Culture

Appendicitis is the most common general surgical emergency worldwide, but its diagnosis remains challenging. A new BJS study examined whether existing risk prediction models can reliably identify which UK patients with a low risk of appendicitis presenting to hospitals with acute right abdominal pain have appendicitis.

This largest worldwide multicentre study of suspected appendicitis in recent years included two-thirds of British hospitals providing emergency surgery (154 UK acute surgical units), making the findings generalisable across the UK. In addition, comparative data were collected from 120 hospitals across Italy, Portugal, the Republic of Ireland, and Spain. The study showed that women had a disproportionately higher risk of hospital admission without surgical intervention. Women who did undergo surgery had high rates of surgeries that removed a normal appendix.

Most risk prediction models were found to be unable to safely identify significant numbers of patients at low risk of appendicitis.

"Appendicectomy is the UK's most common emergency operation. Our study shows the world's highest published rate of normal appendicectomy--that is, surgery for suspected appendicitis but the diagnosis is wrong, and a normal appendix is removed," said corresponding author Aneel Bhangu, MBChB, PhD, FRCS, of the University of Birmingham. "The group most affected are young women and, every year, thousands of women aged 16 to 45 are suffering a sub-optimal experience in the UK."

Adhering to a healthy lifestyle at age 4 years is associated with a decreased risk of overweight, obesity, and abdominal obesity at 7 years, according to a study published in Pediatric Obesity.

The study assessed five lifestyle behaviors--physical activity, sleep duration, television watching, ultra-processed food consumption, and plant-based food consumption--in 1,480 children when they were 4 years of age.

Limited TV time and low consumption of ultra-processed foods, along with high sleep time, physical activity, and consumption of plant-based foods, were associated with lower body mass index and waist circumference and a lower likelihood of developing overweight or obesity and abdominal obesity at age 7 years. Longer TV viewing was the lifestyle factor that was most strongly associated with the development of obesity.

District-level police crime centers that use technology such as remote cameras and analytic tools to support commanders' strategic decision making may be able to help reduce crime, according to a new RAND Corporation report.

Examining strategic decision support centers used by police in Chicago, researchers found that the approach was associated with statistically significant reductions in some types of crimes, including robberies and burglaries.

The analysis found that the Chicago strategic decision support centers enabled novel responses to crime incidents and crime problems that were not previously possible. However, researchers found there are substantial risks to the long-term support of the centers and identified several areas where improvement is needed.

"We found evidence that strategic decision support centers are supporting much higher levels of awareness by police -- and rapid decision-making using that awareness -- than had been present previously," said John S. Hollywood, lead author of the study and a senior operations researcher at RAND, a nonprofit research organization.

"Prior to the opening of the centers, commanders we interviewed described making decisions largely ad-hoc, based on whatever they heard about," Hollywood said. "Once the centers were in place, command decisions were much more structured and data-driven."

The Chicago strategic decision support centers, launched in 2017, occupy small conference rooms and are staffed with three staff members, including one supervisor who is a sworn officer and one civilian crime analyst.

A bank of display screens provides information from sensors that can detect gunshots, feeds from the city's surveillance cameras and details from predictive policing software that identifies places at higher risk of crimes. Officers in each district are provided smartphones that include an app that provides key information, such as individuals to be on the lookout for.

RAND researchers evaluated the influence of the centers on crime levels by reviewing performance in police districts both before and after the centers were established, and comparing those changes to crime levels in other police districts in the city during the same time.

The analysis found that the centers were successful in their principal objective of reducing crime. Estimated crime reductions varied between 3% and 17% for the 10 categories of crime examined, including shootings and sexual assault.

Researchers found that the major challenge facing the Chicago strategic decision support centers is ensuring their long-term sustainability.

Part of that concern can be met by improving operating procedures and staff training. In addition, sustainability efforts should include making planning and budgeting for the centers a part of the police department's routine budgeting process.

The report also recommends expanding the scope of the centers from primarily reacting to crime in patrol operations to take a greater role in support of crime investigations.

The Chicago Police Department has begun taking action on the recommendations, including creation of a new oversight panel for the strategic decision support centers and a more-detailed set of departmental directives to guide center operations, along with ongoing development of supporting technologies.

For solar cells to be widely used in the coming decades researchers must resolve two major challenges: increasing efficiency and lowering toxicity.

Solar energy works through a process that converts light into energy called the photovoltaic effect. Certain light sensitive materials when packaged together in a "cell" have the ability to convert energy from light into electricity.

Most of today's solar cells require a highly processed form of Silicon. The processing results in toxic effects on humans and the environment. According to an article published in AZO Materials in 2015, many strides have been made since the first solar cell was developed, but average efficiency rates are still well below 30 percent, with many cells barely reaching 10 percent efficiency.

Researchers have recently been working with a material?an emerging chalcogenide perovskite CaZrSe3?that has shown great potential for energy conversion applications because of its notable optical and electrical properties.

"These materials hold extreme promise for solar energy conversion applications," says Ganesh Balasubramanian, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Lehigh University's P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science. "One can potentially design them as solar thermoelectric materials that convert thermal energy from the sun to usable electric power."

Balasubramanian, working with postdoctoral student Eric Osei-Agyemang and undergraduate Challen Enninful Adu, have for the first time, revealed first-hand knowledge about the fundamental energy carrier properties of chalcogenide perovskite CaZrSe3. They have published their findings in NPJ Computational Materials in an article called "Ultralow lattice thermal conductivity of chalcogenide perovskite CaZrSe3 contributes to high thermoelectric figure of merit." This work compliments a recent article by the same team published in Advanced Theory and Simulations called "Doping and Anisotropy-Dependent Electronic Transport in Chalcogenide Perovskite CaZrSe3 for High Thermoelectric Efficiency."

"Together they provide a holistic look at the transport properties of these materials," says Balasubramanian. "They also demonstrate that chalcogenide perovskite CaZrSe3 can potentially be used for waste heat recovery or solar energy conversion to electricity."

To arrive at their results, the team performed quantum chemical calculations examining the electronic and lattice properties of these materials to derive useful material transport information.

The news that energy transport through advanced materials such as chalcogenides can be tuned by nano structuring should be welcomed by other researchers in the field, says Balasubramanian, bringing scientists closer to applying these techniques to achieve a solar energy production method that is cheaper, more efficient and less toxic.

In 2014, Colorado began selling recreational cannabis to people older than 21, becoming the first state to legalize recreational marijuana. A new study evaluated the effect of recreational and medical marijuana dispensaries on crime in Denver. The study found that street segments with recreational dispensaries saw no changes in violent, disorder, and drug crime, but experienced significantly higher levels of property crime. Street segments adjacent to recreational dispensaries experienced higher levels of drug and disorder crimes, although the increases were not statistically significant for either type of crime. And street segments with and adjacent to medical dispensaries saw no significant changes in crime. The study concluded that the costs of these crimes were largely offset by the sales revenue generated by recreational dispensaries.

The study, by researchers at John Jay College, the City University of New York (CUNY), appears in Justice Evaluation Journal, a publication of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.

"The increase in nonviolent crimes must be a consideration when assessing the legalization of recreational marijuana," says Nathan J. Connealy, a doctoral student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at CUNY, who led the study. "But the significant revenue these dispensaries generated in Denver may lead other jurisdictions to ask whether the public will tolerate increases in nonviolent crime given the potential monetary benefits of legalizing recreational marijuana."

The study measured changes in levels of violent, disorder, drug, and property crime from the three-year period before recreational marijuana was legalized (2011-2013) against the three-year period after it was legalized (2014-2016). Crime data came from the Denver Police Department.

Researchers analyzed the effects of crime at the street level, that is, they measured the change in crime levels on and near the individual streets where each type of dispensary was located to determine the effects of marijuana sales on a local level. Of the 30,806 total street segments in Denver, they evaluated potential changes in the level of crime for the 186 street segments that opened a recreational marijuana dispensary and the 97 street segments that housed a medical marijuana dispensary in the post-legalization study period. They then compared the findings related to these street segments to street segments that did not have marijuana dispensaries.

Street segments with recreational dispensaries experienced no changes in violent, disorder, and drug crime, but did experience an 18% increase in property crime compared to segments of streets without dispensaries, the study found. Street segments adjacent to recreational dispensaries also experienced notably higher levels of crime related to drugs (17%) and disorder (28%) during the post-legalization period, but those changes did not differ substantively from the comparison street segments. On streets with or near medical dispensaries, there were no significant changes in crime.

Researchers also conducted a cost-benefit analysis by comparing the costs of increased crime (including the total cost of criminal justice, victim cost, and total crime cost) with the local sales and tax revenue generated by Denver's recreational marijuana dispensaries. In this way, they sought to determine whether the monetary benefits of the policy offset the monetary costs of a potential unintended increase in crime.

The researchers found that for sales alone, the revenue generated by the recreational dispensaries outweighed the cost of the local increase in property crime. Specifically, for every dollar cost associated with the rise in property crime, recreational marijuana dispensaries generated more than $309 in sales revenue. The cost-benefit analysis supported the monetary tax benefit of the dispensaries, but to a lesser extent: For every dollar associated with the rise in property crime, the dispensaries generated almost $13 in tax revenue.

"Taken alone, the increase in property crime reflects poorly on legalization, but the sales volumes and the potential boost to the local economy may create an incentive for legalization despite some crime-related concerns," notes Eric L. Piza, associate professor of criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at CUNY, who coauthored the study.

The authors acknowledge that because the study focused on Denver, their findings may not be generalizable to other jurisdictions considering legalization. In addition, the study considered only crimes reported to police.

A healthy lifestyle consists of a mixture of habits. Diet, exercise, sleep and other factors all must be in balance. Similarly, a sustainable farm operates on a balanced plan of soil, crop, and water management techniques.

The western United States is a region with scarce water resources. In this case, water management techniques make up a larger piece of a sustainability plan. There is mounting concern around the globe about water scarcity. This is due to urban sprawl, depleting water supplies in some areas, and predicted water shortages in the future with less snowpack.

Water management techniques that lead to the optimal use of limited resources are not well-identified. Yet. Matt Yost, a researcher at Utah State University, is working to find the best combination of practices to maximize yield, profit, and water efficiency.

"Most cropland in Utah and the western United States is irrigated," explains Yost. "There are areas where groundwater from aquifers is being used faster than it can be replaced. Some of these areas are under intense pressure to conserve water."

Water for irrigation comes from aquifers far below the farm's surface. Aquifers are naturally refilled by water from the surface by precipitation. Increased water use can lower the water table. Eventually wells can go dry. These factors make water optimization crucial for food security.

Yost researches many water management techniques. These include using irrigation scheduling and advanced pivot irrigation technology. In addition, his team researches crop and soil management practices. They look at rotating in drought-tolerant crops, cover crops, and reduced tillage.

Yost's team works together with many farmers across Utah to do farm-scale trials.

"Irrigation research is tough and costly on farmer's fields," says Yost. "It's especially true when it comes to irrigation scheduling. Though difficult, this on-farm research and collaboration is crucial for the understanding and adoption of new water optimization techniques."

So, what is the best combination of management techniques to maximize yield, profit, and water efficiency? The answer isn't clear, yet. Results and analyses are still pending, but Yost offers some initial recommendations:

Advanced pivot irrigation technologies, such as mobile drip and low-energy precision application or spray application, are beneficial.

-They can usually maintain crop yields with about 20% less applied water.

-Most farmers may be able to reduce irrigation rates by 10% without affecting crop yields.

-Biochar applications are showing few short-term crop yield or water saving benefits.

"We are beginning to answer questions about new irrigation techniques and scheduling approaches," says Yost. "But many still exist for discovery."

Next, Yost and his team hope to secure funding for long-term irrigation research sites. Water is a limited and vital resource. Strategies to optimize water use will be crucial to the sustainability of irrigated agriculture.

"In irrigated agriculture, agronomy and irrigation go hand-in-hand," explains Yost. "Nearly everything about one influences the other. Most irrigation programs focus more on engineering than on irrigation science. With my original training in agronomy, I've noticed knowledge gaps and have identified opportunities to unite irrigation science and agronomy." Yost's unique perspective offers a holistic approach to integrated water, soil, and crop management.

Yost presented his work at the November International Annual Meeting of the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America in San Antonio. Funding for this research came from an Innovator Award from the Foundation for Food and Agriculture, Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education, and the Utah State University Water Initiative and Extension Service.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- As the leading cause of death in both the United States and the world, heart disease claims nearly 18 million lives every year, according to the World Health Organization.

Many of these deaths are due to hypertension, or abnormally high blood pressure, and could be prevented through medication or lifestyle changes such as healthier eating, weight loss and regular exercise -- but behavior change is often challenging. That's where mindfulness may be useful, says Eric Loucks, an associate professor of epidemiology, behavioral and social sciences, and medicine at Brown University.

"We know enough about hypertension that we can theoretically control it in everybody -- yet in about half of all people diagnosed, it is still out of control," said Loucks, lead author of a new study published in PLOS One. "Mindfulness may represent another approach to helping these people bring their blood pressure down, by allowing them to understand what's happening in their minds and bodies."

Loucks directs the Mindfulness Center at Brown's School of Public Health, which aims to help scientists, health care providers and consumers better understand whether particular mindfulness interventions work, for which health concerns and for which patients.

For the study, Loucks and a team of researchers developed a nine-week customized Mindfulness-Based Blood Pressure Reduction (MB-BP) program for 43 participants with elevated blood pressure and followed up with them after one year. The program aimed to use mindfulness techniques to enhance attention control, emotion regulation and self-awareness of both healthy and unhealthy habits, thereby diminishing some of the risk factors associated with elevated blood pressure -- and it appears to have worked, the study shows.

After undergoing mindfulness training, participants exhibited significant improvements in self-regulation skills and significantly reduced blood pressure readings. Participants who had not been adhering to the American Heart Association's guidelines for salt and alcohol intake and physical activity improved in those areas as well. The positive effects were still present at the one-year follow-up and were most pronounced for participants who enrolled with stage 2 uncontrolled hypertension (i.e., a systolic blood pressure equal to or greater than 140 mmHg). These participants experienced a mean 15.1-mmHg reduction in blood pressure.

The program, Loucks said, was a "deliberately multimodal intervention," intentionally combining mindfulness training with other strategies used to reduce blood pressure, such as encouraging participants to continue taking prescribed anti-hypertensive medications and educating participants about habits that contribute to elevated blood pressure.

"Future trials could involve a dismantling study, where we would take out some of the health education, for example, and see if mindfulness training still had significant effects," Loucks said. "That's certainly something we're looking at doing in the long term. But mindfulness training is usually designed to be integrated with standard medical care."

He added that a follow-up study is currently underway: a randomized control trial of the MB-BP program that contains more than 200 participants.

"I hope that these projects will lead to a paradigm shift in terms of the treatment options for people with high blood pressure," Loucks said.

For people who don't face challenges in maintaining a healthy blood pressure, MB-BP training may be an effective preventive tool, he added. Within this initial study, more than 80 percent of participants had hypertension (130 systolic over 85 diastolic or higher), while the remainder had elevated blood pressure (at least 120 over 80), and the average participant was 60 years old. But Loucks supports using mindfulness techniques for those across all age groups and blood pressure levels.

"The hope is that if we can start mindfulness training early in life, we can promote a trajectory of healthy aging across the rest of people's lives," he said. "That will reduce their chances of getting high blood pressure in the first place."

An article published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) describes a new pathway in the central nervous system to expel waste substances from the brain through the creation of corpora amylacea (CA), aggregates formed by glucose polymers amassing waste products.

The study, which opens new views on the clinical practice regarding neurodegenerative diseases, is led by Carme Pelegrí and Jordi Vilaplana, lecturers from the Faculty of Pharmacy and Food Sciences, the Institute of Neurosciences (UBNeuro) of the University of Barcelona and the Biomedical Research Networking Center on Neurodegenerative Diseases (CIBERNED).

Other participants in the study are Marta Riba and Elisabet Augé (Faculty of Pharmacy and Food Sciences, UB-UBNeuro and CIBERNED); Joan Campo, David Moral, Ruth Ferrer and Raquel Martín (Faculty of Pharmacy and Food Sciences and INSA-UB), and Laura Molina and Teresa Ximelis, from the Hospital Clinic de Barcelona Biobank Neurological Tissue Bank - IDIBAPS.

Corpora amylacea: an enigma in neuroscience research

Human brain corpora amylacea were first described in 1837 by the prestigious anatomist and physiologist Jan Evangelista Purkinje. These are largely in bordering areas in the central nervous system -near the brain ventricles and subsiding regions- and are abundant in the brain of the elderly and patients affected by neurodegenerative diseases (Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's, etc.), who create excessive metabolic waste substances. However, the origins and function of CA have been unknown by the scientific community for years.

The article, now published in PNAS, describes new features of CA and reveals the determining role of these structures in the expelling of brain waste substances through pathways in which the nervous system, lymphatic system and immune system take part.

From astrocytes to removal by immune system

According to the traditional scheme, waste-product generated by the cells as result of the cell metabolism are processed in the cell environment (thanks to the ubiquitin proteasome system and autophagy mechanisms) or are expelled outside the cells and transported to the circulatory flow.

The conclusions of the study reveal some waste substances in the brain can be removed thanks to the action of the astrocytes, which can pile up the waste compounds and store them as corpora amylacea. Lecturer Carme Pelegrí notes CA "would be equal to waste products containers". "In a second phase, CA are expelled to the cerebrospinal liquid that surrounds the encephalon and the spinal cord", notes the researcher.

"Then, the cerebrospinal liquid drains to the meningeal lymphatic system and this drives the CA to the cervical lymph nodes, where these are removed by the action of the immune system", concludes Jordi Vilaplana.

Previous studies published by other authors had related CA with the accumulation of waste product. Others believed the CA could be expelled to the cerebrospinal liquid due them being located in the nervous system neighbouring areas. However, the new study is the first one to describe the CA expulsion pathway to the cerebrospinal liquid, its transport towards the lymphatic system and its removal through macrophages. The latter phase was previously predicted by the authors of the study, thanks to the existence of CA in epitopes -antigenic structures-, which are natural antibody targets.

"These science evidence shows corpora amylacea act as waste substance containers that are later expulsed from the nervous system, and are later removed. Thus, these can get out of the central nervous system without having to cross the hematoencephalic barrier, a barrier that prevents substances from going between the brain and the blood", note researchers Carme Pelegrí and Jordi Vilaplana.

Inflection point in the study protocols for corpora amylacea

The research on the origins and functions of CA has been surrounded by a great scientific controversy. A great part of these lack of scientific consensus lies in the misuse of certain experimental protocols -origin of fake results obtained by research teams-, which hardened the progress of this research. All pieces of this puzzle started to make sense after an article published by this group (Scientific Reports, 2017) which showed there is a need to adapt these protocols and that there were new scientific perspectives in the study of the nature and function of corpora amylacea. Therefore, by combining these new protocols and different techniques (optical and electronic microscopy, chemical labelling, in vitro macrophage culture, etc.) enabled the team to clear many doubts on CA.

"It is essential to adapt the different protocols to the particularities of the ongoing studies in each case", note the authors. "For instance, the modification of the protocol to get the cerebrospinal liquid was an essential factor to start the studies on CA in this fluid. This search was always focused on the liquid fraction of the cerebrospinal liquid, and the solid fraction -where CA were found- was systematically rejected. This explains why the presence of corpora amylacea in the cerebrospinal liquid was not noticed until now".

Looking for new biomarkers in neurosciences

Studying new biomarkers to help identify and assess the progress the neurodegenerative or brain diseases is determining to advance in the diagnosis and treatment of these diseases. In this context, the conclusions of the study reveal that the study of waste substances in the CA -isolated from the solid fraction of the cerebrospinal liquid- could be a new biomedical tool to diagnose certain diseases.

The relation described between CA and the immune system opens new opportunities in the field of research on neurosciences. "In experimental models, the presence of brain substances outside the brain and which interact with the immune system can result in autoimmune brain diseases. It is important and convenient to study the responses that can appear after the interaction between CA and this system", conclude the researchers.

Data gathered in Finland, Belgium and Portugal reveal that Finnish children are ahead of their European peers in motor skills at ages 6 to 10 years. Differences in motor skills increase with age and independently of the remarkable differences in overweight across the countries.

The gross motor skills of around 3,300 children were evaluated between 2008 and 2016 by using the internationally well-known KTK test. The test measures body coordination and balance, which are known to be fundamental for any kind of human movement.

"Motor skills are assumed to develop with age but especially in Portuguese children the results suggest weak development between the age of 6 and 10 years," says post-doctoral researcher Arto Laukkanen at the Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences. "Belgian children came close to the Finnish children, although the difference was significant for the Finnish children's advantage in this comparison, too."

According to the researchers, it is alarming that around 40 percent of Portuguese children's motor skills were found to be weak or very weak. In comparison, the corresponding figure was around 10 percent in Finnish and Belgian children.

"Internationally, it has been found that a remarkable proportion of today's children are not developing in motor skills at the rate of the past decades," says Laukkanen. "In the USA, as much as 80 percent of children score below the norms determined in the 1980s. There are no longitudinal studies performed in Finland but the results suggest that Finnish children are learning motor skills at a rate which is close to the old days."

Overweight and gender differences explain only some of the differences across the countries

In earlier studies overweight has been associated with the slow developmental rate of motor skills in childhood. This phenomenon was supported in the current study. Of the Portuguese children participating in the study, around 30 percent were overweight. In Finland, 24 percent of the children were overweight and in Belgium the figure was about 20 percent. It's worth noting, where motor skills seemed to develop equally in normal and overweight Finnish children, motor skills seemed to develop modestly in both normal and overweight children, especially in Portuguese children. Therefore, overweight explained only a small part of the difference in motor skills in children across the countries.

"The results suggest that differences in motor skills across the countries come about through many other factors than just overweight," says Laukkanen.

Boys were found to outperform girls in motor skills in all the countries compared. Gender differences were remarkably smaller though in Finnish and Belgian children compared to their Portuguese peers.

"It appears that gender differences in motor skills are the largest where the overall level of motor skills is lower. Correspondingly, the high overall level of motor skills seems to equalize gender differences," says Laukkanen.

The vast majority of the cross-cultural differences in children's motor skills could not be explained. Researchers from the three different nations have proposed some potential factors behind the motor skill differences in addition to overweight and gender differences.

"It may feel surprising that based on the previous studies Portuguese children are known to participate more in organized sports when compared to Finnish and Belgian children," says Laukkanen. "On the other hand, Finnish children are known to be at the top internationally in independent mobility, a fact which is linked to a higher rate of active play. A sports culture based on organized sports participation may not thus necessarily guarantee the necessary equality, quantity and quality of physical activity in children."

The original article "Comparison of motor competence in children aged 6?9 years across northern, central, and southern European regions" was published in Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports.

Researchers in Sweden and the UK have discovered the largest known avian sex chromosome. The giant chromosome was created when four chromosomes fused together into one, and has been found in two species of lark.

"This was an unexpected discovery, as birds are generally considered to have very stable genetic material with well-preserved chromosomes", explains Bengt Hansson, professor at Lund University in Sweden.

In a new study, the researchers charted the genome of several species of lark, a songbird family in which all members have unusually large sex chromosomes. The record-size chromosome is found in both the Eurasian skylark, a species that is common in Europe, Asia and North Africa, and the Raso lark, a species only found on the small island of Raso in Cape Verde.

According to the Lund biologists Bengt Hansson and Hanna Sigeman, who led the study, the four chromosomes have fused together in stages. The oldest fusion happened 25 million years ago and the most recent six million years ago. The four chromosomes that have formed the larks' sex chromosome have also all developed at some time into sex chromosomes in other vertebrates.

"The genetic material in the larks' sex chromosome has also been used to form sex chromosomes in mammals, fish, frogs, lizards and turtles. This indicates that certain parts of the genome have a greater tendency to develop into sex chromosomes than others", says Bengt Hansson.

Why the two species have the largest sex chromosome of all birds is unclear, but the result could be disastrous lead to problems for female larks in the future. Studies of different sex chromosome systems have shown that the sex-limited chromosome, for example the Y chromosome in humans, usually breaks down over time and loses functional genes.

"Among birds, the females have a corresponding W chromosome in which we see the same breakdown pattern. As three times more genetic material is linked to the sex chromosomes of these larks compared to other birds, this could cause problems for many genes", says Hanna Sigeman, doctoral student at the Department of Biology, Lund University.

New drugs to treat strains of TB which have become resistant to treatment are now a possibility following a ground breaking discovery from the University of Surrey.

Findings from the study, published in Cell Reports, show that researchers have successfully identified the source of nitrogen in host blood cells that allows the pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis or the TB bacillus to make proteins and DNA. Preventing access to nitrogen will stop the TB bacillus from growing inside blood cells and halt the spread of the disease in humans. Strains of TB have become resistant to available drugs, which means the disease is becoming more deadly and difficult to treat. This is a growing problem, with figures from the TB Alliance indicating that there were 558,000 worldwide cases of drug-resistant TB last year. New drugs are needed that attack novel targets such as nitrogen uptake.

To investigate the source of nitrogen for the TB bacillus in blood cells, researchers developed a new computational technique called 15N-Flux Spectral Ratio Analysis (15N-FSRA) to learn more about nitrogen metabolism. 15N is a non-radioactive isotope of nitrogen that can be tracked by a technique called mass spectrometry. In the first step of this innovative study, blood cells were fed with different potential nitrogen sources labelled 15N, enabling observation. The cells were then infected with TB bacillus and allowed to replicate and take nitrogen from the host cell. Protein from both blood cells and TB cells were recovered allowing researchers to track by mass spectrometry the route by which the 15N went from host cell to TB bacillus.

Using the computational tool, 15N-FRSA, it was discovered that TB bacillus acquires most of its nitrogen from the host cell amino acid, glutamine. Glutamine is an important amino acid with many functions in the body and are key components of proteins and a critical part of the immune system.

This ground breaking discovery will enable researchers to develop new anti TB drugs to target the transportation and metabolism of glutamine in the body, which will prevent Mycobacterium tuberculosis, or TB bacillus, accessing the nitrogen it needs to survive and replicate.

Johnjoe McFadden, Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey, said: "TB is one the world's deadliest infectious disease and it is very worrying that many strains are becoming resistant to drugs.

"To combat this threat we need to think innovatively and develop novel therapies to prevent an epidemic of TB strains that we are unable to treat. Our finding paves the way for the development of such drugs, which can target uptake of the very amino acid that enables the bacteria to replicate and spread within the body."

Soya and beef from South America, timber from Russia, fish from China - in an era of globalisation, central Europe has become a market for animal and plant products from all over the world. But in addition to these tangible goods, faraway ecosystems also supply intangible or cultural services that do not appear in any trade balance sheet. For example, they provide habitats for species whose existence is of interest to many Europeans. But what kind of regions provide such cultural ecosystem services for highly developed and densely populated countries in Europe? Together with colleagues in the Netherlands, researchers at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig investigated this question. Their findings reveal that Germany and the Netherlands benefit predominantly from services in particularly threatened ecosystems in very poor regions of the world. Responsibility for protecting these ecosystems must therefore be more fairly distributed, argue the researchers in the journal Ambio.

Large, charismatic birds like the black stork and the common crane are extremely popular in Germany, and not just among ornithologists. Every year, hordes of people head outdoors with binoculars to watch the cranes' migration. In some parts of the country, this event has even become a significant tourist attraction. But in many cases, for people in central Europe to enjoy natural phenomena like these, the conditions elsewhere need to be right. A number of popular bird species migrate, crossing the Mediterranean by different routes to spend the winter in Africa.

"If the climate or land use change in the African winter quarters, this can have obvious effects here in Germany," says environmental scientist Dr. Matthias Schröter. The effects may be both ecological and psychological. The smaller the number of birds that return in the spring, the less effectively they can fulfil their role in local ecosystems - and the fewer opportunities there are for wildlife lovers in central Europe to experience pleasure, relaxation or inspiration from encounters with these animals.

Experts refer to such close interconnections between humans and ecosystems in faraway regions as 'telecoupling'. So far, research into how these relationships function and what consequences they have for the supplier at one end of the world at the consumer at the other has mostly focused on agricultural and forestry products. "There are also a couple of studies on industrialised countries that use forests in other regions as carbon sinks to improve their carbon footprint," says Schröter. Some researchers have also studied migrating species that function as pest controllers or pollinators in far-apart regions.

But when it comes to intangible ecosystem services, the situation is more difficult. The effect that nature has on human wellbeing is hard to quantify and analyse numerically. Accordingly, little is currently known about this form of telecoupling. For example, which other regions of the world do people in Germany depend on to be able to enjoy wildlife? And how can we go about demonstrating the link? "There have only been a very few studies so far, and they focus on individual species," says Schröter. "For example, they looked at the links created by the giant panda between its native habitats in China and zoos all over the world."

But he and his colleagues wanted to take a broader look at the phenomenon by including as many animal species as possible. Firstly they analysed data from two online platforms on which German and Dutch bird lovers can post their sightings. They narrowed the data down to the 300 most frequently mentioned species and examined the ranges of these species.

People in Germany and the Netherlands also have a weakness for more exotic species that they may never encounter themselves. Many people in central Europe couldn't imagine a world without lions, elephants, pandas or great apes, even if they experience no direct benefit from these animals. "Charismatic species like these have value to many people simply through the fact that they exist," says Schröter. So to identify these valued species, he and his colleagues combed through 40 annual reports from major conservation organisations such as Naturschutzbund Deutschland (NABU) and the Dutch branch of WWF. "We worked on the assumption that the species mentioned here are particularly popular and have high societal relevance," the UFZ scientist explains.

In this way, the team identified 108 birds and 22 mammals that enjoy celebrity status in Germany. The top five places were taken by the common crane, the white-tailed eagle, the osprey, the northern lapwing and the black stork, with the tiger, the first mammal, following in sixth place. In the Netherlands, meanwhile, the African elephant topped the list. "Almost half of the popular animals among German conservation organisations spend at least part of their lives in distant countries," says Schröter. For the species important to German birdwatchers, the figure is nearly 60%.

Next the researchers overlaid the ranges of all these treasured animals, allowing them to identify the regions that are home to particularly large numbers of the species and whose ecosystems therefore provide the widest range of services for the two countries in question. For Germany, the hotspots are mainly in the African savannah and scrubland south of the Sahara. In the Netherlands, an important role is also played by forests and grasslands closer to home in eastern Europe and central Asia.

"When you take a closer look at these regions, you notice two trends," Schröter explains. Firstly, these are habitats that are heavily influenced by humans, only a small portion of which are protected. For example, less than five percent of the hotspots of value to Germany are located in national parks or other reserves with similarly strict regulations. Moreover, these are also especially poor regions. In the regions important to Germany, the average annual income is just 1,424 US dollars per capita.

"For one thing, we can use findings like these to support more effective and better coordinated conservation efforts," says Schröter. "But it also raises questions of justice." Are poorer countries adequately compensated for ecosystem services that benefit richer ones? In the researcher's opinion, this is not the case. The cost burden of setting up protected areas should not be borne only by the countries that provide the ecosystem services and a few international conservation organisations: "Countries whose citizens benefit from these services far away should also make a financial contribution." To create more justice, he adds, such contributions could, for example, be integrated into the targets of the international Convention on Biological Diversity.

In nature social living is strongly connected to the ability to communicate with others. Maintaining social ties and coordinating with group mates require frequent communication. Therefore, complex social systems are usually associated with well-developed communication abilities. The apex of communication complexity is undoubtedly human language. However, intensive and informationally rich communication comes at a cost in terms of time spent transmitting information and muscular effort invested in articulating signals.

In the 1930s American linguist George Kingsley Zipf popularized this concept by articulating the Law of Brevity, a linguistic rule stating that word length is negatively correlated with its frequency of use in language. This principle was verified in almost a thousand languages and is regularly observed in the process of language evolution, where frequently used long words are often shortened, such as television to TV. Thus, while signalling systems have improved, informational content has been preserved.

Does the existence of the Law of Brevity in human language stem from the evolutionary origins of animal communication? The relationship between call duration and usage frequency has been tested in several animals, but results differed between species. A proposed explanation for the lack of a clear fit of animal repertoires to the brevity principle is the abundance of long-range calls. Humans mostly communicate within short range (

With this in mind, researchers set out to examine whether call amplitude, rather than call duration, might be the main factor by which animal vocal repertoires are optimized. By adopting the "least-effort" logic, i.e., frequent calls should require the least effort to produce, they hypothesized that softer calls would be more frequent than louder ones.

The researchers tested this in rock hyraxes, a medium-sized mammal native to Africa and the Middle East. Rock hyraxes live in groups of up to 30 comprised of multiple females and their offspring, and usually with just one adult resident male. Within the group, hyraxes frequently communicate, using an extensive repertoire of calls. But the bachelor adult males, who lead predominantly solitary lives, interact with females only briefly during the short mating season and with other males mainly through aggressive encounters. Males frequently sing complex and loud self-advertisement songs, transmitting their individual quality to both females and neighboring males.

The hyrax population studied lives in the Ein Gedi Nature Reserve near the Dead Sea in Israel. Since 1999 this wild population has been monitored continuously as part of a long-term study of hyrax behaviour and communication led by Prof. Eli Geffen, of Tel Aviv University, and recently also by Dr. Amiyaal Ilany and Prof. Lee Koren, of the Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences at Bar-Ilan University. As part of this study, 19 male and female hyraxes were fitted with individual, miniature audio recorders and all of their calls were logged for approximately one week. By listening and labelling all recorded calls, the researchers created full rock hyrax vocal repertoire. Using this extensive dataset, they calculated usage frequency of all call types and measured the average duration and amplitude for each one. This allowed them to examine if hyrax vocal repertoire corresponds with the classic Law of Brevity (call duration/usage) relationship, or, whether the optimization factor of the vocal performance is call amplitude.

In their study, just published in the journal Evolution Letters, the researchers demonstrate how changing necessities can affect the development of different voices for various purposes, and provide clues as to how the complexity of human language began to develop. They compared male and female repertoires and found that females produce more call types in general and more affiliative call types, such as a coo, in particular. According to one of the study's lead authors, Dr. Amiyaal Ilany, of Bar-Ilan University's Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, this was not surprising, as hyrax females maintain stable social relationships within a group, while bachelor males have only limited communication opportunities.

The research team, which included Dr. Vlad Demartsev and Naomi Gordon, also discovered sexual differences in relation to the Law of Brevity. In females, longer calls are actually the more frequent ones, in contradiction to the Law of Brevity's prediction. In contrast, amplitude seems to follow the "least effort" paradigm, as soft calls (requiring less effort to produce) are more frequently used. The male repertoire, on the other hand, is characterized by minimized duration, as well as amplitude. Male vocalizations are heavily influenced by the unique requirements of their self-advertisement songs, which must be loud in order to reach remote listeners.

"This raises the question of why human language isn't optimized by amplitude," says Dr. Ilany. "Could it be because the development of artificial signaling means for long-range communication made high amplitude calls less needed? Perhaps the high pressure for increased informational content in the emerging human languages capped the amplitude of the vocal signals, as loud calls have less capacity for informational content. Both scenarios could lead to duration-based optimization that is now widespread," he added.

Their great taste and their health benefits have made them one of the most popular fruits. The world market for strawberries, rich in antioxidants and vitamin C, was greater than 9 millon tons in 2016. According to the latest report by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Spain is the top producer of this food within the European Union, while China and the U.S. are the largest producers worldwide.

Recently, a University of Cordoba research group, in partnership with the USDA, identified a new gene involved in the fruiting duration of this fruit. As explained by the researcher leading the project at UCO, Patricia Castro, there are some strawberry genotypes that produce fruit just once a year, whereas others bear fruit several times over a longer period of time, hence their strawberry production cycle is longer. Understanding how this trait is regulated and inherited is key to increasing efficiency in improvement programs.

This research, published in BMC Plant Biology, specifically studied the genetic mechanisms in charge of making some strawberry varieties produce fruit over a longer period of time. In order to do so, they crossed different strawberry genotypes and analyzed how to segregate this trait in their offspring. In addition, they characterized all the genotypes with molecular markers associated with this trait.

Up to now, as pointed out by researcher Patricia Castro, it was thought that there was only one gene in charge of a longer strawberry fruiting period. Now, and in view of the results, the study concluded that, besides that gene, there is at least one other gene involved in the process.

Though this DNA sequence has not been isolated yet (to do so performing a later study would be necessary), the research was able to determine which gene acts as the suppressor, as in which gene suppresses the ability for the plant to fruit for a longer time. "We observed that some of the families we analyzed have a molecular profile corresponding to genotypes of longer fruiting periods, but only bear fruit once due to the involvement of this gene", points out Castro.

A new opportunity for genetic improvement

Having demonstrated that there is more than one gene involved in the fruiting process of strawberry plants means "that the way we approach genetic improvement will change", says Patricia Castro. For now, the finding gives greater insight into the fruiting mechanism of one of the world's most popular berries but there is still a long way to go. New molecular markers must be developed that allow for the identification of desired traits in plant material and thus, strawberry varieties can be developed more efficiently.

The aim is to lengthen the production period and market this popular fruit, that used to be a sign of spring starting but is now more and more common to be eaten all year round.

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is becoming the most common chronic liver disorder in developed countries. Histological analysis of liver tissue is the only widely accepted test for diagnosing and distinguishing different stages of the disease. However, this technique provides only two-dimensional images of the liver tissue in low resolution and overlooks potentially important 3D structural changes. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden and the University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus Dresden together with colleagues from the Technische Universität Dresden now generated 3D geometrical and functional models of human liver tissue for different disease stages. They reveal new critical tissue alterations, providing new insights into pathophysiology and contributing to high definition medical diagnosis.

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is characterized by the accumulation of fat in the liver with an insulin resistance due to causes other than alcohol intake. It includes a spectrum of liver diseases from simple steatosis ("non-progressive" and reversible) to non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, which can progress into cirrhosis, liver cancer, or liver failure, requiring eventually transplantation. In 2017, an estimated 24 percent of the worldwide population was affected by the disease, which makes it the leading cause of chronic liver disease.

Conventional histological analysis of liver tissue is the gold standard for diagnosing disease progression, but it has several disadvantages: The low resolution 2D images of liver tissue only allow a semi-quantitative evaluation and it can be subjective, since it depends on the pathologist's skills. Most importantly, it fails to provide 3D information on tissue structure and function, as the liver has a complex 3D tissue organization: It consists of functional units, the liver lobuli, containing two intertwined networks, the sinusoids for blood flow and the bile canaliculi for bile secretion and flux. Such an architecture makes it difficult to grasp the 3D organization and overall tissue structure from 2D histological images.

Spatial information

In order to overcome those limitations in diagnosis, the research team of Max Planck director Marino Zerial together with colleagues from the University hospitals in Dresden, Rostock and Kiel, and from the Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing at the Technical University Dresden developed 3D spatially resolved geometrical and functional models of human liver tissue at different stages of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

In 2017, the research group of Marino Zerial developed a model of the bile canalicular network and bile flow in the mouse liver using multi-resolution 3D analysis of its geometry. Now, the team examined the 3D organization of human liver tissue. Although several defects can already be seen in 2D images, the alterations of bile canaliculi and sinusoidal networks can only be recognized upon a 3D reconstruction. Fabián Segovia-Miranda, the first author of the study reports: "Recent advances in making tissue transparent and multi-photon microscopy allow for the imaging of thicker tissue sections, so that 3D information can be captured." The 3D digital reconstruction of those tissues was then used to computationally simulate bile fluid dynamics through a model created by the Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing.

Impaired bile flow

Lutz Brusch from the Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing explains: "While the fluid dynamics of blood flow through the comparatively large capillaries has been addressed by simulations, this was so far impossible for bile due to the lack of accurate geometrical data of human tissue across all relevant scales." With microscopy, digital image reconstruction and computational modelling combined, the researchers identified a set of cellular and tissue parameters connected with disease progression. Fabián adds: "We discovered that the structure of the 3D bile canaliculi network is profoundly different in affected tissue. Such structural changes have also critical functional consequences. Using personalized biliary fluid dynamic simulations, we learned that the flow of bile in some small areas of the tissue is compromised, which is called micro-cholestasis."

Marino Zerial, who is also affiliated with the Center for Systems Biology Dresden, gives an outlook: "High definition medicine paves the way towards diagnosing diseases at early stages, much before symptoms appear. It also helps us to identify molecular pathogenetic mechanisms to design novel therapies." Jochen Hampe from the university hospital Dresden adds: "This three-dimensional analysis of liver tissue allows us to gain completely new insights into the disease mechanisms. This enables us to better understand how bile flow and disease progression are related. It also opens up new approaches for therapies."