Culture

TORONTO, Monday, March 23, 2020 - Many of us are spending a lot of time looking at our hands lately and we think we know them pretty well. But research from York University's Centre for Vision Research shows the way our brains perceive our hands is inaccurate.

In a new study, the Centre's director Laurence Harris, a Psychology professor in York's Faculty of Health, and graduate student Sarah D'Amour, found the brain's representation of the back of hands changes depending on the orientation in which they are held.

The study, published the journal, Public Library of Science (PLoS ONE) today, looked at how accurate healthy individuals are at judging the size of the back and the palm of their hand and how perception of hand size might be affected when viewing the hand in familiar or unfamiliar perspectives.

Using a novel technique that revealed the indivduals' implicit representation of their hands in the brain, researchers found the perceived width is different when the hand is held upright compared to when it is held sideways, but only for the back of the hand. There was no variation seen in perception for the palm.

In the study of 40 participants, researchers used two sequentially presented actual size photos of the hand, one distorted, one not. The distorted photo was adjusted until it was equally like the person's internal representation as the undistorted photo. The internal representation of their hand was then taken as the point midway between these two photos.

What's surprising, says Harris, is that the perceived length of the back and palm of the hand are different from each other. The length of the back of the hand is overestimated even though palm length is perceived accurately.

"These findings are particularly surprising in view of the accuracy shown in positioning the hands when doing complex and precision actions, such as playing the piano or typing on a computer keyboard," said Harris.

There has been extensive research on various aspects of perception and action such as touch, haptics, motor skills, reaching, grasping, pointing, tool use, position sense, and size perception. This is why understanding the complete picture of how the hand is represented in the brain is key, says D'Amour. All these sensory processes and tasks require knowledge about how the brain represents the hand and therefore can be impacted by any size or shape distortions that may occur.

"We see the backs of our hands far more than our palms - and yet it is the backs of our hands that are inaccurately represented in the brain," says D'Amour.

The life-long experiences of directly interacting with and seeing the hands from multiple different viewpoints may result in greater flexibility and plasticity in how the brain represents and perceives the hand, the researchers add.

"These findings imply that the brain's representation of the body is not built up entirely from vision and may not even involve vision at all - even for body parts that are regularly seen," says Harris. "These findings may be extended toward helping people who have extremely distorted perceptions of their own body - misperceptions that cannot apparently be easily overcome by vision."

New IIASA research shows that higher levels of education and increasing workforce participation in both migrant and local populations are needed to compensate for the negative economic impacts of aging populations in EU countries.

An increase in the EU population aged 65+ is inevitable due to decades of low fertility and increased life expectancy. This is widely assumed to imply an increase in future economic burden based on conventional projections that rely heavily on the age structure of the population. A new IIASA study shows however, that when more sophisticated characteristics such as education, and increasing participation in the labor market are considered, the financial challenges posed by aging populations are much less.

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), puts forward a new way of measuring the future cost of dependency. The "productivity-weighted labor force dependency ratio" reflects that not all workers are equally productive and takes into account the influence of expanding education and increasing workforce participation, particularly among women and the elderly.

IIASA researchers created a state-of-the-art demographic model to test the impact of different immigration scenarios (in terms of number of migrants, education level, and integration into the labor market) on dependency ratios. These included scenarios where the EU has an immigration system like Canada, with increased immigration levels of educated migrants and high integration into the labor market, and another where education levels are low and integration fails.

These different migration-related scenarios were compared to scenarios where labor force participation among the general population in all 28 EU member states matches the current rates in Sweden, which has the highest numbers of people employed or looking for work in the EU.

The research shows that when higher levels of education and expected increases in labor force participation are taken into account (particularly among women), the ratio of non-workers to workers is much less than when the traditional indicator that only takes age into account is used. An increase in labor force participation rates could completely offset expected increases in the dependency ratio.

"Although demographic aging is unavoidable in Europe, the research shows that the fears associated with the coming economic burden have been unduly exaggerated. Conventional projections use the simplistic and inappropriate conventional age-dependency ratio, which assumes that everyone aged over 65 is not working and that everyone aged between 15 and 64 is equally productive," says Guillaume Marois, lead author of the study and researcher at IIASA and the Asian Demographic Research Institute of Shanghai University. "With better labor force participation among migrants and the general population, Europe could largely avoid the widely expected negative impacts of aging."

The study also shows that higher immigration levels can have either a positive or a negative effect. If immigrants are well educated and integrated into the labor market, there is a positive impact. If their integration fails and if they are poorly educated, there is a negative impact on dependency.

"Too often, economic and migration policies aimed at reducing the burden of population aging focus on the number of immigrants that a country should welcome. However, this is only one of the factors at play. In the absence of successful integration, increasing immigration can have the opposite effect, highlighting the importance of policies that ensure the best possible integration of migrants." says co-author Alain Bélanger, researcher at IIASA and Quebec's Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS).

In all human populations, average lifespans are longer for women than for men. Moreover, nine out of ten supercentenarians--that is, people 110 years old and up--are women. But what about for other mammals, in the wild? A team led by Jean-François Lemaître, a CNRS researcher at the Biometry and Evolutionary Biology laboratory (CNRS / Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University / VetAgro Sup), compiled demographic data for 134 populations of 101 mammalian species--from bats to lions, orcas to gorillas--making their study the widest reaching and most precise to date. In 60% of the cases, female mammals live longer than males: 18.6% longer on average (versus only 7.8% longer in humans). Is this because male mortality rates rise faster with age? Not necessarily, according to Lemaître's team: for about half of the populations studied, the rise in mortality with age is even more pronounced among female mammals. However, mortality risk is lower among females at all ages.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Many frogs look like a water balloon with legs, but don't be fooled. Beneath slick skin, some species sport spines, spikes and other skeletal secrets.

While most frogs share a simple skull shape with a smooth surface, others have evolved fancier features, such as faux fangs, elaborate crests, helmet-like fortification and venom-delivering spikes. A new study is the first to take a close look at the evolution and function of these armored frog skulls.

Florida Museum of Natural History researchers used 3D data to study skull shape in 158 species representing all living frog families. Radically shaped skulls were often covered in intricate patterns of grooves, ridges and pits formed by extra layers of bone. The research team found that this trait, known as hyperossification, has evolved more than 25 times in frogs. Species with the same feeding habits or defenses tended to develop similarly shaped and patterned skulls, even if they were separated by millions of years of evolution.

"Superficially, frogs may look similar, but when you look at their skulls, you see drastic differences," said Daniel Paluh, the study's lead author and a University of Florida doctoral student. "Some of the weirdest skulls are found in frogs that eat birds and mammals, use their heads as a shield, or in a few rare cases, are venomous. Their skulls show how strange and diverse frogs can be."

The last comprehensive study of frog skulls was published in 1973. Since then, scientists have doubled the number of described frog species, updated our understanding of their evolutionary relationships and developed new analytical techniques with the help of CT scanning.

This enabled Paluh to use 36 landmarks on frog skulls, scanned and digitized as part of the National Science Foundation-funded oVert project, to analyze and compare shapes across the frog tree of life.

"Before we had methods to digitize specimens, really the only way to quantify shape was to take linear measurements of each skull," he said.

Not only do hyperossification and bizarre skull shapes tend to appear together, Paluh found, but they are often associated with frogs that eat either very large prey or use their heads for defense.

Frogs that eat other vertebrates - birds, reptiles, other frogs and mice - often have giant, roomy skulls, with a jaw joint near the back. This gives them a bigger gape with which to scoop up their prey, Paluh said, referencing Pacman frogs as one example. His analysis showed these species' skulls are stippled with tiny pits, which could provide extra strength and bite force.

Nearly all frogs lack teeth on their lower jaw, but some, such as Budgett's frogs, have evolved lower fanglike structures that allow them to inflict puncture wounds on their prey. One species, Guenther's marsupial frog, has true teeth on both jaws and can eat prey more than half its body length.

Other frogs use their heads to plug the entrance of their burrows as protection from predators. These species tend to have cavernous skulls overlaid with small spikes. A few, such as Bruno's casque-headed frog, were recently discovered to be venomous. When a predator rams the head of one these frogs, specialized spikes pierce venom glands just under the skin as a defense.

While the study showed a persistent overlap between hyperossification and fanciful skull shape, researchers aren't sure which came first. Did frogs start eating large prey and then evolve beefier skulls or vice versa?

"That's kind of a 'chicken or the egg' question," Paluh said.

The common ancestor of today's 7,000 frog species did not have an ornamented skull. But heavily fortified skulls do appear in even more ancient frog ancestors, said David Blackburn, Florida Museum curator of herpetology and study co-author.

"While the ancestor of all frogs did not have a hyperossified skull, that's how the skulls of quite ancient amphibian ancestors were built," he said. "These frogs might be using ancient developmental pathways to generate features that characterized their ancestors deep in the past."

Previous studies proposed that frogs evolved hyperossification to prevent water loss in dry environments, but Paluh's research found that habitat and hyperossification were not necessarily linked. The trait shows up in frogs that live underground, in trees, in water and on land.

But habitat does influence skull shape: Aquatic frogs tend to have long, flat skulls, while digging species often have short skulls with pointed snouts, a shape that also enables them to use their mouths like chopsticks to catch small, scurrying prey such as ants and termites, Paluh said. These species include the Mexican burrowing toad and the Australian tortoise frog - distant relatives that live in different parts of the world.

While the study sheds new light on frog skull shape, Blackburn said we still don't know much about the basic biology of frogs.

"Weirdly, it's easier for us to generate beautiful images of skulls than it is to know what these frogs eat," Blackburn said. "Natural history remains quite hard. Just because we know things exist doesn't mean we know anything about them."

The study will publish this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

HOUSTON -- Medical experts have always known myelin, the protective coating of nerve cells, to be metabolically inert. A study led by The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center has found that myelin is surprisingly dynamic, a discovery that has implications for treatment of multiple sclerosis and a type of myelin damage caused by some chemotherapy drugs, often referred to as "chemobrain." Chemobrain can occur in up to 70 percent of patients receiving chemotherapy, leaving them with temporary and even permanent thinking and memory impairment.

Study findings were published in the March 23 online issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

Myelin is comprised of fatty substances and proteins, and when wrapped around neural nerves such those found in the brain and spinal cord, allows electrical impulses to transmit quickly and efficiently along the nerve cells. Diseases such as multiple sclerosis occur when myelin is damaged, a process known as demyelination.

"We actually found that mature myelin is often damaged when cancer patients are treated with various types of chemotherapy drugs and is probably the most consistent manifestation of chemotherapy-induced neurotoxicity," said Study Lead, Jian Hu, Ph.D., assistant professor of Cancer Biology. "Our study shows that mature myelin is a very dynamic material, particularly its lipid components, and it disproves a dogma held for decades, if not a century, that mature myelin is a very stable substance."

Hu's team shows that mature myelin lipids undergo rapid turnover and require an RNA-binding protein known as the quaking or Qki to perform normally. Qki depletion resulted in quick demyelination and gradual neurologic deficits when observed in mice.

Significantly, Qki served as a co-activator of the neural signaling proteins called peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPAR), which play a role in controlling transcription of lipid metabolism genes by working with their partners retinoid X receptors (RXRs). Hu's team found that Qki interacts with a PPAR isoform called PPAR-beta and RXR-alpha to modulate this transcription, opening up a potential new approach to treating demyelination.

"Treatment of Qki-depleted mice with drugs like PPAR-beta or RXR-alpha agonists greatly alleviated neurological disability and extended survival durations," said Hu. "Furthermore, a subset of lesions from patient samples with primary progressive multiple sclerosis were characterized by downregulation of key activities in lipid metabolism associated with Qki and PPAR-beta/RXR-alpha."

"Together, the team demonstrated that continuous lipid production is indispensable for mature myelin maintenance and highlights an underappreciated role of lipid metabolism in demyelinating diseases and cancer therapy related adverse effects such as chemobrain", Hu said.

Space cooling and heating is a common need in most inhabited areas. In Europe, the energy consumed for air conditioning is rising, and the situation could get worse in the near future due to the temperature increase in different regions worldwide. The increasing cooling need in buildings especially during the summer season is satisfied by the popular air conditioners, which often make use of refrigerants with high environmental impact and also lead to high electricity consumption. So, how can we reduce the energy demand for building cooling?

A new study comes from a research group based at the Politecnico di Torino (SMaLL) and the National Institute of Metrological Research (INRiM), who has proposed a device capable of generating a cooling load without the use of electricity: the research has been published in Science Advances*. Like more traditional cooling devices, this new technology also exploits the evaporation of a liquid. However, the key idea proposed by the Turin researchers is to use simple water and common salt instead of chemicals that are potentially harmful for the environment. The environmental impact of the new device is also reduced because it is based on passive phenomena, i.e. spontaneous processes such as capillarity or evaporation, instead of on pumps and compressors that require energy and maintenance.

"Cooling by water evaporation has always been known. As an example, Nature makes use of sweat evaporation from the skin to cool down our body. However, this strategy is effective as long as air is not saturated with water vapour. Our idea was to come up with a low-cost technology capable to maximize the cooling effect regardless of the external water vapour conditions. Instead of being exposed to air, pure water is in contact with an impermeable membrane that keeps separated from a highly concentrated salty solution. The membrane can be imagined as a porous sieve with pore size in the order of one millionth of a meter. Owing to its water-repellent properties, our membrane liquid water does not pass through the membrane, whereas its vapour does. In this way, the fresh and salt water do not mix, while a constant water vapour flux occurs from one end of the membrane to the other. As a result, pure water gets cooled, with this effect being further amplified thanks to the presence of different evaporation stages. Clearly, the salty water concentration will constantly decrease and the cooling effect will diminish over time; however, the difference in salinity between the two solutions can be continuously - and sustainably - restored using solar energy, as also demonstrated in another recent study from our group**", explains Matteo Alberghini, PhD student of the Energy Department of the Politecnico di Torino and first author of the research.

The interesting feature of the suggested device consists in its modular design made of cooling units, a few centimetres thick each, that can be stacked in series to increase the cooling effect in series, as happens with common batteries. In this way it is possible to finely tune the cooling power according to individual needs, possibly reaching cooling capacity comparable to those typically necessary for domestic use. Furthermore, water and salt do not need pumps or other auxiliaries to be transported within the device. On the contrary, it "moves" spontaneously thanks to capillary effects of some components which, like in kitchen paper, are capable of absorbing and transporting water also against gravity.

"Other technologies for passive cooling are also being tested in various labs and research centres worldwide, such as those based on infrared heat dissipation into the outer space - also known as radiative passive cooling. Those approaches, although promising and suitable for some applications, also present major limitations: the principle on which they are based may be ineffective in tropical climates and in general on very humid days, when, however, the need for conditioning would still be high; moreover, there is a theoretical limit for the maximum cooling power. Our passive prototype, based instead on evaporative cooling between two aqueous solutions with different salinities, could overcome this limit, creating a useful effect independent of external humidity. Moreover, we could obtain an even higher cooling capacity in the future by increasing the concentration of the saline solution or by resorting to a more sophisticated modular design of the device" commented the researchers.

Also due to the simplicity of the device assembly and the required materials, a rather low production cost can be envisioned, in the order of a few euros for each cooling stage. As such, the device could be ideal for installations in rural areas, where the possible lack of well-trained technicians can make operation and maintenance of traditional cooling systems difficult. Interesting applications can also be envisioned in regions with large availability in water with high saline concentration, such as coastal regions in the vicinity of large desalination plants or nearby salt marshes and salt mines.

As of now, the technology is not yet ready for an immediate commercial exploitation, and further developments (also subject to future funding or industrial partnerships) are necessary. In perspective, this technology could be used in combination with existing and more traditional cooling systems for effectively implementing energy saving strategies.

HOUSTON - (March 23, 2020) - New research from Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine shows analyzing the brains of stroke victims just days after the stroke allows researchers to link various speech functions to different parts of the brain, an important breakthrough that may lead to better treatment and recovery.

The study, "Dissociation between frontal and temporal-parietal contributions to connected speech in acute stroke" will appear in an upcoming edition of the journal Brain.

Study co-author Randi Martin, the Elma W. Schneider Professor of Psychology at Rice, worked with a team of researchers led by Tatiana Schnur, associate professor of neurosurgery and neuroscience at the Baylor College of Medicine, to evaluate the spontaneous language production of 65 stroke patients by using storytelling. For the experiment, the patients were read the story of Cinderella and were then asked to retell it.

The researchers used a well-established process to score the patients -- the Quantitative Production Analysis method-- and relied on 13 different measures for evaluation, including words per minute, types of words, and sentence length and formation. They found that by evaluating patients between one and 13 days post-stroke, they were able to identify how different and critical components related to language production linked up with different regions of the brain. The researchers used cutting-edge techniques to relate the brain areas damaged in each individual to the degree of their impairment on these language-production measures. Specifically, they found that retrieving words and putting them into increasingly complex sentences relied on the left temporal and parietal lobes, while producing grammatical aspects of sentences relied on the left frontal lobe.

Martin noted there are only a few other studies that have looked at stroke patients in the acute stage, but those focused on ability to produce single words rather than providing a detailed analysis of language production. The majority of studies, she said, look at stroke patients in the chronic stage of recovery, which is at least six months after the stroke. At that time, considerable reorganization of language function in the brain may have occurred. Also, studying individuals at the acute stage allows for studying those with smaller areas of damage, she said. Those with small lesions are likely to recover and thus not included in studies of chronic stroke, and examining these people allows for a more precise mapping between areas damaged and language abilities.

"Many patients in the chronic stage of stroke have significantly worse brain damage than acute patients and have plateaued with their recovery," she said. "Their brains cannot be evaluated in the same way as acute stroke patients."

Future work will look at these same individuals at different stages during their first year of the recovery process. One important issue will be to determine what areas of brain damage and what language abilities will predict performance a year after stroke.

Martin hopes this work will help better understand how different brain regions recover from stroke. She expects the work will be useful in the design of treatment options for stroke patients, including early interventions that may boost long-term recovery.

Lactation temporarily changes how a mother's neurons behave, according to new research in mice published in JNeurosci.

Mothers experience profound changes in their body after giving birth, many of which are controlled by the hormone prolactin. Neurons in the hypothalamus called TIDA neurons regulate prolactin secretion as it fluctuates during the estrous cycle. However, during lactation, the TIDA neurons stop keeping prolactin levels in check, teasing the possibility that they may be altering their properties in response to motherhood.

Thörn Pérez et al. examined the electrical behavior of TIDA neurons in mice both during lactation and throughout the estrous cycle. In order to regulate prolactin, the voltage of TIDA neurons oscillates up and down: when the cell voltage is less negative, it fires more often, while a more negative cell fires less often. The scientists observed that the cell voltage oscillates more frequently during lactation, meaning it fires more often overall. They also fire out of rhythm with each other. These changes are fully reversible -- the cells return to normal when the moms start weaning. During all stages of the estrous cycle, the neurons behaved normally, meaning the neurons change because of motherhood, rather than prolactin levels.

Coal combustion is not only the single most important source of CO2, accounting for more than a third of global emissions, but also a major contributor to detrimental effects on public health and biodiversity. Yet, globally phasing out coal remains one of the hardest political nuts to crack. New computer simulations by an international team of researchers are now providing robust economic arguments for why it is worth the effort: For once, their simulations show that the world cannot stay below the 2 degrees limit if we continue to burn coal. Second, the benefits of phasing out coal clearly outweigh the costs. Third, those benefits occur mostly locally and short-term, which make them useful for policy makers.

"We're well into the 21st century now and still heavily rely on burning coal, making it one of the biggest threats to our climate, our health and the environment. That's why we decided to comprehensively test the case for a global coal exit: Does it add up, economically speaking? The short answer is: Yes, by far," says Sebastian Rauner, lead author and researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). For their computer simulations, the researchers looked not only at electricity generation, but at all energy sectors, including transport, buildings, industry and agriculture.

"We find that, based on all countries' current climate pledges under the Paris Agreement, humanity is so far not on track to keep global warming below 2 degrees. Yet, if all countries would introduce coal exit policies, this would reduce the gap to fulfilling the goal by 50 percent worldwide. For coal-heavy economies like China and India, quitting coal would even close the gap by 80-90 percent until 2030."

The researchers developed a simulation framework which considers the full life cycle effects of phasing out coal, accounting not only for all impacts along of coal combustion from shaft to chimney, but also how a coal exit would affect the remaining energy sources and the energy sector as a whole. For the first time, they analysed monetised environmental and human health costs, thus enabling a comparison with mitigation costs: "In particular, we looked at two externalities: Human health costs, especially caused by respiratory diseases, and biodiversity loss, as measured on the basis of how much it would cost to rewild areas currently cultivated. The mitigation costs, in turn, are mostly economic growth reductions and costs for investments in the energy system."

Phasing out coal yields global net saving effect

"Benefits from reduced health and ecosystem impacts clearly overcompensate the direct economic costs of a coal exit - they amount to a net saving effect of about 1.5 percent of global economic output in 2050 - that is, 370$ for every human on Earth in 2050.", Gunnar Luderer explains, leader of the energy research group at PIK. "We see this effect already in the medium term. In particular, India and China could reap most of those benefits already by 2030."

China and India are prime cases for a coal exit given their high reliance on coal and pressing air pollution crises, magnified by high population density, as well as population growth in India and an increasingly vulnerable aging population in China. Thus people could feel the positive effects of a coal exit almost immediately in their daily lives. "This has very significant policy implications: It makes a huge difference for the citizens of an Indian or Chinese megacity what air they breeze, and for farmers how intact ecosystems are. These benefits are immediate and local," says Sebastian Rauner. "So the incentives towards policy makers are twofold: One, it is not unlikely that phasing out coal can win popular support, and eventually elections. Two, it is worthwhile phasing out coal even if your neighbours do not."

Ending coal is just the beginning

"Phasing out coal could hence be one way out of what we know as the tragedy of the commons," adds Nico Bauer, a co-author of the study and also at PIK, "Coal phase-out has a positive synergy between the global climate challenge and local environmental pollution. In international climate negotiations, governments need to factor-in that exiting coal is a cheap way to substantially reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and has huge co-benefits at home. Our study shows that national and global interests are not necessarily trading-off, but can go hand in hand."

Given the Paris Agreement's current requirement for updates to the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), this paper comes quite timely, comments co-author Gunnar Luderer of PIK: "It underscores the benefits of a global coal exit - to the better of our planet and our health. Yet, importantly, ending coal is just the beginning. It must be flanked by further ambitious climate policies to avoid a lock-in to other fossil fuels, namely oil or natural gas."

Vanderbilt researchers have identified haplotypes, ancestral fragments of DNA, that are associated with hereditary prostate cancer (HPC) in a first-of-its-kind genomic study made possible by the study of prostate cancer patients with family histories of the disease.

The researchers analyzed the Nashville Familial Prostate Cancer Study (NFPCS), in an investigation comparing men with prostate cancer, each from a separate family with a strong history of the disease, to screened men without a personal or family history of prostate cancer. They analyzed haplotypes at a location of chromosome 8 which has been tied to the origin of prostate and numerous additional cancers.

The study, published March 23 in Nature Communications, explains roughly 9% of prostate cancer heritability. One mutation increased risk as much as 22-fold. Another mutation increased risk 4-fold, and was observed even among men without a strong family history. It was also associated with an early age of diagnosis. The researchers identified 183 variants associated with HPC at genome-wide significance, including these and others that had not been previously reported.

"We've taken a comprehensive shotgun approach to investigate data at this (chromosome) location and have been able to deconstruct how it contributes to risk, including which of the haplotypes impact age of onset and also aggressiveness," said the study's senior author, Jeffrey R. Smith, MD, PhD, associate professor of Medicine.

"Almost 2,300 men of the NFPCS, each with a desire to help others, contributed," Smith said. Data from a separate, even larger study of HPC by the International Consortium for Prostate Cancer Genetics confirmed observations.

The study is believed to be the first to identify haplotypes comprehensively from all associated genetic variants at a locus. The study introduces new methods for finding genetic variants most contributing to risk.

When active sport is at the centre of a profession or education, pain is often a constant companion - pain being defined in this case as physical and psychological symptoms. "One in three top athletes suffers significant pain," explains Dr. Johannes Fleckenstein, private lecturer at Goethe University. This is an issue that generally tends to be neglected, but he has made it the main focus of his classes.

This led to a master's thesis in which the author Anke Bumann looks predominantly at the situation of sport students. Bumann sent her questionnaire to the students of 89 sport sciences institutes in German-speaking regions. The response was impressive: 865 individuals took part, 664 completed the entire form, some adding very detailed answers in their own words.

The basis of the survey was the "German pain questionnaire" of the German Pain Society, supplemented by specific aspects such as athleticism, extent of training, self-efficacy and resilience. They were asked in which and how many regions of the body pain occurs, which injuries and other diagnoses are present, as well as psychological factors, alcohol consumption and sleep quality.

The study shows clearly: one in four of the presumably healthy young individuals suffers from pain and shows occurrence of what are known as biopsychosocial factors that can foster pain, in particular stress resulting from high performance pressure. More than half of those surveyed feel pain in two or more regions of the body - although most of them report a relatively high pain tolerance. Compared with others their age, sport students have more frequent depressions, anxiety and stress, while at the same time their self-compassion was significantly lower. On average, the students train five to seven hours a week and consume more painkillers (analgesics) and alcohol. More than 60 percent report of sleep disorders. The findings are the same for all types of sports, with only the location of the pain being different. The lack of self-compassion for their own bodies and its limitations leads, however, to the condition becoming chronic and increasingly difficult to change.

The qualitative answers make it clear that the need is great: There was a frequent expression of happiness that attention was now being paid to the issue and for the opportunity to express one's problems. Fleckenstein hopes that if students confront and discuss this issue early it will help them deal with it more openly - without the fear of being branded as "wimps". In his opinion, teachers could also make a positive contribution by giving more consideration to the health of the candidates during practical exams. And when the sport scientists complete their studies and assume corresponding professional positions, they could gradually contribute to a change in attitudes.

"We have to finally stop trivialising the issue of pain in sports," demands Johannes Fleckenstein. It is alarming that pain disorders already occur in young and physically active students in this number. As professionalism increases, surmise the authors, the number of those affected also increases: "An enormously high performance is demanded, and there is a lot of money involved," says the sport medicine expert. For this reason, the study will now be continued with professional athletes.

It is a longstanding challenge to be able to control biological systems to perform specific tasks. In a paper published in Nature Physics, researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen - in collaboration with groups in US and UK, have now reported doing just that. They have found a way to control bacteria to transport microscopic cargos. Bacteria form the largest biomass in the world, larger than all the animals and plants combined, and they are constantly moving, but their movement is chaotic. The researchers pursued the idea that if this motion can be controlled, they might be able to develop it into a biological tool. They used a liquid crystal to dictate the direction of the bacterial movement, and added a microscopic cargo for the bacteria to carry, more than 5 times the size of the bacteria.

Bacteria-scale railroad construction

Amin Doostmohammadi, Assistant Professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, explains that in the past there have been attempts to control the behavior of bacteria. But he and his colleagues adopted a novel approach: "We thought to ourselves, how about we create a track for the bacteria? The way we do that experimentally is to put the bacteria inside a liquid crystal. The trick is that a liquid crystal is not like a crystal, nor is it a liquid, it is somewhere in between. Each molecule in the crystal has an orientation, but doesn't have a positional order. This means that the molecules can flow like a liquid, but they can also align like a crystal at the same time. This is exactly the physics underlying liquid crystal displays (LCDs), for televisions, monitors and mobile phones We can prepare the underlying liquid crystal such that it takes a well-defined pattern. And the bacteria will orientate in the same direction. It doesn't restrict the bacterial movement, it just orientates them in the direction we want them".

Pattern designing and model building

Strong jets of bacteria moving in a designated direction without fluctuations is the great outcome of the experiment, according to Amin Doostmohammadi. What usually happens if the jets of bacteria are strong enough to be useful, the concentration of bacteria has to be high, and instabilities typically start to appear. The jet becomes unstable and chaotic. But in the liquid crystal pattern, the instabilities can be largely suppressed and prevent the bacterial jets from becoming chaotic. The pattern dictates the direction. This means it is possible to create jets of bacteria strong enough to carry strings of microscopic cargos, each piece of cargo 5 times the size of the bacteria themselves.

Scientific field expanding - and still more potentials are revealing themselves.

Over the last ten years or so the scientific field has expanded. Presently it is possible to control bacteria to a rather large extent and the so called "active matter" - the bacteria, can be made to rotate or form different patterns. Now, with this approach, bacterial jets can be stabilized in space such that they can even carry microscopic cargos. "We are still at an experimental level, and there is not yet a designated area of use for this technique. At the moment, the main motivation is medical applications. But really, when we think about it, we are actually talking about a completely new type of material. We know the liquid crystal from before, but now we are dealing with a living liquid crystal", Amin Doostmohammadi says. " You can imagine all sorts of material science opportunities with this research. Perhaps it could apply to other systems, to cellular behavior or sperm behavior and so on. As a theoretical physicist, I think about the fundamental implications in terms of the science, but this capability of the drug delivery by bacteria, this is something new. One thing worth noting is that when you deliver a drug this way, you don't need any external force. The bacteria are doing it by themselves. It is like a fluid pumping itself. It is a self pumping fluid, so to speak".

Theory and experiment are inextricably linked

The results have been obtained in a collaboration with other research groups. Two collaborators in the USA, Oleg Lavrentovich at Kent State University, and Igor Aranson at Penn State University - started this branch of research in 2014. Now teamed up with Amin Doostmohammadi at the Niels Bohr Institute and Julia Yeomans at the University of Oxford, experiments and theory have come together to design and control strong bacterial jets. "We may have a theoretical idea, but it is the coupling of theory and experiment that actually leads to these promising results", says Amin Doostmohammadi.

New Rochelle, NY, March 23, 2020--A new systematic review and meta-analysis showed a small but significant reduction in subjective pain scores for cannabinoid treatment compared to placebo in patients experiencing acute pain. No increase in serious adverse events suggested the safety of using cannabinoids to treat acute pain, according to the study published in Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. Click here to read the full-text article free on the Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research website through April 23, 2020.

The article entitled "Cannabinoids in the Management of Acute Pain: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis" was coauthored by Herman Johal, MD, MPH, PhD, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada and colleagues from McMaster University and Northern Ontario School of Medicine, Thunder Bay. The researchers included six trials in their study, five using oral cannabinoids, and one using intramuscular cannabinoids. They reported a significant difference in effect size between the oral and nonoral routes of administration, with intramuscular cannabinoids yielding a significant reduction in pain relative to placebo. There was no difference in effect between oral cannabinoids and placebo.

Editor-in-Chief Daniele Piomelli, PhD University of California-Irvine, School of Medicine, states: "The usefulness of cannabis-derived medicines in the treatment of pain, both acute and chronic, is still vigorously debated. The meta-analysis conducted in this study reinforces the need for more rigorous studies to assess whether cannabis might be effective in the treatment of acute pain conditions."

The cytoskeleton is a permanent construction site: it consists of protein filaments that are continually lengthening and shortening in a dynamic process. Through these remodeling processes, the cell can change its shape and even move to a new location. In this way, it guides fundamental processes, such as cell division and differentiation, and processes at a higher level in the organism, such as embryonic development and wound healing. If something goes wrong at the cytoskeletal construction site - e.g., if protein filaments undergo remodeling at the wrong place or time - this could lead to diseases. Such an error in spatio-temporal control is also the reason why metastatic cancer cells start to migrate in the body.

Researchers at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC) and other institutes, such as the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Hinxton, UK, have investigated how a family of 145 proteins causes these remodeling events to occur at the right place and time. Up to this point, scientists had only examined these regulatory proteins in individual studies, and only a few proteins had been characterized. "In order to understand complex processes, including cell shape changes, we need to know how the regulatory proteins work together collectively. Until now, we lacked a bird's eye perspective, so to speak," says Dr. Oliver Rocks, head of the MDC research group "Spatio-temporal Control of Rho GTPase Signaling" and senior responsible author of a new study in the journal Nature Cell Biology. His research group with lead authors Dr. Paul M. Müller and Dr. Juliane Rademacher, together with the group led by Dr. Evangelia Petsalaki at EMBL-EBI and an international research team, has now systematically characterized all these regulatory proteins. The team was able to show that there are different signaling zones within the cell that coordinate the cytoskeleton in space and time and also how these zones are created and maintained.

A new perspective, thanks to a comprehensive database

At the cytoskeletal construction site, the Rho GTPase proteins set the tone. When these molecular switches are activated, they send commands to the machinery on site. There are 145 regulatory proteins that control these molecular switches: RhoGEF proteins turn them on, RhoGAP proteins turn them off. Now Rocks and his team have systematically investigated all these regulators for the first time and created a kind of library. Researchers from all over the world can access this library to see which molecular switches individual proteins control, where in the cell this occurs and which binding partners it has.

The comprehensive information contained in the protein library allows proteins to be analyzed at the systems level for the first time - i.e., from a bird's eye perspective. This has revealed new collective properties of the regulators that were previously imperceptible. In this way, researchers discovered a new mechanism that explains how cell migration is controlled.

Focal adhesions control the balance of two opposing processes

Scientists were aware that two opposing processes controlled by the cytoskeleton - cell protrusion and cell contraction - need to occur in separate places in the cell to allow it to move. In one construction site at the front of the cell, the molecular switches give the command for cell protrusion in the migration direction. Further behind, towards the cell interior, they trigger a contraction of the cytoskeleton. The central question investigated by the MDC team was how Rho GTPases coordinate these two spatially separated processes.

The spatial organization of the two opposing processes is made possible through focal adhesions, explains Rocks. These are protein accumulations located directly below the cell membrane that anchor the cell to its environment. Focal adhesions occur close to the front of the cell, mature into more stable structures and eventually dissolve again. As the cell travels through focal adhesions during migration, these move from the front to the middle of the cell. "The cell exploits the fact that focal adhesions change their location," Rocks says. Initially, his team discovered a surprising number of regulatory proteins on these structures. But the real surprise, he says, "was that we found a specific subgroup of regulators located almost exclusively on newly formed focal adhesions at the cell's edge and another separate subgroup on mature structures towards the middle of the cell." These subgroups control the opposing cytoskeletal processes mentioned above, creating the spatially separated signal zones. The researchers were also able to show that both processes are linked by mechanical forces in the cell, which can help maintain a balance between the number of newly formed focal adhesions and the number of mature ones.

Rocks next plans to investigate how precisely the collective Rho GTPase regulators on the focal adhesions communicate with the cytoskeletal machinery, whether the principle of spatial separation of these proteins also plays a role on other cell structures and how a defective regulatory function can ultimately lead to diseases.

Rocks confirms that gaining this systemic view of cell shape regulation has taken a great deal of effort. "However, it was absolutely essential to revitalize this research field and open up new conceptual approaches for further study," the researcher says. The database and protein library are now available to all scientists worldwide.

Prolonged fear and anxiety brought on by major stressors, like the coronavirus pandemic, can not only take a toll on a person's mental health, but may also have a lasting impact on a man's sperm composition that could affect his future offspring. That is the finding of a provocative new study published in the journal Nature Communications by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

The research outlines a biological mechanism for how a father's experience with stress can influence fetal brain development in the womb. The effects of paternal stress can be transferred to offspring through changes in the extracellular vesicles that then interact with maturing sperm. Extracellular vesicles are small membrane-bound particles that transport proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids between cells. They are produced in large amounts in the reproductive tract and play an integral role in sperm maturation.

"There are so many reasons that reducing stress is beneficial especially now when our stress levels are chronically elevated and will remain so for the next few months," said study corresponding author Tracy Bale, PhD, Professor of Pharmacology and Director of the Center for Epigenetic Research in Child Health & Brain Development at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. "Properly managing stress can not only improve mental health and other stress-related ailments, but it can also help reduce the potential lasting impact on the reproductive system that could impact future generations."

She and her colleagues did not specifically study those who were under stress due to the coronavirus pandemic.

To examine a novel biological role for extracellular vesicles in transferring dad's stress to sperm, the researchers examined extracellular vesicles from mice following treatment with the stress hormone corticosterone. After treatment, the extracellular vesicles showed dramatic changes in their overall size as well as their protein and small RNA content.

When sperm were incubated with these previously "stressed" extracellular vesicles prior to fertilizing an egg, the resulting mouse pups showed significant changes in patterns of early brain development, and as adults these mice were also significantly different than controls for how they responded to stress themselves.

To see if similar differences occurred in human sperm, the researchers recruited students from the University of Pennsylvania to donate sperm each month for six months, and complete questionnaires about their perceived stress state in the preceding month. They found that students who had experienced elevated stress in months prior showed significant changes in the small RNA content of their sperm, while those who had no change in stress levels experienced little or no change. These data confirm a very similar pattern found in the mouse study.

"Our study shows that the baby's brain develops differently if the father experienced a chronic period of stress before conception, but we still do not know the implications of these differences," said Dr. Bale. "Could this prolonged higher level of stress raise the risk for mental health issues in future offspring, or could experiencing stress and managing it well help to promote stress resilience? We don't really know at this point, but our data highlight why further studies are necessary."

The research team did find that stress-induced changes in the male reproductive system take place at least a month after the stress is attenuated and life has resumed its normal patterns. "It appears the body's adaptation to stress is to return to a new baseline," Dr. Bale said, "a post-stress physiological state - termed allostasis."

This research was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and included co-authors from the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the Department of Pharmaceutical Science at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, as well as the University of Pennsylvania.

"This research represents a critical step in understanding important mechanisms that underlie the field of intergenerational epigenetics," said UMSOM Dean E. Albert Reece, MD, PhD, MBA, who is also the Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, University of Maryland, and the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor. "Such knowledge is crucial to identify early interventions to improve reproduction and early childhood development down the road."

While the study did not test stress management interventions to determine what effects they might have on attenuating the changes in sperm composition, Dr. Bale, who goes for regular runs to reduce the stress of the current COVID-19 pandemic, contends that any lifestyle habits that are good for the brain are likely good for the reproductive system.

"It is important to realize that social distancing does not have to mean social isolation, especially with modern technologies available to many of us," said Joshua Gordon, Director of the National Institute of Mental Health in his web message about coping with coronavirus. "Connecting with our friends and loved ones, whether by high tech means or through simple phone calls, can help us maintain ties during stressful days ahead and will give us strength to weather this difficult passage."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has tips on "stress and coping" page on their COVID-19 site that recommends the following to "support yourself":

Take breaks from watching, reading, or listening to news stories, including social media. Hearing about the pandemic repeatedly can be upsetting.

Take care of your body. Take deep breaths, stretch, or meditate. Try to eat healthy, well-balanced meals, exercise regularly, get plenty of sleep, and avoid alcohol and drugs.

Make time to unwind. Try to do some other activities you enjoy.

Connect with others. Talk with people you trust about your concerns and how you are feeling.