Culture

Berkeley -- San Francisco's women firefighters are exposed to higher levels of certain toxic PFAS chemicals than women working in downtown San Francisco offices, shows a new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, San Francisco, and Silent Spring Institute.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are used in grease- and water-resistant coatings and can be found in fabrics, furniture and food packaging, but also notably in firefighting foam and turnout gear. These "forever chemicals," which don't easily break down in the environment, have been linked to a variety of cancers and are known to interfere with immune function, endocrine function and breast development.

The study, which appears Wednesday, Feb. 26 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, is one of the first published results from the Women Firefighter Biomonitoring Collaborative, a long-term investigation into the chemical exposures faced by women firefighters. Partners in the collaboration include the United Fire Service Women, the San Francisco Cancer Prevention Foundation, Commonweal and Breast Cancer Prevention Partners.

"Women firefighters actually raised concern about what they have perceived as elevated rates of breast cancer among their cohort in San Francisco," said Jessica Trowbridge, a graduate student at UC Berkeley and lead author of the paper. "As a team, we decided to conduct an exposure study looking at chemicals that are potential breast carcinogens."

While studies are beginning to document higher rates of cancer among firefighters and higher PFAS exposures, in particular, these studies have primarily focused on men. Documenting the risks faced specifically by women firefighters is critical to ensuring that they receive the protections they need, both for cancer prevention and for compensation if they get sick.

"This is the first study, to our knowledge, that's been done on women firefighters," said Rachel Morello-Frosch, a professor of public health and of environmental science, policy and management at UC Berkeley and senior author of the paper. "The idea of characterizing women's workplace exposures is something that few people are paying any attention to, and here, we are using the newest available technologies to start to do that."

San Francisco is ideal location for this investigation because it has more women firefighters than any other urban fire department in the country. Women make up approximately 15% of the San Francisco fire force, compared to about 5% nationwide. This is due, in part, to 1980s litigation and a consent decree that encouraged the department to hire more women and people of color.

"Women firefighters have benefitted from these well-paid, very honorable professions and now are facing similar concerns about the impacts on their health that studies have demonstrated in men," Morello-Frosch said.

'Is our job causing cancer?'

In 2012, Lt. Heather Buren, along with colleagues form the San Francisco Firefighters Cancer Prevention Foundation (SFFCPF) noticed an alarming trend: In that year alone, five female firefighters were diagnosed with breast cancer.

"We started asking questions, wondering what was up," said Buren, co-author of the paper. "Cancer wasn't new to our profession, but for the first time, I was thinking about cancer as an occupational disease: Was fighting fire somehow a contributing factor in my friends getting sick? Were our repeated exposures to toxic burning chemicals on the fire ground a factor to the high breast cancer rates among SFFD women firefighters?"

Through a series of discussions and community meetings with Commonweal and Breast Cancer Prevention Partners, Buren was introduced to Morello-Frosch. Together, the two began the steps that would eventually launch the biomonitoring collaborative.

Since beginning the study, Buren and a small group of other women firefighters have teamed up with the Bluegreen Alliance to create a training program to help other firefighters take steps to reduce their exposures to PFAS and other toxic chemicals. These steps include many basic measures, like immediately wiping down exposed areas of skin and removing and cleaning turnout gear -- a firefighter's coat, boots and helmet -- after an incident.

"There's also a lot of interest in having firefighters use foams that don't contain PFAS, not just to protect the firefighters, but also because the PFAS foams have contaminated a lot of groundwater and drinking water across the U.S.," said study co-author Ruthann Rudel, research director at Silent Spring Institute.

Because many manufacturers do not disclose the ingredients contained in firefighting foam, the project GreenScreen has recently launched a certification program to identify PFAS-free foams, Rudel pointed out.

'We're here, and our health is important'

To conduct the study, the researchers collected blood samples from 86 women firefighters and 84 women who work in offices in downtown San Francisco. They also conducted hour-long interviews with each participant, asking about workplace activities, eating habits and consumer product use to tease out possible sources of PFAS exposure.

Of the 12 types of PFAS chemicals the researchers tested for, seven were found in detectable amounts in most participants' blood samples, and four were found at detectable amounts in all participants' samples. Three of the seven -- PFHxS, PFUnDA, and PFNA -- were detected at significantly higher amounts in firefighters' blood, compared to office workers' blood.

Each participant received a digital report generated by Silent Spring, detailing their individual results and providing information and concrete steps for reducing their PFAS exposure.

In a companion paper, which also appeared online this month in Environmental Science and Technology, the team detailed a new method that will allow researchers to rapidly screen blood samples for the presence of a variety of different toxic compounds. This method could help identify what else these women firefighters are exposed to that might be harmful. A future study, currently in preparation, will also report on the levels of flame-retardants in the blood samples of the women firefighters and office workers.

"We are here, and our health is important," Buren said. "In many occupations, women are often overlooked and understudied. Firefighting is no different. The SFFD has more women firefighters than any other metropolitan fire department in the U.S. The strength in numbers, coupled with the continued and strong support from our administration and union, has allowed us to focus on the health of our women, which we hope will benefit all firefighters nationally."

DALLAS, February 26, 2020 -- Drinking 12 ounces of sugary drinks more than once per day is linked to lower levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), ("good" cholesterol), and higher levels of triglycerides, in middle aged and older adults, both of which have been shown to increase risk of cardiovascular disease. These results are from a new observational study published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association, the open access journal of the American Heart Association.

In previous studies, added sugars have been shown to increase cardiovascular disease risk. Beverages such as sodas, sports drinks and fruit-flavored drinks are the largest source of added sugars for Americans.

"For some time, we have known sugary drinks can have a negative effect on Americans' health status, yet the assumption for many is that they only contribute to weight gain," said Eduardo Sanchez, M.D., M.P.H., chief medical officer for prevention and chief of the Center for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the American Heart Association. "This research reinforces our understanding of the potential negative impact sugary drinks have on blood cholesterol, which increases heart disease risk. It is yet one more reason for all of us to cut back on sodas and other sugar-sweetened beverages."

Researchers hypothesized that dyslipidemia could be one pathway by which sugary drinks may increase cardiovascular disease risk. An estimated 40% to 50% of U.S. adults are affected by dyslipidemia, an unhealthy imbalance of cholesterol and triglyceride levels in the blood, which increases the risk of cardiovascular disease.

To determine the association between sugary drinks on triglyceride and cholesterol levels, researchers studied observational medical data of up to 5,924 participants from the Offspring and Generation 3 cohorts of the Framingham Heart Study, who were followed for an average of 12.5 years between 1991 and 2014. The Offspring cohort of the Framingham Heart Study includes the children of original participants in the Framingham Heart Study, and the Generation 3 cohort includes grandchildren of the original participants in the Framingham Heart Study.

For this study, the beverages were defined as: 12 ounces of sugary drinks, such as sodas, fruit-flavored drinks, sports drinks, presweetened coffees and teas; 12 ounces of low-calorie sweetened beverages, including naturally and artificially sweetened "diet" sodas or other flavored drinks; or 8 ounces of 100% fruit juices, including orange, apple, grapefruit and other juices derived from whole fruits with no added sugars. Study participants were classified into five groups according to how often they drank the different beverage types ranging from low intake (1 serving per day).

Researchers analyzed how the different drink types and their consumption levels correlated with changes in cholesterol and triglyceride levels over approximately four-year periods. They found that:

Drinking sugar-sweetened beverages (more than 12 ounces per day) was associated with a 53% higher incidence of high triglycerides and a 98% higher incidence of low HDL cholesterol (the "good" cholesterol) compared to those who drank less than one serving per month;

Drinking low-calorie sweetened beverages did not appear to be associated with increased dyslipidemia risk among the people who regularly drank low-calorie sweetened beverages; and

Regularly drinking up to 12 ounces of 100% fruit juice per day was not associated with adverse changes in cholesterol or dyslipidemia, though further research is needed to warrant this finding.

"Reducing the number of or eliminating sugary drink consumption may be one strategy that could help people keep their triglyceride and HDL cholesterol at healthier levels," said lead study author Nicola McKeown, Ph.D., a nutrition epidemiologist at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston. "And, while our study didn't find negative consequences on blood lipids from drinking low-calorie sweetened drinks, there may be health consequences of consuming these beverages on other risk factors. Water remains the preferred and healthiest beverage."

While previous cross-sectional studies have had similar findings, this study reaffirms those findings with prospective data. One potential limitation of the study is that participants self-reported their dietary intake.

The American Heart Association recommends people eliminate sugary drink consumption to improve heart health and to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.

People who have been treated in intensive care commonly suffer from residual cognitive impairment, but the reason for this is unknown. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden now link cognitive impairment with lasting inflammation and a potential treatment target. The results are presented in the scientific journal Intensive Care Medicine.

Every year, some 40,000 people are treated in intensive care in Sweden. More than three quarters of these critically ill patients survive, but many suffer subsequent cognitive impairment as part of what is known as the "post-intensive care syndrome" (PICS). The impairments in memory, attention, processing speed and problem solving can remain for years and prevent timely return to normal life and work for those affected.

"There are no specific treatments as the causes of the condition are unknown," says Peder Olofsson, researcher at Karolinska Institutet's Department of Medicine in Solna.

The study, which was led by Olofsson, followed 100 intensive care patients after discharge and found that they had elevated blood levels of the endogenous, pro-inflammatory protein HMGB1 at the time of discharge from hospital and at three and six months afterwards. This supports the hypothesis that some patients suffer from lasting inflammation of unknown origin after intensive care. High HMGB1 levels could also be linked to the attention deficit observed in the patients.

"More studies are needed to understand the connection in detail, but the finding gives us hope that this prolonged functional impairment can be treated with drugs designed to target HMGB1," says Emily Brück, researcher at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Karolinska Institutet, and the study's first author. "Earlier studies have shown that such substances can improve the cognitive function of mice that have survived a serious illness."

Glioblastoma is an aggressive and deadly brain cancer. Although improved treatment protocols have doubled the survival rate over the past 20 years, glioblastoma tumors usually grow back. After surgeons remove the tumor, patients typically undergo surveillance imaging within 48 hours followed by regular screenings to monitor for recurrence. However, a retrospective study from the University of Missouri School of Medicine and MU Health Care showed patients who underwent surveillance imaging after surgery did not have better outcomes than patients who did not have imaging and returned when they felt symptoms of recurrence.

"Patients who undergo regular imaging can become nervous or anxious in the days or weeks leading up to their imaging appointment," said N. Scott Litofsky, MD, professor and chief of neurological surgery at the MU School of Medicine and MU Health Care. "While surveillance is good, maybe we can change our protocols to make patients more comfortable and give them more control of the process but still deliver quality care."

Litofsky's research team reviewed 74 cases at MU Health Care. Of those, 47 patients underwent routine surveillance and 27 returned when they felt symptoms of recurrence. Litofsky found the median survival without a worsening condition was 6.1 months for the surveillance group and 6.0 for the symptomatic group. Post-recurrence survival rates were 6.4 months for surveillance and 7.7 months for symptomatic cases.

"We have a lot of patients who come from a long distance, and our general philosophy of care is to provide regular follow-up visits," Litofsky said. "The hypothesis was patients would do better if we did regular surveillance. The results indicated that for this population of patients, the outcome was equivalent whether they had surveillance or showed up when they had symptoms."

Litofsky said less patient surveillance testing could improve patient convenience, reduce cost and ease pre-imaging anxiety.

"Sometimes we do things because they seem to be the right thing to do, even if the evidence suggests maybe we don't need to do it," Litofsky said. "We may need to change our paradigm on how we are taking care of these patients."

Litofsky is now planning a pilot study to link patient-reported outcomes identified through a questionnaire to clinic visits for patients. Then he'll examine if the patient-reported outcomes are superior to clinic visits that included surveillance imaging.

"Maybe down the road, we could use a combination of reported outcomes and surveillance so we can reduce the amount of time the patients need to spend coming to appointments," he said.

Litofsky's study, "Does Surveillance-Detected Disease Progression Yield Superior Patient Outcomes in High-Grade Glioma?" was recently published by the journal World Neurosurgery.

A drug used to treat type 2 diabetes could offer a simple and cheap solution to reduce dangerous side effects of steroid treatment, new research from Queen Mary University of London suggests.

The phase 2 clinical trial, funded by Barts Charity, looked at the effects of the diabetes drug metformin on patients currently receiving high doses of glucocorticoids, a type of steroids used to treat chronic inflammatory diseases.

The researchers analysed results from over 50 non-diabetic patients on glucocorticoid treatment from Barts Health NHS Trust and found that patients treated with metformin showed improved clinical outcomes. This included a 30 percent reduction in the rate of infections and lower hospital admissions, in comparison to the placebo group.

They also observed that treatment with metformin strengthened the intended anti-inflammatory effects of glucocorticoids and had beneficial results on several cardiovascular, metabolic and bone markers over the 12-week trial period.

The study is published today in the journal The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, funded as part of a wider £25m commitment by Barts Charity to support innovative medical research at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry at Queen Mary.

Since the discovery of their therapeutic effects in the 1950s glucocorticoids, such as prednisolone, have revolutionized treatment of patients with chronic inflammatory disease.
Now glucocorticoids are used to treat a range of conditions where the immune system is overactive, including rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, inflammatory diseases, and in cancer therapy.

However, prolonged use of these medicines at high doses can lead to serious metabolic side effects such as weight gain, high sugar levels, loss of bone and muscle mass, and increased risk of infection and thrombosis.

Long-term, these features can lead to Cushing's syndrome, a potentially fatal disorder which also exists in patients where the body makes too much of the stress hormone cortisol.

Several biological medicines have been developed as alternatives to steroids but these drugs are expensive and can present their own adverse effects.

Previous research from Professor Márta Korbonits and colleagues found that steroids are able to influence a key metabolic protein, called AMP-kinase or AMPK. Other experimental studies have suggested that metformin acts, at least partly, via the AMPK protein and in the opposite way to steroids. Based on this evidence, the researchers reasoned that the diabetes drug held the potential to reverse the unwanted side effects of steroids.

Professor Márta Korbonits, Professor of Endocrinology at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry at Queen Mary, said: "Our findings are strikingly positive and suggest that a simple and immediately available intervention, treatment with the diabetes drug metformin, can improve the clinical status of patients on glucocorticoid treatment, even if they do not have diabetes. The results could have a huge impact on the large number of patients on long-term glucocorticoids, improving treatment-related complications and their cardiovascular prognosis.

"Whilst developed countries may be increasing the use of biologics or other steroid-sparing agents, in many other parts of the world there's still a heavy reliance on glucocorticoids. Therefore, doctors and patients have been waiting for a safe, cheap and effective treatment that can prevent the major metabolic complications of these medicines, but does not affect, or could even improve, their anti-inflammatory properties. Our results suggest metformin has the potential to help these patients."

Fiona Miller Smith, Chief Executive of Barts Charity, said: "At Barts Charity we are funding research to pioneer improvements in healthcare that not only enhance the lives of patients in our hospitals and local community but can also have an impact worldwide.

"Steroids are used to treat a vast range of conditions, from cancer to rheumatoid arthritis, and a large number of over 60s need to take these drugs to manage chronic conditions that could otherwise become extremely debilitating. The promising findings of this study show how funding innovative research can help us rethink long-standing problems facing patients and healthcare professionals, and in this case, even deliver new, simple and cost-effective treatment options for the NHS."

It is estimated that around three percent of the general adult population and up to 11 percent of over 80s are currently prescribed long-term steroid treatment for chronic inflammatory disease*.

Seagulls favour food that has been handled by humans, new research shows.

Herring gulls were presented with two identical food items - one of which they had seen a human holding.

The gulls pecked more often at the handled food, suggesting they use human actions when deciding what to eat.

The University of Exeter study follows previous research which found that staring at seagulls makes them less likely to steal food.

"UK herring gull numbers are declining, but urban populations have increased," said lead author Madeleine Goumas, of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall.

"Despite the fact they're a common sight in many towns, little is known about urban gull behaviour.

"We wanted to find out if gulls are simply attracted by the sight of food, or if people's actions can draw gulls' attention towards an item.

"Our study shows that cues from humans may play an important part in the way gulls find food, and could partly explain why gulls have been successful in colonising urban areas."

In the study, carried out in Cornish towns including Falmouth and Penzance, a researcher approached individual gulls and placed two buckets on the ground in front of them, each covering a wrapped flapjack.

The buckets were then removed, and the researcher picked up one of the flapjacks, handled it for 20 seconds, and then put it back down on the ground.

In total, 38 gulls were tested, 24 pecked at one of the flapjacks and 19 of these (79%) chose the one that had been handled.

To see if gulls were responding to human handling alone, the experiment was repeated with two non-food items - sponges that were cut into the same size and shape as the flapjacks.

In this case, gulls' preference for the handled sponge did not exceed "chance levels" - suggesting that handling draws their attention to food in particular.

Senior author Dr Laura Kelley said: "Our findings suggest that gulls are more likely to approach food that they have seen people drop or put down, so they may associate areas where people are eating with an easy meal.

"This highlights the importance of disposing of food waste properly, as inadvertently feeding gulls reinforces these associations.

"Herring gulls have a generalist diet that typically includes fish and invertebrates, but they will also consume food found in landfill sites and household waste.

"The effect of this shift in food quality and quantity away from more 'natural' sources is not yet clear.

"Herring gulls are quite adaptable and are likely to be moving into urban areas because of the resources available.

"For example, there are lots of suitable nesting sites, and a ready supply of food.

"Urban environments may also be able to support larger gull populations, meaning that competition among individuals for resources is lower than in rural coastal colonies."

The paper, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, is entitled: "Urban herring gulls use human behavioural cues to locate food."

In estuaries around the world, tiny trematode worms take over the bodies of aquatic snails. These parasitic flatworms invade the snail's body and use its systems to support their colony, sometimes for over a decade, "driving them around like cars," according to senior author Ryan Hechinger, professor of marine sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.

Like many other highly organized animal societies, including bees and ants, trematode colonies form castes to split the workload. Some trematodes, called "reproductives," are larger and do all the reproduction for the colony, while smaller worms with larger mouths known as "soldiers" protect against outside invasion from competing trematodes.

"People think of parasites doing the attacking, not getting attacked," said co-author Mark Torchin, a marine ecologist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). "But these parasites have to fight for their homes within their hosts, and deal with the risk of host invasion."

But, for any society with limited resources, this means a trade off - more soldiers means fewer reproductives.

"Animal societies, like trematodes, have to maintain a balance between reproduction and protection," said first author Emlyn Resetarits, a postdoctoral associate at University of Georgia and former PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin and graduate fellow with STRI. "How many reproductive worms should exist in the colony, and how many soldiers? Are these numbers stable, or do they change in response to environmental pressure?"

In a new study published Feb. 26, 2020 in Biology Letters, the research team demonstrated for the first time that the number of soldiers in a trematode colony depends on the local invasion threat, showing that such societies produce greater standing armies in areas of greater threat. This has big implications for understanding how animal societies determine their resource allocation.

"Each trematode colony is built of clones from a single invading worm," said Hechinger, who specializes in the study of ecology and evolution of parasites. "They don't want to share their snail with another trematode, so as their population takes over their host, they start producing soldiers to fight off any potential invaders."

But the real question was whether the trematodes produced more soldier worms when they lived in environments where they were more likely to encounter invaders.

To find out, the researchers collected snails at 38 different sites with varying levels of invasion threat from 12 estuaries along the North American Pacific coast, from Panama to Northern California, and brought them back to the lab for analysis.

There, they dissected over 150 individual snails to count the number of soldier worms in each one, and found that snails collected in locations where there was a high risk of being invaded by other parasites had larger numbers of soldier worms poised to attack any new threat.

This massive sampling effort, funded by graduate fellowships from the National Science Foundation and STRI, included counting trematode worms from six separate species. All but one showed the same pattern of more soldiers in response to higher risk, indicating that this trait is generalizable among trematode species, families, and even orders, providing support that this may be true for other animal societies.

According to Hechinger, parasitic trematodes make excellent animal models for these kinds of experiments. "It's difficult to study even one termite colony, because of its size," he said, "But with trematodes, you can hold 50 colonies in your hand."

"Unlike a lot of organisms, these trematode societies within snails are very reproducible units - they all live in very similar environments, inside the same species of snail," said Resetarits. "You can really get a sense of how many soldiers there are in one colony versus another, and make direct comparisons between different colonies and across species."

Beyond their utility as a model system, understanding the ecology of these snailbound worms is important because they play a large role in the ecosystems where they're found, passing through the food web in snails, fish, and birds, with different species found in different marine animals.

"There are more tons of trematode flesh than bird flesh in these estuaries," said Hechinger. "These worms can be used as an ecological indicator. If you pick up a hundred snails and look at the diversity of trematode parasites inside them and how many are infected, it tells you something about the diversity and abundance of the birds in the area. Understanding these worms helps us understand how energy flows through these food webs."

"Our next steps will be to determine how these worms determine their resource allocation," said Resetarits. "Do individual colonies react and respond to information about the local invasion threat by producing more soldiers, or are the trematode species in high risk locations adapting their soldier allocation on a population level? This will show us how versatile these colonies are, and give us more information about how their societies adapt to external challenges."

"This discovery is not just an interesting research project," said Hechinger. "This serves as a clear demonstration of the utility of using this system as a model to tackle fundamental sociobiological questions."

Babies born into bilingual homes change the focus of their attention more quickly and more frequently than babies in homes where only one language is spoken, according to new research published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

The study, led by Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), used eye-tracking technology to record the gaze of 102 infants carrying out a variety of tasks.

The researchers chose to test babies aged between seven and nine months to rule out any benefits gained from being able to speak a second language, often referred to as the "bilingual advantage". Instead, the study focused on the effects of growing up hearing two or more languages.

When shown two pictures side by side, infants from bilingual homes shifted attention from one picture to another more frequently than infants from monolingual homes, suggesting these babies were exploring more of their environment.

The study also found that when a new picture appeared on the screen, babies from bilingual homes were 33% faster at redirecting their attention towards the new picture.

Lead author Dr Dean D'Souza, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), said: "Bilingual environments may be more variable and unpredictable than monolingual environments -- and therefore more challenging to learn in.

"We know that babies can easily acquire multiple languages, so we wanted to investigate how they manage it. Our research suggests that babies in bilingual homes adapt to their more complex environment by seeking out additional information.

"Scanning their surroundings faster and more frequently might help the infants in a number of ways. For example, redirecting attention from a toy to a speaker's mouth could help infants to match ambiguous speech sounds with mouth movements."

The researchers are currently investigating whether faster and more frequent switching in infancy has cascading effects over developmental time, for example affecting behaviour in older children and adults.

ITHACA, N.Y. - New research from an interdisciplinary Cornell team has found that as little as 10 minutes in a natural setting can help college students feel happier and lessen the effects of both physical and mental stress.

The research, published Jan. 14 in Frontiers in Psychology, is part of a larger examination of "nature therapy" and aims to provide an easily-achievable dosage that physicians can prescribe as a preventive measure against high levels of stress, anxiety, depression and other mental health issues college students face.

"It doesn't take much time for the positive benefits to kick in -- we're talking 10 minutes outside in a space with nature," said lead author Gen Meredith, associate director of the Master of Public Health Program and lecturer at the College of Veterinary Medicine. "We firmly believe that every student, no matter what subject or how high their workload, has that much discretionary time each day, or at least a few times per week."

Meredith and her co-authors reviewed studies that examined the effects of nature on people of college age (no younger than 15, no older than 30) to discover how much time students should be spending outside and what they should be doing while they're there. They found that 10-50 minutes in natural spaces was the most effective to improve mood, focus and physiological markers like blood pressure and heart rate.

"It's not that there's a decline after 50 minutes, but rather that the physiological and self-reported psychological benefits tend to plateau after that," said co-author Donald Rakow, associate professor in the School of Integrative Plant Science.

To enjoy the positive effects of being outside, students need only to be sitting or walking, the two primary activities the researchers examined in an effort to provide accessible recommendations.

"We wanted to keep this access to nature as simple and achievable as possible," says Rakow. "While there is a lot of literature on longer outdoor programs, we wanted to quantify doses in minutes, not days."

For Cornell students, there are a multitude of options for escaping into nature. For urban universities, research suggests that adding green elements to a built space can produce the same results. It is the time spent in nature, not necessarily nature itself, that's beneficial.

"This is an opportunity to challenge our thinking around what nature can be," says Meredith. "It is really all around us: trees, a planter with flowers, a grassy quad or a wooded area."

The impetus for this work is a movement toward prescribing time in nature as a way to prevent or improve stress and anxiety, while also supporting physical and mental health outcomes. The researchers wanted to consider what "dose" would need to be prescribed to college-age students to show an effect. They are hoping that when it's applied at universities, it becomes part of a student's routine and is consumed in regular doses, like a pill.

"Prescribing a dose can legitimize the physician's recommendation and give a tangible goal" says Meredith. "It's different than just saying: 'Go outside.' There is something specific that a student can aim for."

Whether small-time farmers across the world get swept away by globalization or ride a wave of new opportunities depends largely on how much control they can get, according to a new study that takes a new, big-picture look.

From soybean farmers in China to those who grow vanilla in Madagascar, trendy açaí in the Amazon or rubber in Myanmar, their place in new, fast-paced markets that can be both regional and global isn't fully understood until examined in context with its partners and competitors near and far. Scientists at Michigan State University (MSU) and across the world take a new look in "Understanding How Smallholders Integrated into Pericoupled and Telecoupled Systems" in this week's journal Sustainability.

The takeaway: It's agency - the ability these farmers have to seize some control to better their position in a global market.

"Given that smallholder farmers everywhere are critical to several of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, such as ending poverty and hunger, we need to fully understand how being swept into global markets affect them, and that means not just looking at their bottom line, but how they interact across the entire market process," said Jianguo "Jack" Liu, MSU Rachel Carson Chair in Sustainability. "We found success applying the integrated framework of telecoupling - which allows us to look at both human and natural systems across distances - to reveal some surprising truths."

The group looked at 12 cases of smallholder farmers. Some, like farmers in Kenya, were struggling to grow more corn amidst water shortages. Others, like soybean farmers in China, found themselves at the mercy of enormous markets dominated by Brazil and the United States. Vanilla growers in Madagascar are pummeled by volatile prices while açaí berry growers in the Brazilian Amazon Delta found opportunity in the big cities to sell their newly popular crop.

In each case, these smallholder farmers have traditionally been considered passive to external pressures - swept along the fierce tide of globalization. But as Yue Dou, a former CSIS research associate now at the Institute for Environmental Studies in Amsterdam, notes following that flow paints a more nuanced picture.

"Globalization is not the only way that integrates smallholder to the world," Dou said. "Smallholders also send or receive flows other than agricultural goods, such as labor migration, water discharge, and technology exchange. Some of these various connections are with faraway markets, while some of them are with their neighboring villages and towns. And they co-exist. The telecoupling framework allows us to investigate the various ways smallholders connect with the world, shedding light on the agency of decision makers and potential paths to improve the environment and economics within the system."

The paper examined how some açaí growers rode the new popularity of their crops to new lives by taking second homes in nearby cities which had better job and education opportunities. The Kenyan farmers found benefits in new partnerships with the Chinese, who shared new mulching systems that helped them save precious water and increase corn yields.

Others struggle to grasp control. China's soybean farmers in the northern Heilongjiang Province have little ability to control global soybean prices and are forced to make decisions about what they plant on the basis of these forces, decisions that have environmental consequences as they are forced to plant crops requiring more fertilizer.

"From this study that synthesizes 12 cases, the authors found that if the main linkages smallholders have is with their neighbors and not the distant world, they may have more choices of livelihoods and better overall outcomes in the economy, social well-being, and the environment," Dou said. "When smallholders are connected to faraway systems, the key is to empower them to higher agency and more livelihood opportunities. Sometimes this can be improved by creating additional connections to neighbor systems."

ITHACA, N.Y. - A new study has uncovered key details for how the Salmonella bacteria that causes typhoid fever identifies a host's immune cells and delivers toxins that disrupt the immune system and allow the pathogen to spread.

The findings, published Feb. 21 in the journal PLOS Pathogens, provide new directions for developing treatments for typhoid fever.

The Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi bacteria that causes the fever annually infects up to 21 million people worldwide and close to 6,000 people in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The disease is most common in areas with poor sanitation and unsafe water and food, including South Asia, and especially Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

The study identifies three subunits on a typhoid toxin protein, one of which is key for delivering the toxin into host cells.

"Typhoid fever is life-threatening but the underlying pathogenic mechanisms are not well understood," said Jeongmin Song, assistant professor of microbiology and immunology in the College of Veterinary Medicine. Tri Nguyen and Sohyoung Lee, both postdoctoral researchers in Song's lab, are co-first authors of the study.

"Here we show that one of the proteins secreted by the typhoid bacteria plays an important role for this pathogenic mechanism," Song said.

The study focuses on a toxin, a protein compound secreted by S. Typhi that helps the bacteria evade the host's immune response. This toxin consists of three protein subunits that form a complex.

Two of the subunits, called 'A' subunits, are enzymes; after entering host immune cells, they disrupt immune responses.

A third 'B' subunit recognizes and binds to specific target sugars on the host immune cell's surface, which initiates a process whereby the toxin enters the cell.

The study's authors found that the bacterial B subunit recognizes and attaches to the sugars, known as trisaccharides, on the membranes of immune cells. A trisaccharide called N-acetylneuraminic acid comes in unmodified and modified forms: The B subunit attaches to the unmodified form, but it has a higher affinity to the modified form. Once attached, the toxin gains entry into the cell.

Once inside an immune cell, also known as a white blood cell, the two enzymatic subunits work to disable the cell's innate immune response, which is the body's immediate and general response when a pathogen is detected. Disabling the innate immune response limits the body's adaptive immune response development, where cells have a memory of a prior infection and launch an attack if the pathogen returns.

The findings open the door to develop small molecules that block the high affinity trisaccharides and inhibit the toxin from binding to and entering the target cell.

"We are not saying this is all we should know," Song said, "but this typhoid toxin is essential in this important pathogenic mechanism behind typhoid fever."

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Centuries of archaeological research on the Inca Empire has netted a veritable library of knowledge. But new digital and data-driven projects led by Brown University scholars are proving that there is much more to discover about pre-colonial life in the Andes.

In a recently released edition of the Journal of Field Archaeology, Brown Assistant Professor of Anthropology Parker VanValkenburgh and several colleagues detailed new research they conducted in the former Inca Empire in South America using drones, satellite imagery and proprietary online databases. Their results demonstrate that big data can provide archaeologists with a sweeping, big-picture view of the subjects they study on the ground -- prompting new insights and new historical questions.

"Some questions are really hard to answer when you're looking at only one small story -- say, digging a trench in the remains of a single house," VanValkenburgh said. "Those big questions about the entire Inca Empire -- those are very hard to answer with just a pick and a trowel."

But as VanValkenburgh and his colleagues discovered, researchers can begin to answer those questions by harnessing the power of big data. Working with Vanderbilt University anthropologist Steven Wernke and Japanese ethnohistorian Akira Saito, VanValkenburgh helped to develop and populate two online databases that collect historical information and satellite imagery documenting the Spanish Empire's forced mass resettlement of the Inca Empire in the 16th century.

One database, called LOGAR, includes collated information from the "Tasa de la Visita General," a comprehensive record of the resettlement kept by the Spanish-appointed viceroy of Peru. Another, titled GeoPACHA, serves as a repository of new and existing imagery of these sites, from historical photos to current satellite images.

"This was one of the largest resettlement programs ever attempted by a colonial power in world history," Wernke said. "More than a million people were moved. Yet because there is no single master list in the historical documents, more than half of the settlements had gone unidentified. Now, between the LOGAR and the GeoPACHA, we have identified around three quarters of them, which is astounding."

Using the data they collected, VanValkenburgh, Wernke and Saito created a comprehensive map of every known Spanish-founded colonial settlement, or reducción, stretching from Ecuador to Chile, allowing those who study the region to understand the ebb and flow of social life on a multi-country scale. To demonstrate the potential insights these data hold, the authors created one figure that pinpoints each reducción atop a map of the Inca imperial highway system, demonstrating that the Spanish relied heavily on indigenous infrastructure to conquer and restructure the Inca Empire. Another figure color-coded each reducción by elevation, demonstrating that the data could help inform studies about the ways in which mass resettlement affected Inca settlement systems.

"My team is looking at the different types of terraces people created to support farming in northeastern Peru, and mapping out the places where we're seeing Inca-style terracing in satellite imagery on a massive scale will help us examine both large-scale population history and the scope of Inca impacts on local environments," VanValkenburgh said. "But there are also all sorts of new questions that pop up when you scale out like this."

The power of scale was at the heart of an array of research showcased in the Feb. 12 special issue of the Journal of Field Archaeology, edited by VanValkenburgh and Andrew Dufton, a recent Brown Ph.D. graduate who now teaches at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The supplement, VanValkenburgh said, aimed to provide the first ever survey of the potential benefits and drawbacks of big data in the field of archaeology.

Another of VanValkenburgh's projects, in which he teamed up with Brown Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies James Kellner to capture the architectural complexity of the massive pre-Columbian site of Kuelap using drone LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology, is also featured in the journal edition.

"In archaeology, big data science is really in its infancy, compared to other fields such as genetics and astronomy," VanValkenburgh said. "But what it holds the promise of enabling us to do is to look at processes and patterns on a continental scale, allowing us to, for example, examine the ways in which entire societies have adapted to climate change over long periods of time."

But the use of big data in a humanities-focused field is not without challenges, VanValkenburgh pointed out in the journal introduction he penned with Dufton. Researchers' increasing reliance on high-resolution satellite imagery could raise concerns about individual privacy and national security. Those who want to share data with peers at other institutions or in other countries will face challenges, since the sheer variability of archaeological materials makes it almost impossible to establish universal naming conventions like those employed in medicine or physics.

And especially paramount, VanValkenburgh said, an overreliance on data-driven archaeological methods could distance scholars from the very people and civilizations their research seeks to better understand.

"We've sold our field on the fact that it adds a human dimension to history," VanValkenburgh said. "People are worried about how big-picture perspectives miss the small stories that have been archaeology's bread and butter for a really long time, as well as the future of the community-based and local partnerships that are increasingly important to archaeological practice."

He believes that in an ideal world, big data's role in archaeology will be to start conversations, not make definitive conclusions. His work with Wernke and Saito demonstrates that databases exist to open up new research avenues, most of which will still require archaeological boots on the ground and constant communication with members of the communities where archaeologists work.

"I think we need to be excited about what technology can tell us, but we also need to be humble," VanValkenburgh said. "Digital archaeology needs to be in deep conversation with the meat-and-potatoes work of excavation and surveying, as well as being fundamentally deferential to the even more vital concerns of local stakeholders."

Memphis, Tenn. (February 25, 2020) - Shelley White-Means, PhD, a professor of health economics at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, is the principal investigator of a paper published this month in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health that found breast cancer support groups play a major role in helping underserved African-American women at risk for or diagnosed with breast cancer in Memphis.

Using data from in-depth focus groups, Dr. White-Means, a faculty member in the Department of Interpersonal Education and the Institute for Health Outcomes and Policy at UTHSC, and her co-authors determined that these community based groups are essential in overcoming barriers to care that include fear, lack of transportation and or child care, cost of medication, inadequate insurance, and other issues. Co-authors on the paper are Jill Dapremont, EdD, RN, CNE, associate professor and director of the RN-BSN Program at the University of Memphis, Barbara D. Davis, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Management at the University of Memphis, and Tronlyn Thompson, a biology student at Howard University. The research was funded by the Tennessee Department of Health.

"There are community based support agencies that are vital for the survival of African American women in Memphis with breast cancer," Dr. White-Means said. These groups help women overcome economic, social, and psychological barriers to diagnosis and treatment and act as connectors in underserved areas for women with breast cancer.

The organizations include the National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as navigator programs, and support groups that provide education, social, and psychological support to African American women.

"The work that needs to be done is to have a greater interaction between providers and the health care system and the community based support groups," Dr. White-Means said.

"Gaps in death rates from breast cancer exist between black and white women in Memphis," Dr. White-Means said. The national goal is to reduce breast cancer deaths to 20.7 per 100,000 females. "In Memphis, while white women are close to meeting the 2020 goal, black women are not."

Dr. White-Means has championed research into issues related to health disparities and health equity for decades. She joined the faculty of UTHSC in 2004, bringing with her a dedication to address health disparities in her hometown of Memphis. From 2009 to 2012, Dr. White-Means, her students, colleagues at UTHSC and LeMoyne-Owen College, and various community organizations, with the help of funding from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, developed and ran the Consortium for Health Education, Economic Empowerment and Research (CHEER).

The organization aimed to enhance outcomes and increase the health status of the population in the city's poorest inner-city neighborhood by addressing food insecurity and food deserts, performing health risk assessments, investigating breast cancer disparities, conducting community health summits, and other programs.

"Our emphasis was community-based participatory research collaborations that engaged many agencies that today would be described as 'social determinants of health' organizations," she said. "This focus is very popular now, but at that point, it wasn't."

In October, Dr. White-Means presented a paper at the Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis on the impact of job types on individual health. It was titled, "Workplace Setting and Job Types as Determinants of Health Disparities."

She said she produced that paper to make the public aware that the jobs they have chosen will impact health outcomes. Gig-market or contract jobs that don't carry health care coverage tend to be filled by minorities. "We need to look at what is going on in the labor force," she said. "It's not just about wages. Employees need to be aware that job choices and the growing racial divide in quality of jobs impact health over the lifetime."

Species adapt to their local climates, but how often they adapt to their local communities remains a mystery. To find answers, researchers at McGill University and the University of British Columbia examined over 125 studies testing local adaptation in over 100 species of plants and animals in an article published in The American Naturalist.

"Local adaptation occurs when a population evolves to better suit its local surroundings. We already know that environmental pressures like temperature and drought can drive adaptation, but the impact of living pressures like competition or predator-prey relationships is less clear," according to Anna Hargreaves, an assistant professor of biology at McGill University.

By comparing transplant experiments that used relatively natural environments to ones that reduced stressors like weeds and predation, the researchers examined how often such interactions among species drive local adaptation.

Surprisingly, they found that although the interactions strongly affected how well species grew, survived, or reproduced, interactions did not necessarily spur adaptation. "We expected experiments to show us stronger local adaptation when stressful interactions were left intact. But we found that it wasn't stronger or common in these cases--except perhaps in the tropics," says Hargreaves.

According to the researchers, this is intriguing evidence that interactions might be more evolutionarily important in the tropics. Evolutionary biologists have long speculated that species might drive each other's evolution more often in the tropics, given the amazing diversity of tropical species, but evidence supporting this theory has been sparse until now. The authors say more direct tests of what drives local adaptation, especially studies of tropical species, are needed before we truly understand how interactions between species influence local adaptation.

Scientists from Salk Institute (USA), Skoltech (Russia), and Riken Center for Brain Science (Japan) investigated a theoretical model of how populations of neurons in the visual cortex of the brain may recognize and process faces and their different expressions and how they are organized. The research was recently published in Neural Computation and highlighted on its cover.

Humans have amazing abilities to recognize a huge number of individual faces and interpret facial expressions extremely well. These abilities play a key role in human social interactions. However, how the human brain processes and stores such complex visual information is still poorly understood.

Skoltech scientists Anh-Huy Phan and Andrzej Cichocki, with their colleagues from the US and Japan, Sidney Lehky and Keiji Tanaka, decided to better understand how the visual cortex processes and stores information related to face recognition. Their approach was based on the idea that a human face can be conceptually represented as a collection of parts or components, including eyes, eyebrow, nose, mouth, etc. Using a machine learning approach, they applied a novel tensor algorithm to decompose faces into a set of components or images called tensorfaces as well as their associated weights, and represented faces by linear combinations of those components. In this way, they build a mathematical model describing the work of the neurons involved in face recognition.

"We used novel tensor decompositions to represent faces as a set of components with specified complexity, which can be interpreted as model face cells and indicate that human face representations consist of a mixture of low- and medium-complexity face cells," said Skoltech Professor Andrzej Cichocki.