Culture

The prevalence of cannabis, or marijuana, use in the United States increased from 2005 to 2017 among persons with and without depression and was approximately twice as common among those with depression in 2017. The findings, which are published in Addiction, come from a survey-based study of 728,691 persons aged 12 years or older.

"Perception of great risk associated with regular cannabis use was significantly lower among those with depression in 2017, compared with those without depression, and from 2005 to 2017 the perception of risk declined more rapidly among those with depression. At the same time, the rate of increase in cannabis use has increased more rapidly among those with depression," said corresponding author Renee Goodwin, PhD, MPH, of Columbia University and The City University of New York.

The prevalence of past 30-day cannabis use among those with depression who perceived no risk associated with regular cannabis use was much higher than that among those who perceived significant risk associated with use (38.6% versus 1.6%, respectively).

Certain groups appeared more vulnerable to use. For instance, nearly one third of young adults (29.7%) aged 18-25 with depression reported past 30-day use.

In 2017, the prevalence of past month cannabis use was 18.9% among those with depression and 8.7% among those without depression. Daily cannabis use was common among 6.7% of those with depression and among 2.9% of those without.

Viral and bacterial infections are not the only causes of inflammation of body tissue. It has been known for some time that certain fat molecules in our bloodstream can also trigger an inflammatory response. Patients with higher levels of these fats in their blood have a significantly greater chance of dying early from kidney damage or vascular disease. This causal link has now been clearly demonstrated by an international team of researchers led by Dr. Timo Speer of Saarland University.

The research team was able to show how these fat molecules interact with body cells and how they can mobilize the body's own immune system to damaging effect. The study's findings have now been published in the highly respected medical journal 'Nature Immunology'.

Doctors interested in ways to minimize the risk of cardiovascular disease have long had blood cholesterol levels in their sights. But other types of blood fats (also known as 'lipids') can also be damaging to health. 'Our work has involved studying a special group of lipids, the triglycerides. We've been able to show that when these naturally occurring fats are present at elevated concentrations they can alter our defence cells in such a way that the body reacts as if responding to a bacterial infection. This leads to inflammation, which, if it becomes chronic, can damage the kidneys or cause atherosclerosis - the narrowing of arteries due to a build up of deposits on the inner arterial wall. And atherosclerosis is one of the main causes of heart attacks and strokes,' explains Timo Speer of Saarland University. Speer, who has doctorates in medicine as well as biology, is the lead author of the work just published in Nature Immunology.

The large-scale study was able to demonstrate that patients with elevated levels of triglycerides in their blood had a significantly higher mortality rate than comparison groups with a similar health history. 'Put another way, we can now say that adopting a low-fat diet can significantly extend the life expectancy of high-risk patients, such as those with diabetes or those whose blood pressure is too high,' says Timo Speer. Blood triglyceride levels rise substantially in people who eat a high-fat diet. 'As a result of biochemical changes, the triglycerides develop toxic properties that activate the body's innate immune system. This initiates a series of self-destructive processes including those in which the walls of the arteries are attacked and the blood vessels become occluded, reducing blood flow,' explains Speer. The study has established a definitive link between the chronic inflammation triggered by an elevated triglyceride concentration in the blood and secondary diseases such as kidney failure or heart attack. 'We hope that our results will help in developing new strategies for treating and preventing these life-threatening diseases,' says Timo Speer.

The publication in Nature Immunology is one of the results of the diverse range of scientific investigations being carried out as part of a Transregional Collaborative Research Centre between Saarland University and RWTH Aachen University. The focus of the work performed within the Collaborative Research Centre is to discover which cardiac and vascular diseases can be caused by chronic kidney disease. The German Research Foundation (DFG) is funding this major research programme with ten million euros over a three-year period. Timo Speer is the lead researcher for one the research projects. He is also a senior physician at Saarland University Hospital and laboratory director for experimental and translational nephrology.

UPTON, NY--Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have discovered a new function in a plant enzyme that could have implications for the design of new chemical catalysts. The enzyme catalyzes, or initiates, one of the cornerstone chemical reactions needed to synthesize a wide array of organic molecules, including those found in lubricants, cosmetics, and those used as raw materials for making plastics.

"This enzyme could inspire a new form of 'green' chemistry," said Brookhaven Lab biochemist John Shanklin, who led the research. "Maybe we can adapt this biomolecule to make useful chemicals in plants, or use it as the basis for designing new bio-inspired catalysts to replace more expensive, toxic catalysts currently in use."

Shanklin and his team published a paper describing the research in the journal Plant Physiology.

The team made the discovery in the course of their ongoing research into enzymes that desaturate plant oils. These desaturase enzymes strip hydrogen atoms off specific adjacent carbon atoms in a hydrocarbon chain and insert a double bond between those carbon atoms. Shanklin's group had previously created a triple mutant version of a desaturase enzyme with interesting properties, and they were studying the three mutations separately to see what each one did.

Two of the single mutant enzymes turned out to remove the double bond between adjacent carbon atoms and added an "OH" (hydroxyl group) to each carbon to produce a fatty acid with two adjacent hydroxyl groups.

Fatty acids containing such adjacent OH groups, known as diols, are important chemical components for making lubricants, like those that keep hot engines running smoothly. They can also be converted to building blocks for making plastics or other commodity products.

"Diols are really important industrial chemicals but making them artificially in the lab is quite problematic," Shanklin said.

The best industrial catalysts for this reaction are expensive, highly volatile, and toxic, he noted.

Another problem is that there are distinct forms of diols, and it's hard for chemists to make a single pure form.

"The enzyme mutants we discovered naturally make a single form, so it's ready to use without further processing or waste," Shanklin said.

Tracing the origins of the oxygen atoms in the two OH groups revealed that both came from the same oxygen molecule (O?). The ability to transfer both oxygen atoms from a single O? molecule during a reaction, known as "dioxygenase" chemistry, was something of a surprise for a "diiron" enzyme (one with two iron atoms in its active site).

"Dioxygenase chemistry has not previously been reported for diiron enzymes," Shanklin said. "We had to perform some technically challenging experiments to provide incontrovertible proof that this was indeed happening, and without Ed Whittle's creativity and tenacity, we wouldn't have completed this study."

Whittle, the lead author on the paper (now retired from Brookhaven Lab), has diligently worked on this project over a period of years in Shanklin's lab to nail down this important new discovery.

The team's next goal is to obtain a crystal structure of this enzyme using x-rays at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II)--a DOE Office of Science user facility at Brookhaven Lab.

"We'll share that structural information with our computational chemistry colleagues to figure out the details of how this unprecedented chemistry can occur with this class of catalyst."

That work could help the team learn how to control the configuration of lab-made catalysts to mimic the plant-derived version.

"If we can incorporate what we've learned into the design of industrial catalysts, those reactions could produce purer products with less waste and avoid using toxic chemicals," Shanklin said.

MELBOURNE, FLA. -- New research led by scientists from Florida Institute of Technology found that the strong and long-lasting droughts known as megadroughts parched the usually moist Peruvian cloud forests, spurring farmers to colonize new cropland.

The study, "2,100 years of human adaptation to climate change in the High Andes," reveals that Andean climate changes - especially droughts - over the last 2,100 years were an important determinant of how land was used by native Andean societies. It was published online Dec. 9 in Nature Ecology and Evolution from scientists at Florida Tech, University of Miami and Columbus State University.

The setting of the study is the Laguna de los Cóndores, or Lake of the Condors, in Peru. This is an especially important area to archaeologists as the cliffs above the lake were a tomb-site for over 200 Incan and pre-Incan mummies.

One of the key findings of the study was that the peak of deforestation was about 800 A.D. and that the last deforestation to produce maize agriculture was about 1100 A.D. The farming ended by about 1200 A.D. and the forests reclaimed the valley around the lake. This timing coincided with two things: a wetter regional climate and the beginning of the cliff burials.

"As the landscape changed from a patchwork of maize fields and disturbed forests back to cloud forest, we saw an end to burning and an almost immediate improvement in the lake's water quality," said Mark Bush, professor of biology at Florida Tech and the team leader. "This recovery offers us the hope that some of the bad ecosystem impacts from deforestation and grazing in the Andes are reversible."

But the study also shows that the projected increased droughts resulting from modern climate change in the Andes are likely to cause farmers to deforest and exploit cloud forest regions.

A grant to Bush from the National Geographic Society funded the fieldwork, and follow-up laboratory funding was provided by grants from the National Science Foundation and NASA.

The analysis of sediments recovered from the bottom of the lake provided multiple lines of evidence that included fossil pollen, charcoal and algae, and sediment chemistry. Data from these sources allowed the team to reconstruct an almost year-by-year history of the land use around the lake spanning the last 2,100 years. Multiple cycles of farming activity followed by abandonment aligned to changing climates were recorded, as were five megadroughts.

Each drought lasted for as much as a decade, and each time farmers exploited the valley. Between these dry periods, under the more normal, wetter conditions, the valley was largely abandoned, and forests regrew.

"We were surprised to see how responsive these populations were to climate change," said Christine Åkesson, who conducted the study as a Ph.D. student at Florida Tech and is the lead author of the paper. "We expected to see a steady rise in land use peaking with the internment of mummies in the cliffs and the collapse of Incan society when the Spanish conquered this part of Peru in the 1570s, but that isn't what happened."

CORVALLIS, Ore. - A study by Oregon State University researchers has identified forests in the western United States that should be preserved for their potential to mitigate climate change through carbon sequestration, as well as to enhance biodiversity.

Those forests are mainly along the Pacific coast and in the Cascade Range, with pockets of them in the northern Rocky Mountains as well. Not logging those forests would be the carbon dioxide equivalent of halting eight years' worth of fossil fuel burning in the western lower 48, the scientists found, noting that making land stewardship a higher societal priority is crucial for altering climate change trajectory.

The findings, published in Ecological Applications, are important because capping global temperature increases at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, as called for in the 2016 Paris Agreement, would maintain substantial proportions of ecosystems while also benefiting economies and human health, scientists say.

"The greater frequency and intensity of extreme events such as wildfires have adversely affected terrestrial ecosystems," said study co-author Beverly Law, professor of forest ecosystems and society in the OSU College of Forestry. "Although climate change is impacting forests in many regions, other regions are expected to have low vulnerability to fires, insects and drought in the future."

Law, Oregon State forestry professor William Ripple, postdoctoral research associate Polly Buotte and Logan Berner of EcoSpatial Services analyzed forests in the western United States to simulate potential carbon sequestration through the 21st century.

The five-year study supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture identified, and targeted for preservation, forests with high carbon sequestration potential, low vulnerability to drought, fire and beetles, and high biodiversity value.

Largely through the burning of fossil fuels, which releases the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the Earth has already warmed by 1 degree Celsius. Arctic sea ice is declining at the fastest rate in 1,500 years, sea levels have risen more than 8 inches since 1880, and extreme weather events are becoming more common and damaging.

Atmospheric CO2 has increased 40 percent since the dawn of the Industrial Age. According to the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration's Global Monitoring Division, the global average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration on Jan 1, 2019, was 410 parts per million, higher than at any time in at least 800,000 years.

"Smart land management can mitigate the effects of climate-induced ecosystem changes to biodiversity and watersheds, which influence ecosystem services that play a key role in human well-being," said Buotte, the study's corresponding author.

Preserving temperate forests in the western United States that have medium to high potential carbon sequestration and low future climate vulnerability could account for about a third of the global mitigation potential previously identified for temperate and boreal forests, the authors say.

"At the same time, it would promote ecosystem resilience and maintenance of biodiversity," Law said. "We are in the midst of a climate crisis and a biodiversity crisis. Preserving these forests is one of the greatest things we can do in our region of North America to help on both fronts."

Led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine, a study published in the journal Cell Stem Cell reveals a new mechanism that contributes to adult bone maintenance and repair and opens the possibility of developing therapeutic strategies for improving bone healing.

"Adult bone repair relies on the activation of bone stem cells, which still remain poorly characterized," said corresponding author Dr. Dongsu Park, assistant professor of molecular and human genetics and of pathology and immunology at Baylor. "Bone stem cells have been found both in the bone marrow inside the bone and also in the periosteum - the outer layer of tissue - that envelopes the bone. Previous studies have shown that these two populations of stem cells, although they share many characteristics, also have unique functions and specific regulatory mechanisms."

Of the two, periosteal stem cells are the least understood. It is known that they comprise a heterogeneous population of cells that can contribute to bone thickness, shaping and fracture repair, but scientists had not been able to distinguish between different subtypes of bone stem cells to study how their different functions are regulated.

In the current study, Park and his colleagues developed a method to identify different subpopulations of periosteal stem cells, define their contribution to bone fracture repair in live mouse models and identify specific factors that regulate their migration and proliferation under physiological conditions.

Periosteal stem cells are major contributors to bone healing

The researchers discovered specific markers for periosteal stem cells in mouse models. The markers identified a distinct subset of stem cells that contributes to life-long adult bone regeneration.

"We also found that periosteal stem cells respond to mechanical injury by engaging in bone healing," Park said. "They are important for healing bone fractures in the adult mice and, interestingly, their contribution to bone regeneration is higher than that of bone marrow stem cells."

In addition, the researchers found that periosteal stem cells also respond to inflammatory molecules called chemokines, which are usually produced during bone injury. In particular, they responded to chemokine CCL5.

Periosteal stem cells have receptors - molecules on their cell surface - that bind to CCL5, which sends a signal to the cells to migrate toward the injured bone and repair it. Deleting the CCL5 gene in mouse models resulted in marked defects in bone repair or delayed healing. When the researchers supplied CCL5 to CCL5-deficient mice, bone healing was accelerated.

The findings suggested potential therapeutic applications. For instance, in individuals with diabetes or osteoporosis in which bone healing is slow and may lead to other complications resulting from limited mobility, accelerating bone healing may reduce hospital stay and improve prognosis.

"Our findings contribute to a better understanding of how adult bones heal. We think this is one of the first studies to show that bone stem cells are heterogeneous and that different subtypes have unique properties regulated by specific mechanisms," Park said. "We have identified markers that enable us to tell bone stem cell subtypes apart and studied what each subtype contributes to bone health. Understanding how bone stem cell functions are regulated offers the possibility to develop novel therapeutic strategies to treat adult bone injuries."

Grown as Christmas trees, Fraser firs are highly prized for their rich color and pleasant scent as well as their ability to hold their needles. Unfortunately, they are also highly susceptible to devastating root rot diseases caused by water molds in the genus Phytophthora.

Scientists in Connecticut were conducting experiments testing various methods to grow healthier Fraser trees when they accidentally discovered a new species of Phytophthora. They collected the diseased plants, isolated and grew the pathogen on artificial media, then inoculated it into healthy plants before re-isolating it to prove its pathogenicity.

"Once the organism was isolated, the presence of unusually thick spore walls alerted us that this may not be a commonly encountered species," said Rich Cowles, a scientist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station involved with this study, "and so comparison of several genes' sequences with known Phytophthora species was used to discover how our unknown was related to other, previously described species." In fact, they had discovered a new species altogether.

The fact that these scientists so readily discovered a new species of Phytophthora infecting Christmas trees suggests that there could be many more species waiting to be discovered. Recognizing the greater biodiversity among this genus infecting Christmas trees is important. Transportation of infected nursery stock and chance encounters of different Phytophthora species in the field can lead to new hybrids arising, which can have different pathogenic characteristics than their parent species.

"Knowing how many and which species are present is important, not only for Christmas tree growers, but also for protecting our natural environment," Cowles adds.

Also of note, this research was conducted using apples to do the initial isolation of Phytophthora, a method that dates back to 1931, demonstrating that old methods in plant pathology are still valid and useful. "Combining this robust old technique worked well with modern molecular biology methods to isolate, and then identify our unknown plant disease," according to Cowles.

You see them all over city streets: pedestrians wearing headphones or earbuds - their faces glued to their phones as they stroll along oblivious to their surroundings.

Known as "twalking," the behavior is not without its dangers. Headphone-wearing pedestrians often can't hear the auditory cues - horns, shouts, or the sound of approaching cars - that signal imminent harm. As a result, the number of injuries and deaths caused by twalking in the U.S. has tripled in the last seven years. Last year, moreover, pedestrian deaths in the U.S. were at their highest level since 1990.

To counter this growing public safety concern, researchers at the Data Science Institute, Columbia, are designing an intelligent headphone system that warns pedestrians of imminent dangers. The headphones have miniature microphones and intelligent signal processing that detects sounds of approaching vehicles. If a hazard appears near, the system sends an audio alert to the pedestrian's headphones. The research team is developing prototypes and testing them on streets close to Columbia. Once developed, the intelligent wearable system could help reduce pedestrian injuries and fatalities.

"We are exploring a new area in developing an inexpensive and low-power technology that creates an audio-alert mechanism for pedestrians," says Fred Jiang, a Data Science Institute member and an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Columbia Engineering.

The smart-headphone project was awarded a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation in 2017, and the team has since published two conference papers as well as a journal paper in IEEE Internet of Things Journal on their research. They've also received several honors including a best demo award from an ACM conference and a best presentation award from an IEEE conference. The research team includes Peter Kinget, chair of the Electrical Engineering Department at Columbia and an affiliate of the Data Science Institute; Shahriar Nirjon, a professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and Joshua New, a psychology professor from Barnard College. Graduate students from both Columbia and UNC also work on the project.

The research and development of the smart headphones is complex: It involves embedding multiple miniature microphones in the headset as well as developing a low-power data pipeline to process all the sounds near to the pedestrian. It must also extract the correct cues that signal impending danger. The pipeline will contain an ultra-low power, custom-integrated circuit that extracts the relevant features from the sounds while using little battery power.

The researchers are also using the most advanced data science techniques to design the smart headset. Machine-learning models on the user's smartphone will classify hundreds of acoustical cues from city streets and nearby vehicles and warn users when they are in danger. The mechanism will be designed so that people will recognize the alert and respond quickly. The team is now testing its design both in the lab and on the streets of New York - a city known for its congestion and its cacophony of sounds. New, the psychology professor from Barnard, says he'll conduct perceptual and behavioral experiments with people to see how the alerts can be effectively provided to pedestrians who walk in cities wearing headphones.

Jiang said his aim is to develop a prototype of the smart headphone system at Columbia and then transfer the technology to a commercial company.

"We hope that once refined," he says, "the technology will be commercialized and mass produced in a way that will help cities reduce pedestrian fatalities."

HOUSTON -- (Dec. 9, 2019) -- Online shoppers typically string together a few words to search for the product they want, but in a world with millions of products and shoppers, the task of matching those unspecific words to the right product is one of the biggest challenges in information retrieval.

Using a divide-and-conquer approach that leverages the power of compressed sensing, computer scientists from Rice University and Amazon have shown they can slash the amount of time and computational resources it takes to train computers for product search and similar "extreme classification problems" like speech translation and answering general questions.

The research will be presented this week at the 2019 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2019) in Vancouver. The results include tests performed in 2018 when lead researcher Anshumali Shrivastava and lead author Tharun Medini, both of Rice, were visiting Amazon Search in Palo Alto, California.

In tests on an Amazon search dataset that included some 70 million queries and more than 49 million products, Shrivastava, Medini and colleagues showed their approach of using "merged-average classifiers via hashing," (MACH) required a fraction of the training resources of some state-of-the-art commercial systems.

"Our training times are about 7-10 times faster, and our memory footprints are 2-4 times smaller than the best baseline performances of previously reported large-scale, distributed deep-learning systems," said Shrivastava, an assistant professor of computer science at Rice.

Medini, a Ph.D. student at Rice, said product search is challenging, in part, because of the sheer number of products. "There are about 1 million English words, for example, but there are easily more than 100 million products online."

There are also millions of people shopping for those products, each in their own way. Some type a question. Others use keywords. And many aren't sure what they're looking for when they start. But because millions of online searches are performed every day, tech companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft have a lot of data on successful and unsuccessful searches. And using this data for a type of machine learning called deep learning is one of the most effective ways to give better results to users.

Deep learning systems, or neural network models, are vast collections of mathematical equations that take a set of numbers called input vectors, and transform them into a different set of numbers called output vectors. The networks are composed of matrices with several parameters, and state-of-the-art distributed deep learning systems contain billions of parameters that are divided into multiple layers. During training, data is fed to the first layer, vectors are transformed, and the outputs are fed to the next layer and so on.

"Extreme classification problems" are ones with many possible outcomes, and thus, many parameters. Deep learning models for extreme classification are so large that they typically must be trained on what is effectively a supercomputer, a linked set of graphics processing units (GPU) where parameters are distributed and run in parallel, often for several days.

"A neural network that takes search input and predicts from 100 million outputs, or products, will typically end up with about 2,000 parameters per product," Medini said. "So you multiply those, and the final layer of the neural network is now 200 billion parameters. And I have not done anything sophisticated. I'm talking about a very, very dead simple neural network model."

"It would take about 500 gigabytes of memory to store those 200 billion parameters," Medini said. "But if you look at current training algorithms, there's a famous one called Adam that takes two more parameters for every parameter in the model, because it needs statistics from those parameters to monitor the training process. So, now we are at 200 billion times three, and I will need 1.5 terabytes of working memory just to store the model. I haven't even gotten to the training data. The best GPUs out there have only 32 gigabytes of memory, so training such a model is prohibitive due to massive inter-GPU communication."

MACH takes a very different approach. Shrivastava describes it with a thought experiment randomly dividing the 100 million products into three classes, which take the form of buckets. "I'm mixing, let's say, iPhones with chargers and T-shirts all in the same bucket," he said. "It's a drastic reduction from 100 million to three."

In the thought experiment, the 100 million products are randomly sorted into three buckets in two different worlds, which means that products can wind up in different buckets in each world. A classifier is trained to assign searches to the buckets rather than the products inside them, meaning the classifier only needs to map a search to one of three classes of product.

"Now I feed a search to the classifier in world one, and it says bucket three, and I feed it to the classifier in world two, and it says bucket one," he said. "What is this person thinking about? The most probable class is something that is common between these two buckets. If you look at the possible intersection of the buckets there are three in world one times three in world two, or nine possibilities," he said. "So I have reduced my search space to one over nine, and I have only paid the cost of creating six classes."

Adding a third world, and three more buckets, increases the number of possible intersections by a factor of three. "There are now 27 possibilities for what this person is thinking," he said. "So I have reduced my search space by one over 27, but I've only paid the cost for nine classes. I am paying a cost linearly, and I am getting an exponential improvement."

In their experiments with Amazon's training database, Shrivastava, Medini and colleagues randomly divided the 49 million products into 10,000 classes, or buckets, and repeated the process 32 times. That reduced the number of parameters in the model from around 100 billion to 6.4 billion. And training the model took less time and less memory than some of the best reported training times on models with comparable parameters, including Google's Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, Medini said.

He said MACH's most significant feature is that it requires no communication between parallel processors. In the thought experiment, that is what's represented by the separate, independent worlds.

"They don't even have to talk to each other," Medini said. "In principle, you could train each of the 32 on one GPU, which is something you could never do with a nonindependent approach."

Shrivastava said, "In general, training has required communication across parameters, which means that all the processors that are running in parallel have to share information. Looking forward, communication is a huge issue in distributed deep learning. Google has expressed aspirations of training a 1 trillion parameter network, for example. MACH, currently, cannot be applied to use cases with small number of classes, but for extreme classification, it achieves the holy grail of zero communication."

EVANSTON, Ill. --- There have been many headlines in recent years about the potentially negative impacts contact sports can have on athletes' brains. But a new Northwestern University study shows that, in the absence of injury, athletes across a variety of sports - including football, soccer and hockey - have healthier brains than non-athletes.

"No one would argue against the fact that sports lead to better physically fitness, but we don't always think of brain fitness and sports," said senior author Nina Kraus, the Hugh Knowles Professor of Communication Sciences and Neurobiology and director of Northwestern's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory (Brainvolts). "We're saying that playing sports can tune the brain to better understand one's sensory environment."

Athletes have an enhanced ability to tamp down background electrical noise in their brain to better process external sounds, such as a teammate yelling a play or a coach calling to them from the sidelines, according to the study of nearly 1,000 participants, including approximately 500 Northwestern Division I athletes. 

Kraus likens the phenomenon to listening to a DJ on the radio. 

"Think of background electrical noise in the brain like static on the radio," Kraus said. "There are two ways to hear the DJ better: minimize the static or boost the DJ's voice. We found that athlete brains minimize the background 'static' to hear the 'DJ' better."

The study will be published Dec. 9 in the journal Sports Health.

"A serious commitment to physical activity seems to track with a quieter nervous system," Kraus said. "And perhaps, if you have a healthier nervous system, you may be able to better handle injury or other health problems."

The findings could motivate athletic interventions for populations that struggle with auditory processing.  In particular, playing sports may offset the excessively noisy brains often found in children from low-income areas, Kraus said. 

This is the latest study from the neural processing of sound in sports concussions and contact sports partnership, a five-year, National Institutes of Health-funded research collaboration between Brainvolts and Northwestern University Athletics, which launched last year. 
The study examined the brain health of 495 female and male Northwestern student athletes and 493 age- and sex-matched control subjects. 

Kraus and her collaborators delivered speech syllables to study participants through earbuds and recorded the brain's activity with scalp electrodes. The team analyzed the ratio of background noise to the response to the speech sounds by looking at how big the response to sound was relative to the background noise. Athletes had larger responses to sound than non-athletes, the study showed. 

Like athletes, musicians and those who can speak more than one language also have an enhanced ability to hear incoming sound signals, Kraus said. However, musicians' and multilinguals' brains do so by turning up the sound in their brain versus turning down the background noise in their brain. 

"They all hear the 'DJ' better but the musicians hear the 'DJ' better because they turn up the 'DJ,' whereas athletes can hear the 'DJ' better because they can tamp down the 'static,'" Kraus said.

New research shows road salt runoff into Mirror Lake in Adirondack Park prevents natural water turnover and therefore poses a risk to the balance of its ecology.

In a new study published in Lake and Reservoir Management, researchers from the Ausable River Association and the Adirondack Watershed Institute monitored the water quality of Mirror Lake.

They found that road salt runoff prevented spring mixing of the water column, creating more anoxic water conditions that limited habitat availability of the native lake trout. This finding could also potentially provide insight into how other urban lakes in the New York State may respond to road salt pollution.

"Mirror Lake is the first in the Adirondack Park to show an interruption in lake turnover due to road salt", says Dr. Brendan Wiltse from Ausable River Association, who led the study.

Mirror Lake, located in the Village of Lake Placid, is the most developed lake within the Adirondack Park - a publicly protected area greater than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier, and Grand Canyon National Parks combined.

Like many northern temperate lakes, Mirror Lake experiences 'dimictic' turnover - a natural process where wind and less stratified water conditions (layers of different temperature and density) of spring and fall allows mixing of the water column that redistributes oxygen and nutrients throughout the lake.

High levels of surface-water chloride were first noticed in Mirror Lake in 2014 when it was surveyed as part of the Adirondack Lake Assessment Program, and so the following year, Wiltse and colleagues began monitoring Mirror Lake more intensely.

Bi-weekly measurements of dissolved oxygen, specific conductance, temperature and pH was collected at 1-meter intervals at the point of maximum depth (18 m) from December 2015 through to January 2018. Sampling continued at monthly intervals when the lake was ice covered, but bi-weekly sampling was resumed as soon as possible to capture both spring and fall mixing events.

Wiltse and his team noticed that Mirror Lake completely mixed seasonally except for the spring of 2017. Concentrations of chloride were highest in the deepwater during the previous winter because of road salt application in the Adirondack watershed. These conditions persisted into the summer due to a lack of spring mixing, which left distinct density differences in the water column.

"This resulted in a longer duration and spatial extent of low oxygen conditions in the deepwater," explains Wiltse.

The lack of mixing and oxygenation concerned the researchers because of what it means for fish species such as lake trout, which require cold, oxygenated water to survive and have been declining across their native range in New York State.

"It may also put the lake at a higher risk of algal blooms due to internal phosphorus loading", says Wiltse. "If the lake were to stop mixing in the fall it is possible the lake would experience a winter fish kill," he continues.

While there was not enough historical data to determine when the onset of reduction in turnover began, the team speculates it may have been occurring as far back as 2001.

As to why we're seeing road salt contamination in Mirror Lake, Wiltse explains it's likely due to urbanization and lake size.

"The combination of its small size, concentrated development around the lake, and direct discharge of stormwater to the lake are the primary causes of the high chloride concentrations and reduction in mixing," he says.

Wiltse suspects that conditions may be similar in other lakes elsewhere in the state but argues that more monitoring is required to determine the extent.

"The year-round monitoring occurring at Mirror Lake is unique in the Adirondack Park and not particularly common across the state", says Wiltse. "It is likely that more urban lakes are experiencing this phenomenon but have not been sufficiently studied", he continues.

Meanwhile, the researchers are confident that rapid restoration of natural turnover in Mirror Lake is possible if road salt application in the watershed is reduced.

"A reduction in salt application of 30-40% may be enough to restore turnover of Mirror Lake," says Wiltse, and the recovery would occur in the following spring.

Results of studies on a novel agent to treat multiple myeloma and a combination therapy aimed at slowing the progression of a precursor myeloma condition are among reports being presented by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute investigators at the 61st American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting. The results are being presented by scientists in the Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center and the LeBow Institute for Myeloma Therapeutics at Dana-Farber.

One study yielded promising pre-clinical results using a bispecific T-cell engager (BiTE), an experimental immunotherapy agent to attack myeloma cells in the laboratory and in mice implanted with human myeloma cells. A BiTE is a molecular weapon with two fragments - one that binds to an identifying protein on a cancer cell, and another that binds to a protein on a cytotoxic (cell-killing) T cell, bringing them together in close proximity. This activates the T cell to attack the cancer cell.

BiTEs are somewhat similar to CAR T cells, another form of immunotherapy, but unlike CAR T cells, which are modified in the laboratory from each patient's immune T cells - requiring a long delay before treatment begins - BiTEs are an "off-the-shelf" product.

One limitation of previous BiTEs is their short half-life in the body, meaning they need to be infused frequently or for a long period of time. AMG 701 has an extended half-life, "making it more convenient to administer," said Nikhil Munshi, MD, Director of Basic and Correlative Science at the Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center and an author of the study.

To increase the potency of AMG 701, the researchers administered it along with an immunomodulatory drug - lenalidomide or pomalidomide, drugs commonly used in treating myeloma.

In one experiment, mice that had received implanted myeloma tumor cells along with immune T cells were injected with AMG 701. "Tumors were completely eradicated following three separate injections in the host without weight loss," said the researchers. In another test, mice with myeloma tumors received AMG 701 or lenalidomide, or a both together, beginning 15 days after the tumor implant until the end of the study. While the tumors in the mice receiving only one of the agents eventually progressed, "the combination of AMG 701 with lenalidomide continuously suppressed tumor growth," resulting in enhanced tumor regression and prevention of disease relapse.

"These results strongly support AMG 701-based clinical studies, both as monotherapy and in combination with immunomodulatory agents to enhance elimination of residual diseases and prolong long-term durable responses in multiple myeloma," the scientists said.

First author of the study is Shih-Feng Cho, MD, PhD, and senior author is Yu-Tzu Tai, PhD. The presentation of these findings is scheduled for Session 652, Abstract 135 on Saturday, Dec. 7 at 10 a.m. in Valencia A (W415A) on Level 4 of the Orange County Convention Center.

Investigators presented results of a phase II trial of a combination of three oral drugs administered to individuals with smoldering multiple myeloma (SMM), an asymptomatic condition that often progresses to full-blown myeloma within a few years. SMM patients have abnormal proteins and cancer cells in their blood and bone marrow but have no symptoms.

The trial included 53 patients with SMM considered to be at high risk for progression because of genetic characteristics of their cancer cells or the percentage of bone marrow infiltration of the cancer cells, said first author Mark Bustoros, MD, from Dana-Farber's Center for the Prevention of Progression of Blood Cancers (CPOP).

"We wanted to intervene early in these patients to control the disease and delay progression by using a combination of drugs that would be convenient and with minimal side effects and for a specific period of time," said Irene Ghobrial, MD, Co-Principal Investigator of CPOP and senior author of the study. Patients were prescribed a two-year regimen of 24 cycles of the three drugs used to treat myeloma: ixazomib, lenalidomide, and dexamethasone. Because all the drugs were pills, patients - some of whom lived far from Dana-Farber - only needed to return for blood work and to receive their medications just once a month. The patients ranged in age from 41 to 84, and many were working full-time.

Data collected at a median follow-up period of 14.4 months showed that the overall response rate of patients who completed at least one cycle of treatment was 91.1%, with 14 complete responses or 31.1% (meaning the abnormal proteins had disappeared), nine very good partial responses, or 20%, and 18 partial responses (40%) and four minimal responses (10%).

Thus far, none of the patients in the study have progressed to overt myeloma, Bustoros said. However, the patients haven't been followed long enough yet for the study to show whether the treatment has extended their progression-free survival, he added: that will take another two years. Historically, 50 percent of patients with high-risk smoldering myeloma develop myeloma within two years.

The drug combination was well-tolerated, and no patients had to discontinue the treatment because of adverse effects.

"These are encouraging results," he said, "and we hope with a longer follow-up time we will see patients having a durable response" after finishing the two-year course of treatment. "That's the goal," he said.

The presentation of these findings is scheduled for Session 653, Abstract 580 on Monday, Dec. 9 at 7:45 a.m. in Hall D on Level 2 of the Orange County Convention Center.

Complete details on Dana-Farber's activities at ASH are available online here.

Barbecued, stir-fried or roasted, there's no doubt that Aussies love their meat. Consuming on average nearly 100 kilograms of meat per person per year, Australians are among the top meat consumers worldwide.

But with statistics showing that most Australians suffer from a poor diet, and red meat production adding to greenhouse-gas emissions, finding a balance between taste preferences, environmental protection, and health benefits is becoming critical.

Now, researchers from the University of South Australia can reveal that Aussies can have their health and eat meat too with a new version of the Mediterranean diet adapted for Australian palates.

Incorporating 2-3 serves (250g) of fresh lean pork each week, the Mediterranean-Pork (Med-Pork) diet delivers cognitive benefits, while also catering to Western tastes, and ensuring much lower greenhouse-gas emissions than beef production.

A typical Mediterranean diet includes extra virgin olive oil, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, legumes, wholegrain breads, pastas and cereals, moderate consumption of fish and red wine, and low consumption of red meat, sweet and processed foods.

This study compared the cognitive effects of people aged 45-80 years and at risk of cardiovascular disease following a Med-Pork or a low-fat diet (often prescribed to negate risk factors for cardiovascular disease), finding that the Med-Pork intervention outperformed the low-fat diet, delivering higher cognitive processing speeds and emotional functioning, both of which are markers of good mental health.

UniSA researcher Dr Alexandra Wade says the new Med-Pork diet will provide multiple benefits for everyday Australians.

"The Mediterranean diet is widely accepted as the world's healthiest diet and is renowned for delivering improved cardiovascular and cognitive health, but in Western cultures, the red meat restrictions of the diet could make it hard for people to stick to," Dr Wade says.

"By adding pork to the Mediterranean diet, we're broadening the appeal of the diet, while also delivering improved cognitive function.

"This bodes well for our aging population, where age-associated diseases, such as dementia, are on the rise.

"Improving people's processing speed shows the brain is working well. So, in Australia, the Med-Pork diet is an excellent lifestyle intervention where dementia is one of the leading causes of disability and the second leading cause of death.

"Then, when you add the fact that pork production emits only a fraction of the greenhouse gases compared to beef, and the Med-Pork diet is really ticking all boxes - taste, health and environment."

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), by 2050, the number of people aged 60 years and older will outnumber children younger than five years old, bringing common health concerns associated with ageing into the fore. Further WHO statistics shows that cardiovascular disease is the number 1 cause of death globally and that dementia is one of the major causes of disability and dependency among older people worldwide.

Dr Wade says the Mediterranean diet with lean pork is an effective adaption of a successful eating plan

"Put simply, a Mediterranean diet encourages healthy eating. It's a food-based eating pattern that, with pork, still delivers significant health benefits," Dr Wade says.

"We're hoping that more people will find this dietary pattern to be more in line with their accustomed eating patterns and therefore more adoptable.

"Making a Mediterranean Diet work 'Down Under' is just one step in a bigger picture for better health."

Researchers at Imperial have shown how the chaotic electrical signals underlying irregular heart rhythms lead to the failure of standard treatments.

By modelling how electrical signals on the inside and the outside of the heart move across the muscle, researchers at Imperial College London have suggested why corrective surgery is not currently always beneficial.

The insight could improve surgery for some, by better targeting areas of the heart responsible, and could avoid unnecessary surgery for others, where intervention is unlikely to help.

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common heart rhythm abnormality and is projected to affect about two percent of the global population by 2050. It is the leading cause of stroke, but treatment options are limited.

The current most common treatment is a surgery to burn areas of the heart from the inside thought to be responsible for the irregularity. However, the surgery, known as catheter ablation, is only effective in about 50 percent of patients.

Clinicians in the US recently observed that AF is associated with different patterns of electrical pulses on the inside and the outside the heart, which were previously thought to be incompatible.

Now, a team of physicists and cardiologists at Imperial have developed a model of AF that explains how these differing patterns arise and what causes them. The model can further be used to explain why some patients do not benefit from AF surgery.

For example, the model predicts that the current method of burning the heart from the inside might fail if the sources underlying AF originate on the outside of the heart. For these patients, surgery could be optimised to increase the chances of being successful and reducing symptoms.

The model also predicts that for some patients, the heart muscle is so damaged that regardless of how often the source of AF is destroyed, a new location will always emerge that disrupts the regular rhythm.

For these patients, surgery is likely to be an unnecessary risk, as well as being costly for the healthcare system. The team say new treatments should be developed for these patients.

The team's model is currently based on theories in physics, which match well with observations of electrical pulses from earlier studies.

They are now beginning to work with real data from patients undergoing treatment to pinpoint where in the heart to target using current surgical techniques. This could increase the success rate of current techniques and reduce the time needed for each patient to undergo surgery.

Lead author Max Falkenberg, a PhD student in the Department of Physics at Imperial, said: "Our model helps explain why many patients have unsuccessful surgery, and associates this failure with a number of risk factors such as obesity. We hope that with further development, the model could help us determine for which patients surgery is an unnecessary risk, and which would benefit from surgery if the right regions of the heart are targeted."

Professor Kim Christensen, who supervised the project, said: "Atrial fibrillation is a fascinating example of how a natural complex phenomenon might actually have a relatively simple origin. A long-standing collaboration between physicists and cardiologists at Imperial has managed to overcome persistent barriers to bridging the disciplines and we are now reaping the fruits of that endeavour.

"We are truly excited about the future potential clinical applications of our findings for personalised treatment of atrial fibrillation."

(COLUMBUS, Ohio) - When an adolescent is acutely suicidal and cannot safely remain in the community, inpatient psychiatric hospitalization is the traditional intervention. But a lack of appropriate facilities across the United States, combined with an increasing demand for inpatient psychiatric services, means many young people who are at critical risk often cannot get the help they need.

That very concern led the Alcohol, Drug and Mental Health (ADAMH) Board of Franklin County Ohio to partner with Nationwide Children's Hospital to create the hospital's Youth Crisis Stabilization Unit in 2011. With funding from the ADAMH board, the unit's doctors and mental health professionals developed a new therapeutic model called intensive crisis intervention (ICI).

Now, in what appears to be the first study of its kind and recently published in the journal Child and Adolescent Mental Health, clinicians and researchers at Nationwide Children's have shown that ICI is a promising alternative to lengthy hospitalization. Findings also revealed significant reductions in suicidal ideation at the three-month follow-up.

"Many communities are searching for other options, and what we have found is that this model holds a lot of promise," says Sandra M. McBee-Strayer, PhD, lead author of the study and a research scientist in the Center for Suicide Prevention and Research at Nationwide Children's Abigail Wexner Research Institute.

ICI relies on cognitive behavioral therapy, focusing on responses to stress that can lead to suicidal behavior and working with these adolescents and their families to develop better ways of coping with stressors. The model places a particular emphasis on family engagement, and family members are encouraged to stay in the Youth Crisis Stabilization Unit overnight with their children.

The therapy takes place across three phases. In the first phase, a psychiatrist and crisis clinician conduct assessments, determine what led to the crisis (and what occurred during and afterward) and develop a treatment plan.

In the second, the young person participates in as many as two family sessions and three individual sessions daily to develop successful responses to stressful situations. When families and clinicians agree the adolescent can safely return home, the third phase includes time for safety planning and linking the family to community care. The three phases are designed to take place in three days.

"We know this will not be enough time to 'solve' all of a young person's issues," says Ericka Bruns, LPCC-S, director of Crisis Services at Nationwide Children's and a co-author of the study. "But we can work to help the patient and family understand the crisis, and help build coping mechanisms. The family involvement is so important, because communication in the home and learning about the signs of suicidality is an important part of safety planning."

The recent pilot study considered 50 young people, ages 12-17, who entered the Youth Crisis Stabilization Unit due to suicidal ideation and/or behavior. All participants had to score within the clinical range (score >31) on the "Suicidal Ideation Questionnaire-Junior (SIQ-Jr).", and the average score for these adolescents was 54.3. More than half had already attempted suicide.

Approximately one month after undergoing Intensive Crisis Intervention, the average SIQ-Jr score had decreased to 20.9. Three months later, the score was 20.1. Four participants did report a suicide attempt at the three-month follow-up. The authors note that rate is too small for statistical comparison, but it is in line with rates reported in other studies of suicidality treatments.

The Youth Crisis Stabilization Unit and its ICI are important components of behavioral health services at Nationwide Children's and are part of a larger system of care within the community.