Culture

A new study from UBC researchers finds that teens, especially girls, have better mental health when they spend more time taking part in extracurricular activities, like sports and art, and less time in front of screens.

The study, published in the journal Preventive Medicine, found that spending less than two hours per day of recreational screen time (such as browsing the internet, playing video games, and using social media) was associated with higher levels of life satisfaction and optimism, and lower levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms, especially among girls, the researchers found. Similarly, extracurricular participation was associated with better mental health outcomes.

"Although we conducted this study before the COVID-19 pandemic, the findings are especially relevant now when teens may be spending more time in front of screens in their free time if access to extracurricular activities, like sports and arts programs is restricted due to COVID-19," says the study's lead author Eva Oberle, assistant professor with the Human Early Learning Partnership in the UBC school of population and public health. "Our findings highlight extracurricular activities as an asset for teens' mental wellbeing. Finding safe ways for children and teens to continue to participate in these activities during current times may be a way to reduce screen time and promote mental health and wellbeing."

Data for this study was drawn from a population-level survey involving 28,712 Grade 7 students from 365 schools in 27 school districts across B.C. The researchers examined recreational screen time such as playing video games, watching television, browsing the internet, as well as participating in outdoor extracurricular activities such as sport and art programs after school. They then compared its association with positive and negative mental health indicators.

Highlights of the study's findings include the following:

Adolescents who participated in extracurricular activities were significantly less likely to engage in recreational screen-based activities for two or more hours after school

Taking part in extracurricular activities was associated with higher levels of life satisfaction and optimism, and lower levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms

Longer screen time (more than two hours a day) was associated with lower levels of life satisfaction and optimism, and higher levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms

Differences among boys and girls, with longer screen time negatively affecting girls' mental health more significantly than boys

Among both boys and girls, however, mental health was strongest when teens both participated in extracurricular activities and spent less than two hours on screen time

Oberle says further research is needed to examine why the negative effects of screen time were more detrimental for girls than for boys. She also hopes to focus future research on the effects of different types of screen time.

"We do know that some forms of screen time can be beneficial, like maintaining connections with friends and family members online if we cannot see them in person, but there are other types of screen time that can be quite harmful," she says. "There are many nuances that are not well understood yet and that are important to explore."

The fossil remains of several small mammals discovered in tightly packed clusters in western Montana provide the earliest evidence of social behavior in mammals, according to a new study co-authored by a Yale scientist.

The fossils, which are about 75.5 million years old but exquisitely preserved, offer a rare glimpse into mammalian behavior during the Late Cretaceous Period when dinosaurs dominated, and indicate that mammals developed sociality much earlier than previously thought, said Eric Sargis, professor of anthropology in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and a co-author of the study.

The findings were published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

"It's an exceptional set of fossils -- the most complete and well-preserved mammal specimens from the Mesozoic Era ever discovered in North America," said Sargis, curator of mammalogy and vertebrate paleontology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

"They provide a wealth of information about how these animals lived. They tell us that they burrowed and nested together. It's multiple mature adults and subadults congregating, which we'd never seen before from this period."

Excavated from Egg Mountain in Montana --a well-known dinosaur nesting site -- the fossils include skulls or skeletons of at least 22 individuals of Filikomys primaevus, a newly named genus of multituberculate. The small mammal, which was omnivorous or herbivorous, was as abundant in the Mesozoic Era as rodents are today. (The genus name translates to "neighborly mouse.") Multituberculates existed for more than 130 million years from the Middle Jurassic to the late Eocene epoch, the longest lineage of any mammal. The fossils were discovered in groups of two to five specimens. At least 13 of the specimens were located in the same rock layer within a 344 square-foot area, a space smaller than an average-sized studio apartment.

"These fossils are game changers," said Gregory Wilson Mantilla, professor of biology at the University of Washington, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture in Seattle, and the study's senior author. "As paleontologists working to reconstruct the biology of mammals from this time period, we're usually stuck staring at individual teeth and maybe a jaw that rolled down a river, but here we have multiple, near complete skulls and skeletons preserved in the exact place where the animals lived. We can now credibly look at how mammals really interacted with dinosaurs and other animals that lived at this time."

The researchers found no evidence that the fossils had accumulated through some natural phenomena, such as by being transported by a river, or that they were deposited by predators. The specimens were extracted from suspected burrows where the animals had lived. The bones show no signs of bite marks from predation, and the skeletons are too complete and well-preserved to have been moved by water or accumulated on the surface, according to the study.

An analysis of the specimens' teeth -- the level of wear and whether they had fully erupted into the oral cavity -- and their skeletons -- the degree of fusion in cranial and long bones -- showed that the individuals were either mature adults or subadults, not nursing infants. The groupings of multiple mature adults and subadults strongly suggests social behavior, Sargis said.

Social behavior occurs in about half of today's placental mammals, which bear live young that are nourished in the mother's uterus into late stages of development. Some marsupials, such as kangaroos, also behave socially. The trait was thought to have evolved following the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction that killed off most dinosaur species about 66 million years ago, but the study shows that sociality occurred earlier than that, the researchers concluded.

"Because humans are such social animals, we tend to think that sociality is somehow unique to us, or at least to our close evolutionary relatives, but now we can see that social behavior goes way further back in the mammalian family tree," said Luke Weaver, the study's lead author and a graduate student in biology at the University of Washington in Seattle. "Multituberculates are one of the most ancient mammal groups, and they've been extinct for 35 million years, yet in the Late Cretaceous they were apparently interacting in groups similar to what you would see in modern-day ground squirrels."

The fossils also provide the earliest evidence of burrowing behavior in multituberculates, the study states. The skeletons indicate that F. primaevus could move its shoulders, elbows, and paws similarly to today's burrowing species, such as chipmunks. The researchers found that its hips and knees had flexibility adapted for maneuvering in tight, confined spaces, such as burrows, rather than running on open ground.

Researchers from the South Asia Institute and the Heidelberg Center for the Environment of Ruperto Carola investigated the causes of a glacial lake outburst with subsequent flooding in the Ladakh region of India. In order to frame the case study in a larger picture, the research team led by geographer Prof. Dr Marcus Nüsser used satellite images to create a comprehensive survey of glacial lakes for the entire Trans-Himalyan region of Ladakh. They were able to identify changes in the extent and number of glacial lakes over a 50-year period, including previously undocumented floods. This analysis allows them to better assess the future risk of such events, known as glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs).

"In the wake of global glacier shrinkage caused by climate change, the danger from glacial lake outburst floods is seen as an increasingly pressing problem," explains Prof. Nüsser of the South Asia Institute. An event like this unleashes huge amounts of water. Flash floods, for example, can wreak havoc on villages, agricultural areas, and infrastructure. To find out more about such events, the Heidelberg researchers studied a glacial lake outburst flood in Ladakh that destroyed houses, fields, and bridges in the village of Gya in August of 2014. Studies of the glacial lake, which is situated at 5,300 m above sea level, revealed a drastic short-tem lake level rise prior to the GLOF.

The cause, as the scientists discovered, was a "previously little-known mechanism". "Increased glacial melting caused the lake level to rise quite rapidly. Instead of resulting in spillover, however, the thawing ice cores in the moraine, i.e. the glacier's debris field, drained through subsurface tunnels without disturbing the moraine's surface," states Nüsser. In addition to conducting field surveys, the scientists also interviewed the locals about their recollections of the GLOF event. On the basis of satellite images, the team additionally studied the evolution of the glacial lake since the 1960s in order to reconstruct possible GLOF events.

"The high temporal and high spatial remote sensing imagery from satellites supported by field surveys will allow us to better assess the possible risk of future outbursts in this region," adds the Heidelberg geographer. In light of recurring GLOFs, the new inventory can help us "re-evaluate the hazards, identify vulnerable locations, and develop possible adaptation measures," continues Nüsser. After the flood in Gya, for example, concrete walls were constructed along the undercut bank as a flood protection measure to safeguard the villages and fields from future floods.

DALLAS - Nov. 2, 2020 - An autoimmune side effect of immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) drugs could signal improved control of kidney cancer, according to a new study by researchers in UT Southwestern's Kidney Cancer Program (KCP).

The study, published today in the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer, may have broad implications for patients being treated with ICIs, a type of immunotherapy that is used against a large number of cancers, including lung, breast, liver, and cervical.

Renal cell carcinoma, the most common type of kidney cancer, is the ninth leading cause of cancer in the U.S. Once the cancer has spread to other organs, or metastasized, the survival rate averages 12 percent at five years.

With the advent of ICIs, kidney cancer survival rates are improving. However, only a fraction of patients respond to ICIs - and who will respond is unpredictable. ICIs disable cloaking mechanisms put in place by tumors to evade killing by immune cells. But taking down these cloaking mechanisms also increases the chances that the immune system will turn against the body, causing autoimmune side effects.

KCP investigators hypothesize that kidney cancer patients whose immune system attacked their kidneys may be more likely to benefit from ICIs. Using Kidney Cancer Explorer, a proprietary tool that extracts information from electronic health records, investigators identified metastatic kidney cancer patients treated with ICIs between 2014 and 2018. Using this tool, they analyzed thousands of laboratory test results to identify patients whose kidney function became impaired. Out of 177 patients, they found 36 such patients.

In three of the 36 patients, the impairment was due to an immune-mediated attack. A fourth more recent patient was also identified. All four patients developed acute interstitial nephritis (AIN), an autoimmune condition in which immune cells attack kidney cells, causing inflammation and swelling. While ICIs induce responses in the cancer in up to 40 percent of patients, in this case all four patients with AIN had a response.

"For 100 percent of patients to respond is quite significant," says Roy Elias, M.D., assistant instructor of internal medicine and co-first author of the study. "If a patient develops AIN, it is a sign that the treatment may be working."

This is not the first time that a particular autoimmune effect has been linked to increased response rates to ICIs, says James Brugarolas, M.D., Ph.D., professor of internal medicine and director of the Kidney Cancer Program. In fact, patients with melanoma who developed vitiligo, a condition in which skin pigment cells are killed by immune cells, also had higher chances of response.

Upon identifying a second example of an immune attack to the tissue of origin associated with a favorable cancer response, KCP investigators propose that this finding may be generalizable to other tumor types.

"All cancer cells start out as normal cells," says Brugarolas. "Even after turning malignant, they retain some of their original traits. Thus, an attack against the tissue of origin may signal a higher chance that the immune system will also recognize and attack the cancer."

Further study will be needed to determine whether positive outcomes could be generalizable to patients with other cancers who are experiencing similar immune attacks against the cell of origin of the cancer.

Researchers from ITQB NOVA, in collaboration with the Institut Pasteur in Paris, have shed light on the mechanisms that allow Clostridioides difficile, a pathogen that can only grow in oxygen-free environments, to be able to survive low oxygen levels. C. difficile is a major cause of intestinal problems associated with the use of antibiotics, causing an estimated number of 124k cases per year in the EU, costing on average 5k€ per patient, as a direct consequence of healthcare-associated contagion. Particularly pathogenic varieties of C. difficile are an important cause of high prevalence infections in health care environments and will keep hindering the ideal use of antimicrobial therapy unless these mechanisms are understood more rapidly than these organisms evolve.

A healthy human gut is generally regarded as mainly free of oxygen but, in reality, there are varying levels of oxygen along the gastrointestinal tract, which poses a challenge to anaerobic organisms of the human microbiome, such as C. difficile. In organisms similar to this bacterium, two families of enzymes, flavodiiron proteins and rubrerythrins, have been shown to play an important role in protection against oxidative stress.

"Little was known about the actual proteins involved in the ability of C. difficile to tolerate O2, and our studies have demonstrated a key role of flavodiiron proteins and rubrerythrins proteins in providing C. difficile with the ability to grow in conditions such as those encountered in the colon", says Miguel Teixeira, head of the Functional Biochemistry of Metalloenzymes Lab.

This finding led the ITQB NOVA team, along with the I. Martin- Verstreaet Lab at Institut Pasteur, to develop a comprehensive study on four of these types of proteins. It had been previously established that a flavodiiron protein is able to reduce both oxygen and hydrogen peroxide, and this study confirmed the same for two types of rubrerythrins proteins. In a particular mutant strain of C. difficile, inactivation of both rubrerythrins led to the bacteria not growing at an oxygen level above 0.1%, a significant difference from the bacteria's usual resistance, of up to 0.4% O2.

By demonstrating that flavodiiron and reverse rubrerythrin proteins are essential in C. difficile's ability to tolerate damage to its cells in the presence of oxygen, the two teams of researchers have managed a significant step towards better understanding its mechanisms of resistance. The researchers will now move on to explore other survival mechanisms of these bacteria.

NEW YORK (November 2, 2020) -- More than 700 studies, including 250 international abstracts, highlighting worldwide progress in preventing and controlling healthcare-associated infections and addressing antibiotic resistance were published today as part of the proceedings from the Sixth Decennial International Conference on Healthcare-Associated Infections. The Sixth Decennial, a conference co-hosted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, was cancelled in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic. All abstracts accepted for the meeting appear in a supplement for the journal Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology.

"While COVID-19 disrupted the plans for sharing the progress of preventing healthcare-associated infections and combating antibiotic resistance over the last decade, it is critical we disseminate, learn from, and promote successes across the world," said Denise Cardo, MD, Director of the Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "Despite existing and emerging threats, safe care must be delivered, and patients must be protected from harm. We can meet this challenge with robust and informed action."

As part of the planning for the conference, coordinated once every 10 years for the past 60 years, the Decennial Program Committee of 25 experts in infectious diseases selected the central theme, Global Solutions to Antibiotic Resistance in Healthcare, to acknowledge the need for coordinated international collaboration in the fight against healthcare-associated infections, including those caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The committee reviewed international advances of the previous decade and future trends in the fields of healthcare epidemiology, infectious diseases, infection prevention, patient safety and antibiotic stewardship. Three key topics emerged:

Innovation - The development of novel prevention tools, strategies, diagnostics, and therapeutics has been critical in the progress of infection prevention and addressing the threat of antibiotic resistance. Further innovation related to healthcare technology, practices, policies, and programs are needed to continue to move towards the goal of eliminating HAIs and slowing antibiotic resistance.

Data for Action - Facilities, states, clinicians, and other stakeholders need data to drive detection and prevention strategies to eliminate healthcare-associated infections and combat antibiotic resistance. Improvements in use of surveillance, epidemiologic, clinical, and laboratory data are critical to help close knowledge gaps and allow for the implementation of effective strategies to provide safe care.

Addressing Antimicrobial Resistance Without Borders - Many factors impact the local and global burden and transmission of antibiotic resistance. To prevent resistant pathogens from spreading within and between healthcare facilities and the environment, constant vigilance and action are needed. Global success in containing spread of healthcare-associated infections and antibiotic resistance will require coordinated responses at the local, regional, and international levels. Public health and healthcare systems must work together to share information to detect and to implement effective practices to prevent infections from occurring and spreading.

"While we have worked to manage, control, and understand the COVID-19 pandemic, we still need to address the constant threat of treatment-resistant infections and our imperative to prevent healthcare-associated infections and foster appropriate use of antimicrobial treatments," said David Henderson, MD, FSHEA, president of SHEA. "This volume of research is invaluable for helping us identify how best to move the field ahead to deliver safer healthcare for all."

The meeting was planned in collaboration with the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC) and the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA).

To access the Decennial 2020 supplement to Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology, go to https://bit.ly/3mLRRhm

For farmers in rural Zambia, payday comes just once a year, at harvest time. This fact impacts nearly every aspect of their lives, but until now researchers hadn't realized the true extent.

Economist Kelsey Jack, an associate professor at UC Santa Barbara, sought to investigate how this extreme seasonality affects farmers' livelihoods, as well as development initiatives aimed at improving their condition. She and her coauthors conducted a two-year experiment in which they offered loans to help families through the months before harvest.

The researchers found that small loans in the lean season led to higher quality of life, more time invested in one's own farm, and greater agricultural output, all of which contributed to higher wages in the labor market. The study, which appears in the American Economic Review, is part of a new wave of research re-evaluating the importance of seasonality in rural agricultural settings.

Jack came to this research topic through her personal experience working with communities in rural Zambia over the past 12 years. She would often ask folks what made their lives harder, and she kept hearing the same story. These farmers rely on rainfall, rather than irrigation, for their crops. So their harvest follows the seasons. This means that all of their income arrives at once, during harvest time in June.

"Imagine if you got your paycheck once a year, and then you had to make that last for the remaining 11 months," Jack said. This leads to what's referred to locally as the hungry season, or lean season, in the months preceding harvest.

When households find themselves low on food and cash, they rely on selling labor in a practice known as ganyu to make ends meet. Instead of working on their own farms, family members work on other people's farms, essentially reallocating labor from poor families to those of better means - though it's not always the same people in these positions from year to year.

When Jack spoke about this with her collaborator Günter Fink at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, he mentioned hearing the same story during his work in the region. They contacted another colleague, Felix Masiye, chair of the economics department at the University of Zambia, who said that while this was a known phenomenon in Zambia, no one had researched it yet. The three decided to validate the farmers' story and quantify its effects.

"This is basically the farmers' paper," said Jack. "They told us to write it and we did. And it turned out to be a really interesting story."

Before even launching this project, the researchers met with communities and conducted a full 1-year pilot study across 40 villages. They designed the experiment around the input they received, including loan sizes, interest rates, payment timeframes and so forth. Throughout the project the team worked with village leadership and the district agricultural office, and had their proposal evaluated by institutional review boards in both the United States and Zambia.

The experiment consisted of a large randomized control trial with 175 villages in Zambia's Chipata District. It essentially spanned the whole district, Jack said. The project lasted two years and comprised over 3,100 farmers.

The researchers randomly assigned participants to three groups: a control group in which business proceeded as usual, a group that received cash loans, and a group that received loans in the form of maize. The loans were designed to feed a family of four for four months and were issued at the start of the lean season in January, with payments due in July, after harvest.

"They were designed to coincide with people's actual income flows," Jack said. She contrasted this with most lending and microfinance in rural areas, which doesn't account for the seasonality of income.

The project provided loans to around 2,000 families the first year and about 1,500 the second year. Some of the households were assigned to different groups in the second year to measure how long the effect of the loan persisted.

In addition to collecting data on metrics like crop yield, ganyu wages and default rates, the team conducted thousands of surveys over the course of the study to learn about behaviors like consumption and labor.

Overall, the results affirmed the importance of seasonal variability to the livelihoods of rural farmers and the impact of any economic interventions. "Transferring money to a rural agricultural family during the hungry season is a lot more valuable to that family than transferring money at harvest time," Jack said.

The experiment's most striking result was simply how many people took the loan. "The take-up rates that we saw were absolutely astounding," Jack exclaimed. "I don't think there's an analogue for it in any kind of lending intervention."

A full 98% of eligible households took the loan the first year, and more surprisingly, the second year as well. "If the only measure for whether this intervention helped people was whether they wanted it again, that alone would be enough to say people were better off," Jack stated.

For the most part farmers were able to repay their loans. Only 5% of families defaulted in the first year, though this rose a bit to around 15% in year two. Though she can't be certain, Jack suspects poorer growing conditions in the second year may have contributed to this increase.

Of course, loan uptake was far from the only promising sign the researchers saw. Food consumption in the lean season increased by 5.5% for households in the treatment groups, relative to the control, which essentially bridged the difference between the hungry season and the harvest season.

Families that received loans were also able to devote more energy to their own fields. These households reported a 25% drop in total hours working ganyu, which translated to around 60 hours of additional labor on their own land over the course of the season. This saw agricultural production rise by about 9% in households eligible for the loan, which was more than the value of the loan itself.

With fewer people selling their labor, those who did choose to do ganyu saw their wages increase by 17 to 19% in villages where the program was offered. This was buoyed by a 40% rise in hiring from those who received loans, which helped address economic inequality in the community.

What's more, Jack and her colleagues found little difference in the outcomes between families in the cash group versus those who received shipments of maize. It was a welcome finding, since cash is much cheaper to deliver than sacks of corn, though by no means inexpensive.

In fact, a huge challenge the researchers faced was simply the cost of delivering and collecting the small loans. In rural Zambia people are spread out, financial institutions are rudimentary, and infrastructure like roads are underdeveloped.

"If it was profitable to get these farmers loans then people would be giving them loans," Jack said. "But loans for things like food, school fees, and other basic needs just don't exist at reasonable interest rates."

To account for the large transaction costs, a lender could simply increase the size of their loans. That way the same interest rate yields more money to cover the fixed costs. But according to Jack, most families don't want to take on the burden of a large loan.

The alternative is to charge higher interest on small loans. Interest rates for the loans in the study were 4.5% per month over the course of half a year, which worked out to a 30% interest rate over the six-month loan. This is steep compared to most lenders in countries like the United States; however, it was vastly lower than the 40-100% monthly interest rates otherwise available in these communities.

Several other factors contribute to these sky-high interest rates in addition to the transaction costs, including high risks and the difficulty of enforcing contracts. What's more, the low availability of creditors makes it essentially a lender's market. Economists continue to search for solutions to these challenges.

Until recently, economists had largely written off seasonality as an important factor in rural development, Jack explained. But the results of this study underscore how everything -- from grain prices to wages to labor allocation -- fluctuates around the fact that everyone is poorer at one time of year and better off at another.

"As a result, there are potentially large gains for interventions that help people smooth their very infrequent income over the rest of the year," she said. These can take many forms in addition to loans, from irrigation and new crops to bank accounts and farmer cooperatives -- basically anything that helps smooth out resources or enables income to arrive more frequently.

The upshot is that governments and NGOs can increase their impact by incorporating seasonality into their interventions. Making better use of resources is particularly critical in light of budget cuts and economic hardships caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In fact, many of Jack's current projects have been disrupted by the pandemic, including another randomized control trial that sought to build on the understanding gleaned from this experiment. She hopes to resume these studies, as well as discussions with different governments, as conditions improve.

Nevertheless, this study has provided a wealth of insights in its own right. "Crucially, the value of a dollar depends a lot on how many dollars you have," Jack said, "so you want to direct assistance to those times of the year when they will be most helpful."

Vitamin D is a critical nutrient and has many important functions in the body. A mother’s vitamin D supply is passed to her baby in utero and helps regulate processes including brain development. A study published today in The Journal of Nutrition showed that mothers’ vitamin D levels during pregnancy were associated with their children’s IQ, suggesting that higher vitamin D levels in pregnancy may lead to greater childhood IQ scores. The study also identified significantly lower levels of vitamin D levels among Black pregnant women.

Melissa Melough, the lead author of the study and research scientist in the Department of Child Health, Behavior, and Development at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, says vitamin D deficiency is common among the general population as well as pregnant women, but notes that Black women are at greater risk. Melough says she hopes the study will help health care providers address disparities among women of color and those who are at higher risk for vitamin D deficiency.

“Melanin pigment protects the skin against sun damage, but by blocking UV rays, melanin also reduces vitamin D production in the skin. Because of this, we weren’t surprised to see high rates of vitamin D deficiency among Black pregnant women in our study. Even though many pregnant women take a prenatal vitamin, this may not correct an existing vitamin D deficiency,” Melough said. “I hope our work brings greater awareness to this problem, shows the long-lasting implications of prenatal vitamin D for the child and their neurocognitive development, and highlights that there are certain groups providers should be paying closer attention to. Wide-spread testing of vitamin D levels is not generally recommended, but I think health care providers should be looking out for those who are at higher risk, including Black women.”

Addressing disparities

According to Melough, as many as 80% of Black pregnant women in the U.S. may be deficient in vitamin D. Of the women who participated in the study, approximately 46% of the mothers were deficient in vitamin D during their pregnancy, and vitamin D levels were lower among Black women compared to White women.

Melough and her co-authors used data from a cohort in Tennessee called the Conditions Affecting Neurocognitive Development and Learning in Early Childhood (CANDLE) study. CANDLE researchers recruited pregnant women to join the study starting in 2006 and collected information over time about their children’s health and development.

After controlling for several other factors related to IQ, higher vitamin D levels in pregnancy were associated with higher IQ in children ages 4 to 6 years old. Although observational studies like this one cannot prove causation, Melough believes her findings have important implications and warrant further research.

Vitamin D deficiency

“Vitamin D deficiency is quite prevalent,” Melough said. “The good news is there is a relatively easy solution. It can be difficult to get adequate vitamin D through diet, and not everyone can make up for this gap through sun exposure, so a good solution is to take a supplement.”

The recommended daily intake of vitamin D is 600 international units (IU). On average, Americans consume less than 200 IU in their diet, and so if people aren’t making up that gap through sun exposure or supplementation, Melough says people will probably become deficient. Foods that contain higher levels of vitamin D include fatty fish, eggs and fortified sources like cow’s milk and breakfast cereals. However, Melough notes that vitamin D is one of the most difficult nutrients to get in adequate amounts from our diets.

Additional research is needed to determine the optimal levels of vitamin D in pregnancy, but Melough hopes this study will help to develop nutritional recommendations for pregnant women. Especially among Black women and those at high risk for vitamin D deficiency, nutritional supplementation and screening may be an impactful strategy for reducing health disparities.

Key takeaways

Melough says there are three key takeaways from the study:

Vitamin D deficiency is common during pregnancy, and Black women are at greater risk because melanin pigment in the skin reduces production of vitamin D
Higher vitamin D levels among mothers during pregnancy may promote brain development and lead to higher childhood IQ scores
Screening and nutritional supplementation may correct vitamin D deficiency for those at high risk and promote cognitive function in offspring

“I want people to know that it’s a common problem and can affect children’s development,” Melough said. “Vitamin D deficiency can occur even if you eat a healthy diet. Sometimes it’s related to our lifestyles, skin pigmentation or other factors outside of our control.”

Predicting influenza outbreaks just got a little easier, thanks to a new A.I.-powered forecasting tool developed by researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology.

By incorporating location data, the A.I. system is able to outperform other state-of-the-art forecasting methods, delivering up to an 11% increase in accuracy and predicting influenza outbreaks up to 15 weeks in advance.

Past forecasting tools have sought to spot patterns by studying the way infection rates change over time but Yue Ning, who led the work at Stevens, and her team used a graph neural network to encode flu infections as interconnected regional clusters. That allows their algorithm to tease out patterns in the way influenza infections flow from one region to another, and also to use patterns spotted in one region to inform its predictions in other locations.

"Capturing the interplay of space and time lets our mechanism identify hidden patterns and predict influenza outbreaks more accurately than ever before," said Ning, an associate professor of computer science. "By enabling better resource allocation and public health planning, this tool will have a big impact on how we cope with influenza outbreaks."

Ning and her team trained their A.I. tool using real-world state and regional data from the U.S. and Japan, then tested its forecasts against historical flu data. Other models can use past data to forecast flu outbreaks a week or two in advance, but incorporating location data allows far more robust predictions over a period of several months. Their work is reported in the Oct. 19 - 23 Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management.

"Our model is also extremely transparent -- where other A.I. forecasts use 'black box' algorithms, we're able to explain why our system has made specific predictions, and how it thinks outbreaks in different locations are impacting one another," Ning explained.

In the future, similar techniques could also be used to predict waves of COVID-19 infections. Since COVID-19 is a novel virus, there's no historical data with which to train an A.I. algorithm; still, Ning pointed out, vast amounts of location-coded COVID-19 data are now being collected on a daily basis. "That could allow us to train algorithms more quickly as we continue to study the COVID-19 pandemic," Ning said.

Ning is now working to improve her influenza-forecasting algorithm by incorporating new data sources. One key challenge is figuring out how to account for public health interventions such as vaccination education, mask-wearing and social distancing. "It's complicated, because health policies are enacted in response to outbreak severity, but also shape the course of those outbreaks," Ning explained. "We need more research to learn about how health policies and pandemics interact."

Another challenge is identifying which data genuinely predicts flu outbreaks, and which is just noise. Ning's team found that flight traffic patterns don't usefully predict regional flu outbreaks, for instance, but that weather data was more promising. "We're also constrained by the information that's publicly available," Ning said. "Having location-coded data on vaccination rates would be very helpful, but sourcing that information isn't easy."

So far, the A.I. tool hasn't been used in real-world health planning, but Ning said that it's just a matter of time until hospitals and policymakers begin using A.I. algorithms to deliver more robust responses to flu outbreaks. "Our algorithm will keep learning and improving as we collect new data, allowing us to deliver even more accurate long-term predictions," Ning said. "As we work to cope with future pandemics, these technologies will have a big impact."

A new study led by the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa's Hawai'i Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) revealed that diversity in Hawaiian corals is likely driven by co-evolution between the coral host, the algal symbiont, and the microbial community.

As coral reef ecosystems have rapidly collapsed around the globe over the past few decades, there is widespread concern that corals might not be able to adapt to changing climate conditions, and much of the biodiversity in these ecosystems could be lost before it is studied and understood. Coral reefs are among the most highly biodiverse ecosystems on earth, yet it is not clear what drives speciation and diversification in the ocean, where there are few physical barriers that could separate populations.

The team of researchers used massive amounts of metagenomic sequencing data to try to understand what may be some of the major drivers of adaptation and variation in corals.

"Corals have incredible variation with such a wide range of shapes, sizes, and colors that it's really hard for even the best trained experts to be able to sort out different species," said Zac Forsman, lead author of the study and HIMB assistant researcher. "On top of that, some corals lose their algal symbionts, turning stark white or 'bleached' and die during marine heatwaves, while a similar looking coral right next to it seems fine. We wanted to try to better understand what might be driving some of this incredible variation that you see on a typical coral reef."

Forsman and colleagues examined genetic relationships within the coral genus Porites, which forms the foundation and builds many coral reefs around the world. They were able to identify genes from the coral, algal symbionts, and bacteria that were most strongly associated with coral bleaching and other factors such as the shape (morphology) of the coral colony. They found relatively few genes associated with bleaching, but many associated with distance from shore, and colony morphologies that dominate different habitats.

"We sought out to better understand coral bleaching and place it in the context of other sources of variation in a coral species complex. Unexpectedly, we found evidence that these corals have adapted and diverged very recently over depth and distance from shore. The algal symbionts and microbes were also in the process of diverging, implying that co-evolution is involved. It's like we caught them in the act of adaptation and speciation."

"These corals have more complex patterns of variation related to habitat than we could have imagined and learning about how corals have diversified over various habitats can teach us about how they might adapt in the future," he explained. "Since variation is the raw material for adaptation, there is hope for the capacity of these corals to adapt to future conditions, but only if we can slow down the pace of loss."

VANCOUVER, Wash. - Reports of racial discrimination against Asians and Asian-Americans have increased since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, coinciding with an increase in reported negative health symptoms.

That's according to a new paper written by Washington State University researchers recently published in the journal Stigma and Health.

"When COVID hit, we were quickly hearing anecdotes on social media and in traditional media about Asian-Americans experiencing a variety of racial abuse," said Sara Waters, an assistant professor in WSU's Department of Human Development on the Vancouver campus.

To look into the scope of those anecdotes, Waters and her graduate student, Suyeon Lee, a Ph.D. candidate in WSU's Prevention Science program, created a survey. Over 400 people responded, with almost 30% saying they experienced more discrimination since the pandemic started and 40% experienced more health impacts.

"We expected that people who experience racism would report more health issues," Waters said. "But we were surprised by just how much that increased."

The racial discrimination was above and beyond the increased stress levels experienced by the general public, Waters said.

The survey contained questions about four mental and physical health outcomes: anxiety, depressive and physical symptoms, and sleep difficulties. It also asked people to provide specific examples of racial discrimination they faced. Responses ranged from microaggressions, like people glaring or changing lines at a supermarket, to more direct actions.

"Some of those were very hard to read," Waters said. "One person described walking past a group of children who told her to go back to her country and called her 'Coronavirus.' Another was threatened with a knife. Terms like 'kung flu' and 'China virus' were very common in responses. Words used often by people in leadership positions in our country are filtering down."

Experiencing those kinds of abuse impacts a person's mental and physical health in a variety of ways. For physical health, Lee and Waters asked people to rate any increases in symptoms like headaches, backaches, nausea, and other general physical maladies. For sleep difficulties, they used the established Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index.

"Sleep can be an important indicator of mental well-being," Waters said.

One way the survey results showed people can buffer the impact that discrimination has on health is by having social support.

Respondents who reported increased discrimination, but also report having more social support, had fewer health, especially depression, symptoms.

"That's another problem. In this era of quarantine and social distancing, it can be harder to get that beneficial social support," Waters said.

The researchers conducted their survey over a few weeks in May and June, starting roughly two months after the pandemic hit the U.S.

At the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, there were high hopes that hot summer temperatures could reduce its spread. Although summer didn't bring widespread relief, the connection between the weather and COVID-19 continues to be a hot topic.

The link between weather and COVID-19 is complicated. Weather influences the environment in which the coronavirus must survive before infecting a new host. But it also influences human behavior, which moves the virus from one host to another.

Research led by The University of Texas at Austin is adding some clarity on weather's role in COVID-19 infection, with a new study finding that temperature and humidity do not play a significant role in coronavirus spread.

That means whether it's hot or cold outside, the transmission of COVID-19 from one person to the next depends almost entirely on human behavior.

"The effect of weather is low and other features such as mobility have more impact than weather," said Dev Niyogi, a professor at UT Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences and Cockrell School of Engineering who led the research. "In terms of relative importance, weather is one of the last parameters."

The research was published Oct. 26 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

Co-authors are Sajad Jamshidi, a research assistant at Purdue University, and Maryam Baniasad, a doctoral candidate at Ohio State University.

The study defined weather as "equivalent air temperature," which combines temperature and humidity into a single value. The scientists than analyzed how this value tracked with coronavirus spread in different areas from March to July 2020, with their scale ranging from U.S. states and counties, to countries, regions and the world at large.

At the county and state scale, the researchers also investigated the relationship between coronavirus infection and human behavior, using cellphone data to study travel habits.

The study examined human behavior in a general sense and did not attempt to connect it to how the weather may have influenced it. At each scale, the researchers adjusted their analyses so that population differences did not skew results.

Across scales, the scientists found that the weather had nearly no influence. When it was compared with other factors using a statistical metric that breaks down the relative contribution of each factor toward a particular outcome, the weather's relative importance at the county scale was less than 3%, with no indication that a specific type of weather promoted spread over another.

In contrast, the data showed the clear influence of human behavior -- and the outsized influence of individual behaviors. Taking trips and spending time away from home were the top two contributing factors to COVID-19 growth, with a relative importance of about 34% and 26% respectively. The next two important factors were population and urban density, with a relative importance of about 23% and 13% respectively.

"We shouldn't think of the problem as something driven by weather and climate," Jamshidi said. "We should take personal precautions, be aware of the factors in urban exposure."

Baniasad, a biochemist and pharmacist, said that assumptions about how coronavirus would respond with weather are largely informed by studies conducted in laboratory settings on related viruses. She said that this study illustrates the importance of studies that analyze how the coronavirus spreads through human communities.

"When you study something in lab, it's a supervised environment. It's hard to scale up to society," she said. "This was our first motivation to do a more broad study."

Marshall Shepherd, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Georgia who was not part of the study, said that the research offers important insights about weather and coronavirus across scales.

"This important work clarifies some of the innuendo about weather-COVID-19 connections and highlights the need to address science challenges at the appropriate scales," Shepherd said.

Niyogi said that one of the key lessons of the coronavirus pandemic is the importance of analyzing phenomena at the "human scale"-- the scale at which humans live their day-to-day lives. He said that this research is an example of this type of perspective.

"COVID, it is claimed, could change everything," Niyogi said. "We have been looking at weather and climate outlooks as a system that we scale down, down, down and then seeing how it might affect humans. Now, we are flipping the case and upscaling, starting at human exposure scale and then going outwards. This is a new paradigm we will need for studying virus exposure and human environmental modeling systems involving new sensing and AI-like techniques."

DES PLAINES, IL -- A study published in the most recent issue of Academic Emergency Medicine (AEM), journal showed an increased risk of restraint use in Black patients compared with white patients in the emergency setting. The risk was not increased in other races or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity.

The lead author of the single-center study is Dr. Kristina Schnitzer MD, a psychiatrist in the Schizophrenia Clinical and Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. The findings of the study are discussed with two of the authors in episode 43 of AEM Early Access, a FOAMed podcast collaboration between the Academic Emergency Medicine Journal and Brown Emergency Medicine.

The increased risk of restraint was present in Black patients after controlling for other variables, including repeated visits, using a specialized regression technique. Concerning data also showed that 7-8 percent of all patients with psychosis or bipolar disorder, and six percent of all homeless patients were restrained. The study also identifies that there is an increased risk of patients to be restrained who are on public insurance or uninsured.

The study results warrant a careful examination of current practices and potential biases in utilization of restraint in emergency settings.

AUSTIN, Texas -- A new type of soil created by engineers at The University of Texas at Austin can pull water from the air and distribute it to plants, potentially expanding the map of farmable land around the globe to previously inhospitable places and reducing water use in agriculture at a time of growing droughts.

As published in ACS Materials Letters, the team's atmospheric water irrigation system uses super-moisture-absorbent gels to capture water from the air. When the soil is heated to a certain temperature, the gels release the water, making it available to plants. When the soil distributes water, some of it goes back into the air, increasing humidity and making it easier to continue the harvesting cycle.

"Enabling free-standing agriculture in areas where it's hard to build up irrigation and power systems is crucial to liberating crop farming from the complex water supply chain as resources become increasingly scarce," said Guihua Yu, associate professor of materials science in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Each gram of soil can extract approximately 3-4 grams of water. Depending on the crops, approximately 0.1 to 1 kilogram of the soil can provide enough water to irrigate about a square meter of farmland.

The gels in the soil pull water out of the air during cooler, more humid periods at night. Solar heat during the day activates the water-containing gels to release their contents into soil.

The team ran experiments on the roof of the Cockrell School's Engineering Teaching Center building at UT Austin to test the soil. They found that the hydrogel soil was able to retain water better than sandy soils found in dry areas, and it needed far less water to grow plants.

During a four-week experiment, the team found that its soil retained approximately 40% of the water quantity it started with. In contrast, the sandy soil had only 20% of its water left after just one week.

In another experiment, the team planted radishes in both types of soil. The radishes in the hydrogel soil all survived a 14-day period without any irrigation beyond an initial round to make sure the plants took hold. Radishes in the sandy soil were irrigated several times during the first four days of the experiment. None of the radishes in the sandy soil survived more than two days after the initial irrigation period.

"Most soil is good enough to support the growth of plants," said Fei Zhao, a postdoctoral researcher in Yu's research group who led the study with Xingyi Zhou and Panpan Zhang. "It's the water that is the main limitation, so that is why we wanted to develop a soil that can harvest water from the ambient air."

The water-harvesting soil is the first big application of technology that Yu's group has been working on for more than two years. Last year, the team developed the capability to use gel-polymer hybrid materials that work like "super sponges," extracting large amounts of water from the ambient air, cleaning it and quickly releasing it using solar energy.

The researchers envision several other applications of the technology. It could potentially be used for cooling solar panels and data centers. It could expand access to drinking water, either through individual systems for households or larger systems for big groups such as workers or soldiers.

TORONTO, ON - The era of COVID-19 and the need to constantly wash one's hands and sanitize things have brought microbes to new levels of scrutiny, particularly for their impact on an individual's health.

While associations between microbes and their hosts, from the beneficial - think probiotics in yogurt - to the harmful - such as with viruses spread by touch - have long been known, little is known about how microbes evolve and how their evolution affects the health of their hosts.

Now, researchers at the University of Toronto and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found that as microbes evolve and adapt to their unique hosts, they become less beneficial to hosts of other genotypes.

The findings suggest that there is probably not one universally healthy microbiome. Rather, transplanted microbes might need time to adapt to a new host before they bring benefits.

"There is this prevailing idea that the 'survival of the fittest' means that individuals should reap the benefits others have to offer without reciprocating," says Megan Frederickson, associate professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto, and senior author of a study published in Science. "We found that over time, microbes became better adapted to their hosts through the evolution of more, rather than less, cooperation."

The researchers, led by Frederickson and lead author Rebecca Batstone, a graduate of Frederickson's lab and now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, set out to learn what happens to microbes when paired with the same host across multiple generations of that host.

Their first step was to grow several hundred specimens of the clover-like Medicago truncatula plant in a greenhouse, giving each an initial mixture of two strains of the nitrogen-fixing bacteria Ensifer meliloti. Subsequently, they re-planted new seeds into the same pots, and repeated the process for a total of five plant generations.

After a year in the greenhouse, the researchers grew a new batch of plants, and tested the evolved microbes on them, mixing and matching different evolved microbes and different hosts. They compared how well the plants grew and how many associations they formed when they were given the original or evolved microbes, and when they were given microbes that evolved on different hosts.

Finally, the researchers sequenced the entire genomes of original and evolved microbes to see how they differed genetically.

"When we put microbes from the beginning and the end of the experiment back onto hosts, we found they did best with the same hosts they evolved on, suggesting they adapted to their local host," said Batstone. "The derived microbes were more beneficial when they shared an evolutionary history with their host."

The researchers say the finding suggests that evolution might favour cooperation and that scientists might be able to use experimental evolution in a laboratory setting to make microbes that provide more benefits to their hosts.

"When plants or even animals arrive in new environments, perhaps as invasive species or because they are responding to a changing climate, the microbes they encounter may be initially poor partners. But these microbes might rapidly adapt and develop a more beneficial relationship," said Frederickson.