessed," said Stevenson.

Using anonymized data and detailed surveys from the U.S. Census, the team examined the educational attainment of 5,050 Colorado women and compared those whose high school career occurred before and after the policy change.

To parse out what differences in their lives were due to the family planning initiative vs. other factors, the researchers also looked at the same changes in the outcomes of women of similar age in 17 other states.

They found that overall high school graduation rates in Colorado increased from 88% before CFPI was implemented to 92% after, and about half of that gain was due to the program.

Improvements in graduation rates among Hispanic women, specifically, were even greater, with graduation rates rising from 77% to 87%, about 5% of the increase attributed to CFPI.

In all, the program decreased the percentage of young women in Colorado who left school before graduating by 14%.

Put another way, an additional 3,800 Colorado women born between 1994 and 1996 received a high school diploma by age 20 to 22 as a result of CFPI.

"Supporting access to contraception does not eliminate disparities in high school graduation, but we find that it can contribute significantly to narrowing them," said Stevenson, who believes the Colorado results translate to other states.

Co-author Sara Yeatman, an associate professor of health and behavioral sciences at CU Denver, said that while the program did help some young women avoid unwanted pregnancy and abortion, the data suggest that is not the only mechanism by which increased access to contraception promotes higher graduation rates.

"We think there is also an indirect effect," she said, noting that previous studies dating back to the introduction of the birth control pill in the 1960s suggest contraception access is empowering. "The confidence that you can control your own fertility can contribute to a young woman investing in her education and in her future."

The research team is now looking to see whether increased access to birth control may influence women's futures in other ways, such as boosting their chance of going to or graduating from college, improving their income long-term and reducing their chances of living in poverty.

To Stevenson, these are stronger, more ethically sound reasons for supporting public funding of contraception.

The researchers hope their findings inform the conversation as lawmakers around the country consider proposals to boost Title X funding, lift restrictions requiring that teens get parental consent for birth control and increase access in other ways.

"When these arguments are based solely on the effect of contraception on fertility, it implies that poor women shouldn't have children," Stevenson said. "Our findings suggest that better access to contraception improves women's lives."

A UBC Okanagan researcher is urging people to learn and then heed the symptoms of Atrial Fibrillation (AF). Especially women.

Dr. Ryan Wilson, a post-doctoral fellow in the School of Nursing, says AF is the most commonly diagnosed arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat) in the world. Despite that, he says many people do not understand the pre-diagnosis symptoms and tend to ignore them. In fact, 77 per cent of the women in his most recent study had experienced symptoms for more than a year before receiving a diagnosis.

While working in a hospital emergency department (ED), Dr. Wilson noted that many patients came in with AF symptoms that included, but were not limited to, shortness of breath, feeling of butterflies (fluttering) in the chest, dizziness or general fatigue. Many women also experienced gastrointestinal distress or diarrhea. When diagnosed they admitted complete surprise -- even though they had been experiencing the symptoms for a considerable time.

One in four strokes are AF related, he says. However, when people with AF suffer a stroke, their outcomes are generally worse than people who have suffered a stroke for other reasons.

"I would see so many patients in the ED who had just suffered a stroke but they had never been diagnosed with AF. I wanted to get a sense of their experience before diagnoses: what did they do before they were diagnosed, how they made their decisions, how they perceived their symptoms and ultimately, how they responded."

Even though his study group was small, what he learned was distressing.

"Ten women, in comparison to only three men, experienced symptoms greater than one year," says Dr. Wilson. "What's really alarming is they also had more significant severity and frequency of their symptoms than men--yet they experience the longest amount of time between onset of symptoms and diagnosis."

What really troubles Dr. Wilson are the reasons a diagnosis is delayed in women.

Many doubted their symptoms were serious, he says. They discounted them because they were tired, stressed, thought they related to other existing medical conditions, or even something they had eaten. Most women also had caregiving responsibilities that took precedence over their own health, and they chose to self-manage their symptoms by sitting, lying down, or breathing deeply until they stopped.

What's more alarming, however, is that if women mentioned their symptoms to their family doctor, many said they simply felt dismissed.

"There was a lot more anger among several of the women because they had been told nothing was wrong by their health-care provider," says Dr. Wilson. "To be repeatedly told there is nothing wrong, and then later find yourself in the emergency room with AF, was incredibly frustrating for these women. More needs to be done to support gender-sensitive ways to promote an early diagnosis regardless of the gender."

Dr. Wilson reports that none of the men in his study were upset about their interactions with their health-care providers, mostly because they were immediately sent for diagnostic tests.

"But a delay in diagnosis is not just in this study," he cautions. "Women generally wait longer than men for diagnosis with many ailments. Sadly, with AF and other critical illnesses, the longer a person waits, the shorter time there is to receive treatments. Statistically, women end up with a worse quality of life."

Dr. Wilson, who is currently working on specific strategies to help people manage AF, admits the condition is often hard to diagnose because some of the symptoms are vague. Ideally, he would like people to be as knowledgeable about AF as they are about the symptoms and risks of stroke and heart attacks. As the population is living longer, the number of people with AF continues to increase. In fact, about 15 percent of people over the age of 80 will be diagnosed with the condition.

"People know what to do for other cardiovascular diseases, it's not the same with AF," he adds. "And while the timeline may not be as essential as a stroke for diagnosis and care, there is still a substantial risk of life-limiting effects such as stroke, heart failure and dementia. Reason enough, I hope, for people to seek out that diagnosis."

Seeing through smog and fog. Mapping out a person's blood vessels while monitoring heart rate at the same time--without touching the person's skin. Seeing through silicon wafers to inspect the quality and composition of electronic boards. These are just some of the capabilities of a new infrared imager developed by a team of researchers led by electrical engineers at the University of California San Diego.

The imager detects a part of the infrared spectrum called shortwave infrared light (wavelengths from 1000 to 1400 nanometers), which is right outside of the visible spectrum (400 to 700 nanometers). Shortwave infrared imaging is not to be confused with thermal imaging, which detects much longer infrared wavelengths given off by the body.

The imager works by shining shortwave infrared light on an object or area of interest, and then converting the low energy infrared light that's reflected back to the device into shorter, higher-energy wavelengths that the human eye can see.

"It makes invisible light visible," said Tina Ng, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

While infrared imaging technology has been around for decades, most systems are expensive, bulky and complex, often requiring a separate camera and display. They are also typically made using inorganic semiconductors, which are costly, rigid and consist of toxic elements such as arsenic and lead.

The infrared imager that Ng's team developed overcomes these issues. It combines the sensors and the display into one thin device, making it compact and simple. It is built using organic semiconductors, so it is low cost, flexible and safe to use in biomedical applications. It also provides better image resolution than some of its inorganic counterparts.

The new imager, published recently in Advanced Functional Materials, offers additional advantages. It sees more of the shortwave infrared spectrum, from 1000 to 1400 nanometers--existing similar systems often only see below 1200 nanometers. It also has one of the largest display sizes of infrared imagers to date: 2 square centimeters in area. And because the imager is fabricated using thin film processes, it is easy and inexpensive to scale up to make even larger displays.

Energizing infrared photons to visible photons

The imager is made up of multiple semiconducting layers, each hundreds of nanometers thin, stacked on top of one another. Three of these layers, each made of a different organic polymer, are the imager's key players: a photodetector layer, an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display layer, and an electron-blocking layer in between.

The photodetector layer absorbs shortwave infrared light (low energy photons) and then generates an electric current. This current flows to the OLED display layer, where it gets converted into a visible image (high energy photons). An intermediate layer, called the electron-blocking layer, keeps the OLED display layer from losing any current. This is what enables the device to produce a clearer image.

This process of converting low energy photons to higher energy photos is known as upconversion. What's special here is that the upconversion process is electronic. "The advantage of this is it allows direct infrared-to-visible conversion in one thin and compact system," said first author Ning Li, a postdoctoral researcher in Ng's lab. "In a typical IR imaging system where upconversion is not electronic, you need a detector array to collect data, a computer to process that data, and a separate screen to display that data. This is why most existing systems are bulky and expensive."

Another special feature is that the imager is efficient at providing both optical and electronic readouts. "This makes it multifunctional," said Li. For example, when the researchers shined infrared light on the back of a subject's hand, the imager provided a picture of the subject's blood vessels while recording the subject's heart rate.

The researchers also used their infrared imager to see through smog and a silicon wafer. In one demonstration, they placed a photomask patterned with "EXIT" in a small chamber filled with smog. In another, they placed a photomask patterned with "UCSD" behind a silicon wafer. Infrared light penetrates through both smog and silicon, making it possible for the imager to see the letters in these demonstrations. This would be useful for applications such as helping autonomous cars see in bad weather and inspecting silicon chips for defects.

The researchers are now working on improving the imager's efficiency.

Chimpanzees and bonobos diverged comparatively recently in great ape evolutionary history. They split into different species about 1.7 million years ago. Some of the distinctions between chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and bonobo (Pan paniscus) lineages have been made clearer by a recent achievement in hominid genomics.

A new bonobo genome assembly has been constructed with a multiplatform approach and without relying on reference genomes. According to the researchers on this project, more than 98% of the genes are now completely annotated and 99% of the gaps are closed.

The high quality of this assembly is allowing scientists to more accurately compare the bonobo genome to that of other great apes - the gorilla, orangutan, chimpanzee - as well as to the modern human. All these species, as well as extinct, ancient, human-like beings, are referred to as hominids.

Because chimpanzee and bonobo are also the closest living species to modern humans, comparing higher-quality genomes could help uncover genetic changes that set the human species apart.

In a May 5 Nature paper, researchers explain how they developed and analyzed the new bonobo assembly, and what juxtaposing it to other great ape genomes is revealing.

The multi-institutional project was led by Yafei Mao, of the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, and Claudia R. Catacchio, of the Department of Biology at the University of Bari, Italy. The senior scientists were Evan Eichler, professor of genome sciences at the UW School of Medicine, and Mario Ventura of the University of Bari. Eichler is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

By comparing the bonobo genome to that of other great apes, the researchers found more than 5,571 structural variants that distinguished the bonobo and chimpanzee lineages.

The researchers explained in the paper, "We focused on genes that have been lost, changed in structure, or expanded in the last few million years of bonobo evolution."

The great ape genome comparisons are also enabling researchers to gain new insights on what happened to the various ape genomes during and after the divergence or splitting apart into different species from a common ancestor.

They were particularly interested in what is called incomplete lineage sorting. This is the less-than-perfect passing along of alleles into the separating populations as species diverge, as well as the loss of alleles or their genetic drift. Analyses of incomplete lineage sorting can help clarify gene evolution and the genetic relationships among present-day hominids.

The higher-quality bonobo genome assembly enabled the researchers to generate a higher resolution map comparing incomplete lineage sorting in hominids. They identified regions that are inconsistent with the species tree. In addition, they estimate that 2.52% of the human genome is more closely related to the bonobo genome than the chimpanzee genome, and 2.55% of the human genome is more closely related to the chimpanzee genome than the bonobo genome.

The total proportion based on incomplete lineage sorting analysis (5.07%) is almost double earlier estimates (3.1%).

"We predict a greater fraction of the human genome is genetically closer to chimpanzees and bonobos compared to previous studies," the researchers note.

The researchers took their incomplete lineage sorting analysis back 15 million years to include genome data from orangutan and gorilla. This increased the incomplete lineage sorting estimates for the hominid genomes to more than 36.5%, which is only slightly more than earlier predictions.

Surprisingly, more than a quarter of these regions are distributed non-randomly, have elevated rates of amino acid replacement, and are enriched for particular genes with related functions such as immunity. This suggests that incomplete lineage sorting might work to increase diversity for specific regions.

The new bonobo genome assembly is named for the female great ape whose DNA was sequenced, Mhudiblu, a current resident of the Wuppertal Zoo in Germany. The researchers estimate that sequence accuracy of the new assembly is about 99.97% to 99.99%, and closes about 99.5% of the 108,390 gaps in the previous bonobo assembly.

The bonobo is one of the last great ape genomes to be sequenced with more advanced long-read genome sequence technologies, the researchers noted.

"Its sequence will facilitate more systematic comparisons between human, chimpanzee, gorilla and orangutan without the limitations of technological differences in sequencing and assembly of the original reference," according to the researchers.

Pesticides have been used in European agriculture for more than 70 years, so monitoring their presence, levels and their effects in European soils quality and services is needed to establish protocols for the use and the approval of new plant protection products.

In an attempt to deal with this issue, a team led by the prof. Dr. Violette Geissen from Wageningen University (Netherlands) have analysed 340 soil samples originating from three European countries to compare the contentdistribution of pesticide cocktails in soils under organic farming practices and soils under conventional practices. This study was a combined effort of 3 EC funded projects addressing soil
quality: RECARE (http://www.recare-project.eu/), iSQAPER (http://www.isqaper-project.eu) and DIVERFARMING.

The soil samples were obtained from two case study sites in Spain, 1 case study site in Portugal, and 1 case study site in the Netherlands; which covered four of the main European crops: horticultural products and oranges (in Spain), grapes (in Portugal), and potato production (in the Netherlands). Chemical analyses revealed that the total content of pesticides in conventional soils was between 70% and 90% higher than in organic soils, although the latter soils did also contain pesticide residues.

Although in 70% of conventional soils mixtures of up to 16 residues were detected per sample, only a maximum of five different residues were found in the organic soils. the residues most frequently found and in the greatest quantities were the herbicides Glyphosate and Pendimethalin. The samples were collected between 2015-2018, as no major changes occurred in terms of management, there are indicative of current situation, and likely of other Eu agricultural areas."

Once the presence of these pesticide cocktails in European agricultural soils is unfolded, it becomes necessary to have a greater understanding of the effects that these complex and cumulative mixtures have on soil health, an area in which there is currently a major lack of information.

The research team emphasis the need to define and introduce regulations and reference points on pesticide cocktails in soils in order to protect the soil's biodiversity, and the quality of crop production. Additionally, taking into account the persistence of residues in organic soils it is necessary to reconsider the time required for the transition from conventional agriculture to organic agriculture, making it dependent on the mix of residues in the soil at starting point and the time they take to degrade.

T-cells play a central role in our immune system: by means of their so-called T-cell receptors (TCR) they make out dangerous invaders or cancer cells in the body and then trigger an immune reaction. On a molecular level, this recognition process is still not sufficiently understood.

Intriguing observations have now been made by an interdisciplinary Viennese team of immunologists, biochemists and biophysicists. In a joint project funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund and the FWF, they investigated which mechanical processes take place when an antigen is recognized: As T cells move their TCRs pull on the antigen with a tiny force - about five pico-newtons (5 x 10-12 or 0.0000000005 newtons). This is not only sufficient to break the bonds between the TCRs and the antigen, it also helps T cells to find out whether they are interacting indeed with the antigen they are looking for. These results have now been published in the scientific journal "Nature Communications".

Tailor-made for a specific antigen

"Each T cell recognizes one specific antigen particularly well," explains Johannes Huppa, biochemist and immunology professor at MedUni Vienna.

"To do so, it features around 100,000 TCRs of the same kind on its surface."

When viruses attack our body, infected cells present various fragments of viral proteins on their surface. T cells examine such cells for the presence of such antigens. "This works according to the lock-and-key principle," explains Johannes Huppa. "For each antigen, the body must produce T cells with matching TCRs. Put simply, each T-cell recognizes only one specific antigen to then subsequently trigger an immune response."

That particular antigen, or more precisely, any antigenic protein fragment presented that exactly matches the T cell's TCR, can form a somewhat stable bond. The question that needs to be answered by the T cell is: how stable is the binding between antigen and receptor?

Like a finger on the sticky surface

"Let's say we wish to find out whether a surface is sticky - we then test how stable the bond is between the surface and our finger," says Gerhard Schütz, Professor of Biophysics at TU Wien. "We touch the surface and pull the finger away until it comes off. That's a good strategy because this pull-away behavior quickly and easily provides us information about the attractive force between the finger and the surface."

In principle, T-cells do exactly the same. T cells are not static, they deform continuously and their cell membrane is in constant motion. When a TCR binds to an antigen, the cell exerts a steadily increasing pulling force until the binding eventually breaks. This can provide information about whether it is the antigen that the cell is looking for.

A nano-spring for force measurement

"This process can actually be measured, even at the level of individual molecules," says Dr. Janett Göhring, who was active as coordinator and first author of the study at both MedUni Vienna and TU Vienna. "A special protein was used for this, which behaves almost like a perfect nano-spring, explain the two other first authors Florian Kellner and Dr. Lukas Schrangl from MedUni Vienna and TU Vienna respectively: "The more traction is exerted on the protein, the longer it becomes. With special fluorescent marker molecules, you can measure how much the length of the protein has changed, and that provides information about the forces that occur". In this way, the group was able to show that T cells typically exert a force of up to 5 pico-newtons - a tiny force that can nevertheless separate the receptor from the antigen. By comparison, one would have to pull on more than 100 million such springs simultaneously to feel stickiness with a finger.

"Understanding the behavior of T cells at the molecular level would be a huge leap forward for medicine. We are still leagues away from that goal," says Johannes Huppa. "But", adds Gerhard Schütz, "we were able to show that not only chemical but also mechanical effects play a role. They have to be considered together."

A curiously yellow pre-supernova star has caused astrophysicists to re-evaluate what's possible at the deaths of our Universe's most massive stars. The team describe the peculiar star and its resulting supernova in a new study published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

At the end of their lives, cool, yellow stars are typically shrouded in hydrogen, which conceals the star's hot, blue interior. But this yellow star, located 35 million light years from Earth in the Virgo galaxy cluster, was mysteriously lacking this crucial hydrogen layer at the time of its explosion.

"We haven't seen this scenario before," said Charles Kilpatrick, postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University's Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA), who led the study. "If a star explodes without hydrogen, it should be extremely blue -- really, really hot. It's almost impossible for a star to be this cool without having hydrogen in its outer layer. We looked at every single stellar model that could explain a star like this, and every single model requires that the star had hydrogen, which, from its supernova, we know it did not. It stretches what's physically possible."

Kilpatrick is also a member of the Young Supernova Experiment, which uses the Pan-STARRS telescope at Haleakalā, Hawaii to catch supernovae right after they explode. After the Young Supernova Experiment spotted supernova 2019yvr in the relatively nearby spiral galaxy NGC 4666, the team used deep space images captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which fortunately already observed this section of the sky two and a half years before the star exploded.

"What massive stars do right before they explode is a big unsolved mystery," Kilpatrick said. "It's rare to see this kind of star right before it explodes into a supernova."

The Hubble images show the source of the supernova, a massive star imaged just a couple of years before the explosion. Several months after the explosion however, Kilpatrick and his team discovered that the material ejected in the star's final explosion seemed to collide with a large mass of hydrogen. This led the team to hypothesize that the progenitor star might have expelled the hydrogen within a few years before its death.

"Astronomers have suspected that stars undergo violent eruptions or death throes in the years before we see supernovae," Kilpatrick said. "This star's discovery provides some of the most direct evidence ever found that stars experience catastrophic eruptions, which cause them to lose mass before an explosion. If the star was having these eruptions, then it likely expelled its hydrogen several decades before it exploded."

In the new study, Kilpatrick's team also presents another possibility: a less massive companion star might have stripped away hydrogen from the supernova's progenitor star. However, the team will not be able to search for the companion star until after the supernova's brightness fades, which could take up to a decade.

"Unlike its normal behaviour right after it exploded, the hydrogen interaction revealed it's kind of this oddball supernova," Kilpatrick said. "But it's exceptional that we were able to find its progenitor star in Hubble data. In four or five years, I think we will be able to learn more about what happened."

The United States-Mexico border traverses through large expanses of unspoiled land in North America, including a newly discovered worldwide hotspot of bee diversity. Concentrated in 16 km2 of protected Chihuahuan Desert are more than 470 bee species, a remarkable 14% of the known United States bee fauna.

This globally unmatched concentration of bee species is reported by Dr. Robert Minckley of the University of Rochester and William Radke of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in the open-access, peer-reviewed Journal of Hymenoptera Research.

Scientists studying native U.S. bees have long recognized that the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts of North America, home to species with interesting life histories, have high bee biodiversity. Exactly how many species has largely remained speculation. Together with students from Mexico, Guatemala and the United States, the authors made repeated collections over multiple years, identifying more than 70,000 specimens.

Without such intensive collecting, a full picture of the bee diversity would not have been possible. Most of these bee species are solitary, without a queen or workers, which visit flowers over a 2-4 week lifespan and specialize on pollen and nectar from one to a few plants. Furthermore, these desert species experience periodic drought, which the immature stages survive by going into dormancy for years, much like the seeds of the desert plants they pollinate.

Additionally, bee diversity is notoriously difficult to estimate and compare among studies, because of differences in the collecting techniques and the size of the studied area. An unexpected benefit of the regular and intensive sampling for this study was the opportunity to test if the observed bee diversity approached the true bee diversity in this region, or if many more species were yet to be found. In this case, the larger San Bernardino Valley area is home to 500 bee species, only slightly above the number of species recovered along the border - an unusually robust confirmation of the researchers' estimate.

What we know about the decline of bees due to human activity, along with that of other pollinators, is based primarily on diversity data from human-modified habitats. Needed is baseline information on native bees from pristine areas to help us assess the magnitude and understand the ways in which humans impact bee faunas. This study from the Chihuahuan Desert is therefore an important contribution towards filling that knowledge gap from one of the bee biodiversity hotspots in the world.

Sanaria® PfSPZ-CVac" is a live vaccine consisting of infectious Plasmodium falciparum (Pf) malaria parasites that are injected into the subject at the same time as they receive an antimalarial drug. The parasites quickly enter the liver where they develop and multiply for 6 days, and then emerge into the blood As soon as the parasites leave the liver, the drug kills them immediately. Thus, the immune system of the vaccinated subject is primed against many parasite proteins and becomes highly effective at killing malaria parasites in the liver to block infection and prevent disease.

"With this study, we have reached a new important milestone in the development of an effective malaria vaccine. With only three immunizations over four weeks, we achieved very good protection against malaria," explains Prof. Peter Kremsner, who has helped to advance the malaria research field at the DZIF since its inception. His team was able to develop a new immunization regimen that significantly reduces vaccine administration compared to previous studies. The number of visits required by a subject for complete immunization has been reduced from 13 to three. Importantly, the team showed that vaccination with parasites from Africa could protect against genetically diverse parasites from South America.

Proof of efficacy was provided using the controlled human malaria infection (challenge) regimen developed by the Tübingen and Sanaria teams. Here, the test subjects were infected with parasites after immunization. If immunization against the parasites was successful, the parasites would be specifically killed by the immune system. If the immune protection is incomplete and the parasites multiply, the test subjects are treated before any symptoms of disease appear. Ten of 13 subjects vaccinated in this study were completely immune to the infection.

"The vaccine produces a high level of different antibodies and immune cells in the body that can recognize both the injected parasites and antigens of the subsequent liver stage. These antibodies and immune cells contribute to the strong protective immunity" explains Dr. Rolf Fendel.

With an estimated 229 million infections and 409,000 deaths worldwide in 2019, malaria is one of the world's most important and dangerous infectious diseases. It is caused by parasites transmitted to humans through the bites of infected female mosquitoes. Children under the age of five are the most vulnerable group affected by malaria, accounting for 67 percent (274,000) of all malaria deaths worldwide in 2019.

Daniel Redhead, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and Chris von Rueden, from the University of Richmond, published a new study that describes coalition formation among men in Tsimané Amerindians living in Amazonian Bolivia, over a period of eight years. In two Tsimané communities, the authors describe the inter-personal conflicts that tend to arise between men, and the individual attributes and existing relationships that predict the coalitional support men receive in the event of conflicts.

Conflicts that arise between men concern disputes over access to forest for slash-and-burn horticulture, as well as accusations of theft, laziness, negligence, domestic abuse, and sexual affairs.

Men tend to reciprocate coalitional support

Key findings are that men who are kin or who exchange food and labor are more likely to subsequently provide support to each other in the event of a conflict. Men tend to reciprocate coalitional support over time, and an ally of a man's current ally is likely to become a future ally. The authors also find evidence that men who share a common adversary become allies, though this finding did not hold consistently across the eight years of the study.

In reference to the impact of these findings, Redhead, said: "Coalition formation among men is multiply determined in the Tsimané, and likely in other human societies. Importantly, the social network analyses we used show that properties of the network, not just the individual, affect coalition formation."

Higher status men more likely to provide coalitional support

Furthermore, Tsimané men who are physically formidable or who have more informal influence in their community are more likely to provide coalitional support to others. Evidence was mixed that they receive more coalitional support. These higher status men are hubs of their community's coalitional support network, and there is little indication that this network is partitioned into clearly separable coalitions that divide the community.

"In the Tsimané, men who have higher informal status strategically deploy coalitional support to build up a diverse, community-wide following. In many cases, both disputants in a conflict will report the same higher status man as having provided coalitional support, which points to the often blurry line between coalitional support and conflict mediation", von Rueden said. "Politics is the art of persuading enough people you have their interests at heart. In less egalitarian societies where there is more privately available wealth and community sizes are larger, status is less contingent on providing direct support to a broad swath of community members, there is greater homophily by status, and coalitional divides within a community are more likely to be pronounced."

Redhead and von Rueden focus their study on men because they at present lack longitudinal data on women's coalition formation. However, there is reason to analyze coalition networks separately by gender, given evidence of gender differences in how men and women build and leverage their social relationships, particularly in societies like the Tsimané where there is a pronounced gendered division of labor.

5 May 2021, Bristol - In one of the most advanced applications of in-vitro 3D human lung models in vape research to date, a new peer-reviewed Imperial Brands study shows that, unlike combustible cigarette smoke, blu aerosol had little to no impact on numerous toxicological endpoints under the conditions of test using laboratory models.

Published in the journal Current Research in Toxicology, the experiments compared the toxicological responses of an in vitro 3D lung model (MucilAir™ from Epithelix) after repeated exposure to undiluted whole blu aerosol (1.6% tobacco flavour) or diluted whole cigarette smoke (3R4F Kentucky Reference) over a 28-day period.

After repeatedly exposing the model to smoke or aerosol from each product for four weeks, scientists assessed the biological activity of the 3D lung tissue model against five endpoints related to respiratory function:

Cytotoxic response (general toxicity to cells or tissue)

Barrier integrity (measuring the intactness of tissue structure )

Immunohistochemistry (general assessment of tissue structure)

Cilia beat frequency and active area (detecting abnormal lung cell function)

Pro-inflammatory response (identifying lung tissue inflammation)

This is the first peer-reviewed vaping study evaluating repeated whole cigarette smoke and whole aerosol exposure to a 3D lung model (at the air liquid interface) for this extended 28-day time period.

The use of a 3D lung model and extending the exposure scenario produced a more clinically relevant setup than previous applications, because the model is a closer representation of how the human lung is exposed to aerosol or smoke.

The Toxicity Testing in the Twenty-First Century (TT21C) driven study reinforces Imperial Brands commitment to using advanced 3D tissue models and cellular assays to as part of a global movement to reduce industry reliance on in-vivo (animal) experiments. (Imperial does not test any products on animals, unless formally required to do so by governments or recognised regulatory authorities. See our Position here.)

Results consistent with previous findings

Correlating with Imperial's previous published applications of using a similar method, in the previous study an acute exposure to undiluted whole vape aerosol showed similar biological impact to the lung cell model as humidified air under the experimental conditions. However, diluted combustible cigarettes smoke elicited a significant dose-dependent response in all measured endpoints listed above.

As expected, in the present repeated exposure study, cigarette smoke produced a significant and dose-dependent biological response against all endpoints as the puff number was increased. "Cytotoxicity and inflammatory markers were all elevated in cigarette smoke," said Fan Yu, Pre-Clinical Toxicologist at Imperial Brands and corresponding author. "Likewise, diluted cigarette smoke disrupted normal cilia beat function, cell barrier integrity, as well as tissue structure."

At each puff dose, undiluted blu aerosol contained at least seven times more nicotine relative to cigarette smoke, but for all endpoints elicited no statistically significant difference with the negative control exposed only to humidified air. "Our results suggest nicotine is not the driver of the model's cytotoxic response to cigarette smoke," Yu explained. "More likely it is the many toxicants created through burning tobacco causing the responses that are absent, or substantially reduced, in vape aerosol."

The study is further evidence that vaping may have significant harm reduction potential compared to combustible cigarettes for adult smokers who would otherwise continue to smoke.

"For adult smokers who are uninterested or unwilling to stop smoking, this study adds to a growing body research demonstrating Next Generation Products such as vapes offer a potentially reduced harm alternative if adult smokers choose to transition to these products," said Dr Grant O'Connell, Head of Tobacco Harm Reduction Science.

He added: "To ensure adult smokers are fully informed of the scientific evidence base underpinning NGPs , we urge regulators, policy makers and media alike to recognise and communicate the scientific evidence, such as that presented here, as well as many other findings in the literature, and support a role for high quality, scientifically substantiated products in maximising tobacco harm reduction."

Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this editorial the authors Hui Liu and Juan Chen from Shanxi Eye Hospital, Taiyuan, China discuss biophotonics in photomedicine.

As a cross-disciplinary field, biophotonics is a natural platform for innovation, e.g. researchers have taken advantages of the recently developed nanostructures in Photomedicine to optimize imaging signals and improve drug delivery efficiency. Active investment in healthcare also contributes to the quick clinical transitions of biophotonic innovations.

However, to genuinely and successfully improve people's lives, many gaps have to be bridged. Horizontally, the gaps are between scientists from different fields to make new fundamental breakthroughs through knowledge merging; vertically, the gaps lie in scientists, engineer medical professionals, and physicists to make innovated, reliable, and practical products. Learning another field's language is never easy; promoting this learning requires leaders to advocate communication and understanding among experts. Although it is still a relatively young field, with abundant success so far and booming innovations coming along, it is reasonable to expect giant waves of healthcare transformation involving biophotonics to continue for the next few decades.

Article reference: Hui Liu and Juan Chen, Biophotonics in Photomedicine. BIO Integration, 2021, https://doi.org/10.15212/bioi-2020-0043

BIO Integration is fully open access journal which will allow for the rapid dissemination of multidisciplinary views driving the progress of modern medicine.

As part of its mandate to help bring interesting work and knowledge from around the world to a wider audience, BIOI will actively support authors through open access publishing and through waiving author fees in its first years. Also, publication support for authors whose first language is not English will be offered in areas such as manuscript development, English language editing and artwork assistance.

BIOI is now open for submissions; articles can be submitted online at:

https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/bioi

Please visit http://www.bio-integration.org to learn more about the journal.

Editorial Board: https://bio-integration.org/editorial-board/

Please visit http://www.bio-integration.org to learn more about the journal.

Editorial Board: https://bio-integration.org/editorial-board/

BIOI is available on the IngentaConnect platform (https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cscript/bioi) and at the BIO Integration website (http://www.bio-integration.org).

Submissions may be made using ScholarOne (https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/bioi).

There are no author submission or article processing fees.

Follow BIOI on Twitter @JournalBio; Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/BIO-Integration-Journal-108140854107716/) and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/bio-integration-journal/).

ISSN 2712-0074

eISSN 2712-0082

Keywords: Biophotonics, Photomedicine.

Marine scientists are calling on the EU to adopt a comprehensive plan to protect dolphins and porpoises from fisheries bycatch in European waters.

A team of conservation experts, including Newcastle University's Professor Per Berggren, highlight limitations in EU's efforts to address and mitigate bycatch. The scientists argue this infective response is a result of scattered and complicated management responsibility for the conservation of dolphins and porpoises in Europe, and from a lack of quantitative conservation objectives, including biological reference points that will guide management action to ensure that bycatch does not exceed sustainable levels.

To help address the bycatch issue, which is the primary global threat to dolphins and porpoises, the researchers put forward a framework to reduce bycatch levels.

Publishing their recommendations in the journal Fish and Fisheries, the scientists outline a two-step approach that involves establishing a quantitative management objective for each population and implementing monitoring programmes.

To ensure an accurate estimation of bycatch levels, the experts recommend using electronic monitoring systems that allow a more comprehensive and representative sampling of the fleets.

The scientists also recommend regular formal assessments of small cetacean populations, including generation of estimates of abundance and bycatch mortality. If total bycatch has been estimated to exceed the calculated biological reference point, then a mitigation strategy needs to be put in place while monitoring is continued until levels are below the reference points.

The research team, involving experts from University College Cork, Ireland and Duke University, USA, argue that European countries outside the EU also have a responsibility to address the bycatch of dolphins and porpoises in their Exclusive Economic Zones. This includes the UK, which has an important responsibility to develop frameworks to address bycatch.

Professor Per Berggren, of Newcastle University's School of Natural and Environmental Sciences, said: "Among the most distinctive species of marine wildlife in Europe, cetaceans are vital to the history and culture of European maritime communities and generate significant revenue from ecotourism. However, bycatch of small cetaceans in European fisheries is widespread, including very large numbers of common dolphins in trawl fisheries and bycatch of the critically endangered population of harbour porpoise in the Baltic Sea."

Professor Andrew Read, of Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment, said: "The failure to effectively conserve Europe's dolphins and porpoises is not a result of a lack of scientific knowledge or difficulties in monitoring fisheries and bycatch. Instead, it reflects a lack of political will to ensure that these iconic animals are protected from unsustainable mortality in commercial fisheries throughout European waters. We can and must do better."

Professor Emer Rogan, from University College Cork, added: "Despite a number of EU Regulations and Directives, there is no clear European framework to reduce the mortality of dolphins and porpoises in fisheries to sustainable levels. This limitation hampers the effective implementation of effective management actions."

Reflexes protect our bodies - for example when we pull our hand back from a hot stove. These protective mechanisms could also be useful for robots. In this interview, Prof. Sami Haddadin and Johannes Kühn of the Munich School of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MSRM) of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) explain why giving test subjects a "slap on the hand" could lay the foundations for the robots of the future.

In your paper, published in Scientific Reports, you describe an experimental setup where people were actually slapped on the hand - to study their reflexes....

Kühn: Yes, you can put it that way. For our study, in cooperation with Imperial College London, the test subjects needed their reflexes to protect them against two different pain sources: first, a slap on the hand. And, while pulling their hand and arm out of harm's way, they also had to avoid an elbow obstacle. We studied the hand retraction and discovered that it is a highly coordinated motion.

We also observed that the pain anticipated by a person shapes the reflex: If I know that the object behind me will cause similar pain to the slap on my fingers, I will withdraw my hand differently than when I know that the object will cause no pain.

How can such a seemingly simple experiment contribute to the development of intelligent high-tech machines like robots?

Haddadin: Humans have fascinating abilities. One could speak of a built-in intelligence in the human body that is indispensable for survival. The protective reflex is a central part of this. Imagine the classical "hand on the hot stove" situation. Without thinking, we pull back our hand as soon as the skin senses heat. So far, robots do not have reflexes of this kind. Their reactions to impending collisions tend to be rather mindless: They just stop and don't move until a person takes action.

In some situations this might make sense. But if a robot simply stopped moving when touching a hot stove, this would obviously have fatal consequences. At the MSRM we are therefore interested in developing autonomous and intelligent reflex mechanisms as part of a central nervous system for robots, so to speak. Humans are serving as our role models. How do their reflexes work and what can we learn from them for the development of intelligent robots?

What conclusions can you draw from your experiment for the development of robots?

Kühn: We gained an insight into how the reflex motion works in detail: The way humans coordinate the reflex can be seen as throwing the shoulder forward, in a sense, in order to accelerate the withdrawal of the hand. This principle could be applied in the development of reflex motions in humanoid robots, with a signal sent to one part of a robot in order to influence the motion of another one.

This knowledge will also be helpful in the design of robot-enabled prosthetics that are expected to perform in "human-like" ways.

You mentioned that "anticipated pain" played a role in your experiment. Should robots be able to anticipate pain, too?

Kühn: That would be a big advantage. It could help to classify potential collisions based on danger levels - and to plan evasive actions if appropriate. This would not only ensure the safety of the robot.

If the robot were capable of anticipating human pain, it could intervene in a dangerous situation to save a person from experiencing this pain.

Would robots then need to learn how to feel pain in the same way as humans?

Haddadin: No. Our pain perception is highly complex and linked to emotions. So we can't compare this to a human's "pain sensation". Robots are tools and not living creatures. Artificial pain is nothing more than a technical signal based on data from various sensors. At the MSRM we have already developed an initial reflex mechanism for robots based on "artificial pain". When touching hot or sharp objects, our robot withdrew its arm in a reflexive movement.

What are your next steps on the way to a robot with a fully developed protective reflex?

Haddadin: The big challenge in our research field between humans and machines is that we still have only a rudimentary understanding of our role model: the human reflex system, working with the sensorimotoric learning mechanisms of a complex, neuromechanical motion apparatus. And that is where the exciting scientific challenge lies: with all of the unknowns, to continually improve the human-inspired abilities of our intelligent machines, while using what we learn to arrive at a better understanding of how humans function. Basically, we can say that this has continued since the days of Leonardo Da Vinci and will carry on for many years to come.

LAWRENCE -- Researchers at the University of Kansas have described a new species of fanged frog discovered in the Philippines that's nearly indistinguishable from a species on a neighboring island except for its unique mating call and key differences in its genome.

The KU-led team has just published its findings in the peer-reviewed journal Ichthyology & Herpetology.

"This is what we call a cryptic species because it was hiding in plain sight in front of biologists, for many, many years," said lead author Mark Herr, a doctoral student at the KU Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum and Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. "Scientists for the last 100 years thought that these frogs were just the same species as frogs on a different island in the Philippines because they couldn't tell them apart physically. We ran a bunch of analyses -- and they do indeed look identical to the naked eye -- however, they are genetically isolated. We also found differences in their mating calls. They sound quite different. So, it was a case of using acoustics to determine that the species was different, as well as the new genetic information."

Genetic samples of the new frog, known scientifically as Limnonectes beloncioi (or commonly as the Mindoro Fanged Frog), were collected years ago by KU scientists working in the field on Mindoro Island in the central Philippines but weren't analyzed until recently. Because of its nearly identical physical similarity to a fanged frog on the island of Palawan, called Acanth's Fanged Frog, it was assumed to be the same species.

"You can look at two different things, but to the human eye without intensive investigation they might seem the same," Herr said. "So, we took a bunch of measurements of hundreds of these frogs -- how long their digits were specifically, how wide the tip of their toe was, the length of one specific segment of their leg, the diameter of their eye -- in order to compare populations statistically, even if we thought they look the same. We ran statistical analyses on body shape and size, including a principal component analysis which uses all the measurements at once to compare the frog morphology in multivariate space. After all that, just like the scientists before us, we found nothing to differentiate the frogs based on the shape of their bodies and their size."

However, because the fanged frogs inhabit islands separated by miles and miles of ocean, the researchers had doubts they were the same species, in part because they had different-sounding calls. They decided to analyze the frogs' genome and determined the Mindoro Fanged Frog qualified as its own distinct species.

"We ran genetic analyses of these frogs using some specific genetic markers, and we used a molecular clock model just to get a very basic estimate how long we thought that these frogs may have been separated from one another," Herr said. "We found they're related to each other, they are each other's close relatives, but we found they'd been separate for two to six million years -- it's a really long time for these frogs. And it's very interesting that they still look so similar but sound different."

The KU graduate student specializes in studying the many species of fanged frog across Southeast Asia, where he's carried out extensive fieldwork. He said the frogs' fangs likely are used in combat for access to prime mating sites and to protect themselves from predators. The Mindoro Fanged Frog, a stream frog, is sometimes hunted by people for food.

But the frog's characteristic call, different from Acanth's Fanged Frog, proved difficult for researchers to record.

"They're really wary of us when we're out there with our sound recorders trying to get recordings of these frogs -- that's a really tough aspect, and we were lucky in this project that we had people over many years that were out there and had recorded both of these frogs on Palawan and Mindoro. So, we had recordings from both islands, and that's kind of rare with this group of fanged frogs because people eat them. They call at night, but the second a flashlight or human voice wanders into the equation they're just going to take off -- because they know that they can be killed by people."

Herr's description of the Mindoro Fanged Frog continues a long tradition of KU field research into the herpetological biodiversity of the Philippines and Southeast Asia, according to his faculty adviser Rafe Brown, professor of ecology & evolutionary biology and curator-in-charge of the Herpetology Division of the Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum.

"Mark's discovery reinforces a lesson we've learned over and over through the years -- things we thought we knew, combined with new information, emerge to teach us something completely unexpected," Brown said. "A century ago, KU professor Edward Taylor identified the Mindoro Island population as Acanth's Fanged Frog, the same species as he had named, a few years before, from Palawan Island -- an arrangement that made very little sense. Zoom forward a hundred years, and we find with new technology, genetic information and bioacoustic data that the two islands' populations are actually very well-differentiated, as we would expect. But not morphologically; their physical characteristics have not diverged. This is a case in which the formation of species has not been accompanied by morphological differentiation -- so called 'cryptic speciation.'"