Culture

A fossilised insect wing discovered in an abandoned mine in Labrador has led palaeontologists from McGill University and the University of Gda?sk to identify a new hairy cicada species that lived around 100 million years ago.

Maculaferrum blaisi, described in a study published in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, is the first hemipteran insect (true bug) to be discovered at the Redmond Formation, a fossil site from the Cretaceous period near Schefferville, Labrador.

Alexandre Demers-Potvin, a Master's student under the supervision of Professor Hans Larsson, Director of the Redpath Museum at McGill, said that a single wing was sufficient to identify the family to which the insect belonged.

"We were easily able to demonstrate that the insect belonged to the Tettigarctidae family thanks to the pattern of the veins we observed on its wing," said Demers-Potvin, who is also a 2018 National Geographic Explorer.

The genus name (Maculaferrum) is derived from the Latin words macula - spot - because of the spotted pattern found on parts of the wing and ferrum - iron - due to the high iron content of the red rocks found at the Redmond site. The species name - blaisi - is in honour of Roger A. Blais, who conducted the first survey of the Redmond Formation and of its fossils in 1957 while working for the Iron Ore Company of Canada.

"This gives us a better understanding of the site's insect biodiversity during the Cretaceous, a time before the dinosaurs were wiped out," Demers-Potvin added. "The finding also illustrates that rare species can be found at the Redmond mine and that it deserves the attention from the palaeontological community."

"The find is exciting because it represents the oldest, diverse insect locality in Canada. It's also from an exciting time during an evolutionary explosion of flowering plants and pollinating insects, that evolved into the terrestrial ecosystems of today," said Larsson.

AURORA, Colo. (Feb. 21, 2020) - Despite bureaucratic hurdles, the vast majority of pediatricians want to keep participating in a national program that provides vaccinations at no cost to children who are on Medicaid, uninsured, or who are American Indian/Alaska Native, according to researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

The Vaccine For Children (VFC) Program was created in 1993 to keep children from contracting vaccine-preventable diseases due to an inability to pay for the drugs. Since then, it has increased vaccination rates, decreased vaccine-preventable illnesses and reduced social and racial disparities among those inoculated.

"While it is likely that much of the burden reported by pediatricians related to the VFC program is in response to...tightened requirements, it is reassuring that providers seem to have remained with the program," said the study's first author Sean O'Leary, MD, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

The study, published online today in the journal Pediatrics, examined pediatrician participation in the program.

"We sought to explore pediatricians' current attitudes and experiences with the program and how these attitudes and experiences are affecting participation," said O'Leary, who is also spokesman for the American Academy of Pediatrics and practices at Children's Hospital Colorado.

They researchers sent surveys to 471 pediatricians with 372 responding. They asked how many of the doctors participated in the program, the perceived burdens of taking part, their experiences and practices in stocking the vaccines and their views on a bigger reimbursement for giving the vaccine to Medicaid patients.

Yet when asked if they considered quitting the program in the past year, 85% said they had never seriously considered or discussed it. Another 10% said they had considered it but not seriously and 5% reported seriously considering it.

Those who seriously considered opting out, said the chief culprit was difficulty in record keeping requirements. Other reasons included unpredictable vaccine supplies, inadequate payment for vaccine administration fees and keeping separate stocks of vaccines, requiring separate storage facilities.

But nearly all pediatricians surveyed said the program was valuable because they could give vaccines regardless of the patients' ability to pay, children could get the vaccinations at their own medical provider's office and it improved overall vaccination rates.

O'Leary recommended alleviating burdens where possible. That could include increasing payments for vaccine administration, uniform rules that allow borrowing between private and VFC vaccine stocks and creating incentive to buy proper storage and monitoring equipment.

"In order to maintain and increase vaccination rates," O'Leary said. "It will be important to keep monitoring these attitudes."

What The Study Did: National vital statistics data from 2000 to 2016 were used to examine how rates of alcohol-induced deaths (defined as those deaths due to alcohol consumption that could be avoided if alcohol weren't involved) have changed in the U.S. and to compare the results by demographic groups including sex, race/ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status  and geographic location. The study is accompanied by two commentaries.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

Authors: Susan Spillane, Ph.D., of the National Cancer Institute in Rockville, Maryland, is the corresponding author.

(10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.21451)

Editor's Note: The article includes funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflicts of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

What The Study Did: The risk of dementia in adults 60 and older who experience declines in both memory and gait speed was compared with adults who experience no decline or decline in either memory or gait speed only in this observational meta-analysis that included six studies with about 8,700 participants from the U.S. and Europe.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

Authors: Qu Tian, Ph.D., M.S., of the National Institutes of Health in Baltimore, Maryland, is the corresponding author.

(10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.21636)

Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflicts of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

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About JAMA Network Open: JAMA Network Open is the new online-only open access general medical journal from the JAMA Network. Every Wednesday and Friday, the journal publishes peer-reviewed clinical research and commentary in more than 40 medical and health subject areas. Every article is free online from the day of publication.

Scientists have recovered DNA from a well-preserved horned lark found in Siberian permafrost. The results can contribute to explaining the evolution of sub species, as well as how the mammoth steppe transformed into tundra, forest and steppe biomes at the end of the last Ice Age.

In 2018, a well-preserved frozen bird was found in the ground in the Belaya Gora area of north-eastern Siberia. Researchers at the Centre for Palaeogenetics, a new research center at Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History, haves studied the bird and the results are now published in the scientific journal Communications Biology. The analyses reveals that the bird is a 46 000-year-old female horned lark.

"Not only can we identify the bird as a horned lark. The genetic analysis also suggests that the bird belonged to a population that was a joint ancestor of two sub species of horned lark living today, one in Siberia, and one in the steppe in Mongolia. This helps us understand how the diversity of sub species evolves," says Nicolas Dussex, researcher at the Department of Zoology at Stockholm University.

The result has significance on another level as well. During the last Ice Age, the mammoth steppe spread out over northern Europe and Asia. The steppe was home to now extinct species such as the woolly mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros. According to one theory, this ecosystem was a mosaic of habitats such as steppe, tundra and coniferous forest. At the end of the last Ice Age, the mammoth steppe was divided into the biotopes we know today - tundra in the north, taiga in the middle and steppe in the south.

"Our results support this theory since the diversification of the horned lark into these sub species seems to have happened about at the same time as the mammoth steppe disappeared," says Love Dalén, Professor at the Swedish Museum of Natural History and research leader at the Centre for Palaeogenetics.

In the slightly longer term the researchers´ ambition is to map the complete genome of the 46 000-year-old lark and compare it with the genomes from all sub species of horned larks.

"The new laboratory facilities and the intellectual environment at the Centre for Palaeogenetics will definitely be helpful in these analyses," says Love Dalén.

The researchers at the Centre for Palaeogenetics have access to plenty of samples from similar findings from the same site in Siberia, including the 18 000-year-old puppy called "Dogor" which the researchers are are studying to determine if it is a wolf or a dog. Other findings include the 50 000-year-old cave lion cub "Spartak" and a partially preserved woolly mammoth.

URBANA, Ill. - Starting weanling pigs off with the right diet can make all the difference for the health and productivity of the animal. A new University of Illinois study shows amino acids from a new torula yeast product are more digestible by young pigs than amino acids from fish meal.

"We cannot supply all the amino acids for weanling pigs with soybean meal. We need another source. We used fish meal for a long time, but that is getting too expensive. There are also issues with price and quality volatility, supply, and sustainability with fish meal," says Hans H. Stein, professor in the Department of Animal Sciences at Illinois. "Our study shows we can use the torula yeast product instead of fish meal in diets for weanling pigs."

Stein and doctoral student Vanessa Lagos determined digestibility of amino acids, energy, and phosphorus in a new type of torula yeast produced from woody biomass from the forestry industry. The yeast consumes and metabolizes sugars released from wood, then is pasteurized and dried to a high-quality protein ingredient that can be fed to animals.

In a series of experiments, the researchers quantified digestibility in diets with yeast or fish meal included as the only sources of protein. In the first experiment, weanling barrows were fed a cornstarch-based diet with one of the two protein sources, and digesta were collected and analyzed after five days. The standardized ileal digestibility of crude protein and all amino acids was greater for the torula yeast product than fish meal.

"The yeast has a lower concentration of amino acids but we saw greater digestibility. Therefore, we get the same amount of digestible amino acids from the yeast as we could get from fish meal," Stein says.

In the second experiment, weanling pigs were fed corn-based diets supplemented with yeast or fish meal. Results indicated that digestible and metabolizable energy did not differ between the two protein sources.

A third experiment determined the digestibility of phosphorus by feeding the two sources of protein with or without phytase, an enzyme that makes phosphorus more available to the pig.

"Fish meal contains a lot of calcium and phosphorus compared to yeast. However, like the amino acids, the phosphorus in yeast was more digestible than fish meal. There is just less of it," Stein says. "Ultimately, the torula yeast product provides same amount of digestible amino acids and metabolizable energy as fish meal, but a little bit less phosphorus. That's the bottom line."

He adds that the torula yeast product may have immune-boosting properties relative to fish meal, and plans to investigate that effect in an upcoming study. He also plans to study the growth performance of pigs fed a torula yeast-based diet.

Throughout typical development children must be surrounded by peers both for their well-being and for ample growth of their cognitive, linguistic, and social skills. In children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), peer interaction is a core deficit. More specifically, young children with ASD (preschoolers) do not appear to show the same patterns as their typically developing counterparts along the three key domains associated with efficient peer interaction -- social interactive skills, play, and conversation.

Early social engagement challenges experienced by young children with ASD may limit their early peer relationship experiences and reduce later peer engagement. Although peer relations comprise a core social-communicative deficit in ASD, relevant randomized controlled trials of peer programs for young children with ASD are scarce.

A recent study, conducted by researchers at Bar-Ilan University and published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, aimed at bridging this research gap by evaluating the efficacy of the Preschool Peer Social Intervention (PPSI) in facilitating peer engagement among preschoolers with ASD. The major goal of the PPSI intervention was to increase social engagement of preschoolers with ASD during mixed interactions with their peers with ASD and peers with typical development.

The key results showed that interaction, play and conversation intervention groups improved over time, each mainly in its own targeted peer-engagement domain. Preschoolers with ASD demonstrated more complex social play capabilities, better interaction skills and more adaptive social conversations, leading to better social inclusion with their typical peers. Additionally, teachers reported improvement in children's overall adaptive skills, in overall play complexity and in social engagement in everyday play situations with their peers. However, children not exposed to the intervention showed no improvement in these skills, and even a deterioration on some measures.

"The fact that the control group without intervention did not progress on any of our measures, and even regressed on some, means that individualized peer intervention comprising all three of these domains is essential for reducing loneliness and social isolation in ASD," says Dr. Nirit Bauminger-Zviely, of Bar-Ilan University's Churgin School of Education, who led the study with the participation of Dganit Eytan, Sagit Hoshmand and Ofira Rajwan Ben-Shlomo. The study is a continuation of research conducted in Bauminger-Zviely's ASD laboratory, which is at the forefront of basic and applied research on the social-emotional development of children affected by ASD, exploring possible precursors, correlates, and characteristics of peer relations, as well as developing novel manualized evidenced-based social intervention.

Bauminger-Zviely and team are currently training teachers, speech therapists and psychologists to implement PPSI in their preschools to help children with ASD cope with their major challenge: how to efficiently interact with their peers.

MINNEAPOLIS, MN- February 21, 2020 - Researchers at the University of Minnesota Medical School discover a potential new way in which diet influences aging-related diseases.

Doug Mashek, PhD, a professor in the Departments of Medicine and Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics, leads a team of researchers who discovered that olive oil in the Mediterranean diet may hold the key to improving lifespan and mitigating aging-related diseases. Over the last eight years, with the help of multiple grants from the National Institutes of Health, their research findings were recently published in Molecular Cell.

Early studies on the diet suggested red wine was a major contributor to the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet because it contains a compound called resveratrol, which activated a certain pathway in cells known to increase lifespan and prevent aging-related diseases. However, work in Mashek's lab suggests that it is the fat in olive oil, another component of the Mediterranean diet, that is actually activating this pathway.

According to Mashek, merely consuming olive oil is not enough to elicit all of the health benefits. His team's studies suggest that when coupled with fasting, limiting caloric intake and exercising, the effects of consuming olive oil will be most pronounced.

"We found that the way this fat works is it first has to get stored in microscopic things called lipid droplets, which is how our cells store fat. And then, when the fat is broken down during exercising or fasting, for example, is when the signaling and beneficial effects are realized," Mashek said.

The next steps for their research are to translate it to humans with the goal of discovering new drugs or to further tailor dietary regimens that improve health, both short-term and long-term.

"We want to understand the biology, and then translate it to humans, hopefully changing the paradigm of healthcare from someone going to eight different doctors to treat his or her eight different disorders," Mashek said. "These are all aging-related diseases, so let's treat aging."

A new study, led by Dr Tim DuBuc and Professor Uri Frank from the Centre for Chromosome Biology at NUI Galway, has found that Hydractinia, a North Atlantic jellyfish that also lives in Galway Bay, reproduces in a similar way to humans but does so far more flexibly.

An article presenting these findings has been published today in the journal Science, with co-authors Dr Andy Baxevanis from the National Human Genome Research Institute of the US National Institutes of Health and Dr Christine Schnitzler from the Whitney Laboratory of Marine Bioscience of the University of Florida.

Most animals, including humans, generate germ stem cells - the exclusive progenitors of eggs and sperm - only once in their lifetime. This process occurs during early embryonic development by setting aside (or 'sequestering') a small group of cells. All sperm or eggs that we humans produce during our lives are the descendants of those few cells we sequestered as early embryos. Importantly, there is no way for humans to replenish germ cells that were not sequestered during embryonic development or lost in adult life, resulting in sterility.

In findings that may have implications for the study of human infertility, this research shows that Hydractinia uses a gene called Tfap2 as a 'switch' to commit its adult stem cells to produce gametes - eggs and sperm. Humans also use Tfap2 to commit cells to gamete production but only go through this process once, in a narrow time frame during embryonic development. In contrast, Hydractinia performs this process throughout its adult life. Therefore, the loss of germ cells in Hydractinia has no consequences with respect to fertility as its germ cells can be generated throughout its lifetime.

Speaking today, Professor Uri Frank explained: "Looking at the similar, yet more flexible, system of reproduction in Hydractinia broadens our understanding of the issues affecting reproduction in humans. While much of a human's capacity to reproduce is determined during embryonic development, we see that these jellyfish are far more adaptive and have a much greater capacity to regenerate their reproductive system throughout their adult lives. By looking at these genetically more tractable animals, we hope to understand core processes that control cells' decisions in development and disease."

Making everyday decisions seems easy enough. People know basic information about health and finances that they can use to inform their decision making. But new research from Stevens Institute of Technology suggests that too much knowledge can lead people to make worse decisions, pointing to a critical gap in our understanding of how new information interacts with prior knowledge and beliefs.

The work, led by Samantha Kleinberg, associate professor of computer science at Stevens, is helping reframe the idea of how we use the mountain of data extracted from artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms and how healthcare professionals and financial advisors present this new information to their patients and clients.

"Being accurate is not enough for information to be useful," said Kleinberg. "It's assumed that AI and machine learning will uncover great information, we'll give it to people and they'll make good decisions. However, the basic point of the paper is that there is a step missing: we need to help people build upon what they already know and understand how they will use the new information."

For example: when doctors communicate information to patients, such as recommending blood pressure medication or explaining risk factors for diabetes, people may be thinking about the cost of medication or alternative ways to reach the same goal. "So, if you don't understand all these other beliefs, it's really hard to treat them in an effective way," said Kleinberg, whose work appears in the Feb. 13 issue of Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications.

Kleinberg and colleagues asked 4,000 participants a series of questions about topics with which they would have varying degrees of familiarity. Some participants were asked to make decisions on scenarios they could not possibly be familiar with i.e. how to get a group of mind-reading aliens to accomplish a task. Other participants were asked about more familiar topics i.e. choosing how to reduce risk in a retirement portfolio or deciding between specific meals and activities to manage bodyweight.

For some participants, scenarios had a causal structure, meaning that participants could make the correct decision based on the causal relationship laid out either in text or as a diagram . The team was then able to compare whether people did better or worse with new information or just using what they already knew.

Kleinberg and her team, including former Stevens graduate student Min Zheng and cognitive scientist Jessecae Marsh from Lehigh University, found that when people make decisions in novel scenarios, such as those including mind-reading aliens, they do very well on that problem. "People are just focusing on what's in the problem," said Kleinberg. "They are not adding in all this extra stuff."

However, when that problem, with the same causal structure, was replaced with information about finances and retirement, for example, people became less confident in their choices and made worse decisions, suggesting that their prior knowledge got in the way of choosing the best outcome.

Kleinberg found the same to be true when she posed a problem about health and exercise, as it relates to diabetes. When people without diabetes read the problem, they treated the new information at face value, believed it and used it successfully. People with diabetes, however, started second-guessing what they knew and as in the previous example, did much worse.

"In situations where people do not have background knowledge, they become more confident with the new information and make better decisions," said Kleinberg. "So there's a big difference in how we interpret the information we are given and how it affects our decision making when it relates to things we already know vs. when it's in a new or unfamiliar setting."

Kleinberg cautions that the point of the paper is not that information is bad. She argues only that in order to help people make better decisions, we need to better understand what people already know and tailor information based on that mental model. The National Science Foundation recently awarded Kleinberg, in collaboration with Marsh, a grant entitled, "Uniting Causal and Mental Models For Shared Decision-making in Diabetes," to address this very issue.

"People hold a certain set of beliefs about disease and treatment, finances and retirement," said Kleinberg. "So more information, even with explicit causal relationships, may not be enough to steer people to make the best decisions. It's how we tailor that information to this existing set of beliefs that will yield the best results - and that's what we want to figure out."

Philadelphia, February 21, 2020 - Prematurely born babies often need oxygen therapy to prevent brain damage or death. Unfortunately, excessive oxygen can damage immature lungs and cause severe life-long problems including bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) and pulmonary hypertension (PH). A new study in the American Journal of Pathology, published by Elsevier, provides insights into the important role that the hormone adrenomedullin plays in the development, recovery, and prevention of BPD and PH.

"Our study provides evidence that adrenomedullin may influence the progression and resolution of experimental BPD and PH by affecting lung vascular health," explained Binoy Shivanna, MD, DM, PhD, of the Section of Neonatology, Department of Pediatrics, Baylor College of Medicine, and Texas Children's Hospital, Houston, TX, USA. "Importantly, there is no cure for BPD; however, our findings suggest that adrenomedullin can be developed as a therapy to reduce the burden of BPD-associated PH in premature babies.

Though adrenomedullin helps repair damaged lungs, blood vessels, and the heart in older humans, mice, and rats, its role in resolving experimental BPD-associated PH is unclear. To understand this role, investigators studied lung structure and function in newborn mice genetically bred to have lower-than-normal adrenomedullin levels and compared them with those with normal levels. They exposed one-day-old mice to normal or increased oxygen concentrations for 14 days. Lung structure, including the number of blood vessels and markers of cell damage, was examined at different times up to day 28, and the heart was examined for PH by imaging on days 28 and 70.

The study found that newborn mice deficient in adrenomedullin exposed to high levels of oxygen were more likely to develop lung damage. They had greater cell death, fewer lung sacs (alveoli), fewer lung blood vessels, and more severe symptoms of BPD and PH from which they were slower to recover compared with mice with normal levels of adrenomedullin. This suggests that adrenomedullin is necessary for normal lung development.

The adrenomedullin-deficient mice also showed lower levels of the enzyme endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS), indicating that adrenomedullin may mediate its effect via eNOS.

The investigators also looked at the effect of adrenomedullin in human lung endothelial cells in culture. "We found blocking adrenomedullin or its receptors decreased the expression of eNOS and the ability of these cells to form blood vessels. On the other hand, treatment with adrenomedullin increased the ability of the cells to form blood vessels, and this ability of adrenomedullin was lost when the eNOS function was blocked by genetic manipulation," said Dr. Shivanna.

Dr. Shivanna believes that adrenomedullin could be a novel therapeutic target to treat BPD-associated PH in infants. "This hormone is normally produced in the body and, therefore, this hormonal treatment can be safe without major effects. Our study also suggests that adrenomedullin can improve the quality of life of BPD-associated PH patients by its long-lasting beneficial effects on the lungs and heart."

BPD, a lung disease caused by a reduced rate of lung growth, frequently occurs in babies born before their due date. In the United States, BPD affects 10,000 neonates each year and is the second most expensive childhood disease. Oxygen therapy increases the risk of BPD. Babies with BPD may go on to develop lung infections, asthma, and physical or mental disabilities. Nearly one third of babies with BPD develop PH, which can elevate both short- and long-term morbidity.

Mount Sinai Researchers find social isolation during key developmental windows drives long term changes to activity patterns of neurons involved in initiating social approach in an animal model.

Corresponding Author: Hirofumi Morishita, MDPhD, together with Schahram Akbarian MDPhD Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, and other coauthors (first author Lucy Bicks).

Bottom Line: Loneliness is increasingly being recognized as a serious threat to mental health and wellbeing in our society. Our study in an animal model shows that social isolation during adolescence leads to long-term disruptions in social behavior and disruptions to activity patterns of a type of inhibitory neuron in the brain, which are frequently disrupted in psychiatric disorders including Schizophrenia. Activity patterns of these inhibitory neurons are sufficient to rescue social deficits induced by juvenile social isolation.

Results: Social behavior is composed of interactions where mice are actively exploring conspecifics or passively being explored. We find one population of neurons, parvalbumin expressing inhibitory neurons, increases in activity prior to an active, but not a passive social interaction. Brief activity of these neurons is sufficient to promote increased active social behavior. Juvenile social isolation during adolescence disrupts the activity of these neurons, leading to a decoupling of their activity and subsequent active social behavior initiation. Increasing activity of these neurons in adult animals that were socially isolated during adolescence restores normal social behavior.

Why the Research Is Interesting: The findings help us to understand how social experience during key windows of development might shape long term behavioral outcomes through changes to specific circuits in the brain. Understanding how social experience shapes outcomes can help us to overcome social deficits in cases of early life trauma or in neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders with social deficits.

Who: Mouse models deprived of social experience during the juvenile period.

When: Mice were deprived of social experience during a juvenile phase and their behavior and physiology were examined in adulthood.

What: The study measured activity of parvalbumin expressing inhibitory neurons during social interaction as well as input drive to these neurons.

How: We measured parvalbumin expressing inhibitory neuron activity during social behavior and manipulated activity of these neurons using advanced technologies.

Study Conclusions: Social experience early in life alters specific patterns of parvalbumin expressing inhibitory neurons in prefrontal cortex. This pattern of activity is essential for active social approach behavior in mice.

A study by IRB Barcelona´s Development and Growth Control Laboratory, headed by ICREA researcher Marco Milán, reveals how Dpp and Wg morphogens regulate organ proportions and patterning of the fly wing through independent mechanisms. Given that these morphogens are present in vertebrates, these results are highly significant for understanding the development and growth of human limbs. "The regulatory mechanism that we describe in this study may pave the way to new research lines on malformations and congenital diseases in humans," says Marco Milán.

Size is not determined by gradients

Morphogens are distributed throughout tissues in a concentration gradient, informing cells about their "location" and providing instructions on how they should develop. Several studies have also reported that these morphogens are responsible for the growth of these tissues. While the presence of morphogens along a gradient defines the spatial distribution of the different structures, the study by the Development and Growth Control Laboratory demonstrates that the gradient itself is not indispensable to promote growth. In a previous study, published in 2017 in the journal eLife, this same group proposed that wing growth was independent of the Dpp gradient. These new findings, which have been published in Developmental Cell, "confirm that the presence of Wg is necessary throughout development, but, as occurs with Dpp, its distribution along a gradient is not an indispensable requirement," explains Lara Barrio, first author of the study.

Morphogens stimulate directional growth

The two morphogens addressed in this study, namely Dpp and Wg, promote the growth of the fly wing, but through two independent and non-interchangeable pathways. Dpp stimulates growth along the anteroposterior axis in a unique and exclusive manner, while Wg favours proliferative activity along the proximodistal axis. The work carried out by Barrio and Milán demonstrates that the capacity of these morphogens to promote growth in two distinct directions is due to their restricted expression in two perpendicular bands and to the need for both to be present for the tissue to grow. These findings thus reveal the mechanism through which organ proportions are regulated by morphogen activity.

This study has been funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, the Severo Ochoa Centres of Excellence Award, the programme "A way to build Europe, supported by the European Development Fund (ERDF) and the CERCA Programme, run by the Government of Catalonia.

Sustainable materials, ecofriendly, and produced under good work conditions - convincing arguments for most of us. But how do consumers weigh compliance or non-compliance with such ethical standards in reality? Not as much as they think: Researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) used an example from textile industry to demonstrate that customers unconsciously use a single ethical aspect as an excuse for a less moral behavior regarding other aspects of the same product and compared to other people. The impact of these "indulgence effects" and their significance to economy and politics are reported by the team in the journal PLOS ONE (DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0227036).

The number of consumers interested in products complying with their ethical and moral conceptions and affecting neither humans nor the environment is increasing. In this sense, companies are often criticized for 'green washing, as Nora Szech, Professor of Political Economy at the Institute of Economics (ECON) of KIT says: "Many companies are quite rightly accused of improving just single ethical aspects instead of acting in an integrated way." A study by Szech and her doctoral researcher Jannis Engel reveals, however, that many consumers behave in the same way. "Persons shopping consciously in one respect often consider this a blank check to ignore other values. A little good appears to be good enough. An example to illustrate this is the consumer who shops at the organic food supermarket and then drives home in his or her SUV. This probably happens entirely without a bad conscience."

Pure Organic Cotton Wins over Work Conditions

The economist carried out a three-stage experiment with 200 participants: In the first stage, a computer randomly determines whether the participants have to decide between towels made of conventional cotton and towels made of pure organic cotton. In the second stage, the test persons are to make their choice with respect to production: No money is paid when they decide in favor of products produced under certified, ethical work conditions. They are granted a monetary reward, by contrast, when work conditions of tailors are conventional. "The participants could choose among various amounts of money and had to decide whether they preferred money and a conventionally produced towel or whether they receive no additional money, but a towel produced in compliance with minimum ethical standards for tailors," Szech says. The result: Participants are far less inclined to refuse money for safe work conditions, if their towel is made of pure organic cotton. "We found that test persons deciding in favor of pure organic cotton towels were far less willing to pay for safe work standards," Szech says. "Their decision in favor of the better material was used as a 'moral license' to no longer consider a second ethical aspect. A single, minor improvement of the product is sufficient to develop a high moral self-conception and to consider oneself an ethically acting person."

"Indulgence Effect" Persists after the Purchase

This behavior is not limited to the concrete purchasing situation or the time of purchase. In the third stage of her experiment, Szech found that participants used their decision in favor of pure organic cotton even thirty minutes later as an excuse for being more selfish. Test persons were given the opportunity to donate part of their participation premium to refugees from a local refugee camp. "We found that test persons with a towel made of pure organic cotton donated less often than persons preferring a towel made of conventional cotton," Szech says. "The ethically better material, hence, was used to justify smaller donations to people in need."

However, the acting persons probably are not aware of their behavior. For this reason, a group of uninvolved persons was asked to assess how the towel purchasers would decide. "The study revealed that this control group completely overlooked the impact of moral excuses and indulgence effects," Szech points out. Third persons potentially follow another moral compass and consider the stages of the experiment different, not related situations. "For this reason, they do not expect the test persons to use pure organic cotton as an excuse for a less moral behavior at another point."

According to Szech, the results may trigger social and political debates. As consumers unconsciously react to indulgence effects, companies might use the impacts of moral self-licensing to provide customers with excuses and to influence the purchasing decision. This might also help mask own ethical misconduct. "Politics and the society should know these mechanisms in order to respond accordingly," Szech summarizes.

The interest expressed by the general public in social aspects is constantly growing and there are more and more companies and organisations that want to know what social contribution they make. The tool used to analyse this aspect is social accounting, "an information system that incorporates the social value that is generated in society", explained Leire San Jose, leader of the ECRI research group.

The UPV/EHU research group ECRI Ethics in Finance and Social Value has conducted this analysis at the Hospital Santa Marina run by Osakidetza. This is the first time that it has been applied to a hospital. The social value added index of the hospital has been calculated. "It is an ideal tool for rating the hospital's social efficiency because it establishes how much social value is generated from the public funding that is allocated to it. Great interest has always existed in finding out how efficient the public spending of hospitals is, but until now the social perspective has never been incorporated", explained the UPV/EHU's lecturer and PhD holder.

The features of the Osakidetza Hospital Santa Marina mean that it is highly suited to the conducting of this study: it is a medium-sized public hospital (it has 238 beds and caters for about 200,000 people), it cares for elderly people with chronic diseases or in need of palliative care, so it is easier to interview the stakeholders. A hospital has many stakeholders; besides the actual users of the hospital, it would also be necessary to consider families, staff, future staff (students), teaching staff, suppliers, public administration, etc. "The social value generated for these stakeholders and its conversion into money allow the decisions geared towards the social aim of the public hospital to be managed more efficiently," added San Jose.

What is the value of the socio-emotional contribution made by a hospital?

The methodology for conducting social accounting has been established in previous pieces of work, "but every case is different: in each case it is necessary to consider to whom a social contribution is made and how much", pointed out the researcher. After interviewing the various stakeholders, the research team produced a list of the social values quoted, and having specified the variables provided by a social value, "we translated them into euros", she explained.

Among the social aspects are, firstly, those linked to the market which are incorporated into traditional accounting and "have to do with suppliers, staff, payments, taxes, etc." Secondly, there are the aspects not linked to the market, "such as the number of beds made available in other hospitals, student internships, the service offered by the health professionals, the benefits accruing to families (alleviation, time, etc.), the benefits provided by hospital infrastructure, etc.", she added.

The researcher pointed out that the socio-emotional value of the Hospital Santa Marina amounts to approximately 60 million euros per year for the 2013-2017 period; nevertheless, "the most important thing is that the hospital is interested in having this study carried out, in resorting to stakeholders to ask them and find out what needs to be improved". The researcher also explained that social accounting is tremendously useful in enabling an organisation to compare itself over time, in other words, "to see the evolution of an organisation as the years go by; but it is of great use above all in enabling it to compare itself with other hospitals", she stressed. San Jose admitted that "it is true that we have begun with a hospital that has few patients and with very specific profiles, but there is no problem in applying social accounting to all kinds of hospitals and it would be highly desirable to see what others also do well. It may be important to integrate social efficiency into the accounting of companies; not just cost-based efficiency but also that based on social contributions", she concluded.