Culture

Research carried out at University of Limerick has shown that life expectancy outcomes for two of the most common forms of kidney dialysis treatment are "virtually identical".

In the largest study of its kind, researchers from the Graduate Entry Medical School (GEMS) at UL compared the survival of patients with kidney failure that were treated with either peritoneal dialysis (PD) or haemodialysis (HD) at a dialysis centre, two of the most common forms of available treatments.

The researchers found that the survival of new patients with kidney failure was similar irrespective of treatment type - PD or in-centre HD - and have recommended that this new knowledge be incorporated into policy documents to enable patients and their providers make the best decisions on optimal treatments.

Prior to the study, questions had been raised by the scientific community as to whether one form of dialysis was superior to another in terms of survival benefit. This answer to this question is of "huge significance" according to Professor Austin Stack, Foundation Chair of Medicine and Lead Investigator for the Kidney Research Consortium at UL.

"There has been huge debate on this issue, as they are very different treatments for kidney failure," said Professor Stack.

"Defining whether one treatment confers a survival advantage over another for patients who develop kidney failure is of utmost importance. We have shown in this study that the life expectancy was virtually identical on either of these therapies. This is hugely important as it means that patients have a choice," he added.

The systematic review, a pooled meta-analysis of 17 cohort studies with over 113,000 dialysis patients between 1993 to 2014, was conducted by the research team at UL in association with the Departments of Nephrology and Internal Medicine at University Hospital Limerick, and the findings have just been published in the international journal Nephrology, Dialysis and Transplantation.

"Prior studies on this topic have yielded conflicting results," according to Dr Mohamed Elsayed, the primary author of the study, Research Fellow and Specialist Registrar in Nephrology.

"Indeed, when we looked at the available international literature, we found that the results tended to vary by country, and according to the year the study was carried out. One potential reason for this is that patients who are selected for PD differ from those who are selected for HD, and that practice patterns tend to vary across countries.

"The ideal method for comparing the survival of these two treatments would be a randomised controlled clinical trial but unfortunately due to logistical challenges and recruitment difficulties investigators have failed in the past to successfully complete such trials.

"The next best method is to use an approach that carefully considers the differences between PD and HD and conduct comparisons using what is called a propensity-score matched approach. Such a comparison allows us compare the treatments take into account baseline differences between the patient groups," he added.

The study pooled together the results from research that used a propensity-based approach and found that patients who began dialysis either with in-centre HD or PD experienced similar survival (Hazard Ratio 1.06, 95% Confidence interval 0.99 to 1.14). The findings were remarkably similar for patients with and without diabetes and were consistent across studies that included European, North American and Asian Cohorts.

Despite the overall similar survival between PD and HD, it did uncover important differences from country to country and across different time periods. Importantly, it also found that the survival of PD was better than that of HD in more recent time periods (after 2007).

These research findings have important implications, according to Professor Stack, on how we manage patients with imminent kidney failure approaching dialysis.

"All else being equal, both of these therapies are effective at extending patient survival, and thus the conversation with patients should revolve around which of these treatments is the most suitable treatment from a lifestyle and quality of life perspective," he explained.

"Globally, the rates of use of PD are substantially lower than those of HD, with less than 10% of dialysis patients receiving PD as a maintenance treatment. In the United States, around 10% of dialysis patients are receiving PD with the majority treated with HD. Similarly, in Ireland, the rates of PD use are remarkably low, with only 9.5% of patients utilising PD leaving room for improvement.

"Peritoneal dialysis is a form of dialysis that be provided in one's home, and lead to better quality of life and greater independence. Economically, PD is the cheaper form of therapy compared to in-centre HD with costs that are on average €20,000 lower.

"Given that PD has at least similar survival to HD, and the fact that PD is more cost effective, and leads to better preservation of lifestyle, we advocate that PD should be encouraged as a first-line therapy for many patients with approaching kidney failure," he added.

We are closer to understanding the incredible ability of squid to instantly camouflage themselves thanks to research from The University of Queensland.

Dr Wen-Sung Chung and Professor Justin Marshall, from UQ's Queensland Brain Institute, completed the first MRI-based mapping of the squid brain in 50 years to develop an atlas of neural connections.

"This the first time modern technology has been used to explore the brain of this amazing animal, and we proposed 145 new connections and pathways, more than 60 per cent of which are linked to the vision and motor systems," Dr Chung said.

"The modern cephalopods, a group including octopus, cuttlefish and squid, have famously complex brains, approaching that of a dog and surpassing mice and rats, at least in neuronal number.

"For example, some cephalopods have more than 500 million neurons, compared to 200 million for a rat and 20,000 for a normal mollusc.

Some examples of complex cephalopod behaviour include the ability to camouflage themselves despite being colourblind, count, recognise patterns, problem solve and communicate using a variety of signals.

"We can see that a lot of neural circuits are dedicated to camouflage and visual communication. Giving the squid a unique ability to evade predators, hunt and conspecific communicate with dynamic colour changes".

Dr Chung said the study also supported emerging hypotheses on convergent evolution - when organisms independently evolve similar traits - of cephalopod nervous systems with parts of the vertebrate central nervous system.

"The similarity with the better-studied vertebrate nervous system allows us to make new predictions about the cephalopod nervous system at the behavioural level," he said.

"For example, this study proposes several new networks of neurons in charge of visually-guided behaviours such as locomotion and countershading camouflage - when squid display different colours on the top and bottom of their bodies to blend into the background whether they are being viewed from above or below."

The team's ongoing project involves understanding why different cephalopod species have evolved different subdivisions of the brain.

"Our findings will hopefully provide evidence to help us understand why these fascinating creatures display such diverse behaviour and very different interactions."

Researchers at UPF are testing a new non-invasive method of stimulating the vagus nerve in mice that improves their memory. They have shown for the first time that electrostimulation in the ear of intellectual disability rodent models leads to a cognitive improvement. The study is the result of collaboration between research groups at the Department of Experimental and Health Sciences (DCEXS) and the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC). It has been coordinated by the researcher Andrés Ozaita, principal investigator at the Neuropharmacology Laboratory-NeuroPhar, and is published in the journal Brain Stimulation.

Stimulation of the vagus nerve emerged as a therapy to treat epilepsy or depression that do not respond to drugs, because the ramifications of this nerve carry information to deregulated areas of the brain in both diseases. Some of these regions like the amygdala, prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, are also required for attention and memory. For this reason, the technique has also been found to produce a cognitive improvement. Initially, stimulation was carried out invasively, surgically implanting the device that applies electrical impulses. Subsequently, non-invasive approaches were developed, which stimulate the skin's surface in areas in which the branches of the nerve pass.

Previous studies had revealed the modulation of memory using invasive and non-invasive approaches in animal models and in humans, but non-invasive transcutaneous --through the skin-- approaches had not been tested so far in mouse models.

Researchers at the Biomedical Electronics Research Group developed an electrode to allow non-invasive electrostimulation of the vagus nerve in mice. "Mikel Domingo-Gainza, a student of the bachelor's degree in Biomedical Engineering, built the electrode during his bachelor's degree final project", explains Antoni Ivorra, leader of the Biomedical Electronics Research Group (BERG) and DTIC lecturer. The device is applied in an accessible area of the mouse's ear, which is reached by branches of the vagus nerve.

"We show that this technology achieves a behavioural effect of cognitive enhancement in mice", explains Anna Vázquez-Oliver, co-first author of the article. "We use a test to evaluate the memory in which we value whether the mouse remembers objects it is familiar with. After electrostimulation, the animals achieved better results in the test, their memory lasted longer", she adds. This would be the first proof in mice; in rats it had been shown that applying electrostimulation to the ear yielded brain responses --more neurotransmitter activity--, but no effect on behaviour had been demonstrated.

They then tested the potential of the protocol in a mouse model of fragile X syndrome, the most common form of inherited intellectual disability, which usually shows poor performance in object recognition memory. Transcutaneous stimulation also improved their memory, which supports its relevance in cognitive modulation in the intellectual disability mice model.

In the words of Cecilia Brambilla-Pisoni, co-first author of the study, "the activity we are generating artificially in the fibres of the vagus nerve would produce an activation of areas of the brain that are important for memory. We hypothesize that an increased release of noradrenaline would occur, making the information better consolidated".

Andrés Ozaita notes that "the results confirm the potential of this therapeutic tool that is worth exploring in the context of neurodevelopmental disorders, as previously proposed for invasive forms". Knowing that this technique is functional opens up an important field at the pre-clinical level, since it can be applied to animal models of other diseases. "Now we are focusing on the cellular and molecular results produced by this intervention to be able to elucidate the mechanisms involved", he concludes.

A weather forecast may not allow time to make decisions that minimize the economic impacts of an extreme event, while a seasonal forecast is not precise enough to predict it. Thus, a spring frost - an event that can affect a small area and that can occur in a very short time - can lead to significant economic damages for the agribusiness players.

Predicting a cold spell a few weeks in advance can allow sector players to optimize their economic choices, changing the purchase times of raw materials in the case of a buyer or adopting adaptation strategies in the case of a farm.

The paper "Multi-model subseasonal forecasts of spring cold spells: potential value for the hazelnut agribusiness" (Materia et al. 2020 - https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/WAF-D-19-0086.1), just released on the journal Weather and Forecasting, is the result of a research on the topic led by CMCC Foundation.

"Our case study focuses on the production of hazelnuts in the coastal areas of Turkey facing the Black Sea, home of about 70% of global hazelnut production: since this area is exposed to cold spells, being able to anticipate the extreme events that can compromise the production in the region can have an effect on a global scale" explains Stefano Materia, main author of the paper and researcher at the Climate Simulation and Prediction Division of the CMCC Foundation. The research assesses the reliability of the sub-seasonal forecasts in this area and their consequent economic value for some actors in the sector.

"Today we have data that allow us to make sub-seasonal forecasts on a time scale that is longer than that of the weather (which has a time horizon of 10 days), although not as far from the event as that of the seasonal forecasts. We can make predictions up to 5-6 weeks in advance", clarifies Dr. Materia.

We are seeing today the first applications of a new dataset made available to the international community from 2017, allowing to make predictions of impacts on civil society in a time scale of 30-45 days, which is of great interest to end-users.

The analysis, in addition to studying - thanks to a multi-model approach - the reliability of sub-seasonal forecasts for predicting frosts in advance, calculates their potential economic value for agribusiness players. "Predicting a cold spell a few weeks in advance can allow sector players that use hazelnuts as the main raw material of their products to change the time of purchase. In practical terms, they may start trading on nut price in advance, when the kernel is not even formed yet, on the basis of the forecast outcome. In the event of a predicted cold spell, they can fix the price beforehand, guaranteeing a net gain in case the cold spell occurs. In the same way, a farm will have the time to make adaptation interventions such as covering plants or install anti-frost turbine", continues Stefano Materia. "As shown by our research, the potential forecast economic value is large for many users, who may benefit from the use of sub seasonal predictions compared to a no action strategy. The economic value of forecasts supplied two weeks before the expected event is around 60%, but even forecasts supplied 3 to 6 weeks in advance - that have poorer prediction skills - may result in up to 20% economic gain for agribusiness operators".

An ambitious new study of genes in Asian populations is filling in big gaps in our understanding of human genetics, shedding light on the history of human migration and ultimately aiming to improve our ability to treat disease.

Researchers from dozens of institutions around the world, including the University of Virginia School of Medicine, are seeking to address the under-representation of Asian populations in genetic research. Working as the GenomeAsia100K Consortium, they have examined the genomes of 1,739 people from 219 different population groups in 64 countries across Asia. The ultimate goal, as the group's name suggests, is to sequence the genomes of 100,000 people across Asia. This will produce a treasure trove of genetic information to help medical researchers and doctors better understand and treat genetic diseases, identify those at risk and even determine how patients will respond to drugs.

"Under-representation of Asian populations in genetic studies has meant that medical relevance for more than half of the human population is reduced," said researcher Aakrosh Ratan, PhD, of UVA's Department of Public Health Sciences and the Center for Public Health Genomics. "The main goal of the project is to increase the number of people included in these genetic studies, primarily to boost our knowledge about medical genetics but also to understand human migration and human origins."

Natural Gene Mutations

There are natural gene mutations among and between different populations, Ratan explained. This partly explains why certain populations of different ancestry seem to have a greater risk of certain diseases. Creating detailed reference databases for Asian populations will be a big benefit for medical genetics for all human populations, but especially for efforts to understand rare diseases in Asia.

"For example, in our new paper, we talk about MODY, which refers to maturity-onset diabetes of the young. This is a rarer type of diabetes that usually develops before the age of 25, and often you do not require insulin," Ratan said. "What we showed was that if doctors wanted to treat patients in India with the disease, they would greatly benefit from having information about genetic mutations found in Indian populations to identify the genetic differences that could be causing the disease. If you only look in databases that contain mutation data from European individuals, you are more likely to see false-positive results, and you will find it harder to pinpoint the exact gene causing the disease."

Not only does the research shed light on the cause of diseases, but it will also help doctors better care for patients. For example, some groups may be more prone to an adverse reaction to a particular drug. Identifying the genes responsible could help doctors know which patients should not get that drug, or should not get that drug in certain doses.

"We also studied the genetic differences associated with an adverse reaction to several common drugs and were able to identify Asian populations that showed large variation in their response," Ratan said. "These reference databases are vital to predict or understand why some drugs should not be dispensed in certain dosages to people of certain populations."

Findings Published

Ratan and his collaborators in the GenomeAsia100K Consortium have published their early findings in the prestigious scientific journal Nature. They expect their research will continue for several years.

"I am excited that sequences from several Asian populations will become available as a result of this project," Ratan noted. "It was my first time working in an international consortium, and it was an amazing learning experience."

Are the countries of the Eurozone ready to drop cash in hand? In light of a study of the UPV and UV, the answer is no. The work concludes that in these countries, there are still many years left of paying with cash. And, in Spain, this seems to be the case even more. These and other conclusions have recently been published in Cuadernos de Economía.

In their study, researchers conducted a detailed analysis of the countries in the Eurozone, based on the Global Findex survey of the World Bank: they studied the percentage of the population that has a bank account and uses it - which is known as financial inclusion - and of their use of cash, extracting data both globally and specific to each country.

"The end goal of the study was to learn whether the Eurozone is prepared, or not, to drop cash and implement new methods of payment, specifically, a digital cryptocurrency based on blockchain technology and managed by the European Central Bank," explains Nerea Gómez-Fernández, researcher for the Quality and Change Management Centre of the UPV.

Among its conclusions, the research states that the Eurozone has a higher use of cash than other similarly developed areas. However, there are significative differences among the countries studied. On one hand there are countries such as Finland, France, Germany, Austria, the Benelux countries and Estonia - a country that is clearly committed to digitisation and an economy free of cash, according to the authors - who use less cash.

On the other side of the spectrum are the Mediterranean Europe countries and the Eastern European countries - except for Estonia - in which a greater use of cash usually coincides with lower ownership of accounts. However, there is one exception that proves the rule: Spain. Being one of the countries where one of the highest percentages of population have and use a bank account, it is the second where the most wages are paid in cash, just behind Greece. The third in this ranking is Cyprus.

"This disparity can be explained by the lower relative income of these countries. However, we can't forget about factors as important as banking crises, as well as different behavioural natures and permissiveness with underground economy, which is usually linked to a greater use of cash," adds Juan Francisco Albert, from the Department of Applied Economy of the UV.

Higher income, less cash

The study also concludes that the higher the level of education and income, the higher the probability of having an account with a financial institution, as well as making payments online or with phones. Furthermore, it verifies that people with lower incomes or lower educational levels use cash more often in their daily transactions (paying bills, collecting wages or ordering transfers). Also, that women are less likely to make payments online or with their phones.

Public support

As a conclusion, the UPV and UV researchers add that, given the financial heterogeneity of the countries, legislation that aims to remove cash from the Eurozone would have to be implemented in a very gradual manner.

"And, in any case, public support is necessary, as has happened in countries such as Sweden or Denmark, to facilitate the digitisation of payment methods for people with low incomes or education levels, given their lower financial inclusion and greater use of cash. It is the only possible way to achieve total digitisation and an inclusive payment system that makes it possible to take advantage of the benefits of blockchain technology and the removal of cash that they enable," highlight the study authors.

Benefits of the global cryptocurrency

The study authors say that replacing cash with a cryptocurrency managed by the ECB would entail significant micro and macroeconomic benefits. Firstly, it would make it possible to decrease the cost of transactions and printing of cash, as well as making it more difficult to pay for illegal activities, such as corruption, money laundering, fiscal evasion or financing terrorism. Furthermore, from a macroeconomic viewpoint, this proposal would act as a solution to deal with the liquidity trap and stagnation issues that a majority of developed areas are currently suffering from, which would allow the European Central Bank to implement negative interest rates down to the level necessary to stimulate aggregate demand - the total goods and services demanded by a country, at a specific level of prices and for a specific period of time.

An artificial neural network has identified a square structure within a triangular one in a crater on the dwarf planet Ceres, with several people agreeing on this perception. The result of this intriguing visual experiment, carried out by a Spanish neuropsychologist, calls into question the application of artificial intelligence to the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI).

Ceres, although the largest object in the main asteroid belt, is a dwarf planet. It became famous a few years ago for one of its craters: Occator, where some bright spots were observed, leading to all manner of speculations. The mystery was solved when NASA's Dawn probe came close enough to discover that these bright spots originated from volcanic ice and salt emissions.

Now researchers from the University of Cadiz (Spain) have looked at one of these spots, called Vinalia Faculae, and have been struck by an area where geometric shapes are ostensibly observable. This peculiarity has served them to propose a curious experiment: to compare how human beings and machines recognize planetary images. The ultimate goal was to analyse whether artificial intelligence (AI) can help discover 'technosignatures' of possible extra-terrestrial civilizations.

"We weren't alone in this, some people seemed to discern a square shape in Vinalia Faculae, so we saw it as an opportunity to confront human intelligence with artificial intelligence in a cognitive task of visual perception, not just a routine task, but a challenging one with implications bearing on the search for extraterrestrial life (SETI), no longer based solely on radio waves," explains Gabriel G. De la Torre.

The team of this neuropsychologist from the University of Cadiz, who has already studied the problem of undetected non terrestrial intelligent signals (the cosmic gorilla effect), now brought together 163 volunteers with no training in astronomy to determine what they saw in the images of Occator.

They then did the same with an artificial vision system based on convolutional neural networks (CNN), previously trained with thousands of images of squares and triangles so as to be able to identify them.

"Both people and artificial intelligence detected a square structure in the images, but the AI also identified a triangle," notes De la Torre, "and when the triangular option was shown to humans, the percentage of persons claiming to see it also increased significantly." The square seemed to be inscribed in the triangle.

These results, published in the Acta Astronautica journal, have allowed researchers to draw several conclusions: "On the one hand, despite being fashionable and having a multitude of applications, artificial intelligence could confuse us and tell us that it has detected impossible or false things," says De la Torre, "and this therefore compromises its usefulness in tasks such as the search for extra-terrestrial technosignatures in some cases. We must be careful with its implementation and use in SETI."

"On the other hand," he adds, "if AI identifies something our mind cannot understand or accept, could it in the future go beyond our level of consciousness and open doors to reality for which we are not prepared? What if the square and triangle of Vinalia Faculae in Ceres were artificial structures?"

Finally, the neuropsychologist points out that AI systems suffer from the same problems as their creators: "The implications of biases in their development should be further studied while they are being supervised by humans."

De la Torre concludes by acknowledging that, in reality, "we don't know what it is, but what artificial intelligence has detected in Vinalia Faculae is most probably just a play of light and shadow."

A new study finds that active shooter incidents off campus and politics are key factors that led state legislators to pass laws allowing concealed weapons on college and university campuses between 2004 and 2016.

"We assumed that campus carry legislation might be driven by active shooter incidents in educational contexts," David R. Johnson, lead author of the research, sociologist and assistant professor of higher education leadership in the College of Education at the University of Nevada, Reno, said. "Our analysis found that bill introduction is associated with active shooter incidents anywhere within a legislator's state, but not specifically those occurring at schools and universities."

"The dataset we developed tracked state legislative behaviors related to concealed weapons on campus and captured key factors that may have influenced these activities," said Liang Zhang, coauthor of the research and professor of higher education at New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. "We found that following a mass shooting, Republican legislatures tend to introduce and sometimes adopt legislation that would specifically allow people to bring concealed weapons onto college campuses, while Democrat-controlled legislatures do not."

Johnson and Zhang's academic paper, "Intrastate and interstate influences on the introduction and enactment of campus carry legislation" was published in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association that features the field's leading research. This is believed to be the first empirical analysis of the policy process related to campus carry legislation.

As of 2018, campus carry laws have been enacted in 11 states, 16 states ban concealed weapons and in 23 states the decision to ban or allow guns at higher education institutions is left to university systems or individual schools. The analysis showed that factors unrelated to crime on school grounds led to the introduction and enactment of these bills.

In addition to active shooter incidents, bill introduction is influenced by the percentage of Republicans in state government, conservative citizen political ideology and policy diffusion - the influence of neighboring states' policies on the issue. The analysis of bill enactment reveals that conservative citizen political ideology and contributions from anti-gun control interest groups are the driving forces behind policy adoption.

"Other research suggests that nearly 95 percent of students and faculty at large public universities are opposed to allowing guns on school grounds," Johnson continued. "There's no clear security issue, most stakeholders don't want guns on campus, and it seems that legislators push it through to please their constituents."

An active shooter incident could lead policymakers to adopt new or stronger prohibitions against concealed weapons on campus, but the chief legislative emphasis in the past two decades has been to remove prohibitions established in the 1980s and 1990s.

Zhang added that these gun bills and laws are largely unfunded mandates. The legislature doesn't include funding for the implementation of the new laws, but the schools must install signs, storage lockers and hire more police. The estimates are in the millions for a state higher education system to regulate guns on campus. When considering SB1474 in 2012, the state of Arizona estimated that allowing concealed weapons would introduce $13.3 million in one-time costs and $3.1 million annually for three state universities. The bill ultimately failed.

Zhang and Johnson focused on proposed bills aimed at permitting concealed weapons on campus to explain the policy process related to their introduction and either passage or failure to pass. Their work expands the empirical scope of higher education policy research by considering a social problem that is only indirectly related to student achievement but nevertheless a high priority for some state legislators.

While there are some areas of gun policy that draw bipartisan support, allowing concealed carry in more places is not one of them: 68% of Republicans support increased concealed carry in more places compared to only 26% of Democrats, according to the Pew Research Center. This helps explain why the prevalence of conservative leaning citizens within a state is so influential on the policy process.

In Nevada, for example, the state legislature has three times considered permitting firearms at postsecondary institutions - once in 2011 with a Democratic controlled legislature, once in 2013 with a Democratic controlled legislature and again in 2015 in a Republican controlled legislature. The 2011 and 2013 bills died without consideration. In 2015 AB148 was passed by the Assembly. The Senate never considered the bill.

HOUSTON - (Jan. 28, 2020) - Who -- or what -- is to blame for the xenophobia, political intolerance and radical political parties spreading through Germany and the rest of Europe? A new study from Rice University and Washington University in St. Louis shows a major factor is people's proximity to former Nazi concentration camps.

"Legacies of the Third Reich: Concentration Camps and Outgroup Intolerance" will appear in an upcoming edition of the journal American Political Science Review. Lead author Jonathan Homola, an assistant professor at Rice, and fellow authors Miguel Pereira and Margit Tavits of Washington University were interested in understanding why some Europeans are more xenophobic, less accepting of "outgroups" and more supportive of radical right-wing political parties.

The researchers focused closely on Germany but also examined other parts of Europe. They looked at survey responses from the European Values Study and the German General Social Survey as well as recent electoral results. They were especially interested in explaining intolerance toward Jews, Muslims and foreigners and support for radical right-wing parties. The researchers also used census data, information on the location of Third Reich concentration camps and historical election results.

The researchers found consistent evidence that present-day Germans who live closer to concentration camp sites are more xenophobic; less tolerant of Jews, Muslims and immigrants; and more likely to support extreme right-wing political parties. They also found preliminary evidence of this behavior in other parts of Europe.

"We believe that individuals living near concentration camps during World War II were more likely to conform to the beliefs system of the regime," Homola said. "And we think this was because of cognitive dissonance."

Cognitive dissonance is the process of people justifying new information and beliefs that don't necessarily align their values in order to eliminate feelings of guilt or psychological discomfort. In the case of the Holocaust, these beliefs were passed down from generation to generation, Homola and his fellow authors said.

"While the causes of the Holocaust have attracted ample scholarly attention, its long-term sociopolitical consequences are less understood," Homola said. "Our evidence proves that when it comes to political attitudes, these consequences are real and measurable even today. The prejudice that this racist and inhumane institution instilled in the local population is hard to erase even after the institution itself is long gone."

Homola said prior research in the U.S. has established a similar link between extreme political beliefs or racism and proximity to areas that once were home to a large number of slaves. These historical explanations for present-day prejudice are especially timely, he said, as political developments in the U.S. and Europe have brought intolerance toward marginalized groups back into the limelight.

"It is important to understand both contemporary factors and historical legacies that make exclusionary political appeals attractive," he said.

Human cells have a defense mechanism that protects them from microbial attacks, a Canadian-led team of international researchers has discovered.

When microbes enter our body, they liberate toxins that can damage cells by poking holes in the external cell layer. To defend themselves from the intrusion, cells scramble their membrane fat (lipid) into a more liquid form that allows them to fix the holes, the research team found.

Those repairs prevent the cells from breaking up and dying.

Led by André Veillette, an Université de Montréal medical professor and researcher at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute (IRCM), the discovery was recently published in Cell Reports.

''Our body is very clever", said Veillette. "Some microbes cause diseases by punching holes in the external layer of cells and killing these cells. But our body has the ability to repair these holes. We have identified a molecule, known as TMEM16F, that can repair the holes and prevent the cells from dying."

The researchers hope that by stimulating the scrambling of cell fat with new drugs, they may help to protect humans from some microbes such as listeria, which causes severe diarrhea, and streptococcus, which can trigger destruction of blood cells.

(Boston)--Researchers have determined that after lungs recover from infection, alveolar macrophages (immune cells that live in the lungs and help protect the lungs against infection) are different in multiple ways and those differences persist indefinitely.

How the lungs protect themselves when they are at their healthiest, like in young adult humans, is complex and only beginning to be understood. Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) propose that the new alveolar macrophage biology resulting from prior experiences with infections is one of the elements helping to protect the lungs of young adults against pneumonia.

"We have determined that these immune cells have a memory of their prior experiences and that memory influences how they will respond to any subsequent challenges like later infections," explained corresponding author Joseph Mizgerd, ScD, professor of medicine, microbiology and biochemistry at BUSM.

Worldwide, pneumonia remains a serious public health burden. Each year more than one million children under the age of five die from pneumonia and associated complications. In the U.S., pneumonia is the most common reason for the hospitalization of children and accounts for nearly half of the infectious disease-related hospitalizations and deaths of older adults.

In this study, experimental models were infected with a bacteria called pneumococcus, which is a normal experience for humans during childhood, and then allowed to recover. Another set of models were never infected. The researchers then compared the alveolar macrophages in the lungs of these two different groups, including the receptors on the cell surfaces, the genes being expressed by these cells and the metabolites inside of these cells. The alveolar macrophages in the models which had recovered from pneumonia had a new baseline in all these read-outs. In addition, their alveolar macrophages responded differently to subsequent infections, compared to the alveolar macrophages in lungs without a history of infections.

According to the researchers, young children are extremely susceptible to pneumonia, but multiple types of lung defense develop during childhood and protect against pneumonia, persisting through young adulthood. "The combination of aging, poor living habits and disease degrade these lung defenses so that pneumonia susceptibility increases again in later years," added Mizgerd.

By working to elucidate the naturally acquired defenses against pneumonia in young healthy adults the researchers hope to find better ways of identifying those most at risk for developing pneumonia and to devise new strategies for preventing or curing pneumonia.

DALLAS - Jan. 27, 2020 - Artificial intelligence can help cancer patients start their radiation therapy sooner - and thereby decrease the odds of the cancer spreading - by instantly translating complex clinical data into an optimal plan of attack.

Patients typically must wait several days to a week to begin therapy while doctors manually develop treatment plans. But new research from UT Southwestern shows how enhanced deep-learning models streamlined this process down to a fraction of a second.

"Some of these patients need radiation therapy immediately, but doctors often have to tell them to go home and wait," says Steve Jiang, Ph.D., who directs UT Southwestern's Medical Artificial Intelligence and Automation (MAIA) Lab. "Achieving optimal treatment plans in near real time is important and part of our broader mission to use AI to improve all aspects of cancer care."

Radiation therapy is a common form of cancer treatment that utilizes high radiation beams to destroy cancer cells and shrink tumors. Previous research shows that delaying this therapy by even a week can increase the chance of some cancers either recurring or spreading by 12-14 percent.

Such statistics motivated Jiang's team to explore methods of using AI to improve multiple facets of radiation therapy - from the initial dosage plans required before the treatment can begin to the dose recalculations that occur as the plan progresses.

Jiang says developing a sophisticated treatment plan can be a time-consuming and tedious process that involves careful review of the patient's imaging data and several phases of feedback within the medical team.

A new study from the MAIA Lab on dose prediction, published in Medical Physics, demonstrated AI's ability to produce optimal treatment plans within five-hundredths of a second after receiving clinical data for patients.

Researchers achieved this by feeding the data for 70 prostate cancer patients into four deep-learning models. Through repetition, the AI learned to develop 3D renderings of how best to distribute the radiation in each patient. Each model accurately predicted the treatment plans developed by the medical team.

The study builds upon other MAIA research published in 2019 that focused on developing treatment plans for lung and head and neck cancer.

"Our AI can cut out much of the back and forth that happens between the doctor and the dosage planner," Jiang says. "This improves the efficiency dramatically."

A second new study by Jiang, also published in Medical Physics, shows how AI can quickly and accurately recalculate dosages before each radiation session, taking into account how the patient's anatomy may have changed since the last therapy. A conventional, accurate recalculation sometimes requires patients to wait 10 minutes or more, in addition to the time needed to conduct anatomy imaging before each session.

Jiang's researchers developed an AI algorithm that combined two conventional models that had been used for dose calculation: a simple, fast model that lacked accuracy and a complex one that was accurate but required a much longer time, often about a half-hour.

The newly developed AI assessed the differences between the models - based on data from 70 prostate cancer patients - and learned how to utilize both speed and accuracy to generate calculations within one second.

UT Southwestern plans to use the new AI capabilities in clinical care after implementing a patient interface. Meanwhile, the MAIA Lab is developing deep-learning tools for several other purposes, including enhanced medical imaging and image processing, automated medical procedures, and improved disease diagnosis and treatment outcome prediction.

A collaboration between scientists at Rutgers University and Scripps Research led to the discovery of a small molecule that may slow down or stop the progression of Parkinson's disease.

Parkinson's, which affects 1 million people in the United States and over 10 million worldwide according to the Parkinson's Foundation, is a neurodegenerative disorder with no cure. Symptoms develop slowly over time and can be debilitating to patients, who most recognizably develop tremor, slow movements and a shuffling gait.

A key feature of Parkinson's disease is a protein named α-synuclein, which accumulates in an abnormal form in brain cells causing them to degenerate and die. However, it has been difficult to target α-synuclein because it does not have a fixed structure and keeps changing its shape, making it very difficult for drugs to target. Because higher levels of the protein in the brain speed the degeneration of brain cells, scientists have been looking for ways to decrease the protein production as a form of treatment.

In 2014, Parkinson's disease expert and scientist M. Maral Mouradian, William Dow Lovett Professor of Neurology and director of the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School Institute for Neurological Therapeutics, contacted Matthew D. Disney, chemistry professor at Scripps Research in Florida, to explore a novel idea for treating Parkinson's disease using a new technology developed by Disney.

Disney's method matches RNA structure with small molecules or drug-like compounds. The two collaborators believed this innovative technology could be used to find a drug that targets the messenger RNA that codes for α-synuclein, which causes the disease, in order to reduce production of the protein in the brains of Parkinson's patients. Since the protein itself can't be treated with drugs, RNA could be a more robust and reliable target.

They were right. The NIH-funded study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on January 3, showed that by targeting messenger RNA, the team found a compound that prevents the harmful Parkinson's protein from being made. This new compound, named Synucleozid, reduces specifically α-synuclein levels and protects cells against the toxicity of the misfolded form of the protein, suggesting that it has the potential of preventing disease progression.

"We found the molecule to be very selective at both the RNA level and the protein level," Disney says.

"Currently, there is no cure for Parkinson's disease, and it is truly a devastating disease. For the first time, we discovered a drug-like compound that has the potential to slow down the disease before it advances through an entirely new approach," said Mouradian. Such a treatment would be most effective for people who are in the early stages of the disease with minimal symptoms, she said.

"Several other experimental drugs currently being tested for Parkinson's disease are antibodies that target a very late stage of α-synuclein protein aggregates. We want to prevent these protein clumps from forming in the first place before they do damage and lead to advancing disease.," she said. "This new compound has the potential to do that and could change the course of life for people with this devastating disease."

Mouradian says this discovery is 'highly promising' and is eager for the next steps in optimizing and testing the compound. Additionally, this can benefit another devasting disease that also has α-synuclein clumps, known as Dementia with Lewy Bodies. Further, this new concept of targeting RNA to reduce protein production developed in Disney's lab at Scripps Research may be applied to other challenging diseases because of their similar undruggable proteins including Alzheimer's disease.

"The reach of our study could go beyond people with Parkinson's disease to many other neurodegenerative diseases. It is a classic example of how interdisciplinary research leads to significant change," she shares.

A team of 245 UCLA undergraduates and 31 high school students has published an encyclopedia of more than 1,000 genes, including 421 genes whose functions were previously unknown. The research was conducted in fruit flies, and the genes the researchers describe in the analysis may be associated with the development of the brain, eye, lymph gland and wings.

The fruit fly is often the object of scientific research because its cells have similar DNA to that of human cells -- so knowledge about its genes can help researchers better understand human diseases. The UCLA study should be useful to scientists studying genes involved in sleep, vision, memory and many other processes in humans.

The research is published in the journal G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics. The study's senior authors include researchers Cory Evans and John Olson, who taught UCLA's Biomedical Research 10H, the course in which the studies were conducted.

"I expect this will be a highly cited paper and a valuable resource to life scientists," said Tracy Johnson, director of UCLA's biomedical research minor, which offers the course the students all took. "It's inspiring to know all of this really important research came from freshmen and sophomores. It's beautiful, high-quality research."

The students studied short DNA sequences to learn how specific genes are turned on and off and understand how those genes control the functions of various cell types. Although all cells have essentially the same collection of genes, specific genes are turned on or off depending on the cells' needs, Evans said.

Each student studied several genes, ultimately producing a total of more than 50,000 microscopic images; the researchers then posted their analysis on an online database where other scientists can study the genes' roles.

"This shows not only which genes are turned on, but the history of which genes have been turned on," Johnson said.

The research was conducted as part of a UCLA life sciences course that was developed in the early 2000s by Utpal Banerjee, a UCLA distinguished professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor and a senior author of the paper. The course received initial funding from the HHMI.

"Research on science education says that one of the best way to teach science is by having authentic research experiences embedded in a course," said Johnson, who holds the Keith and Cecilia Terasaki Presidential Endowed Chair in the Division of Life Sciences and is an HHMI Professor. "Professor Banerjee understood years ago when he envisioned the class that students learn more by doing science. They learn how to design experiments, how to think like scientists, how to write about science and how to present their research."

Johnson said the approach is analogous to teaching a sport. "If a kid wants to play soccer, you don't say, 'Don't touch the soccer ball yet. You have to first learn all of the rules, watch other people play and read about the soccer greats, and maybe in a couple of years, we'll let you kick the ball.' No, bring out the soccer balls! So we need to get science students in the lab."

The students completed two other research projects, one of which Evans expects will be published this year. In that study, the undergraduates studied the effects of turning off specific genes in fruit flies using a scientific technique called RNA interference. They then determined which of those 4,000 genes, when turned off, affect the proper development of blood cells.

"We teach students how to do research, not fly biology," said Evans, who is now an assistant professor of biology at Loyola Marymount University. "Their science literacy is high, and they know how to evaluate evidence."

What The Study Did: Associations between county-level concentrations of poverty in the United States and suicide rates among children and adolescents (ages 5 to 19) were explored in this observational study.

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

Authors: Jennifer A. Hoffman, M.D., of the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, is the corresponding author.

(doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2019.5678)

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