Culture

ARLINGTON, VA: October 29, 2020 - As COVID-19 infections escalate, Americans across the political divide demonstrate pronounced support for public health. According to a recently-commissioned survey by Research!America on behalf of a working group formed to address our nation's commitment to science, a strong bipartisan majority of Americans place an urgent or high priority on improving our nation's public health system (78%) and, further, are willing to pay $1 more per week in taxes to support an emergency public health fund to address health threats like a pandemic (71%). Additionally, 82% of Americans agree it is important for elected leaders to listen to public health officials.

Nearly three-quarters (73%) of Americans, across the partisan divide, say the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed that major changes are needed in our public health system, including more funding. COVID-19 has also shined a bright light on the problem of health disparities in the United States, with a strong bipartisan majority of Americans saying that eliminating health disparities is an urgent or high priority (72%). In addition, 82% support research to help tackle this challenge.

A number of recent surveys report that fewer than half of Americans would agree to a COVID-19 vaccination. This newly commissioned survey reveals that the likelihood of getting the vaccine is greatly affected by who recommends it. Almost 43% of respondents said they would be very likely to get the vaccine if recommended by "your doctor"; another 43% if it was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; and 39% if recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By contrast, only 23% would be very likely to get the vaccine if it is recommended by a family member and even fewer, 19%, if recommended by a celebrity they trusted.

"As COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc on our communities, it's important for policymakers to know that a clear bipartisan majority of Americans place a high priority on the urgency of improving our nation's public health system," said Mary Woolley, Research!America's President and CEO and a co-chair of the working group.

"This survey tells us that, overwhelmingly, Americans recognize the crucial importance of public health. In order to meet our future challenges as a nation, we must commit to greatly increasing investment in this area, including investment in the science that drives preparedness, prevention, and response," said Keith Yamamoto, PhD, Vice Chancellor for Science Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Francisco, a co-chair of the working group.

"Policymakers should take note of the public's sense of urgency and act quickly to assure that challenges to our health and quality of life - indeed, our safety and security as a nation -- are met and overcome," said Sudip Parikh, PhD, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and also a working group co-chair.

Other results show:

Americans remain concerned about ongoing issues affecting the public health of the nation: 79% say ensuring a safe drinking water supply is an urgent or high priority, and 72% indicate that addressing drug and opioid abuse is an urgent or high priority.

While a strong majority of all Americans are concerned about the future impact of climate change on their health (70%), people of color report even greater concern: African Americans 74%, Hispanics 83%, and Asian Americans 82%.

Concern is also significant regarding the high number of U.S. hospitalizations from preventable causes and avoidable deaths, compared to peer nations; nearly 7 in 10 Americans say they are very or somewhat concerned about this.

COVID-19 (coronavirus) patients who were administered a novel antibody had fewer symptoms and were less likely to require hospitalization or emergency medical care than those who did not receive the antibody, according to a new study published in the The New England Journal of Medicine.

The multisite, Phase II clinical trial tested three different doses of LY-CoV555, a monoclonal antibody derived from the blood of a recovered COVID-19 patient. While the trial is ongoing, results from the interim analysis indicated a reduced viral load in outpatients with mild to moderate cases of COVID-19 at the 2,800-milligram dosage level, along with reduced rates of hospitalization and emergency medical care among patients at all dosage levels.

The study's co-first author, Peter Chen, MD, professor of Medicine and director of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Cedars-Sinai, said the results are promising.

"For me, the most significant finding was the reduction in hospitalizations," Chen said. "Monoclonal antibodies like this have the potential to reduce the severity of COVID-19 for many patients, allowing more people to recover at home."

Monoclonal antibodies work by attaching themselves to a virus and preventing it from replicating. LY-CoV555 binds to a particular protein, called a spike protein, which SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, needs in order to enter human cells and replicate. By preventing the virus from replicating, the antibody slows down the viral process, allowing the patient's own immune system time to kick into gear.

"What we're doing is preventing the virus from causing too much damage early on in the process," Chen said. "We're buying the patients time, so that their bodies can start developing their own immunity to fight the virus."

Patients in the randomized, double-blind study were given intravenous doses of either 700, 2,800 or 7,000 milligrams of the antibody, or a placebo. Investigators used a nasopharyngeal swab to test patients' viral load before administering the antibody and again at several points after administering the drug. Patients in the trial were also given a questionnaire about their subsequent symptoms and treatment.

Approximately 300 patients received the treatment (100 patients per dosage level) and approximately 150 patients received the placebo. Of the three dosage levels, the 2,800-milligram dosage was shown to be effective in reducing viral load. By day 11, viral load was substantially diminished for most patients, including those in the placebo arm. Further studies will be needed to validate these results, according to the investigators.

"The publication of these data in a peer-reviewed journal adds to the growing body of evidence for the potential utility for neutralizing antibodies as therapeutics for people recently diagnosed with mild to moderate COVID-19, particularly high-risk patients," said Ajay Nirula, MD, PhD, vice president of immunology at Eli Lilly and Company and co-first author of the study. "These data show LY-CoV555 may be effective in treating COVID-19 by reducing viral load, symptoms and the risk of hospitalization in outpatients."

At day 29, hospitalization rates were only 1.6% in the antibody-treated group, compared with 6.3% in the group that received the placebo.

Importantly, the reduction in hospitalizations was seen across all demographic groups, including those in high-risk categories: adults older than 65 and those with a high body mass index (greater than 35). For high-risk patients, hospitalization rates were 4.2% in patients treated with the antibody, compared with 14.6% in placebo-treated patients. The safety profile of patients treated with LY-CoV555 was similar to that of placebo-treated patients.

"We know that COVID-19 is especially hard on the elderly, the obese and people with certain pre-existing health conditions," Chen said. "Antibody treatments like this may have the most benefits for people in these higher-risk categories."

SINGAPORE, 30 October 2020 - Mothers can pass allergies to offspring while they are developing in the womb, researchers from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), KK Women's and Children's Hospital (KKH) and Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore reported this week in the journal Science.

The study, which employed an animal model conducted according to the National Advisory Committee for Laboratory Animal Research (NACLAR) guidelines, shows that the key antibody responsible for triggering allergic reactions, immunoglobulin E (IgE), can cross the placenta and enter the foetus. When inside the foetus, the antibody binds to foetal mast cells, a type of immune cell that releases chemicals that trigger allergic reactions, from runny noses to asthma. After birth, newborn mice develop allergic reactions to the same type of allergen as their mothers at the time of first exposure - unlike adult mice, which require two exposures. Studies in the laboratory also showed that maternal IgE can bind to human foetal mast cells, indicating they might cross the placenta in humans in a similar way.

Dr Florent Ginhoux, Senior Principal Investigator at A*STAR's Singapore Immunology Network (SIgN), a senior co-author of the study, said, "There is currently a significant lack of knowledge on mast cells that are present early on in the developing foetus. Here, we discovered that foetal mast cells phenotypically mature through the course of pregnancy, and can be sensitised by IgE of maternal origin that cross the placental barrier. The study suggests that a highly allergic pregnant mother may potentially transfer her IgE to her baby that consequently develop allergic reactions when exposed to the first time to the allergen."

"Allergies begin very early in life," said Associate Professor Ashley St. John, an immunologist at Duke-NUS' Emerging Infectious Diseases Programme and a senior co-author of the study. "Infants experience allergic responses closely linked with the mother's allergic response in ways that cannot only be explained by genetics. This work emphasises one way that allergic responses can pass from the mother to the developing foetus, and shows how allergies can then persist after birth."

As part of the study, following NACLAR guidelines, researchers exposed mice to ragweed pollen, a common allergen, prior to pregnancy. Mice that developed a sensitivity to the pollen had offspring that also showed an allergic reaction to ragweed. The sensitivity is allergen-specific; the offspring did not react to dust mites, another common allergen.

Notably, the transfer of sensitivity appears to fade with time. The newborn mice had allergic reactions when tested at four weeks, but less or none at six weeks.

The experimental studies were backed up with cellular tests and imaging, which showed maternal IgE bound to fetal mast cells, triggering the mast cells to release chemicals in reaction to an allergen, a process called degranulation.

This study further showed that the IgE transfer across the placenta requires the help of another protein, FcRN. Mice with FcRN knocked out lacked maternal IgE attached to their mast cells, and did not develop allergies after birth.

The study findings potentially open new intervention strategies to limit such transfer to minimise the occurrence of neonatal allergies. Currently, between 10 to 30 per cent of the world's population are affected by allergies. This number is set to continue rising and a solution preventing allergies being passed from mother to child could potentially bring those numbers down over time.

"Our research has really exciting findings that may explain the high incidence of early onset atopic dermatitis (eczema) in children of mothers with clinically proven eczema, which parallel findings in our local birth cohort findings," said Professor Jerry Chan, Senior Consultant, Department of Reproductive Medicine at KKH, Senior National Medical Research Council Clinician Scientist, and Vice Chair of Research with the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Academic Clinical Programme at the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre. "From a clinical point of view, developing a further understanding in placental transfer of IgE, and the mechanism of foetal mast cell activation would be key to developing strategies to reduce the chance of eczema or other allergies from being transferred from mother to baby."

The authors next aim to better understand the mechanism of IgE transfer through the placenta, how IgE binding to mast cells in foetal skin modulate their functions and how it could affect skin physiology after birth.

An international research team has sequenced the full genome of an ornamental variety of miscanthus, a wild perennial grass emerging as a prime candidate for sustainable bioenergy crops.

The genome project -- led by scientists at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI), a Department of Energy (DOE) bioenergy research center -- provides a road map for researchers exploring new avenues to maximize the plant's productivity and decipher the genetic basis for its desirable traits.

The study, published in Nature Communications, was supervised by CABBI researchers Daniel Rokhsar, Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California (UC), Berkeley; and Kankshita Swaminathan, Faculty Investigator at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, Huntsville, Ala. (pictured). The team, which included more than 40 collaborators, was led by Therese Mitros, Adam Session, and Guohong Albert Wu from Rokhsar's lab; and Brandon James from Swaminathan's lab. Mitros and James are CABBI researchers, and Session and Wu are affiliated with the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI), a DOE Office of Science user facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

Miscanthus grasses, also used in gardens, paper production, and roofing, are a promising source of biomass, a renewable alternative to petroleum-based fossil fuels. They belong to the Andropogoneae family of grasses, which includes maize, sorghum, and sugarcane -- highly productive and globally important plants grown as a source of food, feed, and biofuels.

Miscanthus is extremely adaptable and easy to grow. It can thrive on marginal lands, requires only limited fertilization, has a high tolerance for drought and cool temperatures, and uses the more efficient C4 form of photosynthesis.

The CABBI team's sequence and genomic analysis of Miscanthus sinensis -- the first for any type of miscanthus -- provide a foundation for systematic improvements to optimize those desirable traits. The project also produced an atlas of genes that are turned on and off in different parts of the plant during its seasonal life cycle, revealing new regulators of perenniality, a desirable trait for biofuel and other crops.

"The genomic toolkit we have assembled for miscanthus will be a valuable resource for researchers studying this plant and breeding it to improve biomass and other traits," Swaminathan said. "By comparing miscanthus with sorghum, sugarcane, and other related grasses, researchers within CABBI and beyond hope to decipher the genetic basis for innovations linked to productivity and adaptability."

The study relied on extensive field collections over several growing seasons at the University of Illinois that captured the plant's full life cycle. Led by Swaminathan, scientists measured gene expression in the leaves, stems, and rhizome (the underground part of the stem). The catalog of tissue-preferred genes will provide clues for how to genetically modify the plant to improve certain processes, said Mitros, who led the computational work on genome assembly, annotation, and sequence analysis.

The study also revealed a group of genes involved in the all-important nutrient remobilization cycle. In the fall, as the plant's leaves die, nitrogen and other nutrients are sent to the rhizome, where they are stored underground over the winter; in the spring, that energy is taken up into other tissues as the plant grows instead of going back into the soil, reducing the need for fertilizer. The rhizomes also produce new stems, allowing the plant to get bigger every year, and help with carbon storage. All of that makes miscanthus more sustainable -- less costly to manage and more environmentally friendly.

Many M. sinensis lines are used as decorative grasses and grow both from the rhizome and from seed. The grass with bioenergy potential, Miscanthus x giganteus "Illinois" type, doesn't create viable seed and is thus more difficult to propagate. CABBI researchers like Erik Sacks, Associate Professor in the Department of Crop Sciences at Illinois, are working on new hybrids, crossing M. sinensis and M. sacchariflorus to create multiple giganteus varieties that would be more adaptable to different regions and produce seeds.

The genetic sequence is a platform to understand the variations within all kinds of miscanthus varieties, Rokhsar said. Miscanthus hybrids have evolved naturally in Asia, and Sacks and other breeders hope to combine the best of the populations to create varieties best suited for particular locations.

On a fundamental level, the study will help scientists tease out answers to basic questions about plant biology, such as the circuits involved in the rhizome nutrient cycle, how it works through the seasons, and how it evolved. And it will give them more information about the rules for crossing and combining miscanthus so they can produce optimal hybrids, Rokhsar said.

"The types of data presented in this study are also critical to deploy techniques like gene-editing to help decipher the function of the genes that control traits and adaptations important to the success of this high-yielding grass," Swaminathan said.

For example, the gene expression data point to a suite of genes that may be involved in the ability of miscanthus to store energy in a modified underground stem (the rhizome) over winter and bounce back each year bigger than before. Swaminathan is intrigued by what makes a stem become a storage organ in Andropogoneae grasses; she wants to understand the molecular mechanisms that direct the miscanthus rhizome to store complex carbohydrates while sugarcane and sweet sorghum stems store sugar.

Miscanthus and other plants have complex genomes, with a history of more genomic duplication than seen in animals. Having multiple copies of chromosomes allows for larger plants and more genetic diversity while providing more targets for genetic engineers. But it also made the sequencing and assembly a challenge, Rokhsar said. "We drew on lots of different technologies to make that happen."

The team's analysis determined that miscanthus is a "paleo-allotetraploid," meaning it arose by ancient hybridization of two ancestral species, rather than by doubling within a single species as happened in sugarcane. The two progenitors of miscanthus are long-extinct -- dying out after the hybridization about 2 million years ago -- but their chromosomes live on in miscanthus. Session used computational analyses to figure out the ancient origins of each chromosome and identify segments that have swapped chromosomes. He also teased apart subtle differences in the way the two chromosome sets have evolved since the duplication -- vital information for genetic engineers who want to knock out particular genes, Mitros said.

The paper is the culmination of a multi-year, interdisciplinary effort to sequence a miscanthus genome involving dozens of researchers in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. It is built on the work of scientists like Sacks, who has collected germplasm from thousands of lines of Miscanthus in Japan, Korea, and other countries.

Other instrumental researchers included Professors Stephen Moose and Matthew Hudson, University of Illinois crop scientists who were involved in the genome project when the project was under the auspices of the Energy Biosciences Institute, a BP-funded initiative at Illinois, UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab. Professor Stephen Long, another U of I crop scientist, had been among the first to propose miscanthus as the basis for a new biofuel economy as part of a scientific team in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. Moose led EBI's feedstocks group and pioneered the genomics work, producing chromosome maps of M. sinensis and early gene expression data sets for multiple Miscanthus lines. The JGI carried out much of the genome sequencing under the supervision of Rokhsar, who was also part of the original EBI project and has a long-standing interest in complex plant and animal genomes.

Swaminathan was a scientist on Moose's team during the EBI project. The team, which included Rokhsar and Mitros, started by trying to decipher the M. x giganteus Illinois genome, but "it was a jigsaw puzzle not coming together," she said. The researchers realized that M. x giganteus was too complicated, and turned to a double-haploid line of M. sinensis generated by Katarzyna Glowacka, then a graduate student in Poland and now a faculty member at the University of Nebraska. Using the best available data at the time, they put together a fragmented genome assembly. Swaminathan joined HudsonAlpha in 2016, bringing a freezer full of samples with her, and both James and fellow Postdoc Mohammad Belaffif started processing samples and analyzing the data.

CABBI was formed in 2017 and took on the genome project. Mitros pulled together the genomic analysis. Swaminathan's team focused on gene expression, and Sacks contributed data from his diversity collections. Researchers in Europe shared genotype data and information on the M. sacchariflorus genome, and the project grew.

"It took that concerted effort, with someone at the center pulling all the data together to make sense of it," Swaminathan said. "This would have just not happened without CABBI."

In a new study published in the Academy of Management Journal by Traci Sitzmann, an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Denver Business School, and Elizabeth Campbell, an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota, provide empirical evidence and an explanation into why religion perpetuates the gender wage gap.

While studying trends in 140 countries around the world, researchers found the gender wage gap is 29 percentage points greater in the most religious countries. Women earn 46% as much as men in the most religious countries and 75% of men's wages in secular countries. This trend of a greater gender wage gap in religious cultures applies across all six major world religions--Buddhism, Christianity, Folk, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism.

The same trend occurs in the United States--the gender wage gap is eight percentage points greater in religious than secular states.

Sitzmann and Campbell also conducted a series of experiments to demonstrate that the effect of religiosity on the gender wage gap is causal, meaning religion is the cause for the wage gap. The researchers found being exposed to religious values resulted in supervisors allocating significantly higher wages to male than female employees, even though the employees performed at the same level.

Why does religion increase the gender wage gap?

Sitzmann and Campbell's research shows that religion sets up different social expectations for men and women in three areas:

Religiosity socializes members to increase their family size, placing a heavy burden on women because men are permitted or even expected to repudiate domestic tasks. This decreases a women's career success due to the infeasibility of both working full-time and taking on most domestic responsibilities.

Believing they are protecting a women's sexuality, religious societies place restrictions on women's ability to enter public spaces, interact unchaperoned with members of the opposite sex, and freely choose their apparel. Religion is often misused to legitimize violations of women's human rights.

Religiosity advocates that men should pursue power and decision-making authority, while women should heed power and defer to men's authority. This unequal distribution of power results in women's underrepresentation in leadership positions. Indeed, Pope Francis indicated that "the door is closed" to women who wish to be ordained priests.

What are the implications?

Religious values are central to cultures around the world. In the U.S., Congress has their own chaplain to opening meetings with prayer; money is imprinted with "In God We Trust;" Supreme Court nomination hearings focus on the justice's religious values; and increasingly businesses are demonstrating religious support by providing employees with a place to pray and evoking god as an explanation for firm policies.

"The existing management literature proposes that religion is a "benign and positive force," which is in direct opposition to research on the intersection between religion and gender," said Sitzmann. "Our research is instrumental for documenting that religiosity has a systematic effect on women's wages, suggesting that businesses should toe a fine line between permitting religious freedom and ensuring that freedom does not infringe upon the rights of others. "

What is the solution?

A common notion is that the gender wage gap will resolve itself over time, but this is also contingent upon religiosity. The gender wage gap in secular U.S. states will take approximately 28 years to close, while the gap in religious states will take approximately 109 years to close, according to Sitzmann's study.

Rather than waiting 47 years for wage parity, organizational leaders and policymakers can assess whether employees are paid equitably based on the value of their work, regardless of gender. This is required for organizations in Iceland, which has helped the country maintain the smallest gender wage gap for the past nine years.

"Research has provided incontrovertible evidence that men and women's job performance is the same," said Sitzmann. "Wages should align with performance, rather than with employees' gender. I hope this research sensitizes organizational leaders to rectify cases where professional equals are compensated unequally based on gender."

Scientists have discovered that sodium bicarbonate - also known as baking soda or bicarbonate of soda - can reprogram T cells in leukemia patients to resist the immune-suppressing effects of cancer cells, which can drive leukemia relapse after stem cell transplants. The work clarifies why patients frequently relapse after transplant, and lays the foundation to test sodium bicarbonate as a safe and simple therapy to reduce relapse rates and improve treatment outcomes. Allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation is a form of stem cell transplant that can sometimes cure people with blood cancers such as acute myeloid leukemia (AML). However, complete response rates can be as low as 17% after 100 days, largely because the leukemia will frequently return. There is a pressing need for methods that can boost the anticancer effects of stem cell transplants, but researchers haven't fully understood why donated T cells often fail to finish off tumors. By studying mouse models of leukemia and T cells from patients before and after transplantation, Franziska Uhl and colleagues found that AML cells suppressed the metabolic activities and the spread of donated T cells by secreting lactic acid, which acidified the cellular environment and interfered with glucose metabolism. Searching for therapies, the team turned to the antacid sodium bicarbonate, and found that a clinical formulation named bicaNorm reversed these suppressive effects on T cells in 10 transplant recipients with relapsed AML. The authors call for trials with larger groups of patients to better determine the long-term benefits of sodium bicarbonate for recipients of stem cell transplants.

BOSTON - A temporary tracheostomy--an opening created in the neck to facilitate placing a tube into a person's windpipe--can be essential for allowing a critically ill patient to come off a ventilator. A new article, with an accompanying video, published in the New England Journal of Medicine by clinicians at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) offers valuable guidance on how to safely perform the procedure in patients with COVID-19.

"Tracheostomy facilitates ventilator weaning, decreasing the need for sedating medications and allows family members to more easily interact with their loved ones," said senior author Hugh G. Auchincloss, MD, MPH, a thoracic surgeon at MGH. "We were concerned that tracheostomy was being underutilized in the management of patients with severe disease in the setting of COVID-19 because of concern that performing the procedure would expose health care workers to the virus."

The article and video provide step-by-step instructions on how to perform a tracheostomy quickly and safely at the bedside, with modifications to prevent generating aerosols that could contain the virus that causes COVID-19. Instructions start with details on equipment, preparation and positioning before initiating the procedure. Next steps include information on the procedure itself, such as the size and location of the incision and the placement of the bronchoscope that allows the surgeon to visualize the patient's airways. The article and video also offer guidance on what to do if difficulties or complications arise, and on care that is required after the surgery.

"We hope that this video can help physicians around the world consider the modifications to percutaneous tracheostomy that can reduce the risk of procedural aerosolized transmission of COVID-19 and other viruses," said lead author Daniel Hashimoto, MD, MS, chief resident in General Surgery at MGH and associate director of research of MGH's Surgical Artificial Intelligence & Innovation Laboratory. "This work helps provide education on performing percutaneous tracheostomy for non-COVID-19 infected patients as well."

An international research collaboration including Northwestern University astronomers has produced the most detailed family portrait of black holes to date, offering new clues as to how black holes form. An intense analysis of the most recent gravitational-wave data available led to the rich portrait as well as multiple tests of Einstein's theory of general relativity. (The theory passed each test.)

The team of scientists who make up the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and the Virgo Collaboration is now sharing the full details of its discoveries. This includes new gravitational-wave detection candidates which held up to scrutiny -- a whopping total of 39, representing a variety of black holes and neutron stars -- and new discoveries as a result of combining all the observations. The 39 events averaged more than one per week of observing.

The observations could be a key piece in solving the many mysteries of exactly how binary stars interact. A better understanding of how binary stars evolve has consequences across astronomy, from exoplanets to galaxy formation.

Details are reported in a trio of related papers which will be available in pre-print on Oct. 28 at arxiv.org. The studies also are being submitted to peer-reviewed journals.

The gravitational-wave signals on which the studies are based were detected during the first half of the third observing run, called O3a, of the National Science Foundation's Laser Interferometry Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), a pair of identical, 4-kilometer-long interferometers in the United States, and Virgo, a 3-kilometer-long detector in Italy. The instruments can detect gravitational-wave signals from many sources, including colliding black holes and colliding neutron stars.

"Gravitational-wave astronomy is revolutionary -- revealing to us the hidden lives of black holes and neutron stars," said Christopher Berry, an LSC member and author of the papers. "In just five years we have gone from not knowing that binary black holes exist to having a catalog of over 40. The third observing run has yielded more discoveries than ever before. Combining them with earlier discoveries paints a beautiful picture of the universe's rich variety of binaries."

Berry is the CIERA Board of Visitors Research Professor in Northwestern's CIERA (Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics) and a lecturer at the University of Glasgow. Other Northwestern authors include CIERA members Maya Fishbach and Chase Kimball. CIERA is home to a broad group of researchers in theory, simulation and observation who study black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs and more.

As a member of the collaboration, Northwestern researchers analyzed data from the gravitational-wave detectors to infer the properties of detected black hole and neutron star binaries and to provide an astrophysical interpretation of these discoveries.

The papers are summarized as follows:

The "catalog paper" details the detections of black holes and neutron stars from the first half of O3a, bringing the total number of detection candidates for that period to 39. This number vastly exceeds detections from the first two observing runs. (The first run had three gravitational-wave detections, and the second had eight.) Previously announced detections from O3a include a mystery object in the mass gap (GW190814) and the first-of-its-kind intermediate mass black hole (GW190521).

In the "populations paper," the researchers reconstructed the distribution of masses and spins of the black hole population and estimated the merger rate for binary neutron stars. The results will help scientists understand the detailed astrophysical processes which shape how these systems form. This improved understanding of the mass distribution of black holes and knowing that black hole spins can be misaligned suggests there could be multiple ways for binary black holes to form.

Using the set of detections reported in the catalog paper, the researchers conducted detailed analysis by combining everything together. In what they call the "testing general relativity paper," the authors placed constraints on Einstein's theory of general relativity. The theory passed with flying colors, and they updated their best measurements on potential modifications.

"So far, LIGO and Virgo's third observing run has yielded many surprises," said Fishbach, a NASA Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow and LSC member. "After the second observing run, I thought we'd seen the whole spectrum of binary black holes, but the landscape of black holes is much richer and more varied than I imagined. I'm excited to see what future observations will teach us."

Fishbach coordinated writing of the populations paper which outlines what the collaboration has learned about the properties of the family of merging black holes and neutron stars.

Berry helped coordinate analysis as part of a global team to infer the properties of the detections, and he served as an LSC Editorial Board reviewer for the catalog and testing general relativity papers.

Graduate student Chase Kimball, an LSC member, contributed calculations of the rates of mergers to the populations paper. Kimball is co-advised by Berry and Vicky Kalogera, the principal investigator of Northwestern's LSC group, director of CIERA and the Daniel I. Linzer Distinguished University Professor of Physics and Astronomy in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

The LIGO and Virgo detectors finished their latest observing run this past March. The data analyzed in these three papers were collected from April 1, 2019, to Oct. 1, 2019. Researchers are in the process of analyzing data from the second half of the observing run, O3b.

The detectors are scheduled to resume observing next year after work is done to increase their detection range.

"Merging black hole and neutron star binaries are a unique laboratory," Berry said. "We can use them to study both gravity -- so far Einstein's general relativity has passed every test --and the astrophysics of how massive stars live their lives. LIGO and Virgo have transformed our ability to observe these binaries, and, as our detectors improve, the rate of discovery is only going to accelerate."

Centaurs are minor planets believed to have originated in the Kuiper Belt in the outer solar system. They sometimes have comet-like features such as tails and comae--clouds of dust particles and gas--even though they orbit in a region between Jupiter and Neptune where it is too cold for water to readily sublimate, or transition, directly from a solid to a gas.

Only 18 active Centaurs have been discovered since 1927, and much about them is still poorly understood. Discovering activity on Centaurs is also observationally challenging because they are faint, telescope time-intensive and because they are rare.

A team of astronomers, led by doctoral student and Presidential Fellow Colin Chandler in Northern Arizona University's Astronomy and Planetary Science PhD program, earlier this year announced their discovery of activity emanating from Centaur 2014 OG392, a planetary object first found in 2014. They published their findings in a paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, "Cometary Activity Discovered on a Distant Centaur: A Nonaqueous Sublimation Mechanism." Chandler is the lead author, working with four NAU co-authors, graduate student Jay Kueny, associate professor Chad Trujillo, professor David Trilling and PhD student William Oldroyd.

The team's research involved developing a database search algorithm to locate archival images of the Centaur as well as a follow-up observational campaign.

"Our paper reports the discovery of activity emanating from Centaur 2014 OG392, based on archival images we uncovered," Chandler said, "plus our own new observational evidence acquired with the Dark Energy Camera at the Inter-American Observatory in Cerro Tololo, Chile, the Walter Baade Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile and the Large Monolithic Imager at Lowell Observatory's Discovery Channel Telescope in Happy Jack, Ariz."

"We detected a coma as far as 400,000 km from 2014 OG392," he said, "and our analysis of sublimation processes and dynamical lifetime suggest carbon dioxide and/or ammonia are the most likely candidates for causing activity on this and other active Centaurs."

"We developed a novel technique," Chandler said, "that combines observational measurements, for example, color and dust mass, with modeling efforts to estimate such characteristics as the object's volatile sublimation and orbital dynamics."

As a result of the team's discovery, the Centaur has recently been reclassified as a comet, and will be known as "C/2014 OG392 (PANSTARRS)."

"I'm very excited that the Minor Planet Center awarded a new comet designation befitting the activity we discovered on this unusual object," he said.

This week, Chandler has been invited to present the results at the 52nd Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) 2020 meeting.

Menstrual dysfunction is more prevalent in young Finnish athletes than it is among non-athletes of a similar age, but athletes experience less body weight dissatisfaction than non-athletes do. These findings are from a recent study at the Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. The study was conducted among members of sports clubs who exercised at least four times a week (athletes) and non-members (non-athletes).

The current study used data from the Finnish Health Promoting Sports Club (FHPSC) study, in which a cohort of athletes and non-athletes in adolescence (14-16 years) and subsequently in young adulthood (18-20 years) were investigated.

The findings of the study showed that in adolescence, 18% of both athletes and non-athletes reported menstrual dysfunction. However, 8% of the athletes reported primary amenorrhea (absence of menses by the age of 15) in contrast to the non-athletes group, where the prevalence of primary amenorrhea was 0%. In young adulthood, the prevalence of menstrual dysfunction in athletes was 39%, while 6% of the non-athletes reported menstrual dysfunction. In this study, menstrual dysfunction was defined as follows: primary amenorrhea, prolonged menstrual cycle (>35 days) or absence of menses for at least three consecutive months (secondary amenorrhea).

"We did not investigate the reasons for menstrual dysfunction, but we know from previous studies that one of the most common reasons for menstrual dysfunction is low energy availability (i.e., inadequate energy intake relative to exercise energy expenditure)," explains Suvi Ravi, the corresponding author and a PhD student at the Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences.

"The human body is wise, and in this kind of situation it allocates energy to the functions essential for survival and reduces energy allocation for the systems that are not so essential for life, such as reproductive function."

The present study also assessed body weight dissatisfaction among the participants. The results showed that athletes were more satisfied with their weight and had less desire to lose weight than non-athletes did. Despite this, in both age groups about 20% of the athletes and about 40% of the non-athletes reported body weight dissatisfaction.

"This is concerning since we know that body weight dissatisfaction can result in disordered eating," Ravi says.

"Attention should be paid to young people's body weight dissatisfaction as well as menstrual dysfunction in order to prevent future health problems, such as disordered eating and impaired bone mineral density, which can result from low energy availability and menstrual dysfunction."

The study, in which six Wits researchers were involved, show that these newly discovered variants were found mostly among newly sampled ethnolinguistic groups.

Researchers identified new evidence for natural selection in and around 62 previously unreported genes associated with viral immunity, DNA repair and metabolism.

They observed complex patterns of ancestral mixing within and between populations, alongside evidence that populations from Zambia was a likely intermediate site along the routes of expansion of Bantu-speaking populations.

These findings improve the current understanding of migration across the continent, and identify responses to human disease and gene flow as strong determinants of population variation.

The study contributes a new major source of African genomic data, which showcases the complex and vast diversity of African genetic variation and which will support research for decades to come.

"Africa is the continent with greatest genetic diversity and this study shows the importance of African genomic data for taking science and health research forward. It is an important step in redressing existing biases in available data for research, which hamper the study of African health problems and narrows global research," says Zané Lombard, a senior author of the study and an Associate Professor in the Division of Human Genetics in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Wits and at the National Health Laboratory Service.

Lombard led the study under the auspices of the Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) Consortium in association with Dr Neil Hanchard, Baylor College of Medicine, Texas, U.S.A, and Dr Adebowale Adeyemo, National Human Genome Research Institute, Maryland, U.S.A.

Members of the H3Africa Consortium who contributed to this work comprise people from 24 institutions across Africa, including the Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience (SBIMB) in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Wits University.

The SBIMB's Dr Ananyo Choudhury, Dr Dhriti Sengupta, Professor Scott Hazelhurst and Mr Shaun Aron led analyses and writing the paper, while Professor Michèle Ramsay, director of the SBIMB, participated in developing the study design and was a principal investigator who contributed samples towards this large-scale sequencing effort.

426 INDIVIDUALS, 13 AFRICAN COUNTRIES, 50 ETHONLINGUISTIC GROUPS

The study found a vast breadth of genomic diversity among these genomes, with each ethnolinguistic group harbouring thousands of unique genetic variants.

Not only populations from the same geographic region but even those from the same country showed a great deal of variation among themselves, reflecting the deep history and rich genomic diversity across Africa.

"We used a wide variety of computational techniques to gain insights into population history, environmental adaptation, and susceptibility to diseases from these genomes", says Choudhury, first author of the study and a senior scientist at the SBIMB.

"We were able to discover over 3 million novel variants within these genomes. This was after comparison with more than 1000 African genomes in public repositories, suggesting that the potential for discovering novel genetic variants by sequencing African populations is still far from saturation."

First evidence of East Africa to Nigeria migration 50+ generations ago

In addition to contributing to the vast amount of novel variation observed in African populations, the inclusion of previously unstudied population groups in the study enabled scientists to add puzzle pieces to the jigsaw of established historical interactions and migration events on the continent.

"Inclusion of novel African genomes in our study strongly supported Zambia as an intermediate site in the Bantu-migration route to the South and East of the continent," said Mr Shaun Aron, lead analyst on the population genetics component of the study and a lecturer in the SBIMB.

Evidence supporting movement from East Africa to central Nigeria between 1500 and 2000 years ago was revealed through the identification of a substantial amount of East African ancestry, particularly Nilo-Saharan from Chad, in a central Nigerian ethnolinguistic group, the Berom.

"This highlights the complex historical movement of people on the continent and diversity of even proximally close African groups," says Aron.

VIRAL INFECTIONS MIGHT SHAPE GENOMIC DIFFERENCES

The researchers found more than 100 areas of the genome that had probably been under natural selection; a sizable proportion of which were associated with immunity related genes.

Natural selection - "selected by nature" - comes from Charles Darwin's work into survival of the fittest. It means that when individuals are exposed to certain environmental factors (diet, viral infection, etc.) some gene variants may give the humans that bear them in their genome an added advantage to survive.

"While genes involved in resistance to insect-transmitted diseases like malaria and sleeping sickness have long been known to be positively selected, our study shows that other viral infections could have also helped to shape genomic differences between people and groups by altering the frequency of genes that affect individuals' disease susceptibility," says Dr Dhriti Sengupta of the SBIMB and one of the lead analysts.

Also, the selection signals were not homogenous across the continent. Sengupta says, "There were noticeable variations in selection signals between different parts of the continent, indicating that large-scale local-adaptations might have accompanied the migration of populations to new geographies, and consequent exposure to new diets and pathogens."

Selection signals are parts of the genome that give us a signature (signal) that the specific part of the genome was under selection pressure at some point.

AFRICAN ACCESS TO PRECISION MEDICINE

Lombard, a senior author on the paper and an Associate Professor in the Division of Human Genetics at Wits, says: "The findings have broad relevance, from population genetics research into human history and migration, to clinical research into the impact of specific variants on health outcomes".

Immediate next steps include further examination of the initial findings and leveraging the data to represent more African populations.

The researchers hope their work will lead to wider recognition of the extent of uncatalogued genomic variation across the African continent and the need for continued inclusion of the many diverse populations in Africa in genomics research.

"Adding genomic data from all global populations - including Africa - is essential to ensure that everyone can benefit from the advances in health that precision medicine offers," says Lombard. Precision medicine - or 'personalised' medicine - refers to disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person.

AFRICAN GENOMIC RESEARCH IN AFRICA, BY AFRICANS

The study represents a major milestone in advancing African genomics research capacity. Instead of African data being analysed elsewhere - as has been the general trend over the last decade - this research was conducted predominantly by local African researchers using local computational facilities.

Studies like this one highlight the importance of computing infrastructure and storage capacity for large data projects at Wits and in South Africa.

Infrastructure such as the computing cluster at Wits, established and managed by Professor Scott Hazelhurst, director of Wits Bioinformatics, is essential to support genomics research and growing African datasets. He says: "Initiatives such as the H3Africa Consortium have laid the foundation to foster and encourage collaborative research in Africa, which has made studies like these possible."

Professor Michèle Ramsay, director of the SBIMB, says: "This study, in a sense, announces the availability of both infrastructure and analytic skills for large-scale genomics research on the continent."

According to the Job Stress Index 2020 compiled by Stiftung Gesundheitsförderung Schweiz, a Swiss health foundation, almost one-third of the Swiss workforce experience work-related stress. Should this stress become chronic, it can lead to states of exhaustion that have a negative impact on public health and carry a significant economic cost.

The goal: a digital early warning system

At the Mobiliar Lab for Analytics at ETH Zurich, an interdisciplinary team is working to pre-empt such states of exhaustion by developing a digital early warning system that uses machine learning to detect stress in the workplace in real time. "Our first step was to find out how to measure the effects of social pressure and interruptions - two of the most common causes of stress in the workplace," says psychologist Jasmine Kerr. Kerr is driving the project forward together with mathematician Mara Nägelin and computer scientist Raphael Weibel.

The three doctoral students are all lead authors on a recent study, details of which appeared in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology. They used a university platform to recruit 90 participants, who agreed to take part in an experiment lasting just under two hours. To conduct their experiment, Kerr, Nägelin and Weibel transformed the Decision Science Laboratory at ETH Zurich into three group office environments. Each workstation was equipped with a chair, a computer with monitor and kits for collecting samples of saliva.

Playing the parts of employees at a fictional insurance company, the participants were asked to perform typical office tasks, such as typing up information from hand-written forms and arranging appointments with clients. While they did so, the researchers observed their psychobiological responses. At a total of six points during the experiment, the participants rated their mood on questionnaires, while a portable ECG device continuously measured their heartbeat. The researchers used the saliva samples to measure the concentration of the stress hormone cortisol.

In line for a promotion

For their experiment, the researchers divided the participants into three groups and exposed each group to a different level of stress. All groups were given the same workload. In the middle of the experiment, all participants were visited by two actors masquerading as representatives of the insurance company's HR department. For participants in the control group, the actors staged a sales pitch dialogue, while in the two stress groups they pretended to be looking for the most suitable candidates for a promotion.

The difference between the two stress groups was that participants in the first group stopped work only to have samples of their saliva taken. But the participants in the second stress group had to contend with additional interruptions in the form of chat messages from their superiors urgently requesting information.

Almost twice the level of cortisol

Upon evaluation, the data indicated that asking participants to compete for a fictional promotion was enough to raise their heart rate and trigger the release of cortisol. "Participants in the second stress group released almost twice the level of cortisol as those in the first stress group," Nägelin says. Weibel adds: "Most research into workplace interruptions carried out to date focused only on their effect on performance and productivity. Our study shows for the first time that they also affect the level of cortisol a person releases, in other words they actually influence a person's biological stress response."

What surprised the researchers were participants' subjective responses in terms of how they perceived psychological stress. They observed that participants in the second stress group, who were interrupted by chat messages, reported being less stressed and in a better mood than the participants in the first stress group, who didn't have these interruptions. Interestingly, although the two groups rated the situation as equally challenging, the second group found it less threatening. The researchers inferred that the release of cortisol triggered by the additional interruptions mobilised more physical resources, which in turn led to a better emotional and cognitive response to stress. It is also possible that the interruptions distracted the participants from the impending social stress situation, meaning that they felt less threatened and thus less stressed.

Enzymes enable biochemical reactions that would otherwise not take place on their own. In nature, it is mostly proteins that function as enzymes. However, other molecules can also perform enzymatic reactions - for example ribonucleic acids, RNAs. These are then called ribozymes.

In this field, the research group of chemistry professor Claudia Höbartner is now reporting a scientific breakthrough: Her team at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) in Bavaria, Germany, has developed a ribozyme that can attach a very specific small chemical change at a very specific location in a target RNA.

More precisely: the ribozyme transfers a single methyl group to an exactly defined nitrogen atom of the target RNA. This makes it the first known methyl transferase ribozyme in the world. Accordingly, Höbartner's group has given it the short name MTR1.

In the journal Nature the group presents details about the new ribozyme. In the target RNA, it produces the methylated nucleoside 1-methyladenosine (m1A). The methyl group is transferred from a free methylated guanine nucleobase (O6-methylguanine, m6G) in a binding pocket of the ribozyme.

Ribozymes in evolution

The ribozyme discovered at the JMU Institute of Organic Chemistry sheds light on an interesting aspect of evolution. According to the "RNA world hypothesis", RNA was one of the first information-storing and enzymatically active molecules. Ribozymes similar to those developed by Claudia Höbartner and her team may have produced methylated RNAs in the course of evolution. This in turn may have led to a greater structural and thus functional diversity of RNA molecules.

In nature, methyl groups are installed on RNAs by specialised protein enzymes. These proteins use cofactors that contain RNA-like components. "It is reasonable to assume that these cofactors could be evolutionary 'leftovers' of earlier enzymatically active RNAs. Our discovery may therefore mimic a ribozyme that has possibly been lost in nature a long time ago," says Claudia Höbartner.

In the laboratory, new or naturally extinct ribozymes can be found by a method called in vitro evolution. "It starts from many different sequences of synthetic RNA, and is analogous to finding a needle in the haystack", says co-author Mohammad Ghaem Maghami, a postdoctoral researcher in the Höbartner group.

New ribozyme also acts on natural RNA

The authors have also been able to show that MTR1 can install a single methyl group not only on synthetic RNA structures but also on natural RNA strands found in cells.

This news is likely to attract great attention from cell biologists, among others. The reason for this is that the methylation of RNA can be considered as a biochemical on or off switch. It has a key role in the functioning of RNA structures and can control many life processes in the cell.

The newly developed ribozyme MTR1 is expected to be a useful tool for a wide range of research areas in the future. "For example, it could help to better understand the interaction of methylation, structure, and function of RNA," explains JMU PhD student Carolin Scheitl, the first author of the publication in Nature.

The next steps of the researchers

Many new projects will build on these results. Höbartner's group intends to solve the structure of their new ribozyme and reveal the detailed chemical mechanism of the RNA-catalyzed methylation. With the methods now established, her team will also be able to develop ribozymes for a variety of other reactions.

According to the JMU professor, these ribozymes also offer an excellent possibility to control Watson-Crick base pairing and to install fluorescent labels for RNA imaging.

BUFFALO, N.Y. - A University at Buffalo-led research team has discovered a technique that could help increase the effectiveness of vaccines against the novel coronavirus, the virus that causes COVID-19.

Jonathan F. Lovell, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UB, is the primary investigator on the research, titled "SARS-CoV-2 RBD Neutralizing Antibody Induction is Enhanced by Particulate Vaccination," which was published online in Advanced Materials today, Oct. 28.

COVID-19 has caused a disruptive global pandemic, infecting at least 40 million worldwide and causing more than 220,000 deaths in the United States alone. Since it began spreading in early 2020, biomedical researchers have been in active pursuit of an effective vaccine.

According to Lovell, one answer might lie in designing vaccines that partially mimic the structure of the virus. One of the proteins on the virus - located on the characteristic COVID spike - has a component called the receptor-binding domain, or RBD, which is its "Achilles heel." That is, he said, antibodies against this part of the virus have the potential to the neutralize the virus.

It would be "appealing if a vaccine could induce high-levels of antibodies against the RBD," Lovell said. "One way to achieve this goal is to use the RBD protein itself as an antigen, that is, the component of the vaccine that the immune response will be directed against."

The team hypothesized that by converting the RBD into a nanoparticle (similar in size to the virus itself) instead of letting it remain in its natural form as a small protein, it would generate higher levels of neutralizing antibodies and its ability to generate an immune response would increase.

Lovell's team had previously developed a technology that makes it easy to convert small, purified proteins into particles through the use of liposomes, or small nanoparticles formed from naturally-occurring fatty components. In the new study, the researchers included within the liposomes a special lipid called cobalt-porphyrin-phospholipid, or CoPoP. That special lipid enables the RBD protein to rapidly bind to the liposomes, forming more nanoparticles that generate an immune response, Lovell said.

The team observed that when the RBD was converted into nanoparticles, it maintained its correct, three-dimensional shape and the particles were stable in incubation conditions similar to those in the human body. When laboratory mice and rabbits were immunized with the RBD particles, high antibody levels were induced. Compared to other materials that are combined with the RBD to enhance the immune response, only the approach with particles containing CoPoP gave strong responses.

Other vaccine adjuvant technology does not have the capacity to convert the RBD into particle-form, Lovell said.

"We think these results provide evidence to the vaccine-development community that the RBD antigen benefits a lot from being in particle format," Lovell said. "This could help inform future vaccine design that targets this specific antigen."

In a new international cross disciplinary study, researchers have used artificial intelligence to analyse large amounts of historical photos from WW2. Among other things, the study shows that artificial intelligence can recognise the identity of photographers based on the content of photos taken by them.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now able to identify photographers based on the content of images they've taken.

This is the conclusion of a new study at AU Engineering, Aarhus University, where, in collaboration with Tampere University and the Finnish Environment Institute, researchers have used state-of-the-art artificial intelligence to trawl through photographs taken by 23 well-known Finnish photographers during the Second World War.

The photographs used in the study are part of the publicly available Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive containing around 160,000 photographs from Finnish Winter, Continuation, and Lapland Wars captured in 1939-1945.

The study was published in the scientific journal IEEE Access, and the researchers wanted to demonstrate the advantages of using modern neural networks to analyse images to such an extent that the machine could automatically detect people and objects in a variety of scenes and even distinguish photographers on the basis of characteristics in the image - all much faster than any manual reviewing process.

Such an automatic analysis can serve as a tool for providing content-based textual descriptions of public photographic archives like the Photo Archives of the Museum of Danish Resistance, as it is now required at the European Union level.

The EU Accessibility Directive (DIRECTIVE (EU) 2016/2102) came into effect in September 2020 and requires textual descriptions of image contents to be added to all public images on the Web.

"We were quite surprised by the accuracy with which the AI can recognise photographers based on characteristics in the photos, such as content and framing," says Alexandros Iosifidis, an associate professor and expert in artificial intelligence at Aarhus University.

The photographs analysed in the study show that some photographers have very distinct and easily recognisable characteristics, while others are more difficult for the AI to recognise. On average, the AI model achieved a classification accuracy of 41.1 per cent. (20.1 - 69.7 per cent).

The most recognisable photographer was Heikki Roivainen, a Finnish professor of botany who worked as an official war photographer during the Continuation War; the second of two wars fought between Finland and the Soviet Union during WW2.

"Big data analysis of the contents of photograph collections has been a long-time dream for me and I am very fascinated about the results in this project. That an AI can recognize eg. the framing and various aspects of contents in photographs has many applications in a wide range of fields within humanities and social sciences," says university lecturer at Tampere University Anssi Männistö, who has been researching photographs in journalism for more than 25 years.

The name of the study is 'Machine-Learning-Based Analysis of Finnish World War II Photographers', and it was initiated to facilitate public access to the Finnish war photography archive by using intelligent image search, among other things.

AI also provides the opportunity to link photo archives of this kind to war-related research in social sciences, as the AI can make observations that would otherwise not be possible at a large-scale.

The research results have now been made publicly available to introduce and facilitate this modern approach to research into historical and social studies via photo archives.