Culture

Tuning the light intensity and reducing the concentration of atmospheric particulate matter (PM) in commercial buildings are both crucial to keep indoor people comfortable and healthy. While, the intelligent smart windows fabricated on the flexible transparent electrodes can change its transmittance in response to electrical or thermal stimulus to tune the light intensity of commercial buildings to maintain thermal comfort. Up to now, it is still a significant challenge to fabricate the large-scale flexible transparent smart window for high-efficiency PM2.5 capture.

Recently, a research team led by Prof. YU Shuhong from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) develops a simple solution based process to fabricate large-area Ag-nylon flexible transparent windows for high-efficiency PM2.5 capture.

It takes only about 15.03 dollars and 20 minutes to fabricate 7.5 m2 Ag-nylon flexible transparent windows without any modification showing a sheet resistance of as low as 8.87 ? sq-1 and optical transmittance of 86.05%.

The obtained Ag-nylon mesh serves not only to turn the indoor light intensity as thermochromic smart windows after uniformly coated with thermochromic dye but also to purify indoor air as high-efficiency PM2.5 filter.

The time-dependent temperature profiles and uniform heat distribution show that the obtained Ag-nylon electrodes can be used as an ideal intelligent thermochromic smart window with excellent mechanical stability whose performance remains stable even after 10,000 bending cycles of bending test with a minimum bending radius of 2.0 mm and 1,000 cycles of stretching deformation with mechanical strain as high as 10%.

In addition, the Ag-nylon electrodes can be constructed for PM filter showing a removal efficiency of 99.65% and maintaining stable even after 100 cycles of PM filtration and cleaning process.

The success of the present design strategy provides more choices in developing next-generation flexible transparent smart windows and air pollution filters.

A San Diego State University astrophysicist has helped discover evidence of a gigantic remnant surrounding an exploding star--a shell of material so huge, it must have been erupting on a regular basis for millions of years.

When a white dwarf, the core of a dead star, is in a close orbit with another star, it pulls gas from the other star. The gas becomes heated and compressed, eventually exploding to create a nova. This explosion causes the star to brighten by a millionfold and eject material at thousands of miles per second. The ejected material forms a remnant or shell surrounding the nova.

Allen Shafter and former SDSU postdoc. Martin Henze, along with a team of astrophysicists led by Matthew Darnley at Liverpool John Moores University in England, have been studying a nova in the nearby Andromeda galaxy known as M31N 2008-12a. What makes the nova unusual is that it erupts far more frequently than any other known nova
system.

"When we first discovered that M31N 2008-12a erupted every year, we were very surprised," said Shafter. A more typical pattern is about every 10 years.

Shafter and his team believe M31N 2008-12a has been erupting regularly for millions of years. These frequent eruptions over time have resulted in a "super remnant" surrounding the nova measuring almost 400 light years across.

Using Hubble Space Telescope imaging along with ground-based telescopes, the team worked to determine the chemical composition of the super-remnant and confirm its association with M31N 2008-12a. These findings, published in an article in the journal Nature, open the door to the possibility that this nova and remnant are linked to something more crucial to the universe.

Type Ia supernovae are among the most powerful and luminous objects in the universe and are believed to occur when a white dwarf exceeds its maximum allowable mass. At that point, the entire white dwarf is blown apart instead of experiencing explosions on the surface as other novae do. These are relatively rare and unseen in our own galaxy since the early 1600s.

Theoretical models show that novae experiencing frequent explosions surrounded by large remnants must harbor massive white dwarfs that are nearing their limit. This means M31N 2008-12a is behaving precisely the way astronomers believe a nova does before it potentially explodes as a supernova.

The discovery of additional large remnants around other novae will help identify systems undergoing repeated eruptions and help astronomers determine how many type Ia supernovae are formed; how frequently they occur; and their potential association with novae like M31N 2008-12a. Type la supernova are a critical part of understanding how the entire universe expands and grows.

"They are, in effect, the measuring rods that allow us to map the visible universe," said Shafter. "Despite their importance, we don't fully understand where they come from."

Shafter and his team are now working to understand if what they observed with M31N 2008-12a is rare, or if there is an unseen population of novae experiencing this as well.

Despite widespread infection, some frog populations are surviving a deadly disease that is the equivalent of mankind's Ebola virus. The reason --genetic diversity.

That's the finding of a new study published this week in the journal Immunogenetics. Anna Savage, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Central Florida, is the lead author of the study.

The research is important because frogs are facing what may be a mass extinction as a result of disease, Savage says.

"If you have more genetic variation, you have more potential to respond and adapt to anything," Savage says.

However, protecting frog habitats from destruction and pollution is critical, she says.

"Don't destroy habitats, maintain large population sizes -- these simple things are the best actions to implement, given whatever limited information we have, to give populations the chance to rebound," she says.

The virus Savage and her colleagues studied is called Ranavirus. It affects cold-blooded animals, such as amphibians, reptiles and fish. It causes a tadpole's internal organs to fill with blood and explode, much like the Ebola virus does in humans. It is one of the top two pathogens causing worldwide amphibian decline.

Researchers suspect that Ranavirus and other similar pathogens have long been in the environment, but they are exploring why the pathogens are now causing so many disease outbreaks.

"Certainly, the rise of these infectious pathogens coincides with the period when global temperatures started to significantly increase," she says. "There are a lot of biologists working on studies trying to tease apart the relationship between climate and amphibian health and how that might translate to some of these global disease problems."

It is important to study frogs because of the roles they play, Savage says. They help control diseases by eating insects that can infect humans and also are an essential part of the food chain.

"If we lost them, there would be this major energetic crisis where we wouldn't have a food source for many other animals that depend on them to survive," Savage says.

In the study, researchers collected tail clippings from tadpoles in 17 randomly selected ponds in Patuxent Research Refuge in Maryland over the course of two years. Tail clipping is a minimally invasive and nonlethal method for tissue collection. The clippings were used to analyze and determine the presence and severity of Ranavirus in the tadpoles. The team also checked for major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes, which can help a tadpole's immune system fight off disease.

They found Ranavirus infection in 26 percent of the 381 tadpoles they sampled and that the presence of a particular combination of MHC genes was associated with decreased severity of the virus.

"There was evidence that this combination of immune genes was helping those individuals limit how bad the viral infection can get," she says. "To our knowledge this is the first study that shows that this group of immune genes is actually important for Ranavirus susceptibility."

The findings could have implications for frog species in Florida, as Ranavirus is a disease that threatens frogs in the state, including the American bullfrog, the southern leopard frog and the endangered Gopher frog.

"These immune genes aren't completely different across different species," she says. "We actually see a lot of the same variants shared at the level of the entire genus or even the whole family. So, some of the work we've done is showing that we're finding the same genetic variants in wood frogs as in other frogs, including species in Florida."

The artificial intelligence software, created by researchers at Imperial College London and the University of Melbourne, has been able to predict the prognosis of patients with ovarian cancer more accurately than current methods. It can also predict what treatment would be most effective for patients following diagnosis.

The trial, published in Nature Communications took place at Hammersmith Hospital, part of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.

Researchers say that this new technology could help clinicians administer the best treatments to patients more quickly and paves the way for more personalised medicine. They hope that the technology can be used to stratify ovarian cancer patients into groups based on the subtle differences in the texture of their cancer on CT scans rather than classification based on what type of cancer they have, or how advanced it is.

Professor Eric Aboagye, lead author and Professor of Cancer Pharmacology and Molecular Imaging, at Imperial College London, said:

"The long-term survival rates for patients with advanced ovarian cancer are poor despite the advancements made in cancer treatments. There is an urgent need to find new ways to treat the disease. Our technology is able to give clinicians more detailed and accurate information on the how patients are likely to respond to different treatments, which could enable them to make better and more targeted treatment decisions."

Professor Andrea Rockall, co-author and Honorary Consultant Radiologist, at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, added:

"Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform the way healthcare is delivered and improve patient outcomes. Our software is an example of this and we hope that it can be used as a tool to help clinicians with how to best manage and treat patients with ovarian cancer."

Ovarian cancer is the sixth most common cancer in women and usually affects women after the menopause or those with a family history of the disease. There are 6,000 new cases of ovarian cancer a year in the UK but the long-term survival rate is just 35-40 per cent as the disease is often diagnosed at a much later stage once symptoms such as bloating are noticeable. Early detection of the disease could improve survival rates.

Doctors diagnose ovarian cancer in a number of ways including a blood test to look for a substance called CA125 - an indication of cancer - followed by a CT scan that uses x-rays and a computer to create detailed pictures of the ovarian tumour. This helps clinicians know how far the disease has spread and determines the type of treatment patients receive, such as surgery and chemotherapy.

However, the scans can't give clinicians detailed insight into patients' likely overall outcomes or on the likely effect of a therapeutic intervention.

Researchers used a mathematical software tool called TEXLab to identify the aggressiveness of tumours in CT scans and tissue samples from 364 women with ovarian cancer between 2004 and 2015.

The software examined four biological characteristics of the tumours which significantly influence overall survival - structure, shape, size and genetic makeup - to assess the patients' prognosis. The patients were then given a score known as Radiomic Prognostic Vector (RPV) which indicates how severe the disease is, ranging from mild to severe.

The researchers compared the results with blood tests and current prognostic scores used by doctors to estimate survival. They found that the software was up to four times more accurate for predicting deaths from ovarian cancer than standard methods.

The team also found that five per cent of patients with high RPV scores had a survival rate of less than two years. High RPV was also associated with chemotherapy resistance and poor surgical outcomes, suggesting that RPV can be used as a potential biomarker to predict how patients would respond to treatments.

Professor Aboagye suggests that this technology can be used to identify patients who are unlikely to respond to standard treatments and offer them alternative treatments.

The researchers will carry out a larger study to see how accurately the software can predict the outcomes of surgery and/or drug therapies for individual patients.

The study was funded by the NIHR Imperial Biomedical Research Centre, the Imperial College Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre and Imperial College London Tissue Bank.

This research is an example of the work carried out by Imperial College Academic Health Science Centre, a joint initiative between Imperial College London and three NHS hospital trusts. It aims to transform healthcare by turning scientific discoveries into medical advances to benefit local, national and global populations in as fast a timeframe as possible.

Researchers have uncovered new evidence about the agriculturally important process of vernalization in a development that could help farmers deal with financially damaging weather fluctuations.

Vernalization is the process by which plants require prolonged exposure to cold temperature before they transition from the vegetative state to flower. For decades it's been a key focus of research into plant development and crop productivity.

But how vernalization might work under variable temperatures in the field has been unclear, as have some of the underlying molecular controls of the process.

The research carried out by John Innes Centre scientists in collaboration with colleagues in Hungary and France shows that vernalization is influenced by warm conditions as well as cold, and a much wider temperature range than previously thought.

Led by Dr Laura Dixon, the study began as an exploration into how variance in ambient temperatures might influence flowering regulation in winter wheat. But it unexpectedly uncovered an "extreme vernalization response".

"We have shown that vernalization responds to warmer conditions than those classically associated with vernalizing. Before this study we thought vernalization only happened up to a maximum of about 12°C, but the true temperature is much higher. This information is immediately useful to breeders," says Dr Dixon.

The researchers used a panel of 98 wheat cultivars and landraces and exposed them to temperatures ranging from 13 to 25 °C in controlled environments.

Normally, once the vernalization process completes, plant growth is accelerated under warm temperatures. But the team identified one cultivar, named Charger, which did not follow this standard response.

Gene expression analysis revealed that the wheat floral activator gene (VRN-A1) was responsible for this trait. Further experiments showed that expression of genes that delay flowering is reactivated in response to high temperatures (of up to 24 °C), demonstrating that vernalization is not only a consequence of how long the plant experiences continuous cold.

This study published in the journal Development highlights complex workings of a genetic network of floral activators and repressors that coordinate a plant's response to a range of temperature inputs. It also finds that the Charger cultivar is an extreme version of a response to warmer temperatures that may be prevalent in winter wheat cultivars.

The team is now looking to provide diagnostic genetic markers which will allow breeders to track the distinct allele responsible for this warm-temperature vernalization trait. They also hope to use their new knowledge of warm weather interruption to reduce the length of vernalization in the breeding cycle, so that new wheat lines can be generated more quickly.

Dr Dixon explains: "This study highlights that to understand the vernalization response in agriculture we must dissect the process in the field and under variable conditions. The knowledge can be used to develop new wheat cultivars that are more robust to changing temperatures."

Current lithium ion battery technology will probably not be able to handle the coming decades' huge demand for energy. It is estimated that by 2050, electricity will make up 50% of the world's energy mix. Today that rate is 18%. But installed capacity for renewable energy production is expected to increase fourfold. This will require batteries that are more efficient, cheaper and environmentally friendly.

One of the alternatives being studied today in many parts of the world is the lithium-air battery. Some of the Brazilian efforts in the search for such device were presented on Day Two of FAPESP Week London, held February 11-12, 2019.

"There is a lot of talk today about electric cars. Some European countries are also thinking about banning combustion engines. In addition, renewable sources like solar energy need batteries to store what is generated during the day through solar radiation," said Rubens Maciel Filho, a professor at the School of Chemical Engineering of the University of Campinas (UNICAMP).

The lithium-air battery, currently functioning only on a laboratory scale, uses ambient oxygen as a reagent. The battery stores additional energy through an electrochemical reaction that results in the formation of lithium oxide.

"It is a sustainable way to store electrical energy. With advances, it can support numerous discharge/charge cycles. It has great potential for use in transportation, in light and heavy vehicles alike. It can also work in electric power distribution networks," said the researcher.

But turning experiments into commercially viable products involves understanding the fundamentals of the electrochemical reactions that occur in the process.

"It also requires the development of new materials that allow us to leverage desirable reactions and minimize or avoid undesirable ones," said Maciel, director of the New Energy Innovation Center (CINE). With units at UNICAMP, the Nuclear Energy Research Institute (IPEN) and the São Carlos Chemistry Institute at the University of São Paulo (USP), the center is supported by FAPESP and Shell under the scope of the Engineering Research Centers Program (ERC).

He went on to explain that some of the phenomena need to be observed in operando, or in other words, in real time. "The idea is to keep track of the reactions that occur in dynamic experiments and the different chemical species that are formed, even if temporarily.

Otherwise, some of the stages in the process get lost and the battery becomes inefficient in terms of charge time and duration of charge."

To conduct these measurements, the researchers are using the National Synchrotron Light Laboratory (LNLS) at the Brazilian Center for Light Research in Energy and Materials (CNPEM), located in Campinas.

Another project presented during the session involved sulfur-air batteries. Despite not being as efficient, they are inexpensive and store energy for many hours. "They can store energy for up to 24 hours at a very low cost. Its main ingredients are sulfur and caustic soda and they are extremely inexpensive. That is why we are investing in them," said Nigel Brandon, a professor at Imperial College.

Because of these characteristics, sulfur-air batteries can be used in homes or businesses. Brandon believes, however, that their greatest potential is in charging stations for electric cars, which will become much more commonplace due to the European goal of cutting carbon emissions 80% by 2050.

"It is important to underscore the fact that the different battery projects are not competing with each other but rather are complementing each other," said Geoff Rodgers of Brunel University London, session facilitator.

Sun, hydrogen and biofuels

More efficient batteries are particularly important in a scenario in which the use of solar energy is expected to increase. Peak solar radiation during the day will require the need for efficient storage of energy so it can be drawn upon at night.

Maciel also talked about a project at CINE to develop more efficient photovoltaic cells that could be used in the future to convert solar energy to electricity as well to obtain chemical products, or even hydrogen from water hydrolysis.

Liquid hydrogen is a very efficient fuel, but its production entails high-energy costs. It is one of the options being considered in the United Kingdom since biofuels are not as viable as in Brazil.

"We are looking for new bacterial enzymes for oxidation of lignin, an aromatic polymer that makes up more than 25% of plant cell walls and is part of the residue of biofuel production. The goal is to develop new products such as biofuels, new plastics and chemical products for industry," said Timothy Bugg of the University of Warwick.

GALVESTON, Texas - Researchers from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have developed a promising drug that has proven to significantly increase muscle size, strength and metabolic state in aged mice, according to a study just published in Biochemical Pharmacology.

As we age, our bodies increasingly lose the ability to repair and rebuild degenerating skeletal muscles. Beginning around age 35, muscle mass, strength and function continually decline as we get older. This can dramatically limit the ability of older adults to live fully active and independent lives.

"We identified a protein in muscle stem cells that appears to be responsible for their age-related dysfunction, and then developed a small molecule drug that limits the effects of this protein," said senior author Stanley Watowich, UTMB associate professor in the department of biochemistry and molecular biology. "By resetting muscle stem cells to a more youthful state, we were able to rejuvenate them so that they could more effectively repair muscle tissues."

In the study, aged mice with a muscle injury were treated with either the drug or a placebo. Following seven days of drug treatment, researchers found that the aged mice that received the drug had more functional muscle stem cells that were actively repairing the injured muscle. In the treated group, muscle fiber size doubled, and muscle strength increased by 70 percent, compared with the placebo group. In addition, the blood chemistry of the drug-treated and untreated mice was similar, suggesting no adverse drug effects were occurring.

Adults over 65 are the fastest growing segment of the population in many countries. In the next decade, the U.S. elderly population will increase by 40 percent and the cost of their health care is expected to double, accounting for over half of all U.S. health care spending. Much of this spending will be used to treat health problems related to muscle decline, including hip fractures, falls and heart disease.

"There are no treatments currently available to delay, arrest or reverse age-related muscle degeneration," said senior author Harshini Neelakantan, a UTMB research scientist in the department of biochemistry and molecular biology. "These initial results support the development of an innovative drug treatment that has the potential to help the elderly to become fitter, faster and stronger, thus enabling them to live more active and independent lives as they age."

Brain-computer interfaces promise to restore communication for individuals with severe speech and physical impairments. Current brain computer interfaces share many features of high-tech, conventional augmentative and alternative communication systems, but via direct brain link. Choosing the "right" brain-computer interface that maximizes reliability of the neural control signal and minimizes fatigue and frustration is critical.

Jonathan Brumberg, assistant professor of speech-language-hearing at the University of Kansas, will present on this subject and demonstrate a variety of brain-computer interfaces in his talk, "Evolution in Technology to Aid and Restore Communication," at the AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

What: "Talking without Speaking: Overcoming Communication Challenges with Technology," a scientific sessions panel at AAAS.
Who: Jonathan Brumberg, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS; brumberg@ku.edu
When: 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM Sunday, February 17, 2019
Where: Marriott Wardman Park - Thurgood Marshall Ballroom East, 2660 Woodley Rd NW, Washington, D.C., 20008

Background (panel description): Millions live with developmental or acquired communication disorders that significantly limit their ability to communicate with those around them. People can be left at a loss for words because of disorders such as autism, cerebral palsy, or intellectual disability, as well as acquired disorders such as stroke and brain injury. Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) helps people overcome communication barriers via a range of high- and low-tech options. No longer simply science fiction, brain-computer interfaces can now be a plausible solution for acquired disorders. Evolving mobile technology has helped to normalize AAC use by making tablet and smartphones central to everyday interaction. However, the attitude that there's an app for everything creates its own problems. First, basic language challenges, such as aphasia and autism, require well-organized interface designs and partner support for successful AAC use. For people with relatively intact cognitive-linguistic skills, barriers include physical access to devices. The recipe for successful communication for people needing AAC requires the right technology as well as an understanding of user abilities and limitations. While possibilities are endless, considerations about the application of technology must always be at the forefront of AAC implementation practice. The session explores these scientific opportunities and pragmatic challenges.

AURORA, Colo. (Feb. 15, 2019) - Scientists at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus have implicated a largely hidden part of the human genome in the severity of autism symptoms, a discovery that could lead to new insights into the disorder and eventually to clinical therapies for the condition.

The researchers found the critical genes are part of the human genome that is so complex and difficult to study that it has been unexamined by conventional genome analysis methods.

In this case, the region encodes most copies of the Olduvai (formerly DUF1220) protein domain, a highly duplicated (~300 copies in the human genome) and highly variable gene coding family that has been implicated in both human brain evolution and cognitive disease.

The researchers, led by James Sikela, PhD, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the CU School of Medicine, analyzed the genomes of individuals with autism and showed that, as the number of copies of Olduvai increased, the severity of autism symptoms became worse.

While the Sikela lab has shown this same trend previously, the discovery has not been pursued by other researchers due to the complexity of the Olduvai family.

"It took us several years to develop accurate methods for studying these sequences, so we fully understand why other groups have not joined in." Sikela said. "We hope that by showing that the link with autism severity holds up in three independent studies, we will prompt other autism researchers to examine this complex family."

In order to provide more evidence that the association with autism severity is real, the Sikela lab used an independent population and developed a different, higher resolution measurement technique. This new method also allowed them to zero in on which members of the large Olduvai family may be driving the link with autism.

Though autism is thought to have a significant genetic component, conventional genetic studies have come up short in efforts to explain this contribution, Sikela said.

"The current study adds further support to the possibility that this lack of success may be because the key contributors to autism involve difficult-to-measure, highly duplicated and highly variable sequences, such as those encoding the Olduvai family, and, as a result, have never been directly measured in other studies of autism," Sikela said.

Bacteria, often synonymous with infection and disease, may have an unfair reputation. Research indicates there are as many, if not more, bacterial cells in our bodies as human cells, meaning they play an important role in our physiology (1). In fact, a growing body of evidence shows that greater gut microbiota diversity (the number of different species and evenness of these species' populations) is related to better health. Now, research published in Experimental Physiology has suggested that the efficiency with which we transport oxygen to our tissues (cardiorespiratory fitness) is a far greater predictor of gut microbiota diversity than either body fat percentage or general physical activity.

The findings suggest that exercise at a sufficiently high intensity, to improve cardiorespiratory fitness, may support health through favourable alterations in the presence, activity and clustering of gut microbes. Such exercise-induced improvements, in cardiorespiratory fitness, often correspond with central (e.g. increased volume of blood pumped by the heart each beat) and peripheral adaptations (e.g. increased number of capillaries to transport oxygen from blood to muscles).

Before now, it was understood that higher cardiorespiratory fitness tended to coincide with greater gut microbiota diversity, but it was unclear whether this relationship was attributable to body fat percentage or physical activities of daily-living. Since cancer treatment is known to trigger physiological changes detrimental to cardio-metabolic health, including increased body fat percentage and declining cardiorespiratory fitness, this research was performed on cancer survivors. In total, 37 non-metastatic breast cancer survivors, who had completed treatment at least one year prior, were enrolled.

Participants performed a graded exercise test to estimate peak cardiorespiratory fitness, assessments of total energy expenditure and examination of gut microbiota from faecal swipes. The results showed that participants with the higher cardiorespiratory fitness had significantly greater gut microbiota diversity compared to less fit participants. Further statistical analyses highlighted that cardiorespiratory fitness accounted for roughly a quarter of the variance in species richness and evenness, independent of body fat percent.

These data offer intriguing insight into the relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness and gut microbiota diversity. However, given the cross-sectional nature of the study design, the research team's findings are correlative in nature. The participant sample was restricted to women with a history of breast cancer, who tended to exhibit low cardiorespiratory fitness and other health problems, meaning generalisation to other groups should be made with caution.

Stephen Carter, lead author of the paper from Indiana University, is enthusiastic about continuing his team's research:

"Our group is actively pursuing an interventional study to determine how variation in exercise intensity can influence gut microbiota diversity under controlled-feeding conditions to uncover how exercise may affect functional outcomes of gut microbiota, as well as, studying how exercise prescription may be optimized to enhance health outcomes among clinical populations."

Support from managers and colleagues, as well as a positive attitude, are most likely to enable a more long-term return to work for employees after a sickness absence, according to a new review of research led by the University of East Anglia (UEA).

The review evaluated the impact of personal and social factors on sustainable return to work after ill-health due to musculoskeletal disorders, such as joint and back pain, and common mental health conditions, for example stress, depression or anxiety.

It also compared the effects of these factors across the two types of conditions, which are recognised as the most common causes of sickness absence in developed countries.

Personal and social factors were found to play a role in enabling sustainable return to work after ill health. However, sustainable return to work does not appear to be the result of a single factor. Instead, it seems to be influenced by a combination of multiple factors.

Researchers from UEA's Norwich Business School and Uppsala University in Sweden found the most consistent evidence for achieving sustainable return to work was for support from line managers or supervisors and co-workers, employees having a positive attitude and high self-efficacy - their belief in their capabilities to achieve a goal or outcome - being younger and having higher levels of education.

The review examined evidence from 79 previous studies conducted between 1989 and 2017. Its findings are published in the Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation.

For the purposes of the review, sustainable return to work was defined as a stable full-time or part-time return to work to either the original or a modified job for a period of at least three months, without relapse or sickness absence re-occurrence.

Lead author Abasiama Etuknwa, a postgraduate researcher at UEA, said: "These findings will help us understand what factors may either bring about or hinder a sustainable return to work. The relationship between the social environment and personal factors like attitudes and self-efficacy appears to impact positively on maintainable return to work outcomes.

"Promoting a culture of support at the workplace is essential, a culture that makes returning workers feel valued, worthy and not necessarily blamed for absence, as the former would improve work attitudes and ease the transition back to work."

The economic cost of sickness absence is growing yearly. Extended sickness absence is associated with reduced probability of return to work, which becomes costly for employers, increasing the urgency to help workers return early.

Co-author Kevin Daniels, professor of organisational behaviour at UEA, said: "To reduce costs related to sickness absence and reduce the risk of long-term disability associated with extended absence from work, there is a big need for a better understanding of the factors that either impede or facilitate a sustainable return to work for staff sick-listed with musculoskeletal and common mental health disorders.

"Previous studies have shown how poor quality jobs can cause ill-health. However, there is also strong evidence that good quality jobs, for example those that enable reasonable work-life balance, allow staff some say in how their work is done and have supportive managers, are an important component for a speedy recovery after ill-health episodes and are generally beneficial for physical and mental health."

Other personal factors identified as impacting return to work included economic status/income, length of sickness absence, and job contract/security. There was no consistent evidence of whether gender affected sustainable return to work.

Social factors also included job crafting - employees redesigning their job task to fit their motives, strengths and passions - and its related practices, such as employee-initiated changes to their job or how work is done.

The authors say the review provides employers and policymakers with knowledge of the key factors that will help with implementing more effective return to work programmes.

"Existing return to work programmes need to encourage supportive interactions between leaders and co-workers and returning workers during the process, especially as this could have a direct effect on sustainable return to work, as well as an indirect effect through enhanced returners' attitudes towards work and self-efficacy," said Miss Etuknwa.

"Although return to work takes place within a complex system involving employing organizations and the healthcare system, given the consistent evidence of the role line managers play, we recommend that policymakers consider ways to provide guidance for employers."

This guidance could: outline the supportive role of line managers and other key workplace professionals, for example human resources professionals and occupational health providers, during the return to work process; train these professionals on the return to work process and how to effectively manage and support returning workers; and outline ways to assist line managers in providing necessary support.

Virtual reality has been shown to help children with autism with nearly 45% remaining free from their fears and phobias six months after treatment.

A separate study also published tomorrow, has shown for the first time that the treatment works for some autistic adults.

The Blue Room, developed by specialists at Newcastle University working alongside innovative technology firm Third Eye NeuroTech, allows the team to create a personalised 360 degree environment involving the fear which may debilitate the person with autism in real life.

Within this virtual environment, which requires no goggles, the child can comfortably investigate and navigate through various scenarios working with a therapist using iPad controls but remain in full control of the situation.

The research, funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), is published today in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

"For many children and their families, anxiety can rule their lives as they try to avoid the situations which can trigger their child's fears or phobia," says Professor Jeremy Parr, who led the study.

"To be able to offer an NHS treatment that works, and see the children do so well, offers hope to families who have very few treatment options for anxiety available to them."

Autism can affect a child's learning and development, often resulting in impaired social and communication skills and many also have fears or phobias which can be very distressing but are often overlooked. It is thought these phobias affect around 25% of children with autism. In the trial phobias included travelling on public transport, school classrooms, dogs and balloons.

The Newcastle University experts describe the randomised controlled trial involving 32 children with autism aged 8 - 14 years. Half received treatment in the Blue Room straight away and half acted as a control group, receiving delayed treatment six months later.

Accompanied by a psychologist they underwent four sessions in a week involving a personalised scenario in the Blue Room. Parents were able to watch the treatment via a video link.

"People with autism can find imagining a scene difficult which is why the Blue Room is so well-received. We are providing the feared situation in a controlled way through virtual reality and we are sitting alongside them to help them learn how to manage their fears," explains Dr Morag Maskey, researcher from the Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle University.

"It is incredibly rewarding to see the effect it can have for some, overcoming a situation which just a week previously would have been so distressing."

After receiving the treatment and with the support of their parents, the children were then introduced to the scenario in the real world.

Two weeks after treatment, the research shows that four of the first 16 (25%) had responded to treatment and were able to cope with a specific phobia. This effect remained with a total of six showing improvement after six months (38%), however, one reported a worsening of their phobia. Meanwhile, in the control group, five untreated participants had become worse in the six months.

The control group went on to be treated in the Blue Room after this time. Results showed that overall 40% of children treated showed improvement at 2 weeks, and 45% at 6 months.

This improvement is comparable with other treatments and the team intend to further examine why some don't respond.

For the first time, the Blue Room treatment was offered to autistic adults. In a separate publication in Autism in Adulthood by the same team, the VR treatment was shown to work in five out of eight autistic adults.

Aged 18- 57, the adults received four 20 minute sessions in the Blue Room with a personalised computer generated scene. Six months after the sessions, five of the eight participants still had real life day-to-day improvements in relation to their phobia.

NHS treatment is available to UK families through the Complex Neurodevelopmental Disorders Service at Northumberland Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust https://www.ntw.nhs.uk/resource-library/complex-neuro-developmental-service-cnds/

Dr Rajesh Nadkarni, Executive Medical Director at Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust, said: "We are proud to be a partner of the Newcastle Blue Room Treatment which is helping people with autism to manage their anxiety. Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust has a strong track record in providing nationally recognised autism services, and we welcome this new research demonstrating the positive effects of this highly innovative treatment."

Eddie Nelson is Director of Third Eye NeuroTech, (http://thirdeye.tv/index.html ) the immersive reality technology company based in County Durham which provides the Blue Room facility. He says: "It is rare as a business that we get the chance to help young people and their families in such a dramatic and tangible way. But what we see with the Blue Room is very anxious young people and adults coming in, yet within four of these specialised sessions they come out having combatted their fears."

Specific phobias which were addressed in the Blue Room treatment included: Dogs, Wasps/bees, lifts, fear of the dark, flying, dolls, balloons, public transport, school, walking into rooms.

Alongside the NHS Service, the Newcastle University team are continuing further research into the effectiveness and lasting effect of the Blue Room.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Using an army of small satellites, researchers have shown that water levels in small lakes across northern Canada and Alaska are far more variable during the summer than previously thought. The findings, published in Geophysical Research Letters, could have implications for how scientists calculate the natural greenhouse gas emissions from these northern lakes.

The study used images taken by a network of more than 150 CubeSats -- small satellites about the size of shoeboxes -- which made nearly daily observations of more than 85,000 small North American lakes during the summer of 2017. The images enabled the researchers to see how the lakes changed over time. They found small but significant shoreline changes in individual lakes that added up to hundreds of square kilometers of lake area change across the study region.

"There's been a lot of research on climate-driven changes in lake area, but it's mainly focused on long-term changes," said Sarah Cooley, a Ph.D. student at Brown University and the study's lead author. "This is the first time that anyone has looked at fine-scale, short-term changes, and we found that there's much more variability within a season than expected."

The study area captures a substantial swath of Arctic tundra and boreal forest, a biome that circles the Earth's northern hemisphere in a band from about 50 to 70 degrees north latitude. The region is home to critical forest and tundra ecosystems as well as the planet's highest density of lakes, so understanding its hydrology is scientifically important. One reason for that is that boreal lakes are a significant source of natural greenhouse gas emissions. Their sediments contain tons of organic carbon, which washes in from the surrounding landscape. Some of that carbon then decomposes and it emitted into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide and methane greenhouse gases.

This new finding of substantial summer shoreline fluctuation has implications for how scientists calculate these emissions, the researchers say. That's because shoreline areas where water ebbs and flows from season to season are known hotspots for greenhouse gas production and emission. But estimates of lake emissions generally assume shorelines to be stable within each season. The finding of surprising within-season shoreline fluctuation, the researchers say, suggests that current emissions models from boreal lakes may be underestimated.

"A shoreline that's fluctuating is going to emit more carbon than a stable shoreline," Cooley said. "These short-term fluctuations, which no one had ever mapped before, suggest these lakes are potentially emitting more gas than people thought."

Another finding that surprised the research team was the large overall importance of shoreline fluctuations on the ancient Canadian Shield, a rocky, wet landscape in central Canada where millions of small lakes cover 20 percent of the landscape.

"Previous studies assumed lakes in this area to be relatively stable," said Laurence C. Smith, a co-author of the study and project leader for NASA's Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment, which helped fund the study. "To our surprise, the high-resolution, high-frequency imaging afforded by CubeSats revealed that small shoreline fluctuations in this lake-rich area sum to impressively large numbers."

In all, the study explored four sub-areas of the North American Arctic and sub-Arctic and found the little-studied Canadian Shield to be most dynamic of all, with about 1.4 percent of its landscape seasonally inundated by small fluctuations in lake levels.

Big data, small satellites

Another takeaway from the study, Cooley says, is that it shows the power of CubeSats to acquire data that larger satellites can't gather.

"What I'm most excited about from a science perspective is the ability to make use of this new CubeSat imagery," Cooley said. "We couldn't have made these observations without the CubeSats, and here we show that it's possible to extract valuable scientific information from those images."

Large space agency satellites festooned with sensitive scientific instruments can gather all sorts of information, but simply don't make enough overhead passes to catch changes that occur over short periods of time. And the satellites that do pass over on a daily basis lack the camera resolution to make fine-scale observations of lake area.

The CubeSats, recently launched by a company called Planet, offered a potential solution. The company operates more than 150 satellites, which orbit the Earth in an arrangement that enables them to image Earth's entire landmass each day as the planet rotates beneath them. And while the tiny satellites lack sophisticated scientific equipment, they do have high-powered cameras capable of capturing images with 3-meter resolution.

But the CubeSat data present some unique challenges, Cooley says. For example, the location data from CubeSats tend not to be as precise as those from space agency satellites. And the CubeSat images lack filters that make them easier to analyze. NASA or European Space Agency (ESA) satellite data are filtered to eliminate images taken on cloudy days or other low-quality images.

So Cooley had to design her own system to compensate for those issues. For the study, she trained a machine learning algorithm to spot anomalous data patterns and throw them away. For example, instances in which a lake suddenly disappears in a day only to return to view a few days later are most likely due to cloud cover or glitchy observations, not an actual lake disappearance. The algorithm could flag such instances and remove them from the data.

Using that algorithm, Cooley and her colleagues were able to sift through more 25 terabytes of CubeSat data. Cooley says she expects more interesting earth science findings to come from CubeSats in the coming years.

"I see this as a beginning of a new period in remote sensing, in that suddenly all sorts of earth observations that may not have been possible before will become possible with these small, simple satellites," Cooley said.

While wisdom is closely linked to improved health and well-being, its role and impact among persons with schizophrenia, possibly the most devastating of mental illnesses, is not known.

In a new paper, publishing February 14, 2019 in Schizophrenia Research, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine report that, on average, persons with schizophrenia (PwS) obtained lower scores on a wisdom assessment than non-psychiatric comparison participants (NPCPs), but that there was considerable variability in levels of wisdom. Nearly one-third of PwS had scores in the "normal" range, and these PwS with higher levels of wisdom displayed fewer psychotic symptoms as well as better cognitive performance and everyday functioning.

"Taken together, our findings argue for the value of assessing wisdom in persons with schizophrenia because increasing wisdom may help improve their social and neuro-cognition, and vice versa," said senior author Dilip Jeste, MD, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Neurosciences and director of the Stein Institute for Research on Aging at UC San Diego School of Medicine.

"There is a concept of 'wellness within illness,'" said Jeste. "Our findings support the hypothesis that wisdom and schizophrenia co-exist in a proportion of these patients, specifically those functioning at a higher level. Furthermore, the data suggest that treatments which enhance positive psychological traits, such as wisdom, may promote health and well-being in persons with schizophrenia.

"We have a tendency in medicine to focus attention on remediating symptoms and impairments to the exclusion of individual strengths. A sustained effort to assess and enhance positive traits in a person with severe mental illness, such as their levels of wisdom, happiness and resilience, might do much to improve the quality of their lives."

In this study, 65 stable adult outpatients with a diagnosis of chronic schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 96 NPCPs completed a commonly used, three-dimensional wisdom scale (3D-WS) that includes measures of cognitive, reflective, and affective (relating to emotion) wisdom.

While people with schizophrenia had lower average scores on the wisdom scale than NPCPs, those PwS with higher wisdom scores performed better on neurocognitive and functional assessments than those with lower scores. Indeed, level of wisdom positively correlated with performance on multiple neurocognitive tests in PwS; no such relationships were detected in NPCPs.

The researchers also found that the reflective domain of wisdom -- the ability to look inward accurately and without bias or to recognize others' perspectives -- was significantly related to the mental health and well-being of PwS, while levels of cognitive and affective wisdom appeared to have no such correlative effect.

"In healthy adults, wisdom seems to reduce the negative effects of adverse life events. It boosts a sense of well-being, life satisfaction and overall health," said first author Ryan Van Patten, a postdoctoral scholar in the UC San Diego School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry. "In persons with schizophrenia, wisdom is also connected to levels of happiness, resilience, and subjective recovery."

In recent years, there has been increasing empirical evidence that wisdom has a biological basis and can be modified and enhanced through a variety of interventions. This study, said Jeste, supports the idea that therapies which promote wise behavior in persons with schizophrenia can also boost their broader capacity to function in society, more healthfully and with greater happiness and satisfaction.