Culture

Men and women aged over 50 can reap similar relative benefits from resistance training, a new study led by UNSW Sydney shows.

While men are likely to gain more absolute muscle size, the gains relative to body size are on par to women's.

The findings, recently published in Sports Medicine, consolidated the results of 30 different resistance training studies involving over 1400 participants. This paper specifically compared the results of men and women aged 50 and over.

"Historically, people tended to believe that men adapted to a greater degree from resistance training compared to women," says Dr Amanda (Mandy) Hagstrom, exercise science lecturer at UNSW Medicine & Health and senior author of the study.

"The differences we found primarily relate to how we look at the data - that is, absolutely or relatively. 'Absolute' looks at the overall gains, while 'relative' is a percentage based on their body size."

The paper is the first systematic review and meta-analysis to examine whether older men and women reap different resistance training results. The findings add to past research on differences in younger adults (18-50), which suggested that men and women can achieve similar relative muscle size gains.

The researchers compared muscle mass and strength gains in 651 older men and 759 older women across the 30 studies. The participants were aged between 50 and 90, with most having no prior resistance training experience.

While 50 is not typically considered an 'older adult', it was selected as the threshold for this study given the potential for menopausal hormone changes to influence resistance training outcomes.

"We found no sex differences in changes in relative muscle size or upper body strength in older adults," says Dr Hagstrom.

"It's important for trainers to understand that women benefit just as much as men in terms of relative improvement compared to their baseline."

Sex-specific workout tips

Older men tended to build bigger muscles when looking at absolute gains, the researchers found. They were also more likely to see greater absolute improvements to upper and lower body strength.

But when it came to relative lower body strength, older women saw the biggest increases.

"Our study sheds light on the possibility that we should be programming differently for older men and women to maximise their training benefits," says Dr Hagstrom.

The team conducted a sub-analysis of the literature to see what resistance training techniques gave the best results for each sex.

"Older men might benefit from higher intensity programs to improve their absolute upper and lower body strength," says Dr Hagstrom.

"But older women might benefit from higher overall exercise volumes - that is, more weekly repetitions - to increase their relative and absolute lower body strength."

Longer training durations could also help increase relative and absolute muscle size (for older men) or absolute upper body strength (for older women).

"Changes to exercise regimes should be made safely and with professional consultation," says Dr Hagstrom.

Strengthening future health

Feeling stronger and having bigger muscles aren't the only benefits to resistance training.

Resistance training can offer other health benefits, like increasing a person's stamina, balance, flexibility and bone density. It has also been shown to help improve sleep, sense of wellbeing, and decrease the risk of injury.

"Strength training is very important and beneficial to our health - especially for older people," says Dr Hagstrom.

"It can help prevent and treat many age-related chronic diseases, like diabetes, heart disease and arthritis."

Dr Hagstrom hopes her future research can identify more best-practice prescriptions for resistance training exercises.

"Learning more about resistance training and its benefits could help improve overall health outcomes for Australia's ageing population," she says.

Social media misinformation can negatively influence people's attitudes about vaccine safety and effectiveness, but credible organizations -- such as research universities and health institutions -- can play a pivotal role in debunking myths with simple tags that link to factual information, University of California, Davis, researchers, suggest in a new study.

Researchers found that fact-check tags located immediately below or near a post can generate more positive attitudes toward vaccines than misinformation alone, and perceived source expertise makes a difference.
"In fact, fact-checking labels from health institutions and research universities were seen as more 'expert' than others, indirectly resulting in more positive attitudes toward vaccines," said Jingwen Zhang, assistant professor of communication and lead author of the study.

The findings were published online Wednesday, Jan. 6, in the journal Preventive Medicine.

Has implications for COVID-19

The data was collected in 2018 -- before the COVID-19 pandemic -- but the study's results could influence public communications about COVID-19 vaccines, researchers said.

"The most important thing I learned from this paper is that fact checking is effective...giving people a simple label can change their attitude," Zhang said. "Secondly, I am calling for more researchers and scientists to engage in public health and science communications. We need to be more proactive. We are not using our power right now."

While there is a strong consensus in the medical community that vaccines are safe, cost-effective and successful in preventing diseases, widespread vaccine hesitancy has resurged in many countries, the study said. The United States has faced issues with lower-than-preferred vaccine participation for influenza and even measles, which medical experts blamed for a 2019 measles outbreak. "Because both individuals and groups can post misinformation, such as false claims about vaccines, social media have played a role in spreading misinformation," Zhang said.

Study authors tested the effects of simple fact-checking labels with 1,198 people nationwide who showed different levels of vaccine hesitancy. In the experiment, researchers used multiple misinformation messages covering five vaccine types and five categories of 13 different fact-checking sources. They avoided any explanations that repeated the false information.

Using a mock twitter account, one post, for example, consisted of a misinformation claim on a specific vaccine and a picture of a vaccine bottle. It read: "According to a US Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) there were 93,000 adverse reactions to last year's Flu Shot including 1,080 deaths & 8,888 hospitalizations."

Researchers then used alternating fact-checking labels from various sources in media, health organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Johns Hopkins University, and algorithms. One read, for example, "This post is falsified. Fact-checked by the Centers For Disease Control. Learn why this is falsified."

The results showed that those exposed to fact-checking labels were more likely to develop more positive attitudes toward vaccines than misinformation alone. Further, the labels' effect was not moderated by vaccine skepticism, the type of vaccine misinformation or political ideology.

"What approaches are most effective at targeting vaccine misinformation on social media among users unlikely to visit fact-checking websites or engage with thorough corrections?" researchers asked in the paper. "This project shows that seeing a fact-checking label immediately below a misinformation post can make viewers more favorable toward vaccines."

She explained that a tag could be as simple as a reply to a misinforming tweet that explains the information is false, and links to credible information at a university or institutional web site.

Ideally, she said, tagging should be done by social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter. She said social media companies are working with entities, such as the WHO, to correct misinformation. "We are headed in the right direction, but more needs to happen," she said.

An international team of researchers led by Swinburne University of Technology has demonstrated the world's fastest and most powerful optical neuromorphic processor for artificial intelligence (AI), which operates faster than 10 trillion operations per second (TeraOPs/s) and is capable of processing ultra-large scale data.

Published in the prestigious journal Nature, this breakthrough represents an enormous leap forward for neural networks and neuromorphic processing in general.

Artificial neural networks, a key form of AI, can 'learn' and perform complex operations with wide applications to computer vision, natural language processing, facial recognition, speech translation, playing strategy games, medical diagnosis and many other areas. Inspired by the biological structure of the brain's visual cortex system, artificial neural networks extract key features of raw data to predict properties and behaviour with unprecedented accuracy and simplicity.

Led by Swinburne's Professor David Moss, Dr Xingyuan (Mike) Xu (Swinburne, Monash University) and Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell from RMIT University, the team achieved an exceptional feat in optical neural networks: dramatically accelerating their computing speed and processing power.

The team demonstrated an optical neuromorphic processor operating more than 1000 times faster than any previous processor, with the system also processing record-sized ultra-large scale images - enough to achieve full facial image recognition, something that other optical processors have been unable to accomplish.

"This breakthrough was achieved with 'optical micro-combs', as was our world-record internet data speed reported in May 2020," says Professor Moss, Director of Swinburne's Optical Sciences Centre and recently named one of Australia's top research leaders in physics and mathematics in the field of optics and photonics by The Australian.

While state-of-the-art electronic processors such as the Google TPU can operate beyond 100 TeraOPs/s, this is done with tens of thousands of parallel processors. In contrast, the optical system demonstrated by the team uses a single processor and was achieved using a new technique of simultaneously interleaving the data in time, wavelength and spatial dimensions through an integrated micro-comb source.

Micro-combs are relatively new devices that act like a rainbow made up of hundreds of high-quality infrared lasers on a single chip. They are much faster, smaller, lighter and cheaper than any other optical source.

"In the 10 years since I co-invented them, integrated micro-comb chips have become enormously important and it is truly exciting to see them enabling these huge advances in information communication and processing. Micro-combs offer enormous promise for us to meet the world's insatiable need for information," Professor Moss says.

"This processor can serve as a universal ultrahigh bandwidth front end for any neuromorphic hardware --optical or electronic based -- bringing massive-data machine learning for real-time ultrahigh bandwidth data within reach," says co-lead author of the study, Dr Xu, Swinburne alum and postdoctoral fellow with the Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering Department at Monash University.

"We're currently getting a sneak-peak of how the processors of the future will look. It's really showing us how dramatically we can scale the power of our processors through the innovative use of microcombs," Dr Xu explains.

RMIT's Professor Mitchell adds, "This technology is applicable to all forms of processing and communications - it will have a huge impact. Long term we hope to realise fully integrated systems on a chip, greatly reducing cost and energy consumption".

"Convolutional neural networks have been central to the artificial intelligence revolution, but existing silicon technology increasingly presents a bottleneck in processing speed and energy efficiency," says key supporter of the research team, Professor Damien Hicks, from Swinburne and the Walter and Elizabeth Hall Institute.

He adds, "This breakthrough shows how a new optical technology makes such networks faster and more efficient and is a profound demonstration of the benefits of cross-disciplinary thinking, in having the inspiration and courage to take an idea from one field and using it to solve a fundamental problem in another."

A systematic review and meta-analysis of international COVID-19 literature, led by UNSW Sydney, has confirmed that while children under five years old were likely to recover from the infection, half of those infected were infants and almost half of the infected under-fives were asymptomatic.

These findings will help to inform future policy and decision-making about potential COVID-19 vaccination for young children and maternal immunisation programs during pregnancy - but the scientists say future research is needed to explore the potential risk of transmission from infants to their mothers, families and other caregivers, and to find out more about whether asymptomatic under-fives can spread the disease.

The collaborative study between researchers from UNSW Sydney, Telethon Kids Institute Perth, The University of Sydney, International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research Bangladesh (icddr,b) and The Royal Veterinary College University of London was published in the journal Vaccine recently.

Senior author Dr Nusrat Homaira, of the Discipline of Paediatrics at UNSW Medicine and Sydney Children's Hospital, is a medically trained respiratory epidemiologist with more than 14 years' experience in the field of paediatric respiratory diseases.

Dr Homaira said the research filled a key knowledge gap on the epidemiology and clinical characteristics of COVID-19 in children under five.

"There have been systematic reviews published for the whole population - including all children aged under 18 years and adult populations - but not specifically on the under-five age group," she said.

"We chose to focus on the under-fives because they are the most at-risk age group for respiratory infections and respiratory infections are one of the most common reasons why children are hospitalised - so, it is important to have a clearer understanding of COVID-19 infection and its severity in children under five.

"Secondly, children often have asymptomatic infection generally and play a significant role in transmission of respiratory infections within the community - which is why immunisation is often targeted at that age group for infections like the flu - so, we wanted to understand all those issues in light of COVID-19."

First wave of COVID-19 investigated

The researchers whittled down an initial shortlist of almost 2000 papers to 65 studies which they examined in their systematic review.

These studies represented 1214 children younger than five years old with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection.

The systematic review showed young children aged less than five years generally developed mild COVID-19 disease and these infections were often acquired through community sources.

The researchers selected 31 of the 65 studies (representing 1181 infected children) for their more detailed meta-analysis.

The 65 studies were conducted in 11 countries - primarily China (49 studies) and the United States (six studies) - and spanned four World Health Organization (WHO) regions: Western Pacific, Pacific American, Eastern Mediterranean and European.

The researchers did not identify any study from the South-East Asian Region (SEARO) which tends to have a higher burden of childhood acute respiratory infections (?ARI)?.

Dr Homaira said the research was current as at 4 June 2020 and covered the first wave of COVID-19 in most countries.

"In our meta-analysis, the pooled estimates showed that among children aged under five years with COVID-19 infection, half were infants (aged less than one year) and like COVID-19 infection in adults, 53 per cent were male," she said.

"In the studies that reported both symptomatic and asymptomatic COVID-19 cases, the pooled prevalence showed 43 per cent of cases were asymptomatic and seven per cent had severe disease that required intensive-care-unit admission.

"Only one death was recorded - a 10-month-old female infant with no underlying medical conditions or no history of preceding exposure to a known COVID-19 case."

Dr Homaira acknowledged the researchers submitted their paper in August and the peer-review process took until December for publication.

"New primary papers have since emerged on COVID-19 in the under-fives but those findings are not dissimilar to what our study has already reported," she said.

Potential risk of COVID-19 vertical transmission

Dr Homaira said the researchers also looked into the important but little understood issue of potential vertical transmission of COVID-19 from pregnant women to their newborns.

"In our findings, of 139 newborns from confirmed COVID-19-infected mothers, five (3.6 per cent) had laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection within several hours to days of birth," she said.

"However, whether the newborns acquired it from their mothers or not was unclear because none of those studies could persuasively claim mother to neonate transmission.

"So, more research is needed to understand if children born to women who have COVID-19 during pregnancy have an increased risk of acquiring the infection and what the long-term outcomes are for newborns with the disease."

Dr Homaira said the potential risk of vertical transmission from mothers to newborns had ramifications for possible COVID-19 vaccination of young children and maternal immunisation programs.

"Vaccination remains one of the most effective public health interventions to prevent transmission of infectious diseases. However, the immature immune system of newborns also makes them unsuitable for many vaccines," she said.

"Maternal immunisation in pregnancy has been proven to be an effective strategy in providing protection to infants, against many vaccine-preventable diseases including whooping cough, tetanus and influenza during the first few months of life.

"When we wrote our paper in July, there was no COVID-19 vaccine available but now several countries have started administering multiple COVID-19 vaccines which are being offered to healthcare workers, people over 80 years old, and residents and staff of nursing homes in the first phase.

"As the vaccine is being rolled out to the whole population and other parts of the world, maternal immunisation could be a viable preventive approach - particularly given we found half of COVID-19 infections in the under-fives were among infants."

Laying the groundwork for future research on under-fives

Dr Homaira said as far as the researchers were aware, their study was the most comprehensive systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature, specifically for children aged under five with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection.

"Our systematic review suggests the prognosis of COVID-19 in this age group aligns with current published research, with more than 90 per cent of children developing mild to moderate disease," she said.

"But our meta-analysis shows almost half of young COVID-19 cases were asymptomatic and half were infants, illustrating the need for ongoing monitoring to better understand the epidemiology, clinical pattern and transmission of COVID-19 in order to develop effective preventive strategies against the disease in young children.

"So, while it's unlikely for COVID-19 to be a severe disease for the under-fives, it's still important for children to be tested if they develop respiratory symptoms and then standard precautions should be followed if they are positive."

A new SFU-led study finds that about half of media stories in early 2020 featuring COVID-19 "preprint" research--research that has not yet been peer-reviewed--accurately framed the studies as being preprints or unverified research.

SFU PhD student Alice Fleerackers, a researcher in the Scholarly Communications Lab, and publishing program professor Juan Pablo Alperin collaborated with an international team of researchers to analyze more than 500 mentions in over 450 stories from digital news outlets covering preprint COVID-19 research. The study was published this week in Health Communication.

Their analysis is based on 100 COVID-19 preprints posted on top-ranked preprint servers medRxiv and bioRxiv from January 1 to April 30, 2020.

"We found that it wasn't just newer, less 'traditional' media outlets, like Medium or Yahoo! News that did not accurately identify the research as preprint or preliminary," Fleerackers says. "Even established publications like The New York Times and The Guardian did not consistently describe the preprints they covered as unreviewed."

The media's coverage of COVID-19 preprints may in part be a reflection of larger pressures facing the scientific community. "The urgency of the pandemic required researchers and journalists to sacrifice the assurances of peer review for more rapid publication," Alperin explains. "Just as researchers are adjusting to the new way of rapidly communicating among each other, so too are journalists figuring out how that greater uncertainty needs to be conveyed to the public."

Fleerackers notes that coverage of preprint research can be helpful to the public. For example, sharing findings about promising prevention strategies as early as possible can save lives. But it can also undermine the public's trust in the media if a preprint is mischaracterized as widely accepted science but the findings are later discredited.

"We saw this with a couple of high profile preprints published at the beginning of the pandemic, for example, which linked tobacco to COVID-19 prevention," she explains. "These studies were highly flawed, but they got a ton of media coverage--sparking unnecessary panic and even encouraging some people to pick up smoking."

The early months of the pandemic offered few examples of best practices to turn to and the science continued to evolve, rapidly changing what was known about the virus and how the public could best protect themselves from becoming infected. Fleerackers adds that reporters covering coronavirus often had little or no expertise in health and science.

"Journalists have not had an easy year. All things considered, I'm impressed with what they've been able to accomplish despite the odds," she says. "And overall, audiences seem to be responding well. Many countries saw a boost in news consumption during the early stages of the pandemic, and trust in journalism has been high."

The small GTPases of the ADP-ribosylation factor (Arf) family are key initiators of various physiological processes including secretion, endocytosis, phagocytosis and signal transduction. Arf family proteins function to mediate recruitment of cytosolic effectors to specific subcellular compartments. This process facilitates Arf effectors to perform cargo recognition, lipid modification or other cellular functions. Blocking the activities of Arf family proteins inhibits secretion of important molecules from the cell and also inhibits cellular uptake of nutrients. Defects in Arfs or their regulatory proteins are related to various inherited diseases, including X-linked intellectual disability (XLID), Joubert syndrome, Bardet-Biedl syndrome and cilia dysfunction. Thus, studying molecular mechanisms of Arf-regulated intracellular activities represents an opportunity to understand these diseases' etiology and develop novel therapeutic strategies.

Arf family proteins cycle between a GDP-bound inactive state and a GTP-bound active state. They have similar structural organizations containing an N-terminal amphipathic helix motif and the switch domains. The switch domains of Arf proteins directly bind their corresponding guanidine nucleotide exchange factors (GEFs), thus enabling Arf proteins to bind GTP. It is generally conceived that membrane recruitment of Arf proteins are initiated by GTP-binding induced conformational changes of Arf proteins.

In addition to this conventional mechanism, Prof Guo and his team discovered that the N-terminal amphipathic motifs of the Golgi-localized Arf family protein, Arfrp1, and the endosome- and plasma membrane-localized Arf family protein, Arl14, are sufficient to determine specific subcellular localizations in a GTP-independent manner. Exchanging the amphipathic helix motifs between these two Arf proteins causes the switch of their localizations. The spatial determination mediated by the Arfrp1 helix requires its binding partner Sys1. In addition, the study indicates that the acetylation of the Arfrp1 helix and the myristoylation of the Arl14 helix are important for the specific subcellular localization. A proposed model represents the membrane recruitment of Arfrp1 and Arl14 is shown in Figure 1.

These study uncovers novel insight into the molecular machinery that regulates membrane association of some Arf proteins, suggesting that the membrane association and activation of some Arf proteins are uncoupled. This study also offers novel short motifs for targeting proteins to specific intracellular localizations.

Microscopy -- Nanoscale commuting

Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, or CNMS, contributed to a groundbreaking experiment published in Science that tracks the real-time transport of individual molecules.

A team led by the University of Graz, Austria, used unique four-probe scanning tunneling microscopy, or STM, to move a single molecule between two independent probes and observe it disappear from one point and instantaneously reappear at the other.

The STM, made available via the CNMS user program, operates under an applied voltage, scanning material surfaces with a sharp probe that can move atoms and molecules by nudging them a few nanometers at a time. This instrument made it possible to send and receive dibromoterfluorene molecules 150 nanometers across a silver surface with unprecedented control.

"The project showcases precision instrument capabilities at the atomic level that open new frontiers in controllable molecules, or molecular machinery, for CNMS users," said ORNL's An-Ping Li.

Media Contact: Ashley Huff, 865.241.6451, huffac@ornl.gov

GIF: https://www.ornl.gov/sites/default/files/2021-01/6mb_gif.gif

Caption: The animation depicts the controlled transport of a single molecule between two scanning tunneling microscope tips in an experiment at ORNL. Credit: Michelle Lehman/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Transportation - Easy on the pedals

Fuel economy can take a tumble when temperatures plummet, according to the Department of Energy's 2021 Fuel Economy Guide. Compiled by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the guide includes several tips to improve a vehicle's fuel performance.

Parking your car in a warmer place, combining trips so that the vehicle is driven with a warm engine, and checking tire pressure regularly can all improve fuel economy. Driving sensibly, observing the speed limit, and limiting idling can also save money year-round.

"Many people think idling to warm up a car will improve fuel economy in cold weather," ORNL's Stacy Davis said.

"However, cars warm up faster when driven, and idling gets zero miles per gallon. So, idle your vehicle as little as possible."

The guide also helps consumers select the most fuel-efficient vehicle to save fuel and money in any weather.

Media Contact: Jennifer Burke, 865.414.6835, burkejj@ornl.gov

Image: https://www.ornl.gov/sites/default/files/2021-01/Transportation%20-%20Easy%20on%20the%20pedals.jpg

Caption: The 2021 Fuel Economy Guide, compiled by ORNL researchers, provides tips for keeping fuel costs down and helps consumers find the most fuel-efficient vehicle. Credit: ORNL/U.S. Dept. of Energy

Manufacturing - Defect detection

Algorithms developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory can greatly enhance X-ray computed tomography, or XCT, images of 3D-printed metal parts, resulting in more accurate, faster scans.

Industrial XCT is gaining popularity as a way to nondestructively inspect and qualify additively manufactured, or AM, parts. But the process is hampered by an effect called beam hardening that can affect the ability of standard algorithms to resolve small defects, such as pores and cracks, in reconstructed images.

To improve the process, ORNL researchers demonstrated a new method using a deep neural network trained on simulated data from computer-aided design models and physics-based information. The method reduces noise and artifacts and produces higher quality images significantly faster than typical algorithms.

"We aim to enhance the resolution and defect detectability in X-ray images which, in turn, will be instrumental for qualification and certification of AM parts," said ORNL's Amir Ziabari.

Media Contact: Stephanie Seay, 865-576-9894, seaysg@ornl.gov

Image: https://www.ornl.gov/sites/default/files/2021-01/Manufacturing%20-%20Defect%20detection%201.jpg

Caption: A standard X-ray CT image of a 3D-printed metal turbine blade shows beam hardening and streaking effects. Credit: Amir Ziabari/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Image: https://www.ornl.gov/sites/default/files/2021-01/Manufacturing%20-%20Defect%20detection%202.jpg

Caption: An X-ray CT image of a 3D-printed metal turbine blade was reconstructed using ORNL's neural network and advanced algorithms. Credit: Amir Ziabari/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Microorganisms are the most abundant and diverse form of life on Earth. However, the vast majority of them remain unknown. Indeed, only a small fraction of the microorganisms of our planet can be cultured under traditional conditions, leaving a world of unculturable organisms out of our scope. This is especially true for bacteria thriving under extreme conditions as the harsh conditions are hardly reproducible in a lab. While some microbial studies have been performed in the Sahara, the Atacama, and the Gibson desert, European arid lands remain poorly studied.

To finally explore the microbial community of some European deserts, researchers from the University of Valencia and the Darwin Bioprospecting Excellence, here studied the bacterial diversity of the semi-arid Tabernas Desert. To this aim, the team developed new bacterial culture approaches.

"Culturomics of the Tabernas desert was the ideal crossroad between a rare, poorly studied environment, and the application of simple, yet powerful culturing techniques including long incubation times, diluted media, and careful colony picking", says Dr Manuel Porcar, group leader at the University of Valencia, president of Darwin Bioprospecting Excellence, and last author of the study.

The researchers experimented with different culture methods to find permissive conditions for some unculturable species. Their strategy lied in combining different media, using serial dilutions of the nutrients (up to a hundred times), and extending incubation time (up to a month). In total, 254 bacterial strains were isolated. Most of the species isolated from the concentrated media were previously described as soil inhabitants or species isolated from other deserts. However, 60% of the strains isolated from the highly diluted media are non-identified and possibly new bacteria species. Besides, playing on incubation times also allowed, after a month, to isolate some oligotrophic strains (slow-growing bacteria living under low nutrient conditions) otherwise difficult to growth under lab conditions.

Altogether, this study highlights the potential of simple strategies to obtain higher microbial diversity from natural samples, especially if taken from extreme environments. But the unexploited bacterial biodiversity of the Tabernas Desert could have impacts well beyond ecology and bacteriology:

"We are currently characterising several of the unidentified bacteria, three of them being new Kineococcus species. I am certain that some bacterial strains produce biotechnologically relevant products. It is just a matter to carry out the right screening", says Porcar.

The asteroid impact 66 million years ago that ushered in a mass extinction and ended the dinosaurs also killed off many of the plants that they relied on for food. Fossil leaf assemblages from Patagonia, Argentina, suggest that vegetation in South America suffered great losses but rebounded quickly, according to an international team of researchers.

"Every mass extinction event is like a reset button, and what happens after that reset depends on which organisms survive and how they shape the biosphere," said Elena Stiles, a doctoral student at the University of Washington who completed the research as part of her master's thesis at Penn State. "All the biodiversity that we observe today is related to the organisms that made it past the last big reset 66 million years ago."

Stiles and her colleagues examined more than 3,500 leaf fossils collected at two sites in Patagonia to identify how many species from the geologic period known as the Cretaceous survived the mass extinction event into the Paleogene period. Although plant families in the region fared well, the scientists found a surprising species-level extinction rate that may have reached as high as 92% in Patagonia, higher than previous studies have estimated for the region.

"There's this idea that the Southern Hemisphere got off easier from the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction than the Northern Hemisphere because we keep finding plant and animal groups that no one thought survived," said Peter Wilf, professor of geosciences at Penn State and associate in the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute. "We went into this study expecting that Patagonia was a refuge, and instead we found a complex story of extinction and rebound."

Researchers from Penn State; the Museo Paleontologico Egidio Feruglio (MEF), Chubut, Argentina; Universidad Nacional del Comahue INIBIOMA, Rio Negro, Argentina; and Cornell University had been collecting the fossils for years from the two sites, in what is now Chubut province. Unlike North America, where the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary is well known from many sites in the western United States, the fossil record from this period is fragmented across the Southern Hemisphere, a result of rapidly changing ancient environments.

"Most of the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary interval known from the Southern Hemisphere is marine," said Ari Iglesias, a researcher at Universidad Nacional del Comahue INIBIOMA. "We were interested in obtaining the continental record, what happened on land. So, in this study we tried to get as close to the K-Pg boundary as possible, and we reached it in a small area in Chubut province. There we found floras right before the K-Pg boundary, or Maastrichtian floras, and right after the K-Pg boundary, so Danian age floras."

The assemblages that the team obtained constitute the most complete collection of late Cretaceous and early Paleogene fossil floras in the Southern Hemisphere, added Iglesias.

The researchers studied the assemblages for survivor pairs -- plants that grew in both the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods -- and found few species-level matches. They then compared their findings to previous pollen and insect herbivory studies from the same area and to North American fossil records. Their study, which is the first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, appears in the journal Paleobiology.

"The 92% extinction estimate we get when we consider fossil leaf species across the K-Pg boundary should be taken as a maximum" Stiles said. "We were surprised to find such high extinction levels compared with the 60% extinction rate seen in North America. Nonetheless, we observed a sharp drop in plant species diversity and a high species-level extinction."

Ecosystem recovery likely took millions of years, added Stiles, which is a small fraction of Earth's nearly 4.5-billion-year history.

Stiles also led a novel morphospace analysis to identify changes in leaf shape from the Cretaceous to the Paleogene, as such changes could provide clues to the kinds of environmental and climatic occurrences that took place across the boundary interval. She studied each leaf fossil for nearly 50 features, including shape, size and venation patterns.

The analysis showed a higher diversity of leaf forms in the Paleogene, which surprised the researchers given the high species-level extinction and drop in number of species at the end of the Cretaceous. They also found an increase in the proportion of leaf shapes typically found in cooler environments, which suggests that climatic cooling occurred after the end-Cretaceous extinction event.

The researchers' findings, combined with those of previous studies, suggest that despite the high species-level extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, South American plant families largely survived and grew more diverse during the Paleogene. Among the survivors were the laurel family, which today includes plants such as bay leaves and avocados, and the rose family, which includes fruit like raspberries and strawberries.

"Plants are often overlooked in these big events in geologic history," Stiles said. "But really, because plants are the primary producers on terrestrial landscapes and sustain all other life forms on Earth, we should be paying closer attention to the plant fossil record. It can tell us how the landscape changed and how those changes affected different groups of organisms."

January 5, 2021 - As anyone living with hay fever can attest, days with high pollen counts can bring attacks of sneezing, nasal congestion and other allergy symptoms. Now, a new study suggests rising pollen levels may also trigger flare-ups of pain and other symptoms in patients with urologic chronic pelvic pain syndrome (UCPPS), reports The Journal of Urology®, Official Journal of the American Urological Association (AUA). The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

"Our study provides evidence to suggest increased pollen counts may trigger symptom flares in people living with UCPPS," comments Siobhan Sutcliffe, PhD, ScM, MHS, of Washington University School of Medicine, St Louis. "If the association with pollen levels is confirmed through future studies, it may help us to understand how flares occur in individuals with urologic chronic pelvic pain, as well as how to prevent or treat these otherwise unpredictable attacks."

Patients with UCPPS experience flares of pelvic or bladder pain and urinary symptoms, which can be frequent and disabling. The cause of UCPPS is unknown, but talking to patients provides some intriguing clues - including the fact that patients with UCPPS report higher than average rates of allergies and asthma.

What's more, some patients find their symptoms are improved when they take allergy medications. Some drugs used for allergy treatment, such as antihistamines and mast cell inhibitors, are also used for treating patients with UCPPS and other chronic pelvic pain diagnoses. If there is a link between UCPPS and allergies, then symptom flares might be more common when pollen counts are higher.

Dr. Sutcliffe and colleagues explored this association using data on patients with UCPPS enrolled in an ongoing study (Multidisciplinary Approach to the Study of Chronic Pelvic Pain, or MAPP). In 290 participants, pollen levels were compared for times when the patients were versus were not having symptom flares. They were part of an overall group of 409 patients followed up with over time to assess the overall relationship between flare rates and pollen levels. Patients were drawn from eight study sites across the United States. Information on UCPPS flares was compared with pollen levels, based on local air quality monitoring data from each study area.

Day-to-day changes in pollen counts were not related to UCPPS flares, either on the day of a flare or the preceding three days. This was the case for all participants and on analysis of those reporting allergies or respiratory tract disorders.

However, when pollen counts rose beyond the medium or high threshold, UCPPS flares significantly increased. One to two days after pollen counts exceeded the "medium" or higher threshold, the odds of a symptom flare increased by 22 percent in all patients with UCPPS, and by 33 percent in those with allergies.

Flare rates also increased in the three weeks after pollen counts exceeded medium or high thresholds, with a significant 23 percent increase in risk for patients with allergies. The results remained about the same on analysis excluding patients who were taking UCPPS medications with anti-allergy effects.

"Our results are consistent with patients reporting that higher pollen counts trigger their flares and with case series and report data suggesting allergy and asthma medications relieve UCPPS symptoms," Dr. Sutcliffe and coauthors write. The findings are also supported by evidence that UCPPS and allergies share common biological factors, i.e., mast cell activation and histamine release. After histamine is released in response to allergens, levels remain elevated in the urine for some time - which might contribute to bladder-related symptoms in UCPPS.

While the findings provide new evidence of a link between allergies and UCPPS, the researchers note some limitations of their study - not all of the observed associations were statistically significant. "If pollen does indeed trigger flares for some patients with urologic chronic pelvic pain, that might have implications for further research and patient care," Dr. Sutcliffe adds. "For example, patients may benefit from taking antihistamines on days with high pollen levels, or from allergy testing and immunotherapy."

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Last month, Japan's Hayabusa2 mission brought home a cache of rocks collected from a near-Earth asteroid called Ryugu. While analysis of those returned samples is just getting underway, researchers are using data from the spacecraft's other instruments to reveal new details about the asteroid's past.

In a study published in Nature Astronomy, researchers offer an explanation for why Ryugu isn't quite as rich in water-bearing minerals as some other asteroids. The study suggests that the ancient parent body from which Ryugu was formed had likely dried out in some kind of heating event before Ryugu came into being, which left Ryugu itself drier than expected.

"One of the things we're trying to understand is the distribution of water in the early solar system, and how that water may have been delivered to Earth," said Ralph Milliken, a planetary scientist at Brown University and study co-author. "Water-bearing asteroids are thought to have played a role in that, so by studying Ryugu up close and returning samples from it, we can better understand the abundance and history of water-bearing minerals on these kinds of asteroids."

One of the reasons Ryugu was chosen as a destination, Milliken says, is that it belongs to a class of asteroids that are dark in color and suspected to have water-bearing minerals and organic compounds. These types of asteroids are believed to be possible parent bodies for dark, water- and carbon-bearing meteorites found on Earth known as carbonaceous chondrites. Those meteorites have been studied in great detail in laboratories around the world for many decades, but it is not possible to determine with certainty which asteroid a given carbonaceous chondrite meteorite may come from.

The Hayabusa2 mission represents the first time a sample from one of these intriguing asteroids has been directly collected and returned to Earth. But observations of Ryugu made by Hayabusa2 as it flew alongside the asteroid suggest it may not to be as water-rich as scientists originally expected. There are several competing ideas for how and when Ryugu may have lost some of its water.

Ryugu is a rubble pile -- a loose conglomeration of rock held together by gravity. Scientists think these asteroids likely form from debris left over when larger and more solid asteroids are broken apart by a large impact event. So it's possible the water signature seen on Ryugu today is all that remains of a previously more water-rich parent asteroid that dried out due a heating event of some kind. But it could also be that Ryugu dried out after a catastrophic disruption and re-formation as a rubble pile. It's also possible that Ryugu had a few close spins past the sun in its past, which could have heated it up and dried out its surface.

The Hayabusa2 spacecraft had equipment aboard that could help scientists to determine which scenario was more likely. During its rendezvous with Ryugu in 2019, Hayabusa2 fired a small projectile into the asteroid's surface. The impact created a small crater and exposed rock buried in the subsurface. Using a near-infrared spectrometer, which is capable of detecting water-bearing minerals, the researchers could then compare the water content of surface rock with that of the subsurface.

The data showed the subsurface water signature to be quite similar to that of the outermost surface. That finding is consistent with the idea that Ryugu's parent body had dried out, rather than the scenario in which Ryugu's surface was dried out by the sun.

"You'd expect high-temperature heating from the sun to happen mostly at the surface and not penetrate too far into the subsurface," Milliken said. "But what we see is that the surface and subsurface are pretty similar and both are relatively poor in water, which brings us back to the idea that it was Ryugu's parent body that had been altered."

More work needs to be done, however, to confirm the finding, the researchers say. For example, the size of the particles excavated from the subsurface could influence the interpretation of the spectrometer measurements.

"The excavated material may have had a smaller grain size than what's on the surface," said Takahiro Hiroi, a senior research associate at Brown and study co-author. "That grain size effect could make it appear darker and redder than its coarser counterpart on the surface. It's hard to rule out that grain-size effect with remote sensing."

Luckily, the mission isn't limited to studying samples remotely. Since Hayabusa2 successfully returned samples to Earth in December, scientists are about to get a much closer look at Ryugu. Some of those samples may soon be coming to the NASA Reflectance Experiment Laboratory (RELAB) at Brown, which is operated by Hiroi and Milliken.

Milliken and Hiroi say they're looking forward to seeing if the laboratory analyses corroborate the team's remote sensing results.

"It's the double-edged sword of sample return," Milliken said. "All of those hypotheses we make using remote sensing data will be tested in the lab. It's super-exciting, but perhaps also a little nerve-wracking. One thing is for certain, we're sure to learn a lot more about the links between meteorites and their parent asteroids."

DURHAM, N.C. -- Self-control, the ability to contain one's own thoughts, feelings and behaviors, and to work toward goals with a plan, is one of the personality traits that makes a child ready for school. And, it turns out, ready for life as well.

In a large study that has tracked a thousand people from birth through age 45 in New Zealand, researchers have determined that people who had higher levels of self-control as children were aging more slowly than their peers at age 45. Their bodies and brains were healthier and biologically younger.

In interviews, the higher self-control group also showed they may be better equipped to handle the health, financial and social challenges of later life as well. The researchers used structured interviews and credit checks to assess financial preparedness. High childhood self-control participants expressed more positive views of aging and felt more satisfied with life in middle age.

"Our population is growing older, and living longer with age-related diseases," said Leah Richmond-Rakerd, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, who is the first author on the study. "It's important to identify ways to help individuals prepare successfully for later-life challenges, and live more years free of disability. We found that self-control in early life may help set people up for healthy aging."

The children with better self-control tended to come from more financially secure families and have higher IQ. However, the findings of slower aging at age 45 with more self-control can be separated from their childhood socio-economic status and IQ. Their analyses showed that self-control was the factor that made a difference.

And childhood is not destiny, the researchers are quick to point out. Some study participants had shifted their self-control levels as adults and had better health outcomes than their childhood assessments would have predicted.

Self-control also can be taught, and the researchers suggest that a societal investment in such training could improve life span and quality of life, not only in childhood, but also perhaps in midlife. There is ample evidence that changing behaviors in midlife (quitting smoking or taking up exercise) leads to improved outcomes.

"Everyone fears an old age that's sickly, poor, and lonely, so aging well requires us to get prepared, physically, financially, and socially," said Terrie Moffitt, the Nannerl O. Keohane Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke, and last author on the paper. "We found people who have used self-control since childhood are far more prepared for aging than their same-age peers."

The study appears the week of Jan. 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study, based in New Zealand, has tracked these people since they were born in 1972 and 73, putting them through a battery of psychological and health assessments at regular intervals since, the most recent being at age 45.

Childhood self-control was assessed by teachers, parents and the children themselves at ages 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11. The children were measured for impulsive aggression and other forms of impulsivity, over-activity, perseverance and inattention.

From ages 26 to 45, the participants also were measured for physiological signs of aging in several organ systems, including the brain. In all measures, higher childhood self-control correlated with slower aging.

The people with the highest self-control were found to walk faster and have younger-looking faces at age 45 as well.

"But if you aren't prepared for aging yet, your 50's is not too late to get ready," Moffitt added.

A clear view of anatomical structures is vital for the success of surgery--especially in microsurgery where narrow anatomical cavities or proximity to vulnerable organs and tissues can pose significant risks to patient health. The surgical microscope has evolved to become a powerful tool for improving surgical visualization.

A comprehensive review of surgical microscopes, authored by Baowei Fei, professor of bioengineering and radiology at University of Texas at Dallas, and bioengineering doctoral candidate Ling Ma, relates the evolution of surgical microscopes as they have developed with wider ranges of magnification, longer working distances, better illumination, and more stable supporting structures. Ma and Fei explain how surgical microscopes are modified into slightly different optical configurations and equipped with specific imaging modalities and platforms for different surgical applications.

Beyond the loupe

The first reported surgical microscope in an operating room was used by a young otolaryngology surgeon named Carl Olof Nylén in 1921 at the University of Stockholm. Nylén used a monocular Brinell-Leitz microscope during surgery on a patient with a chronic ear infection. This was a step up from a single lens loupe. The tool was updated a year later by Gunnar Holmgren who developed a binocular microscope for depth perception and an attached light source to accompany the magnification. Holmgren would scarcely recognize today's surgical microscopes with adjustable magnification, bright and shadow-free illumination, variable working distance to allow manipulation of surgical instruments, and a stable, unobstructed view of the entire operating field.

Though surgical microscopes were not introduced into neurosurgical operating rooms until 1957, when Theodor Kurze at University of Southern California removed a benign tumor from a cranial nerve in a 5-year-old patient, neurosurgery is now the leading market for surgical microscopes.

Versatile visualization, integrated imaging modalities

Surgical microscopy has come a long way. In addition to high-precision optics and flexible mechanical design, versatile visualization features such as 3D display are now included, as well as integrated imaging modalities. Augmented reality displays, which overlay real-life structures with, say, MRI or OCT images of the structures, improve visualization of the surgical field as well as the multimodal images. Such advanced capabilities are changing clinical practice in the operating room, enabling surgeons to see better and perform challenging procedures with greater ease and success.

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) and laser speckle contrast imaging (LSCI) modalities are particularly promising since they can be used on-demand anytime during surgery and provide abundant real-time diagnostic data as noncontact and label-free imaging modalities. Ma and Fei note that both HSI and LSCI add very little complexity to the system and take minimal effort for physicians to adopt.

The visualization capabilities and integrated technologies in surgical microscopes continue to expand. With advanced communication technologies and well-developed augmented-reality-assisted platforms, large groups will be able to participate remotely in surgical procedures, sharing a clear view of the surgical field via headsets, smartphones, or large conference room screens.

Robotic visualization platforms allow freedom of movement for the surgeon and enable the whole team to observe detailed structures. Integrated technologies, such as an endoscopic micro-inspection tool, can enable the surgeon to "bookmark" a position of the surgical field and visualize the same structure at different angles. Such systems enrich the concept of the surgical microscope with multiple cutting-edge technologies and also provide clear advantages in time, functionality, and ergonomics.

First utilized for otolaryngology, surgical microscopes are contributing to a wide array of microsurgeries, from lymphatic reconstruction to nerve repair. Increasing clinical use of surgical microscopes can be anticipated, and in a greater range of surgical applications.

TROY, N.Y. -- A loss of enzymatic processes within the body can increase a person's risk of bone fracture. This new insight was recently published in eLife by an international team of scientists and engineers led by Deepak Vashishth, the director of the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Enzymatic processes are essential to any number of chemical reactions that occur within the body, including the production of the extracellular matrix within bone that is critical for mechanical support. Phosphorylation -- one of those key enzymatic processes -- is the attachment of a phosphoryl to a protein, and is critical for cellular regulation. This process plays a role in many diseases, but until now, researchers didn't know if it altered tissue integrity and organ function.

In this paper, researchers looked at a protein known as osteopontin, which plays a vital role in holding the matrix together. The researchers developed a process by which they could induce phosphorylation -- or its counterpart, dephosphorylation -- in bones from genetically modified mice, some that had osteopontin and others that did not. By comparing results from the two groups, researchers found that fracture toughness, a measure of bone's mechanical strength, increased with osteopontin phosphorylation and declined with dephosphorylation. More specifically, phosphorylation enhanced crosslinks and increased the attraction between the charged groups on osteopontin and bone mineral, making bone stronger and its fracture more difficult.

"This is the first study that lays down that phosphorylation in bone matters, particularly how it assists bone in releasing energy, and that loss of this modification is bad for bone," Vashishth said.

The team also studied the effect of osteopontin phosphorylation levels in the rare bone diseases hypophosphatemia and hyperphosphatemia, which are associated with skeletal deformities. In both diseases, Vashishth said, osteopontin phosphorylation levels decreased, a finding that lays the groundwork for further exploration.

"Another promising discovery was that these levels do change with diseases in bone," Vashishth said. "Is phosphorylation directly affecting the fracture propensity of bones in these diseased conditions? And what therapeutic tools can we use to fix this? These are the questions that we want to investigate."

In the spirit of the New Polytechnic, the model that drives research and education at Rensselaer, this research was highly collaborative across multiple disciplines. Vashishth and his lab worked with researchers at McGill University in Canada, the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, the University of Patras in Greece, Aarhus University in Denmark, and Vienna University of Technology in Austria. Each research team brought a different expertise and piece of this puzzle to the work.

The team's findings may also be applied to similar processes within other connective tissues and possible therapeutics to counteract abnormal osteopontin phosphorylation levels.

"This is not just specific to bone, because phosphorylation is a more ubiquitous change in other tissues in the body," Vashishth said. "Osteopontin is not only in bone, it's in other tissues in our body, like our kidneys and several other places. This research can also shed light on other things that can happen throughout the body."

Worldwide, marine megafauna are at risk of extinction due to climate change, habitat loss, pollution, overhunting, population fragmentation, and hybridization with related species in areas disturbed by humans. Genetic studies can help determine the conservation status of marine animals, identifying threats to species conservation and informing interventions and policies, such as the protection of diversity hotspots or corridors for gene flow.

In a new study in Frontiers in Marine Science, researchers for the first time measured genetic diversity in manatees at a large geographical scale -- that is, along the northern coastline of South America. They show that the Antillean subspecies of the West Indian manatee forms a single, non-continuous population along the Brazilian coastline. Manatees from this population occasionally interbreed with the Antillean subspecies population located further North and West, between Guyana and Venezuela. Moreover, there seems to be no natural hybridization between the Antillean Amazonian manatee, even though their habitats overlap in the mouth of the Amazon river.

The Antillean subspecies of the West Indian manatee (Trichechus manatus manatus) and the Amazonian manatee (Trichechus inunguis) (order Sirenia) are both classified as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Antillean manatees occur across most of the Caribbean and along the Atlantic coast of Central and South America. In contrast, the Amazonian manatee is exclusively found in the mouth of the Amazon River. Historically, both were hunted intensively. Though hunting pressure has subsided, both remain at risk due to further anthropogenic threats, especially habitat degradation and collisions with boats. Manatees have strict habitat requirements, mainly places with seagrass and freshwater, such as estuaries. Due to continuous human pressure on their habitats, such as seagrass meadows, populations have decreased, potentially leading to a decrease in genetic variability.

''Genetic diversity is critical for species to be able to adapt to changing environments and avoid inbreeding and needs to be considered to allow for long-term protection of species,'' says coauthor Dr Margaret Hunter from the Wetland and Aquatic Research Center of the U.S. Geological Survey in Gainesville, Florida. "Here we show that manatee populations of Venezuela, Guyana and Brazil have some degree of interrelatedness but overall low genetic diversity.'"

To determine whether there is genetic connectivity between the West Indian and Amazonian manatee, the authors took 17 DNA samples from the Amazonian manatee, 78 from the Antillean subspecies in Brazil (southern cluster of populations) and 11 from Guyana and Venezuela (northern cluster), including adults and calves, and measured diversity at nuclear and mitochondrial neutral genetic markers.

The researchers found no evidence of natural hybridization between the two species. What they did find was evidence of gene flow between the northern and southern cluster of Antillean manatees. It seems the physical barrier of the Amazon River plume is not enough to block gene flow between the northern and southern cluster.

''These results make it possible for us to understand current genetic diversity of the Brazilian West Indian manatee population,'' says coauthor Dr Fábia de Oliveira Luna from Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation - National Center for Research and Aquatic Mammals Conservation, Brazil. ''We call on policymakers to improve the national action plan. An important action is the creation of new protected areas, which help establish biological corridors and promote gene flow. Another is to protect habitats where manatees give birth. Newborn calves have stranded along the Ceará and Rio Grande do Norte coastline of Brazil: upon rescue, these should released into the genetic population of origin, or in gap areas without residing manatees. In contrast, captive breeding should be avoided for now as enough calves are born in the wild."