Culture

AUSTIN, Texas -- For people experiencing homelessness, missing proof of identity can be a major barrier to receiving critical services, from housing to food assistance to health care. Physical documents such as driver's licenses are highly susceptible to loss, theft or damage. However, researchers from Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin say new technology solutions such as blockchain can be used to keep important health care information secure and portable.

"Health care institutions and social services are so fragmented and siloed they're unable to accurately collect, share or verify basic identity information about a person experiencing homelessness," said Tim Mercer, M.D., MPH, director of the Global Health Program in the Department of Population Health at Dell Med and co-author of a new commentary published in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved. "This puts the burden on the most underserved people in our communities to navigate complex bureaucracies, just to prove their identities."

How Blockchain Works

Mercer and co-author Anjum Khurshid, M.D., Ph.D., say blockchain holds great potential as "techQuity"-- technology that provides innovative solutions to advance health equity. Blockchain is a decentralized, digital ledger system that uses encryption to share information or transactions across a network of computers. Once verified, each "block" of new information is linked to the existing block, creating a chain of secure data that a person can access anytime, anywhere.

"The architecture of blockchain technology makes it a unique solution for managing identities of vulnerable people, allowing them to secure their information and control when and where that data gets shared," said Khurshid, director of data integration in Dell Med's Department of Population Health. "For instance, if you need to prove you're over 18 years old, that information can be validated through blockchain without having to share your driver's license."

Putting the Technology to the Test

In 2018, the City of Austin worked with a team at Dell Med to test the feasibility of blockchain technology to establish an identity system for people experiencing homelessness. The results of the study showed that blockchain allowed them to upload and share documents with service providers, while holding their personal information as an asset in their blockchain account.

In the commentary, Mercer and Khurshid propose a research agenda to address unresolved issues, including:

Defining the scope of the problem,

Mapping infrastructure requirements,

Understanding legal and ethical considerations, and

Testing the overall effectiveness of blockchain to not only solve identity management problems, but also to improve health equity for people experiencing homelessness.

"While blockchain is seeing increased applications across the health care and social sectors, this is still largely uncharted territory," said Mercer. "We have an incredible opportunity to partner with the private technology sector to solve this pernicious problem that plagues one of society's most vulnerable populations."

A study encompassing some 9,000 dogs conducted at the University of Helsinki demonstrated that fearfulness, age, breed, the company of other members of the same species and the owner's previous experience of dogs were associated with aggressive behaviour towards humans. The findings can potentially provide tools for understanding and preventing aggressive behaviour.

Aggressive behaviour in dogs can include growling, barking, snapping and biting. These gestures are part of normal canine communication, and they also occur in non-aggressive situations, such as during play. However, aggressive behaviour can be excessive, making the dog a health threat to both humans and other animals.

"Understanding the factors underlying aggressive behaviour is important. In what kinds of circumstances does aggressive behaviour occur and what is the dog's motive for such behaviour? In normal family dogs, aggressive behaviour is often unwanted, while some dogs with official duties are expected to have the capacity for aggressiveness. At the same time, aggressiveness can be caused by welfare issues, such as chronic pain," says doctoral researcher Salla Mikkola from the University of Helsinki.

The canine gene research group active at the University of Helsinki surveyed connections between aggressive behaviour and several potential risk factors with the help of a dataset encompassing more than 9,000 dogs, a sample from a larger dataset from a behavioural survey dataset of nearly 14,000 dogs. The study investigated aggressiveness towards both dog owners and unfamiliar human beings. Dogs were classified as aggressive if they growled often and/or had attempted to snap at or bite a human at least occasionally in the situations described in the survey.

"Dogs' fearfulness had a strong link to aggressive behaviour, with fearful dogs many times more likely to behave aggressively. Moreover, older dogs were more likely to behave aggressively than younger ones. One of the potential reasons behind this can be pain caused by a disease. Impairment of the senses can contribute to making it more difficult to notice people approaching, and dogs' responses to sudden situations can be aggressive," Mikkola adds.

Small dogs are more likely to behave aggressively than mid-sized and large dogs, but their aggressive behaviour is not necessarily considered as threatening as that of large dogs. Consequently, their behaviour is not addressed. In addition, the study found that male dogs were more aggressive than females. However, sterilisation had no effect on aggressive behaviour.

The first dogs of dog owners were more likely to behave aggressively compared to dogs whose owners had previous experience of dogs. The study also indicated that dogs that spend time in the company of other dogs behave less aggressively than dogs that live without other dogs in the household. While this phenomenon has been observed in prior research, the causality remains unclear.

"In the case of dogs prone to aggressive behaviour in the first instance, owners may not necessarily wish to take a risk of conflicts with another dog," Mikkola muses.

Significant differences in aggressive behaviour between breeds

Differences in the aggressiveness of various dog breeds can point to a genetic cause.

"In our dataset, the Long-Haired Collie, Poodle (Toy, Miniature and Medium) and Miniature Schnauzer were the most aggressive breeds. Previous studies have shown fearfulness in Long-Haired Collies, while the other two breeds have been found to express aggressive behaviour towards unfamiliar people. As expected, the popular breeds of Labrador Retriever and Golden Retriever were at the other extreme. People who are considering getting a dog should familiarise themselves with the background and needs of the breed. As for breeders, they should also pay attention to the character of dam candidates, since both fearfulness and aggressive behaviour are inherited," says Professor Hannes Lohi from the University of Helsinki.

The terms "co-creation" and "co-production", which denote the possibility for laypeople to participate in decision-making processes that affect their lives, have been gaining popularity. A new IIASA-led study explored options for empowering citizens as a driver for moving from awareness about the need to transform energy systems to action and participation.

The European Union's climate and energy policies for 2020-2030 require decarbonization of the energy sector. To this end, EU member countries are working on a number of key goals including greater energy efficiency, greater use of renewable energy, and increased energy security across the EU. The successful implementation of policies that support the achievement of these goals might lead not only to a transformation of energy systems, but also to socioeconomic transitions, and will depend on economic and technical factors, as well as behavioral aspects such as people's attitudes towards such a transition.

In their study published in the journal Energy Policy, IIASA Cooperation and Transformative Governance Research Group Leader, Nadejda Komendantova and colleagues, explored the potential for polycentric governance - a system that comprises multiple centers of decision making and co-production at different levels. In such a system, energy becomes a common good rather than a private or a public one. Polycentric governance presents opportunities for the co-production of energy policy by various stakeholder groups. The study specifically considered existing attitudes towards renewable energy sources among the residents of two so-called Climate and Energy Model (KEM) regions in Austria, their level of awareness about policy interventions for an energy transition, and their willingness to participate in decision-making processes.

"Emerging technologies and changing attitudes towards energy generation, transmission, and distribution create various options that facilitate participation in energy transitions. The emergence of distributed energy systems, which might lead to polycentricity in the governance of such a transition, also creates a need to reframe the discourse from social acceptance of certain technologies, towards engagement, and from focusing on particular technologies, to a focus on social innovations and new forms of governance," explains Komendantova. "This approach is not about providing information and educating the public; it is about listening to people and providing them with a variety of options and alternatives to make choices about services that affect their communities."

While both KEM regions (Freistadt and Amstetten) have committed to including a high degree of renewable energies (up to 100%) in their energy mix and have set ambitious goals to achieve this, one region already had a system in place that allowed citizens to participate in decisions concerning the energy transition in their region, while the other did not. The researchers conducted a large-scale survey that included around 2,000 respondents, who were representative of all social groups in these two regions, and found that the ability to participate in decision-making processes actually increased trust in both the process and decision makers among the respondents. The findings further indicate an increase in the level of awareness about energy transitions and a willingness to pay up to 10% more for electricity from renewable energy sources when they have the option to get involved in decisions around this. Interestingly, having the option to participate did not increase the number of people who actually participated in decision-making processes on energy transition, but having the option to participate increased the level of trust towards policymakers who implement energy transition.

According to the researchers, the willingness of respondents to use renewable energy sources is driven to an equal extent by concerns about climate change and the consideration that renewable energy sources can help them to become less dependent on energy providers. In this regard, the researchers point out that this would not necessarily mean that people produce their own energy, for instance, using residential solar panels, but rather that renewable energy is produced in their own region, which avoids the need to import it from elsewhere.

The study also found that the majority of people who would like to participate in decision-making processes would also like to participate in the process of selecting the technology or the site for the renewable energy project, while participating in financing the projects is the least desirable option.

"When people indicated that they were not willing to participate in decision-making processes, this was mainly because they felt they didn't have adequate information or time. The number of people who didn't want to participate because they thought that participation is not important was minor. Overall our results confirmed the willingness of people to participate, but conditions for participation should be created," Komendantova notes.

To facilitate participation among citizens in regions aiming to transition to sustainable energy systems, the researchers recommend that targeted information campaigns are created and communicated via trusted media channels to inform residents about projects that affect them. There is also a need to better understand the role of emerging information channels such as social media in energy transition, as well as other digital options that are emerging to increase the willingness of stakeholders to actively take part in the energy transition and address concerns about existing conditions.

In recent decades, Spain has undergone rapid social changes in terms of gender equality, despite, as a result of the Franco dictatorship, starting from a more backward position than most European countries. This process is hampered by the economic downturn that began in 2008, underlining the importance of the economic context in the development of gender inequality levels. Little attention has been paid in academia to how this gender revolution is associated with factors related to individual wellbeing.

A study by Jordi Gumà, a researcher at the Department of Political and Social Sciences and member of the UPF Sociodemography Research Group (DEMOSOC), together with Bruno Arpino, a researcher at the University of Florence (Italy), explores the association between the subjective level of satisfaction with life and the degree of relative participation by women and men in terms of providing financial resources to the household and performing domestic chores among the partnered adult Spanish population.

"When no financial difficulties are reported, it seems that gender behaviour in the home environment has less influence on individuals' levels of life satisfaction, whether men or women, than in homes with financial problems".

Following their research, published in Revista Internacional de Sociología, the researchers (who separate the analysis of the public and the private spheres to capture the effects differentially) conclude that the level of satisfaction with life is marked largely by household financial capacity: "When no financial difficulties are reported, it seems that gender behaviour in the home environment has less influence on individuals' levels of life satisfaction, whether men or women, than in homes with financial problems", the researchers assert.

Furthermore, the results reveal that there would be a situation of tension between the social context and inherited values (with an imbalance between gender values, far more egalitarian, and the end practices observed) would affect the levels of individual wellbeing.

The research methodology analyses Spanish samples from the European Social Survey (ESS) of 2004 and 2010 together, in which questions about family, work and wellbeing were introduced. The various analyses have been carried out independently according to sex, in order to identify possible differences between men and women. The sample was restricted to partnered individuals, within the 25-59 years age bracket.

The researchers state that the relative contribution to household income and the performance of household chores "has a significant effect on life satisfaction in the specific case of people with financial difficulties". This effect shows that the gender profile in households that report having financial difficulties is far closer to the traditional one. However, significant differences were found between men and women.

The overall situation of the household determines women's satisfaction

With regard to women, the researchers found that "their satisfaction with life is defined mainly by the overall situation of the household, beyond their own situation in terms of their relative contribution to income and relative time spent on household tasks". That is, it is their position within the private sphere that has the greatest impact on the values of life satisfaction in respect of women in Spain.

The position of women within the private sphere has the greatest impact on the values of life satisfaction in respect of women in Spain.

Among women who report not having financial difficulties (reaching the end of the month adequately or comfortably), the authors observe a positive relationship between their levels of satisfaction and time spent on household tasks: the greater their dedication, the higher their level of satisfaction. This pattern is exactly the opposite in the case of women who report having financial difficulties, whereby the greater their dedication to household tasks, the lower their satisfaction.

According to the researchers, one possible explanation is that more solvent households would be more able to hire paid services to perform household chores, so that although these women spend more time on household tasks than their partners, the actual number of hours allocated may be less than those who report having financial difficulties, and neither does this mean that there is parity with men. In fact, if we look at the average number of hours spent on such tasks, the figure is significantly lower among women with greater economic power.

Men's satisfaction with life is marked by their individual situation

In the case of men, the authors found significant differences in the level of satisfaction with regard to their relative contribution to the family budget. In the context of households with financial difficulties, men who report contributing more to total family income display higher levels of satisfaction than those who report contributing less than their partners.

According to the researchers, "being the main provider of material resources to the household is associated with values of satisfaction in the group of men in households with financial difficulties, while among men who report not having financial difficulties, being the main contributor does not seem to give them an extra boost to their levels of satisfaction".

In the context of households with financial difficulties, men who report contributing more to total family income display higher levels of satisfaction than those who report contributing less than their partners.

The same applies in the case of participation in household tasks, where significant differences were only observed, again, in men with financial difficulties, who reveal that devoting less time than their partners to household tasks is a situation associated with higher levels of satisfaction.

In consequence, according to the researchers, unlike the case of women, Spanish men's life satisfaction is determined to a greater extent by their individual situation, beyond the characteristics of the household as a whole. This suggests that, in this particular group of men, their position within the public sphere continues to set their perception of satisfaction with life.

Myotonic dystrophy is a hereditary degenerative neuromuscular disease that occurs mainly in adults, affecting about 50,000 people only in Spain. Symptoms range from difficulty walking and myotonia (great difficulty in relaxing the contracted muscles) to severe neurological problems, leading to progressive disability that unfortunately puts many of those affected in a wheelchair. This disease is very heterogeneous among patients (age of onset, progression, hereditary transmission, affected muscles), which makes the development of generic treatments especially complex.

Currently, drugs against myotonic dystrophy are developed in animal models such as Drosophila, the fruit fly, or in 2D cell cultures. They are later tested in mice and finally in patients. Unfortunately using these approaches, some of the drugs that have been developed have not been able to reach the last stages of clinical trials because they were not effective in patients, highlighting the difficulty of extrapolating results obtained with animals to humans.

Now, the team led by the ICREA Researcher Professor and head of the Biosensors for Bioengineering group at IBEC, Javier Ramón, and by his team's postdoctoral researcher Juan M. Fernández, has developed for the first time a three-dimensional model for myotonic dystrophy, using bioengineering techniques and patient cells. The work, which is part of the doctoral thesis of the IBEC researcher Xiomara Fernández, has recently been published in the journal Biofabrication and opens new avenues for finding personalized and effective treatments against this rare disease, and to date without cure. This work has been funded in part with funds from a fundraising campaign launched by IBEC from late 2017 to late 2019.

The new 3D model for myotonic dystrophy:

Researchers started from fibroblasts from patient's skin, which are cells of the connective tissue responsible for maintaining its structure, that were previously "reprogrammed" to become myoblasts, muscle precursor cells. These myoblasts were placed inside a gelatine and cellulose matrix and the mixture was subjected to a kind of rubber stamp to give it a shape of elongated rectangles, simulating muscle fibers. Subsequently, the matrix was incubated under the ideal conditions for the myoblasts to continue their development.

"What we observe is that, unlike classic cell cultures, the patient cells in our model are capable of fusing to form muscle fibers that adopt the 3D shape found in muscles and essential for their functioning.", states Juan M. Fernandez, researcher at IBEC.

Ability to test drugs in a personalized and fast way:

To evaluate the functionality of the new 3D model, the researchers have applied a drug, called AntagomiR-23b, to the muscle fibers. This drug has been previously developed by some authors of this work and in the not-too-distant future will enter the phase of clinical trials thanks to the Arthex Biotech company. They observed that both, the molecular and structural characteristics of the fibers derived from the patient, recovered their normal parameters when treated, validating their use for the development of new drugs.

In addition, this model has a low cost, its implementation is simple, and it can accelerate the process of developing new treatments, since it is faster compared to animal testing. This model represents a great step towards personalized medicine, since taking into account the enormous variability between patients is key when seeking treatments for this disease.

"This new model will allow testing different drugs and administering to the patients the one that has given the best results with their own cells. In this way, the treatment will be personalized, more effective and with no need for animal testing", explains Xiomara Fernandez, first author of the article.

Living materials, which are made by housing biological cells within a non-living matrix, have gained popularity in recent years as scientists recognize that often the most robust materials are those that mimic nature.

For the first time, an international team of researchers from the University of Rochester and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands used 3D printers and a novel bioprinting technique to print algae into living, photosynthetic materials that are tough and resilient. The material has a variety of applications in the energy, medical, and fashion sectors. The research is published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

"Three-dimensional printing is a powerful technology for fabrication of living functional materials that have a huge potential in a wide range of environmental and human-based applications." says Srikkanth Balasubramanian, a postdoctoral research associate at Delft and the first author of the paper. "We provide the first example of an engineered photosynthetic material that is physically robust enough to be deployed in real-life applications."

HOW TO BUILD NEW MATERIALS: LIVING AND NONLIVING COMPONENTS

To create the photosynthetic materials, the researchers began with a non-living bacterial cellulose--an organic compound that is produced and excreted by bacteria. Bacterial cellulose has many unique mechanical properties, including its flexibility, toughness, strength, and ability to retain its shape, even when twisted, crushed, or otherwise physically distorted.

The bacterial cellulose is like the paper in a printer, while living microalgae acts as the ink. The researchers used a 3D printer to deposit living algae onto the bacterial cellulose.

The combination of living (microalgae) and nonliving (bacterial cellulose) components resulted in a unique material that has the photosynthetic quality of the algae and the robustness of the bacterial cellulose; the material is tough and resilient while also eco-friendly, biodegradable, and simple and scalable to produce. The plant-like nature of the material means it can use photosynthesis to "feed" itself over periods of many weeks, and it is also able to be regenerated--a small sample of the material can be grown on-site to make more materials.

ARTIFICIAL LEAVES, PHOTOSYNTHETIC SKINS, AND BIO-GARMENTS

The unique characteristics of the material make it an ideal candidate for a variety of applications, including new products such as artificial leaves, photosynthetic skins, or photosynthetic bio-garments.

Artificial leaves are materials that mimic actual leaves in that they use sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide--a major driver of climate change--into oxygen and energy, much like leaves during photosynthesis. The leaves store energy in chemical form as sugars, which can then be converted into fuels. Artificial leaves therefore offer a way to produce sustainable energy in places where plants don't grow well, including outer space colonies. The artificial leaves produced by the researchers at Delft and Rochester are additionally made from eco-friendly materials, in contrast to most artificial leaf technologies currently in production, which are produced using toxic chemical methods.

"For artificial leaves, our materials are like taking the 'best parts' of plants--the leaves--which can create sustainable energy, without needing to use resources to produce parts of plants--the stems and the roots--that need resources but don't produce energy," says Anne S. Meyer, an associate professor of biology at Rochester. "We are making a material that is only focused on the sustainable production of energy."

Another application of the material would be photosynthetic skins, which could be used for skin grafts, Meyer says. "The oxygen generated would help to kick-start healing of the damaged area, or it might be able to carry out light-activated wound healing."

Besides offering sustainable energy and medical treatments, the materials could also change the fashion sector. Bio-garments made from algae would address some of the negative environmental effects of the current textile industry in that they would be high-quality fabrics that would be sustainability produced and completely biodegradable. They would also work to purify the air by removing carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and would not need to be washed as often as conventional garments, reducing water usage.

"Our living materials are promising because they can survive for several days with no water or nutrients access, and the material itself can be used as a seed to grow new living materials," says Marie-Eve Aubin-Tam, an associate professor of bionanoscience at Delft. "This opens the door to applications in remote areas, even in space, where the material can be seeded on site."

PHILADELPHIA - Belief in conspiracies about the COVID-19 pandemic increased through the early months of the U.S. outbreak among people who reported being heavy users of conservative and social media, a study by Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) researchers has found.

Prior APPC research found that people who regularly used conservative or social media during the early months of the pandemic were more likely to report believing in a group of COVID-19 conspiracies. The current study expands on that, finding that a reliance on conservative or social media actually predicted an increase in conspiracy beliefs from March to July 2020.

From March to July 2020, for example, the share of conservative media users who reported believing that the Chinese government created the coronavirus as a bioweapon rose from 52% to 66%. Conservative media included sources such as Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Breitbart News, One America News, and the Drudge Report.

Further, these increases in conspiracy beliefs were associated with less mask wearing and decreased intentions to get a vaccine when it became available, according to the study, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

"The media played a role in the promotion or reduction of conspiracy beliefs," said Dan Romer, research director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, who co-authored the study with APPC Director Kathleen Hall Jamieson. "There were media sources that hindered the ability of the country to confront the pandemic."

Although some social media platforms said they downgraded or removed false or misleading content about the pandemic, the ongoing use of social media was also correlated with an increased belief in COVID-19 conspiracies.

"The major social media platforms are playing Whac-A-Mole with COVID conspiracy purveyors," Jamieson said. "Block their imaginings in one place and they reappear in another."

A Chinese bioweapon and other COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs

The researchers conducted an Annenberg Science Knowledge (ASK) survey using a national U.S. probability sample in March 2020 and again in July 2020 with the same group of 840 adults. The respondents were asked about three conspiracy beliefs, media use, steps taken to prevent the spread of the virus, and their intentions to be vaccinated, among other things.

In July, the researchers found these levels of overall acceptance of the conspiracy beliefs, with the overall sample rating them either "definitely true" or "probably true":

17% of U.S. adults reported believing that "the pharmaceutical industry created the coronavirus to increase sales of its drugs and vaccines," up from 15% in March;

32% reported believing that some in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) "are exaggerating the danger posed by the coronavirus to damage the Trump presidency," up from 24% in March; and

38% reported believing that "the coronavirus was created by the Chinese government as a biological weapon," up from 28% in March.

From March to July 2020, conservative media users' belief that the pharmaceutical industry created the virus rose from 13% to 28%, and that some in the CDC were exaggerating the danger of the virus to damage the Trump presidency went from 34% to 61%.

In 2020, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, for instance, frequently discussed the conspiracy theory that the novel coronavirus was bioengineered in a Chinese lab. And Rush Limbaugh alleged that "the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump" and that "it probably is a ChiCom [Chinese Communist] laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized."

Mainstream news sources

While the use of conservative media and social media were associated with increased belief in conspiracies, use of the mainstream print media had the opposite association. The researchers found that regular use of the mainstream print media such as the Associated Press, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post predicted a decline in these conspiracy beliefs, which was related to greater mask wearing and greater intentions to get vaccinated.

"When mainstream news treats conspiracy theories, it is to raise concerns about the effects of accepting them, not to legitimize them," Romer said.

People who relied on mainstream television news (such as ABC, NBC, and CBS News) didn't exhibit any change in their beliefs in conspiracies after controlling for their other media use. "People who get a lot of information from mainstream TV news were also more likely to want to be vaccinated and were more likely to wear masks, but that wasn't related to whether or not they believed in conspiracies," said Romer. "It operated independently."

The findings illustrate the importance of mainstream broadcast TV news in informing the country about effective means of confronting the pandemic during the months from March to July 2020.

The media and public health authorities

The researchers suggested that the findings "point to the need for greater efforts on the part of commentators, reporters, and guests on conservative media to report verifiable information about the pandemic. The results also suggest that social media platforms need to be more aggressive in downgrading, blocking, and counteracting claims about COVID-19 vaccines, claims about mask wearing, and conspiracy beliefs that have been judged problematic by public health authorities."

At the same time, the researchers said, public health authorities seeking to prevent the spread of the virus "should seek opportunities to present accurate information about the pandemic to users" of conservative and social media. Reaching users of mainstream news media is also important because they were "either less likely to subscribe to conspiracy beliefs (in the case of print) or more likely to adopt protective behavior (in the case of broadcast television news)."

HOUSTON - (May 3, 2021) - Ever look at a flatfish like a flounder or sole, with two eyes on one side of its head, and think, "How did that happen?"

You're in luck. Rice University biologist Kory Evans has the answer.

"Flatfishes are some of the weirdest vertebrates on the planet, and they got weird very, very fast by changing multiple traits at once over a short period of time," said Evans, an assistant professor of biosciences at Rice who specializes in studying the evolution of fish over long time scales.

Of all mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians and fish, flatfish are easily the most asymmetric. Evans, the corresponding author of a study on flatfish evolution in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said it helps to keep that in perspective.

"Imagine any other animal," he said. "Like, say you're out walking and you see a squirrel, and one eye is here and the other is there," he said, pointing to two places on the same side of his face. "That squirrel is having a bad time. And there are 800 species of these fish that just do that.

"Perspective helps for understanding how weird these animals actually are."

In evolutionary terms, flatfish asymmetry isn't just a novelty, it's an innovation, and a trait that sets flatfish far apart from even their closest relatives.

Evans said flatfish evolution is particularly interesting because they began as typical, symmetrical fish. They started evolving their current shape, or morphology, about 65 million years ago, and within 3 million years, they'd largely finished.

"We got all that novel colonization of morphospace in 3 million years' time," Evans said. "And look how much time has passed since then. So there's a really brief and short period of time when they evolved all these new forms and all these crazy species."

In their study, Evans and co-authors Olivier Larouche of Rice and Sara-Jane Watson of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology found that tight integration of genetic traits in flatfish led to a sort of evolutionary cascade.

"Integration is where there's a high degree of correlation between traits, such that if you change one trait, another trait will be changed as well," Evans said. "At macroevolutionary timescales, this gets really interesting, because traits then begin to co-evolve with one another. So if you change one trait, you might end up changing several others."

He said traits can become more integrated if their morphological development is controlled or influenced by shared gene interaction networks.

"If the signaling networks expand to encompass more and more traits, then you can theoretically smear changes all across an entire organism using the same signaling network, and you can change really fast," he said. "It's like pressing one button and flipping the whole animal all at once."

Evans, Larouche and Watson used several methods to piece together the story of flatfish evolution. One was a phylogenetic comparative method that tracks the evolutionary history of traits between and among species. Phylogenetic trees have branches that show where species diverge. "Typically, the tree is built using genetics," Evans said. "So, maybe we'll have a bunch of genomes for all those species. And we can use that to figure out who's more closely related to who. Then, once the tree is built, I can see how traits have changed over time using the branching pattern of the tree as a guide."

The researchers also used a micro-CT scanner in the Evans lab to make 3D scans of the skulls of several flatfish species. The scans were used to make 3D morphometric models that could be compared for differences in shape. But many flatfish species are so dissimilar that it wasn't possible to "tease them apart with just shape or just phylogeny alone," Evans said.

So the researchers created complex mathematical models to track the degree of integration between different regions of the skull across the 65-million-year history of flatfishes and their relatives.

"We found that flatfishes were way more integrated than non-flat fishes, and what this means is that the evolution of asymmetry for flatfishes ended up being an integrated process, basically, involving changes all across the skull," he said. "As the eye migrated, a bunch of other things changed as well. And it became additive. So as the flatfish skull got more and more integrated, more things began to change, per unit time, than a generation before."

As to why flatfish evolved to be asymmetrical, Evans said it wasn't the only path to becoming flat.

"Other fishes that are flat did not do this, like stingrays," he said. "They just went flat like a pancake. But their eyes aren't both on the same side. The remora (aka suckerfish) are also a flat-looking fish, and they didn't do that."

Given evolution is a competition for "survival of the fittest," the evolutionary success of flatfish begs the question: Is asymmetry somehow advantageous?

"I'm not gonna lie," Evans said. "I don't really know if there's an advantage. I think they did it because they could."

East Hanover, NJ. May 3, 2021. An international team of multiple sclerosis (MS) researchers showed that longitudinal changes in social cognition are associated with psychological outcomes of daily living, suggesting that social cognition may exert a central role in people with MS. The article, "Social Cognition in Multiple Sclerosis: A 3-Year Follow-Up MRI and Behavioral Study" (doi: 10.3390/diagnostics11030484) was published on March 9, 2021, in Diagnostics. It is available open access at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8001246/.

The authors are Helen M. Genova, PhD, of Kessler Foundation's Center for Neuropsychology and Neuroscience Research, and Stefano Ziccardi, PhD, Marco Pitteri, PhD, and Massimiliano Calabrese, MD, of the University of Verona. Dr. Genova also has an academic appointment at Rutgers University.

Some recent MS research, including work led by Dr. Genova, has shown that social cognition deficits may affect people with MS who otherwise have no other cognitive impairments. Social cognition, which is required to understand and process the emotions of others, is an extremely important skill set for forming successful relationships with others, and deficits in this area can significantly affect a person's quality of life.

Previous studies investigating the prevalence of social cognition impairment among people with MS suggested that impairment tracked with symptoms such as cognitive fatigue. More research was needed to clarify these results and determine whether changes to the area of the brain called the amygdala--known to be associated with emotions--correlated with social cognition. Moreover, no study had investigated the social cognition performance in people with MS with a longitudinal perspective, meaning that no data existed on the evolution of social cognition deficits over time.

In this three-year follow-up study, MS researchers conducted a longitudinal investigation of the evolution of social cognition deficits and amygdala damage in a group of 26 cognitively-normal people with relapsing-remitting MS. They analyzed the association between social cognition and several domains related to psychological well-being. Concurrently, they investigated the evolution of amygdala lesion burden and atrophy and their association with social cognition performance.

To gather data, the team used a battery of neuropsychological tests; social cognition tasks to assess theory of mind, facial emotion recognition, and empathy; and 3T-MRI to analyze structural amygdala damage. They then compared these findings to baseline data collected from participants three years prior.

The results confirmed that, despite being classified as cognitively normal, people with relapsing-remitting MS showed a significantly lower performance in several social cognition domains as compared to a matched group of healthy controls. These domains include facial emotion recognition, in particular fear and anger, as well as empathy. Longitudinal changes in the social cognition domain were also found to be associated with psychological outcomes of daily living, such as depression, anxiety, fatigue, and social functioning quality of life.

"We confirmed the longitudinal stability of social cognition deficits in cognitively-normal people with relapsing-remitting MS, mirroring the amygdala structural damage and psychological well-being," said Dr. Genova. "These results confirm that social cognition exerts a key role in MS, affecting individuals' everyday lives. Our research highlights the need to identify treatments to improve social cognition in this population."

CHICAGO--May 3, 2021-- Patients with one or more health conditions are more likely to be screened for colorectal cancer than those without comorbidities, according to new research in the Journal of Osteopathic Medicine. However, patients with five or more health conditions are also less likely to be screened than patients with two to four health conditions.

Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in the U.S. resulting in more than 53,000 deaths each year. Regular colorectal screenings, whether colonoscopy or at-home stool test, are the most effective tool to identify and treat the disease at an early stage.

"No prior study, to my knowledge, has assessed the impact of multiple comorbidities on colorectal screenings. It was a real surprise to see how a patient's other health conditions impact their likelihood of being tested," said Ben Greiner, DO, an internist at the University of Texas Medical Branch Hospitals in Galveston, Texas. "Our findings reveal a lack of or myriad health conditions may prevent patients from receiving the preventive care they need."

The study found patients with diabetes, hypertension, skin cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), arthritis, depression, and chronic kidney disease were significantly more likely to be screened than those without these health conditions.

Barriers to care

"It may be that the treating physician or a patient suffering from five or more additional disease states is fatigued by more pressing treatment needs and therefore not prioritizing important screenings," said Dr. Greiner. "I also worry about the person who has no other health conditions and is either not seeing their doctor on a regular basis or, because of their otherwise clean bill of health, not following the screening recommendation."

A large U.S. study found that an increase in screening adherence of roughly 40% corresponded with a 52% reduction in cancer mortality. According to the American Cancer Society (ACS), the lifetime risk of developing colorectal cancer is about 1 in 23 (4.3%) for men and 1 in 25 (4.0%) for women. The ACS guidelines recommend that all patients aged 45 or older be screened.

Chestnut Hill, MA (5/3/2021) -- The billion-year-old fossil of an organism, exquisitely preserved in the Scottish Highlands, reveals features of multicellularity nearly 400 million years before the biological trait emerged in the first animals, according to a new report in the journal Current Biology by an international team of researchers, including Boston College paleobotanist Paul K. Strother.

The discovery could be the "missing link" in the evolution of animals, according to the team, which included scientists from the U.S., United Kingdom, and Australia. The microfossil, discovered at Loch Torridon, contains two distinct cell types and could be the earliest example of complex multicellularity ever recorded, according to the researchers.

The fossil offers new insight into the transition of single celled organisms to complex, multicellular animals. Modern single-celled holozoa include the most basal living animals and the fossil discovered shows an organism which lies somewhere between single cell and multicellular animals, or metazoa.

"Our findings show that the genetic underpinnings of cell-to-cell cohesion and segregation -- the ability for different cells to sort themselves into separate regions within a multicellular mass -- existed in unicellular organisms a billion years ago, some 400 million years before such capabilities were incorporated into the first animals," said Strother, a research professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Boston College.

The fossil's discovery in an inland lake shifts the focus on the first forms of early life from the ocean to freshwater.

Animals, or etazoa, are one of only five groups of organisms that have evolved complex multicellularity - organisms that grow from a single cell that develops into a myriad of different cells and tissues. Animals probably evolved from unicellular ancestors that went through multicellular stages during their life cycles, said Strother, an expert in paleobotany and palynology, the study of fossil spores and pollen. Land plants, too, achieved complex multicellularity when they evolved from simpler algal ancestors some time during the early Paleozoic from about 500 to 400 million years ago..

"We describe here a new fossil that is similar to living unicellular relatives of animals, belonging to the group Ichthyosporea," said Strother. "Our fossil shows life-cycle stages with two different kinds of cells, which could be the first step toward the evolution of complex multicellularity in the evolutionary lineage leading to the Metazoa."

The study was based on populations of cells preserved in the mineral phosphate that were collected from billion-year-old lake deposits found in the northwest Scottish Highlands, Strother said. Samples are prepared in rock thin sections which allow microfossils to be seen under the light microscope or with a focused ion beam microscope.

The microfossils were discovered as part of an ongoing project to describe life living in freshwater lakes one billion years ago, using samples collected in Scotland and Michigan by Strother beginning in 2008, with support from NASA and the National Geographic Society, and now the Natural Environment Research Council in the UK.

The new fossil has been described and formally named Bicellum brasieri in the new report.

Strother said the discovery has the potential to change the way scientists look at the earliest forms of life on Earth.

"Our study of life in billion-year-old lakes is challenged by our ability to determine which kinds of organisms are represented in these deposits," he said. "Previously we have assumed that most of what we see in these deposits are various kinds of extinct algae, but the morphological features of Bicellum really are more like those of modern-day unicellular relatives of animals. This is causing us to broaden our approach to reconstructing the diversity and ecology of life on Earth one billion years ago."

The discovery will allow researchers to expand upon a more thorough reconstruction of the life-cycle of Bicellum, Strother said.

"Armed with comparative morphology with modern day Ichthyosporeans, we may be able to recognize additional morphogenic stages and determine how a single generative cell divides to become a multicellular cell mass," he said.

People have become accustomed to having their temperature checked during the pandemic because fever is a key indicator of COVID-19.

A new commentary by Washington State University College of Nursing Associate Professor Catherine Van Son and Clinical Assistant Professor Deborah Eti proposes that taking a temperature is a less useful indicator of infection in older adults and that a pulse oximeter be used instead.

The paper, published in Frontiers in Medicine, said baseline temperatures are lower in older adults. A lower baseline temperature means a fever may be overlooked using the CDC's standard definition of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit or greater.

"In fact," the paper says, "upwards of 30% of older adults with serious infections show mild or no fever."

Other common signs of COVID may also be dismissed and attributed to aging, such as fatigue, body aches and loss of taste or smell.

Additionally, some COVID-19 patients have no visible signs of having low oxygen levels, such as shortness of breath, yet have oxygen saturation below 90%. Such asymptomatic hypoxia can be associated with extremely poor outcomes.

Van Son and Eti say inexpensive, portable pulse oximeters should be considered for wide use in COVID-19 screenings of older adults because the devices can detect changes in oxygen saturation without other indications of infection.

"Detecting (asymptomatic hypoxia) is critical for the prevention of infection progression and initiating treatment," they wrote. "Earlier interventions could help patients avoid highly invasive procedures (i.e., intubation) and improve the allocation of scarce healthcare resources."

Palo Alto, CA--New work from a Stanford University-led team of researchers including Carnegie's Arthur Grossman and Tingting Xiang unravels a longstanding mystery about the relationship between form and function in the genetic material of a diverse group of algae called dinoflagellates.

Their findings, published in Nature Genetics, have implications for understanding genomic organizational principles of all organisms.

Dinoflagellates include more than 2,000 species of marine and freshwater plankton, many of which are photosynthetic, and some of which also ingest other organisms for food. They play a wide variety of roles in various ecosystems, including extreme environments, and are predominantly known to humans as the cause of toxic "red tides" and as the source of most ocean bioluminescence.

Some photosynthetic dinoflagellates are also crucial to the health of coral reefs. These algae are taken up by individual coral cells and form mutually beneficial relationships through which nutrients are exchanged. Ocean warming and pollution can cause this relationship between the alga and animal to break down, resulting in ghostly white "bleached" corals that are at risk of starvation, which could lead to the death of reef ecosystems.

"Like animals and plants, dinoflagellates are complex eukaryotic organisms and are evolutionarily interesting because their genetic material is packaged in a way that is unique among organisms with complex cellular architecture," said lead author Georgi Marinov of Stanford University.

One defining characteristic of eukaryotes is that their DNA is housed inside a nucleus within each cell and is organized as separate units called chromosomes. Furthermore, in most eukaryotes, segments of DNA are wound around a spool-like complex of proteins called a nucleosome. This organization is thought to predate the common ancestor of all eukaryotes. It helps to condense the genetic material into a small space and control access to the DNA and how the genes encoded in it are activated to direct the cell's physiological functions.

"By contrast, even though dinoflagellates are eukaryotes, their genome is not packaged as nucleosomes, but rather appears to be permanently condensed and exist in a liquid crystal state," Grossman explained. "We still have so much to learn about how genome architecture influences genome function in all eukaryotes; so, dinoflagellate's exceptional 'tight' packaging of DNA may help us understand the similarities and differences in organizational principles among eukaryote genomes."

To delve into this question, the research team--which also included Stanford's Alexandro E. Trevino, Anshul Kundaje, and William J. Greenleaf--used sophisticated technology to map the 3-D spatial relationships of the genetic material of the dinoflagellate Breviolum minutum.

"Our work revealed topological features in the Breviolum genome that differ from the various models of dinoflagellate genome organization that have been predicted since the 1960s," said Xiang.

They found evidence of large self-interacting regions of DNA in the dinoflagellate genome called "topologically associating domains." The work suggests that this genomic architecture is induced by the process by which genes are transcribed into RNA; this RNA is subsequently translated into proteins that perform the cell's various activities.

In fact, when transcription was inhibited, the architecture 'loosened up', indicating that the rigidly preserved topographical features are, indeed, a function of gene activity.

"There are many more questions raised by these results, which represent a big step forward in unraveling the mysteries of the dinoflagellate genome. They are also providing a new perspective on structure-function relationships inherent to chromosomes," Grossman concluded.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. --A new study found overlooked tsunami hazards related to undersea, near-shore strike-slip faults, especially for coastal cities adjacent to faults that traverse inland bays. Several areas around the world may fall into this category, including the San Francisco Bay area, Izmit Bay in Turkey and the Gulf of Al-Aqaba in Egypt.

The study led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign civil and environmental engineering professor Ahmed Elbanna and professor Ares Rosakis of the California Institute of Technology used the Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications to model tsunami hazards related to strike-slip faults around the globe. The results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Whenever we saw large tsunamis triggered by earthquakes along strike-slip faults, people assumed that perhaps the earthquake had caused an undersea landslide, displacing water that way," Rosakis said.

The researchers said that a strike-slip fault exists when two blocks of rock on the fault line slide horizontally past one another. The San Andreas Fault is an example of a strike-slip fault.

In September 2018, a moderate 7.5 magnitude earthquake and unexpectedly powerful tsunami swept through Palu, a city situated on the inland side of Palu Bay on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The quake occurred along a northwest-southeast trending strike-slip fault that runs through the city and plunges below the bay along Palu's northwest shore.

"It looked like a bulldozer had come in and leveled the town," said co-author Costas Synolakis, the president of Athens College and a professor of civil engineering at the University of Southern California, who surveyed the area following the devastating event. "This is why it is so important that we try to understand what really happened."

Studies exploring connections between strike-slip faulting and tsunamis exist. However, they focus on specific fault systems or geographic locations, obscuring the complex details of the fault geometry and bathymetry, the study reports.

"What is unique about our study is that instead of considering a location-specific event, we focused on the fundamentals of a strike-slip fault system interacting within the boundaries of a narrow bay," Elbanna said. "We opted to simulate a very basic planar fault passing through a very simplified smooth-bottomed bay, similar to a bathtub. Having this simplified baseline model allows us to generalize to any place on the planet that may be at risk."

Intersonic earthquakes are fault ruptures that happen so quickly that their movement outpaces the seismic shear waves they generate - like a sonic boom, but with the shock wave moving through the earth's crust. The simulations found that intersonic earthquakes can provide enough energy and large enough horizontal displacements to trigger large tsunami waves.

When such earthquakes occur within a narrow bay, the researchers reported three distinct phases that can lead to a tsunami: the initial fault movement and shockwave causing almost instantaneous shaking of the coastal land; the displacement of water while the earthquake is occurring; and gravity-driven motion of the tsunami wave after the ground motion has subsided that carries the wave to shore.

Click here for a video explaining this motion.

"Each of these phases will have a different effect depending on the unique geography of the surrounding land and bathymetry of the bay," Elbanna said. "And, unlike the earthquakes and subsequent water displacement that occur many miles offshore, an earthquake and tsunami that occurs within the narrow confines of a bay will allow for very little warning time for the coast."

Elbanna compares the effect of horizontal strike-slip fault displacements to holding a water cup in your hand and shaking it horizontally.

"The sloshing motion is a result of the horizontal shaking. When an earthquake occurs along a strike-slip fault in a narrow bay, the horizontal ground motion pushes and pulls the boundaries of the bay leading to displacement of water in the vertical direction and initiation of the tsunami," he said.

Click here for a video explaining this motion.

"The physics-based model used in this study provides critical insight about the hazard associated with strike-slip faulting, particularly, the need to account for such risk to mitigate future damage to other bays traversed by strike-slip faults," said Illinois graduate student Mohamed Abdelmeguid, who conducted the simulations along with former graduate student Xiao Ma, currently a senior research scientist at Exxon Mobil.

The at-risk regions identified by the team - Northern California, Turkey and Egypt - have experienced intersonic earthquakes in the past, and the researchers recommend revisiting the tsunami hazard rating of underwater strike-slip faults, particularly those traversing narrow bays.

"It may not look like the tsunami scene from Dwayne Johnson's 'San Andreas' movie, but the tsunami risk for Northern California and several places worldwide need to be seriously revisited," Elbanna said.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- Sometime between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, prehistoric humans took their first steps into Sahul, an ancient landmass made up of modern Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania. But nobody knows which way they went after that.

"One of the really big unanswered questions of prehistory is how Australia was populated in the distant past. Scholars have debated it for at least 150 years," said Sandia National Laboratories archaeologist and remote sensing scientist Devin White.

Now, an international team of scientists using a Sandia supercomputer in the largest reconstruction ever attempted of prehistoric travel has mapped the probable "superhighways" that led to the first peopling of Australia. Their results were published April 29 in Nature Human Behaviour.

Their methods could help organizations like the United Nations and the Federal Emergency Management Agency forecast modern day human migration resulting from climate change or sudden humanitarian crises, while the new maps could inform the search for undiscovered archaeological sites. The research team believes it also might be possible to apply their approach to other areas of the world, further illuminating the human story since the first migrations out of Africa about 120,000 years ago.

Powered by 125 billion simulations run on a supercomputer typically used to develop autonomous systems and machine learning technologies, the team's research is the first high-resolution computational analysis of human migration at a continental scale, dividing the entire supercontinent into pixels 1,640 feet (500 meters) across.

"It is the largest and most complex project of its kind that I'd ever been asked to take on," said White, who wrote the primary algorithm used, called "From Everywhere to Everywhere," and overhauled it to program the way-finders. For more than 15 years, White has used geospatial analysis, remote sensing and high-performance computing to study human transportation networks.

Archaeologist and computational social scientist Stefani Crabtree, a fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and professor at Utah State University in Logan led the study.

"We decided it would be really interesting to look at this question of human migration because the ways that we conceptualize a landscape should be relatively steady for a hiker in the 21st century and a person who was way-finding into a new region 70,000 years ago," Crabtree said. "If it's a new landscape and we don't have a map, we're going to want to know how to move efficiently throughout a space, where to find water, and where to camp -- and we'll orient ourselves based on high points around the lands."

Researchers packed a virtual 25-year-old woman with 22 pounds (10 kilograms) of tools and water and sent her on billions of walks across the continent as it would have looked 50,000 years ago. Her task: find the paths that require the fewest calories to traverse without straying too far from reliable sources of water or from highly visible landscape features like large rock outcrops. The team found that the simulations returned to certain paths again and again, which the researchers dubbed "superhighways," that line up well with the earliest known archaeological sites on the continent.

Researchers affiliated with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH) also contributed to the project and explained the strong connection between Aboriginal communities, the landscape they have traveled across for millennia and a timeless realm known as the Dreaming.

"Australia's not only the driest, but also the flattest populated continent on Earth," said Sean Ulm, the center's deputy director and a distinguished professor of archaeology at Queensland, Australia-based James Cook University. "Our research shows that prominent landscape features and water sources were critical for people to navigate and survive on the continent. In many Aboriginal societies, landscape features are believed to have been created by ancestral beings during the Dreaming. Every ridgeline, hill, river, beach and water source is named, storied and inscribed into the very fabric of societies, emphasising the intimate relationship between people and place. The landscape is literally woven into peoples' lives and their histories. It seems that these relationships between people and country probably date back to the earliest peopling of the continent."