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A rupture along the full length of the fast-slipping Alpine Fault on New Zealand's South Island poses the largest potential seismic threat to the southern and central parts of the country. But new evidence of a 19th century earthquake indicates that in at least one portion of the fault, smaller earthquakes may occur in between such large rupture events.

The findings published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America suggest that some places along the fault, particularly around the towns of Hokitika and Greymouth, could experience strong ground shaking from Alpine fault earthquakes more often than previously thought.

The best paleoseismic evidence to date suggests the southern and central sections of the Alpine Fault, at the boundary separating the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates, typically rupture during very large full-section earthquakes of magnitude 7.7 or larger. The last such earthquake took place in 1717.

After trenching along the fault at the Staples site near the Toaroha River, however, Robert Langridge of GNS Science and colleagues uncovered evidence of a more recent earthquake along the northeastern end of the fault's central portion. Radiocarbon dating places this earthquake between 1813 and 1848.

"One of the real challenges with the Alpine Fault--because it is so bush-covered--is actually finding sites that have been cleared and therefore can be studied," said Langridge. "Once we started working there [at the Staples site] the story really grew in large part because of the richness of dateable organic material in the trenches."

The four most recent earthquakes uncovered by the researchers at the site range in dates from 1084 to 1848. The events were confirmed by data collected from other nearby trenching sites and from geological deposits called turbidites, which are sediments shaken loose into a body of water by seismic activity, in lakes along the central section of the Alpine fault.

The most recent earthquake could represent a "partial-section" rupture of only the central portion of the Alpine fault, a rupture of the fault's northern section that continued southwest into the central segment, or even triggered slip from a rupture along the nearby Marlborough Fault System. Langridge and colleagues said that there isn't enough evidence yet to favor one of these scenarios over the others.

However, the findings do suggest that seismic activity on the Alpine Fault is more complex than suspected, particularly along its northern reaches where the plate boundary transitions into another fault zone.

"One of the outcomes of this study is that you should expect a shorter recurrence interval of strong shaking at fault section ends," Langridge said. "Because of the recurrence times of earthquakes though, you obviously have to wait a long time to see the effects of such fault behavior."

"That's why paleoseismology is a vital tool in understanding faults," he added, "because otherwise we'd have only short insights into the past."

The Alpine Fault is sometimes compared with California's San Andreas Fault, being another fast-moving strike slip fault near a plate boundary. Langridge said researchers in California and New Zealand have a long history of earthquake science collaboration and are learning from each other about the treatment of active faults and fault segmentation for seismic hazard models.

"The San Andreas Fault, being on the opposite side of the Pacific plate, it is like our distant brother or whanau--family," said Langridge.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Widespread forest management and protections against deforestation can help mitigate climate change - but will come with a steep cost if deployed as broadly as policymakers have discussed, new research suggests.

The study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, found that planting and protecting trees, especially in the tropics, could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 6 gigatons a year from 2025 to 2055. That reduction, the researchers' economic model showed, would cost as much as $393 billion a year over the same time period.

"There is a significant amount of carbon that can be sequestered through forests, but these costs aren't zero," said Brent Sohngen, co-author of the study and a professor of environmental economics at The Ohio State University.

A 6-gigaton reduction by 2055 would amount to about 10 percent of the total reduction needed to keep the climate from warming beyond 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius. Policymakers and scientists agree that humans worldwide need to put strategies in place that will keep the climate from warming above that threshold.

Limiting warming by that amount would not mean climate change is solved. At a 2-degree increase, for example, extreme heatwaves will become widespread, droughts would plague many urban environments around the world, and heavy rainfalls - including those from tropical storms or hurricanes - would become more commonplace. Many insects and animals would also die.

Those levels, though, would allow for some adaptation, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that is trying to help the world address climate change. The world is currently on pace to warm by about 4 degrees.

A number of recent studies have suggested that tree planting, management and conservation can solve a significant share of the world's climate problem, but most studies have ignored the costs. This analysis updated the Global Timber Model, which considers potential climate change policies and the effects they would have on forest land use, management and trade. The model allowed the researchers to calculate the worldwide financial costs of sequestering carbon in the world's forests.

The researchers found that protecting existing forests is cheaper than planting new ones, and that forest management, including changing how and when trees are harvested, provides low-cost options to store carbon in regions where timber management is an important economic activity.

One important reason why the costs in this study are higher than other estimates is because researchers captured carbon leakage, which occurs if carbon emissions shift to other sectors or geographic areas. For example, if planting trees in one location on agricultural land causes additional deforestation somewhere else, the net change in carbon will be smaller because of this leakage.

The study illustrates the geography and timing of the costs of forestry actions to mitigate climate change. Specifically, the researchers found forests in Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia are likely to contribute the greatest possible carbon sequestration efforts at the lowest costs. Protecting tropical forest land in the short term gives way to planting and managing tropical and temperate forests, often with longer rotations, to maintain high levels of mitigation beyond 2050.

"Protecting, managing and restoring the world's forests will be necessary for avoiding dangerous impacts of climate change, and have important co-benefits such as biodiversity conservation, ecosystem service enhancement and protection of livelihoods," said Kemen Austin, lead author of the study and senior policy analyst with RTI International, a nonprofit research institute based in North Carolina. "Until now, there has been limited research investigating the costs of climate change mitigation from forests. Better understanding the costs of mitigation from global forests will help us to prioritize resources and inform the design of more efficient mitigation policies."

The researchers also found that in the temperate and subarctic regions, the United States would likely be responsible for the greatest share of forest-related carbon mitigation efforts - about 24 percent of the possible mitigation in those climate regions would come from the United States based on forested and deforested land. China and Canada have the potential to contribute significantly, too, the researchers found.

And managing the world's forests would be only one piece of the broader puzzle. Energy sources that don't rely on fossil fuels - things like solar and wind power - likely will play the largest role in any climate change mitigation strategy.

"What we see is that you should devote about a third of your effort to this stuff and two-thirds to the other stuff - to reducing coal, to investing in solar, to switching to electric," Sohngen said. "If you want your total mitigation to be as cheap as possible, that's what you would do."

CORVALLIS, Ore. -- Tobacco control efforts have reduced cigarette smoking for many, but those efforts have disproportionately helped white smokers, while other racial and ethnic groups are still struggling, an Oregon State University researcher's analysis found.

The study, published recently in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research, compared cigarette use among racial and ethnic groups. Across all groups, the number of cigarettes consumed per day dropped roughly 30% between 1992 and 2019.

However, the reduction in cigarette use was highest for non-Hispanic whites, an indication that the tobacco control policies implemented over the last 25 years have benefited this group more than others, said Kari-Lyn Sakuma, lead author on the study and an assistant professor in OSU's College of Public Health and Human Sciences.

"I think the biggest takeaway is that while there's been major advances in reducing cigarette use, and in death and sickness associated with cigarettes, we still have a long way to go, particularly as we start to look at who benefited the most from these major efforts to reduce the impact of cigarettes on health," Sakuma said.

"We can see dramatic decreases among white populations. But when you start looking at racial and ethnic groups, and examining more closely the different cigarette use behaviors, it gives us clues as to where the disparities exist and where we can do better to target our public health efforts."

The study compared cigarette use among African Americans, Asian/Pacific Islanders, Hispanics/Latinos, American Indian/Alaskan Natives and non-Hispanic whites, as these were the racial and ethnic groups delineated by the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Survey.

Researchers compared results for each group in the U.S. as a whole with each group's results in California specifically. California was chosen as a state that has been at the forefront in legislation and intervention to curb tobacco use, and the data shows cigarette use there has declined more sharply than the U.S. average, across all groups.

Researchers looked at the change over time in how many cigarettes smokers said they smoked each day and how many days they smoked; the rate of uptake, or how many people started smoking for the first time; and how many people successfully quit smoking.

Sakuma has been studying the disparate impact of tobacco use among specific racial and ethnic groups for years. She said tobacco companies have poured lots of money into advertising and marketing their products specifically in low-income neighborhoods and in African American and Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods. These companies also invest significant funds in countering public health policies that could help protect communities.

Lower income neighborhoods have fewer resources to combat these messages, especially because most tobacco control measures start with local pressure -- such as communities pushing to ban cigarette billboards near schools.

"In other communities, there's other things that they need to fight for. While one community may have the task force and resources to create policies to reduce advertising around schools, other folks in lower-income areas are fighting for their schools to remain open," Sakuma said. "It's a difference in ability to address these issues."

Communities with more resources can also afford to fight court battles with tobacco companies and raise public awareness around ballot measures seeking to reduce cigarette use.

Moving forward, Sakuma said, policy makers should prioritize public health efforts that use the study results to tailor public health messaging and outreach for racial and ethnic groups that could benefit more fully from the tobacco control measures of the last few decades.

"We've been successful in the past, but we have to maintain that success while targeting some efforts and distributing more resources among higher-risk groups or more vulnerable communities," she said.

ITHACA, NY, December 1, 2020 -- Thousands of years ago, people in South America began domesticating Solanum pimpinellifolium, a weedy plant with small, intensely flavored fruit. Over time, the plant evolved into S. lycopersicum - the modern cultivated tomato.

Although today's tomatoes are larger and easier to farm compared with their wild ancestor, they also are less resistant to disease and environmental stresses like drought and salty soil.

Researchers from Boyce Thompson Institute, led by Zhangjun Fei, created a high-quality reference genome for S. pimpinellifolium and discovered sections of the genome that underlie fruit flavor, size and ripening, stress tolerance and disease resistance. The results were published in Nature Communications on November 16.

"This reference genome will allow researchers and plant breeders to improve traits like fruit quality and stress tolerance in the tomato," said Fei, "for example, by helping them discover new genes in the modern tomato as well as by reintroducing genes from S. pimpinellifolium that were lost over time as S. lycopersicum was domesticated."

Fei is a BTI faculty member and co-corresponding author on the paper, as well as an adjunct professor in Cornell University's School of Integrative Plant Science (SIPS).

Although other groups had previously sequenced S. pimpinellifolium, Fei said this reference genome is more complete and accurate, thanks in part to cutting-edge sequencing technologies that are able to read very long pieces of DNA.

"Older sequencing technologies that read short pieces of DNA can identify mutations at the single-base level," said Shan Wu, a postdoctoral scientist in Fei's lab and co-corresponding author on the paper. "But they aren't good at finding structural variants, like insertions, deletions, inversions or duplications of large chunks of DNA."

"Many known traits of the tomato are caused by structural variants, so that is why we focused on them," Fei said. "Structural variants also are understudied because they are more difficult to identify."

Fei's group compared their S. pimpinellifolium reference genome to that of the cultivated tomato, called Heinz 1706, and found more than 92,000 structural variants.

The researchers then combed the tomato pan-genome, a database with the genomes of more than 725 cultivated and closely related wild tomatoes, and discovered structural variants related to many important traits. For example, the modern cultivated tomato has some genomic deletions that reduce their levels of lycopene, a red pigment with nutritional value, and an insertion that reduces their sucrose content.

Jim Giovannoni, BTI faculty member and co-author of the study, notes that many consumers are disappointed in the quality and flavor of modern production tomatoes because past breeding efforts ignored those traits in favor of performance and yield.

"Identification of the additional genetic diversity captured in the S. pimpinellifolium genome provides breeders with opportunities to bring some of these important features back to store-bought tomatoes," said Giovannoni, who is also an adjunct professor in SIPS and a scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service.

The researchers found many other structural variants that could be of interest to plant breeders, including variants in numerous disease-resistance genes and in genes involved in fruit size, ripening, hormonal regulation, metabolism, and the development of flowers, seeds and leaves.

The group also found structural variants associated with regulating the expression of genes involved in the biosynthesis of lipids in fruit skin, which could help improve the fruit's post-harvest performance.

"So much genetic diversity was lost during tomato domestication," Fei said. "These data could help bring some of that diversity back and result in tomatoes that taste better, are more nutritious and more resilient."

As case rates of COVID-19 reach new heights across the nation, many states and cities are tightening stay-at-home restrictions to stop the spread. New research suggests that that those suffering from economic hardships are less likely comply with new stay-at-home orders; however, these same U.S. residents would be more likely to adhere to the new public health guidelines if their households received stimulus funds.

The results, published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, suggest that of the measures taken to address economic dislocation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the CARES Act helped reduce an important source of viral spread: social interaction.

In the new paper, researchers from the University of California San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy and the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy sought to accurately measure public willingness to abide by shelter-in-place ordinances first introduced in spring of 2020.

The researchers examined large quantities of geolocated cellular phone device use patterns. The data, provided by the analytics company UNACAST, estimates information such as the number of people who are living in a home, the average time spent at home or outside, and changes in the average distance a user traveled. This information helped the researchers assess compliance with stay-at-home orders.

To determine how economic conditions shape compliance, the researchers compared the cell-phone data to county records containing average household incomes for every county across the U.S. from February through July 2020. They also took account of other factors that might influence county residents' willingness to comply, including how severely each county was hit by the virus, unemployment levels, population density, partisanship and where residents get their news.

Counties with above median income comply with shelter-in-place policies with reducing movement by an additional 60% compared to before the policies were introduced; however, compliance with shelter-in-place orders in counties where the average income is below the median is uneven at best.

"Not surprisingly, impoverished communities exposed to economic dislocation are the least likely to comply with shelter-in-place policies," said co-author Jesse Driscoll, associate professor of political science at UC San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy. "The data showed that working-class families -- especially those who had lost jobs or might soon lose them -- were overall much less likely to stay home, since they needed to leave the house to work. The more urgent public policy question going into this winter is whether these behaviors changed when stimulus checks arrived last time."

To assess how stimulus checks from the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, passed in March 2020, impacted compliance, the researchers used the same cellphone movement data to determine whether household income increases changed behavior as more of a county's residents began receiving stimulus payments.

While some beneficiaries received their checks weeks ahead of when others, the team were able to measure the impact stimulus dollars had on residents from data of recipients who used an electronic banking to deposit the funds, made available by the financial data company Facteus.

The researchers found that local stimulus injections significantly increased social distancing. For every additional dollar per capita a county received, movement temporarily declined by over 1 percent.

"As counties received more stimulus funds, their residents stayed home more," the authors write. "When they did head out, people in counties where most had received stimulus checks traveled less than people in counties where most checks had not yet arrived."

The authors conclude, "Targeted economic relief such as direct stimulus transfers and increased unemployment benefits may have limited potential spread of COVID-19 among economically disadvantaged populations."

PHILADELPHIA (December 1, 2020) - More than 90 percent of human papillomavirus (HPV)-related cancers could be prevented by widespread uptake of the HPV vaccine. Yet, vaccine use in the United States falls short of public health goals.

In an article in JMIR Nursing, researchers explain how they applied user-centered design principles to develop a mobile health (mhealth) app to improve HPV vaccine uptake and how its use was evaluated with parents and parent-adolescent dyads. The app -- Vaccipack -- is exclusively focused on adolescent vaccines and targets key parental beliefs related to HPV vaccines. The mhealth app is designed for parents (to use and share with their adolescents) to promote the initiation and completion of the HPV vaccine series in their adolescent children.

The study from the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Penn Nursing) evaluated the acceptability of and intention to use the app. It found that intention to use the app was high among both parents and adolescents after being introduced to the app and given time explore it.

"Theory-based content design, although standard practice in behavioral intervention research, has not been a typical approach adopted by app developers," says Anne M. Teitelman, PhD, FNP-BC, FAANP, FAAN, Associate Professor Emerita of Nursing at Penn Nursing. "Evaluation of acceptability and likely use, as we present here, is an important preliminary step for developing apps and in designing behavioral interventions that are most likely to achieve the desired health outcome." Teitelman is the lead investigator of the study and among the developers of the app.

Millions of sperm enter the race to fertilize, but only one wins the sprint to the egg.

Now Yale researchers have discovered that these winning sperm possess a few key molecular characteristics that differentiate them from those left behind, they report Dec. 1 in the journal eLife.

Sperm tails are lined with channels containing pores for entry of calcium which help sperm move through the female reproductive tract. Each pore of these calcium channels is comprised of four subunits, CatSper 1 through 4, which work together to serve functions such as controlling the mobility and navigation of the sperm.

Researchers playfully describe them as the sperm's racing stripes.

A team of Yale scientists led by Jean-Ju Chung, assistant professor of cellular and molecular physiology, found one of the subunits that form these racing stripes is critical in sperm selection for fertilization.

Using 3D molecular imaging and artificial neural network modeling, Chung's lab devised a way to visually track and quantify sperm in the reproductive tracts of female mice after mating. They discovered that the sperm which advanced from uterus to oviduct had the channels containing intact Catsper1 subunit. Other sperm likely lost functioning CatSper ion channels by losing intact CatSper1. These sperm become immobile and are left behind.

Sperm that make it far into the female reproductive tract share other characteristics: they tend to have already lost a cap-like structure called the acrosome in the sperm head, likely a prelude to fertilizing the egg.

The insights into molecular signatures of sperm and interactions within the reproductive tract may help inform new treatments for infertility or conversely, male birth control. Mutations have been found in the CatSper genes of infertile men and could be a target for fertility treatments. Since the CatSper channel is necessary for sperm to function, blocking it could lead to development of non-hormonal contraceptives with minimal side effects in both men and women, Chung said.

"Better understanding how the fittest sperm cells are selected and how those left are eliminated after fertilization in the female reproductive tract can improve current strategies for assisted reproduction," Chung said.

As cars keep getting smarter, automation is taking many tricky tasks --?from parallel parking to backing up --?out of drivers' hands.

Now, a University of Toronto Engineering study is underscoring the importance of drivers keeping their eyes on the road -- even when they are in an automated vehicle (AV).

Using an AV driving simulator and eye-tracking equipment, Professor Birsen Donmez and her team studied two types of in-vehicle displays and their effects on the driving behaviours of 48 participants.

The findings, published recently in the journal Accident Analysis & Prevention, revealed that drivers can become over-reliant on AV technology. This was especially true with a type of in-vehicle display the team coined as takeover request and automation capability (TORAC).

A "takeover request" asks the driver to take vehicle control when automation is not able to handle a situation; "automation capability" indicates how close to that limit the automation is.

"Drivers find themselves in situations where, although they are not actively driving, they are still part of the driving task -- they must be monitoring the vehicle and step in if the vehicle fails," says Donmez.

"And these vehicles fail, it's just guaranteed. The technology on the market right now is not mature enough to the point where we can just let the car drive and we go to sleep. We are not at that stage yet."

Tesla's AV system, for example, warns drivers every 30 seconds or less when their hands aren't detected on the wheel. This prompt can support driver engagement to some extent, but when the automation fails, driver attention and anticipation are the key factors that determine whether or not you get into a traffic accident.

"Even though cars are advertised right now as self-driving, they are still just Level 2, or partially automated," adds Dengbo He, postdoctoral fellow and lead author. "The driver should not rely on these types of vehicle automation."

In one of the team's driving scenarios, the participants were given a non-driving, self-paced task -- meant to mimic common distractions such as reading text messages -- while takeover prompts and automation capability information were turned on.

"Their monitoring of the road went way down compared to the condition where these features were turned off," says Donmez. "Automated vehicles and takeover requests can give people a false sense of security, especially if they work most of the time. People are going to end up looking away and doing something non-driving related."

The researchers also tested a second in-vehicle display system that added information on surrounding traffic to the data provided by the TORAC system, called STTORAC. These displays showed more promise in ensuring driving safety.

STTORAC provides drivers with ongoing information about their surrounding driving environment, including highlighting potential traffic conflicts on the road. This type of display led to the shortest reaction time in scenarios where drivers had to take over control of the vehicle, showing a significant improvement from both the TORAC and the no-display conditions.

"When you're not driving and aren't engaged, it's easy to lose focus. Adding information on surrounding traffic kept drivers better engaged in monitoring and anticipating traffic conflicts," says He, adding that the key takeaway for designers of next-generation AVs is to ensure systems are designed to keep drivers attentive. "Drivers should not be distracted, at least at this stage."

Donmez's team will next look at the effects of non-driving behaviours on drowsiness while operating an AV. "If someone isn't engaged in a non-driving task and is just monitoring the road, they can be more likely to fall into states of drowsiness, which is even more dangerous than being distracted."

ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. -- Imagine a silent helicopter stealthily moving troops and supplies around a future battlefield. U.S. Army researchers look to helicopter noise reduction technology as a top priority in aircraft design.

At the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, now known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory, researchers collaborated with Uber and the University of Texas at Austin to investigate the acoustic properties of electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, which use distributed electric propulsion to power flight.

These eVTOL vehicles may aid the Army with important tasks such as aerial surveillance and cargo transport; however, they feature smaller rotors than traditional helicopters. As a result, eVTOL rotors may emit a different sound signature that researchers will have to take into consideration.

"The noise you hear from these smaller rotors is generated through fundamentally different physical mechanisms," said Dr. George Jacobellis, Army research engineer at the laboratory's Vehicle Technology Directorate. "Traditional modeling techniques need to be improved to account for all of the noise generated so that vehicle designers can be aware of what will actually be heard."

Standard helicopter noise simulations focus primarily on predicting thickness noise and loading noise, because they constitute the dominant noise sources for large helicopters.

Thickness noise stems from the displacement of the air by the rotor blades, while loading noise occurs when lift and drag forces act on the air that flows around the rotary wings. Together, they make up what experts refer to as tonal noise.

In contrast, Army researchers suspected that eVTOL rotors generate more broadband noise, which refers to sounds caused by turbulence, than tonal noise.

"We didn't know whether broadband noise was important or not, but we knew that the tonal and broadband noise scaled differently," Jacobellis said. "We thought that as rotors became smaller there would be some point at which broadband noise would be the dominant source."

The team confirmed their hypothesis in their research study, which not only measured the acoustic characteristics of various eVTOL rotor configurations but also assessed the modeling capabilities of helicopter noise simulations for eVTOL rotors.

During the field experiment, the researchers set up a test stand with two electrically-powered rotors and recorded the noise generated above and below the rotor plane with nine microphones placed in a circular array surrounding the rotor hub.

For the simulations, the team utilized the Rotorcraft Comprehensive Analysis System coupled with a separate program called PSU-WOPWOP, a routine noise prediction code named after an onomatopoeia for the sound that helicopter blades make.

"RCAS computes the aerodynamic loads, or forces, on the blades as well as the bending and twisting of the blades," Jacobellis said. "This information is necessary to use as inputs to PSU-WOPWOP, which computes the noise generated by the rotor. Connecting the two programs required a significant amount of work, which was done by our group as well."

The researchers modeled the broadband noise in PSU-WOPWOP with Pegg's method, one of the two settings present in the simulation program with the other called Brooks' method.

While Pegg's method makes broadband noise predictions based off of experimental data of the entire rotor, Brooks' method accounts for the unique distribution of lift along the blade.

"[These technologies] are promising in their ability to predict the noise of eVTOL rotors, but we need to do more work to obtain acceptable accuracy," Jacobellis said. "The next steps are to implement the Brooks method for higher accuracy acoustic predictions and to compare the unsteady loads between the simulation and experiment to check the accuracy of the simulations in predicting the unsteady loads. The Brooks method should be better at capturing unique configurations and loading distributions."

Researchers also found that co-axial co-rotating rotors, or stacked rotors, may potentially offer better performance and lower noise than a conventional rotor. Unlike conventional rotors which employ blades arranged in a single plane, stacked rotors place blades in multiple planes.

According to the results of their study, stacked rotors with equally spaced rotor blades produced the lowest noise level, around the same level as that of a traditional rotor.

By investigating different values of axial spacing, Army researchers believe that they may uncover a stacked rotor configuration that produces lower noise than the conventional rotor.

"I do think that a stacked rotor can be beneficial for eVTOL applications," Jacobellis said. "The added degree of freedom for the design will allow for gains in efficiency and control over the acoustic signature, which has been shown in the results. More investigation is needed, however, to quantify the noise reduction with axial spacing."

ASM Journal editors and staff seek to improve gender equity after analysis shows that women are not only underrepresented but receive more negative outcomes

Highlights:

Researchers analyzed nearly 80,000 manuscript submissions to ASM journals to gather baseline data on gender bias in the publication process.

They found that women are underrepresented in ASM journals.

Studies with women listed as corresponding authors were more likely to be rejected during the first two rounds of editorial review.

Men hold more editorial positions at ASM journals than women.

The analysis will guide new mechanisms to promote gender equity in the publishing process.

Washington, DC - December 1, 2020 - Over the past 6 months, leading scientific societies and journals have been taking a close look at their own publication data to identify biases against women scientists and guide new solutions. This week in mBio, researchers report on the first such study to focus on inclusivity in microbiology.

Patrick Schloss, Ph.D, a microbiologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and Ada Hagan, Ph.D, a former postdoctoral researcher in his lab, led a group of scientists who analyzed 6 years' worth of manuscripts submitted to journals published by the American Society for Microbiology.

They found that ASM journals have a significant representation problem.

The study revealed that the percentage of papers in ASM journals that listed women as senior authors was significantly lower than global and society-level estimates of the percentage of women in the field. In addition, manuscripts that listed women as corresponding authors were rejected after the initial review by an editor or after the first round of peer review by as much as 12 percentage points more often than those authored by men.

"The gender of the author was one of the biggest predictors of whether a manuscript would be editorially rejected," Hagan said.

The study also revealed gender disparities within the editorial ranks of the journals. Between 2012 and 2018, the period of the study, women represented only 17.6% of the Editors-in-Chief of the journals. Additionally, only 28.8% of the group of all editors were women. For comparison, women account for at least half of Ph.D.s in biology, though they represent less than 30% of tenure-track positions in the field.

With more than 40,000 members and 16 peer-reviewed journals, the American Society for Microbiology is one of the largest societies in the life sciences. Schloss is the Chair of the ASM Journals Committee, and Hagan's position was funded by ASM.

Schloss said ASM is committed to promoting and increasing diversity in the field, and scientists have a responsibility to look at all levels of the research process to identify and address biases. The goal of the new study, he said, was to gather baseline data about representation in the publishing process that could be used to inform solutions.

"We cannot improve things unless we know where we are," he said. "It might make people uncomfortable, but it's very important as a community that we figure this out."

The researchers identified nearly 80,000 unique manuscripts submitted to ASM journals between 2012 and 2018. They tracked the papers through the stages of publication and used an algorithm that categorized the gender of authors by first names. (If the algorithm reported a low degree of confidence, then the researcher's gender was classified as "unknown.")

"There won't be any easy fixes to these problems," Schloss said.

However, he said the new analysis can help guide society-level changes that engender a more equitable publishing process. For example: The study authors recommended that journals commit to inclusion and diversity in their mission statement--and support that statement by supporting women and implementing protocols for reporting discrimination. The ASM Journals committee is also taking several steps to improve the representation of Black microbiologists in ASM's journals.

Schloss said scientific societies should also aim for gender parity at leadership levels. Right now, the editorial boards at ASM journals are generally dominated by men. "Ideally, we'd like to have 50% of the masthead be women, and that they handle 50% of the papers," he said. "There's no reason why that can't be a 50-50 population."

Hagan and Schloss point out gender disparities in STEM fields extend beyond the publication process, but that by addressing the new findings, the ASM can build a more welcoming environment.

"We're talking about it a lot more than we used to," Schloss said, "but we still need to do better."

Historically credited as being the first bacterium ever characterized as a plant pathogen, fire blight is a bacterial disease that leads to significant losses of pear and apple. The role of insects in the spread of this disease has been long studied. In a new study, plant pathologists based at Cornell University and Cornell AgriTech take a hypothesis that has been more or less ignored for 100 years and provided support for its validity.

According to first author Matthew Boucher, the study describes a long hypothesized but never experimentally supported transmission mechanism for fire blight. Boucher and colleagues show that flies in an apple orchard can acquire the bacterial agent (Erwinia amylovora) of fire blight from sugary droplets exuding from diseased apple trees and subsequently transmit the bacterium to uninfected shoots so long as those shoots are damaged in some way.

"This transmission mechanism is mechanical, the bacterium does not appear to have a close evolutionary relationship with any given insect and may seem inefficient to an unsuspecting observer," explained Boucher. "However, we show that the massive populations of E. amylovora in the sugary droplets exuding from trees allow flies to acquire enough bacteria for the population to persist in and on flies for as long as seven days in some cases."

Flies can continually shed bacteria over the course of those seven days, resulting in multiple opportunities for a single insect to initiate an infection.

"Demonstrating that bacterial populations can survive within the insect is important because previous research largely discounted E. amylovora survivability within an insect." More research is needed, especially under field conditions, but this is an exciting step toward understanding the diversity of interactions between plants, insects, and phytopathogens.

"We also show that insects do not need to have intimated, co-evolved relationships with plant pathogens to be important agents in the disease cycle. There are only one or two similar pathogens in documented research, but there are likely more out there that need to be studied to advance our knowledge of this end of the disease-vector spectrum," Boucher said when asked what makes his work groundbreaking. "As a collective work, we show the importance of integrating historical literature into modern research and revisiting topics and hypothesis that may not have been technologically feasible to investigate when they were first proposed."

If there is a silver lining in cancer's chaotic biology, it's that the same traits that give cancer cells a growth advantage often present opportunities for sabotaging them.

That's the central idea behind a new research paper published November 23 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Xuejun Jiang, a cell biologist in the Sloan Kettering Institute, and Craig Thompson, President and CEO of Memorial Sloan Kettering. They found that cancer cells often exhibit metabolic changes that make them vulnerable to a particular type of cell death called ferroptosis.

Ferroptosis -- literally, death by iron -- is often triggered by oxidative stress, the buildup in cells of free radicals and other corrosive chemicals that are byproducts of using oxygen to burn fuel for energy. But many cancer cells, which need abundant amounts of energy to grow and divide, have found a way around this problem.

"Genetic mutations that allow cancer cells to cope with oxidative stress make them more resistant to ferroptosis," Dr. Jiang says. "Another way to say this is that without the benefit of those mutations, cancer cells might be very, very sensitive to ferroptosis."

He and his colleagues, including postdoctoral fellows Junmei Yi and Jiajun Zhu, tested this idea by giving mice a combination of drugs -- one that promotes ferroptosis and one that blocks the effect of the mutations. The results of this one-two punch were dramatic.

A Commonly Mutated Pathway

The particular mutations Dr. Jiang and colleagues studied affect a signal-sending pathway called PI3K-AKT-mTOR, which controls metabolism. Mutations in this pathway are among the most common found in cancer. That likely reflects the fact that cancer cells have increased metabolic demands owing to how quickly they reproduce. Cancers with mutations in the PI3K-AKT-mTOR pathway are some of the most difficult to treat.

The team found that tumor cells with these mutations demonstrated a hardy resistance to an experimental ferroptosis-inducing drug that was administered to cells growing in a dish. When the scientists added drugs that block the action of this metabolic pathway to the ferroptosis-inducing drug, the cancer cells died.

Next, they tested whether this same effect would be seen in mouse models of breast and prostate cancers containing these mutations. Indeed, the drug combination resulted in near-complete tumor destruction in the mice.

"These were some of the most significant tumor regressions I've ever seen coming from experiments in my lab," Dr. Jiang says.

He and his collaborators further showed that the way the mutated PI3K-AKT-mTOR pathway protects cancer cells is by increasing the activity of a protein that is involved in making lipids for the cell's outer membrane. These extra lipids help to protect the cells against oxidative stress, and therefore ferroptosis. Blocking PI3K-AKT-mTOR prevents this lipid synthesis and re-sensitizes the cells to ferroptosis.

The new findings complement previous work from the Jiang lab, published in 2019 in the journal Nature. In that paper, Dr. Jiang found the some cancers have mutations that make them more sensitive to ferroptosis, even without administering metabolism-altering drugs. In a sense, the new results represent the flipside of the equation.

"The key point is that many cancers have genetic alterations that can be exploited to trigger ferroptosis and kill the cells. It's an exciting way to think about developing new cancer treatments."

The team has applied for a patent related to this work. Their next step is to test the drug combination in tumor samples obtained from patients being treated at MSK.

CHICAGO --- After recovering from COVID-19, some patients are left with chronic, debilitating pain, numbness or weakness in their hands, feet, arms and legs due to unexplained nerve damage. A new Northwestern Medicine study shows how advanced imaging technology can pinpoint what may have caused patients' nerve damage and help determine the best course of treatment.

"Let's say you have numbness in your fingers. That might actually be due to problems in your neck, elbow or wrist, and the best way to figure it out is with an MRI or ultrasound," said lead author Dr. Swati Deshmukh, assistant professor of radiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a Northwestern Medicine radiologist. "We offer advanced imaging that shows even really, really small nerves, which helps us localize where the problem is, assess the severity and suggest what might be causing it."

This is the first known publication to summarize how these advanced imaging techniques can help physicians identify and treat nerve damage in COVID-19 patients. The study will be published December 1 in the journal Radiology.

TWO NEW CAUSES OF NERVE DAMAGE

Previous research from Northwestern and Shirley Ryan AbilityLab found COVID-19 patients can experience nerve damage after being flipped onto their stomachs (prone positioning) in the ICU as a life-saving measure to help them breathe. This new paper demonstrates how advanced imaging aids this cohort of patients as well as two additional patient cohorts with COVID-19-related nerve damage:

Secondary to an inflammatory immune response that attacked the nerves or

From a hematoma (when blood collects outside of the blood vessels).

"Similar to how the body's immune response attacks the lungs in severe COVID cases, some patients have an immune response that affects their nerves," Deshmukh said. "Another group of patients developed hematomas as a complication from the blood thinners they were treated with when they had COVID."

Deshmukh said she hopes the findings will raise awareness of this imaging technology.

"I have to wonder if there are physicians out there who are seeing these otherwise young, healthy patients, and they don't know exactly what's wrong and they're thinking, 'What am I supposed to do for patients with post-COVID pain and weakness?'" Deshmukh said. "I want physicians and patients to be aware of the diagnostic options available due to recent innovations in technology, and inquire if advanced imaging might be right for them."

HOW THE TECHNOLOGY WORKS

The imaging described in the paper includes ultra-high-resolution ultrasound and MR neurography (MRI of peripheral nerves, which impact the arms and legs). They can help localize where a patient's problem is, show the severity of nerve damage, how many nerves are affected and if the nerve damage also has impacted the muscles.

The advanced ultrasound technology is new, portable, less expensive and can sometimes be even better at detecting nerve damage than MRI, Deshmukh said. Ultrasound also can be performed on patients who are unable to tolerate MR imaging.

GUIDING TREATMENT DECISIONS

If imaging technology discovers nerve damage caused by stretch injury because of prone positioning, Deshmukh said, that patient may be referred to a physician who specializes in rehabilitation or peripheral nerve surgery. If imaging finds nerve damage due to an inflammatory response, the patient may be better served by seeing a neurologist. If imaging reveals nerve damage from a hematoma, blood thinner medications would have to be adjusted immediately and the patient may even have to see a surgeon.

For COVID-19 patients and survivors with neuromuscular complications or "long-hauler" symptoms, imaging can help reveal the problem and guide further treatment.

All patients in the study had tested positive for COVID-19.

When healthcare professionals treat patients suffering from advanced cancers, they usually need to use a combination of different therapies. In addition to cancer surgery, the patients are often treated with radiation therapy, medication, or both.

Medication can be combined, with different drugs acting on different cancer cells. Combinatorial drug therapies often improve the effectiveness of the treatment and can reduce the harmful side-effects if the dosage of individual drugs can be reduced. However, experimental screening of drug combinations is very slow and expensive, and therefore, often fails to discover the full benefits of combination therapy. With the help of a new machine learning method, one could identify best combinations to selectively kill cancer cells with specific genetic or functional makeup.

Researchers at Aalto University, University of Helsinki and the University of Turku in Finland developed a machine learning model that accurately predicts how combinations of different cancer drugs kill various types of cancer cells. The new AI model was trained with a large set of data obtained from previous studies, which had investigated the association between drugs and cancer cells. 'The model learned by the machine is actually a polynomial function familiar from school mathematics, but a very complex one,' says Professor Juho Rousu from Aalto University.

The research results were published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications, demonstrating that the model found associations between drugs and cancer cells that were not observed previously. 'The model gives very accurate results. For example, the values ??of the so-called correlation coefficient were more than 0.9 in our experiments, which points to excellent reliability,' says Professor Rousu. In experimental measurements, a correlation coefficient of 0.8-0.9 is considered reliable.

The model accurately predicts how a drug combination selectively inhibits particular cancer cells when the effect of the drug combination on that type of cancer has not been previously tested. 'This will help cancer researchers to prioritize which drug combinations to choose from thousands of options for further research,' says researcher Tero Aittokallio from the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM) at the University of Helsinki.

The same machine learning approach could be used for non-cancerous diseases. In this case, the model would have to be re-taught with data related to that disease. For example, the model could be used to study how different combinations of antibiotics affect bacterial infections or how effectively different combinations of drugs kill cells that have been infected by the SARS-Cov-2 coronavirus.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- An inexpensive, FDA-approved drug -- cholestyramine -- taken in conjunction with an antibiotic prevents the antibiotic from driving antimicrobial resistance, according to new research by scientists at Penn State and the University of Michigan. The team's findings appear today (Dec. 1) in the journal eLife.

"Antimicrobial resistance is a serious problem that has led to people dying from common bacterial infections," said Andrew Read, Evan Pugh Professor of Biology and Entomology and director of the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, Penn State. "Many of our most important antibiotics are failing, and we are beginning to run out of options. We have created a therapy that may help in the fight against antimicrobial resistance, an 'anti-antibiotic' that allows antibiotic treatment without driving the evolution and onward transmission of resistance."

According to Valerie Morley, postdoctoral scholar in the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, Penn State, an important cause of antibiotic-resistant infections in healthcare settings is vancomycin-resistant [VR] Enterococcus faecium.

"E. faecium is an opportunistic pathogen that colonizes the human gastrointestinal tract and spreads via fecal-oral transmission," she said. "The bacterium is asymptomatic in the gut but can cause serious infections, such as sepsis and endocarditis, when introduced to sites like the bloodstream or the spinal cord."

Morley noted that daptomycin is one of the few remaining antibiotics to treat VR E. faecium infection, yet VR E. faecium is quickly becoming resistant to daptomycin as well. Daptomycin is administered intravenously to treat infections caused by VR E. faecium. The antibiotic is mostly eliminated by the kidneys, but 5-10% of the dose enters the intestines, where it can drive the evolution of resistance.

To investigate whether systemic daptomycin treatment does, indeed, drive an increase in daptomycin-resistant VR E. faecium, the team inoculated mice orally with different strains of daptomycin-susceptible VR E. faecium. Beginning one day after inoculation, the researchers gave the mice daily doses of either subcutaneous daptomycin, oral daptomycin or a control mock injection for five days. The team used a range of doses and routes of administration, including those that would be similar to clinical human doses, to maximize the likelihood of observing resistance emergence. Next, they collected fecal samples from the mice to measure the extent of VR E. faecium shedding into the environment and to determine daptomycin susceptibility of the E. faecium bacteria that were present in the feces.

The researchers found that only the highest doses of daptomycin consistently reduced fecal VR E. faecium below the level of detection, whereas lower doses resulted in VR E. faecium shedding. From the bacteria that were shed, the team found that one strain acquired a mutation in a gene that had previously been described in association with daptomycin resistance, while another acquired several mutations that had not previously been associated with daptomycin resistance.

"Our experiments show that daptomycin resistance can emerge in E. faecium that has colonized the GI tract, and that this resistance can arise through a variety of genetic mutations," said Morley.

The team also observed that daptomycin-resistant bacteria were shed even when the daptomycin was administered subcutaneously.

Finally, the team investigated whether the orally administered adjuvant cholestyramine -- an FDA-approved bile-acid sequestrant -- could reduce daptomycin activity in the GI tract and prevent the emergence of daptomycin-resistant E. faecium in the gut. They found that cholestyramine reduced fecal shedding of daptomycin-resistant VR E. faecium in daptomycin-treated mice by up to 80-fold.

"We have shown that cholestyramine binds the antibiotic daptomycin and can function as an 'anti-antibiotic' to prevent systemically administered daptomycin from reaching the gut," said Read.

Amit Pai, professor and chair of the Department of Clinical Pharmacy, University of Michigan, noted that no new strategies have been developed to reduce antimicrobial resistance beyond the use of combination therapy, the development of vaccines for upper and lower respiratory tract infections and simply reducing the unnecessary use of antibiotics.

"These are blunt instruments for antimicrobial resistance reduction at the population level but do not readily translate to an intervention that can be used in individuals," said Pai. "Reducing selective antibiotic pressure on bacteria that reside in the colon is a potential individual-level strategy that deserves greater attention."