Earth

Analyzing how people move about in their daily lives has long been important to urban planners, traffic engineers, and others developing new infrastructure projects.

But amid the social restrictions and quarantine policies imposed during the global spread of COVID-19--which is directly linked to the movement of people--human mobility patterns changed dramatically.

To understand just how COVID-19 affected human movement on a global scale, Shouraseni Sen Roy, a professor in the College of Arts and Sciences Department of Geography and Sustainable Development, and graduate student Christopher Chapin developed COVID-19 vs. Human Mobility, an innovative and interactive web application that, shared in a new study, shows the connections between human mobility, government policies, and cases of COVID-19.

"At a macro level, understanding movement patterns of people can help influence decision making for higher-level policies, like social gathering restrictions, mask recommendations, and tracking and tracing the spread of infectious diseases," said Sen Roy. "At a local level, understanding the movement of people can lead to more specific decisions, like where to set up testing sites or vaccination sites."

Using a collection of big data sets, Chapin, who in May earned his Master of Science in Business Analytics with a minor in geospatial technology, developed the web application from three independent sources: Apple Maps, which provides data on human movement via walking, driving, and public transportation; Oxford University's COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, which provides data on government policies implemented during the pandemic; and global cases of COVID-19 gathered by Johns Hopkins University.

"Putting together this data application was a very ambitious project," said Chapin, the lead author of the study in the Journal of Geovisualization and Spatial Analysis. "I'm really proud of the end result and grateful that Dr. Sen Roy pushed me to get the application published. Now other researchers can access the massive amount of data on COVID-19 and human mobility on a global scale."

Users of the interactive web application can select a country, or a specific state or county in the U.S. and view comparisons between human mobility and COVID-19 cases across time. They also can view information on government policies in relation to the spread of COVID-19.

"Since the initial launch, we have continued to update the application with appropriate data at regular intervals," said Sen Roy. "The web application produces interesting visualizations that can reveal fascinating trends specific to a given area that might otherwise not be recognized."

During their exploration of the data, the researchers found a handful of case studies that suggested interesting trends. For example, in New Orleans, the application shows a spike in human mobility at the end of February 2020, which coincided with Mardi Gras celebrations. Coincidentally, there was a corresponding spike in COVID-19 cases almost a month after the event.

"We are hoping to garner more conversation and interest in the application that can help us and other researchers continue to see how COVID-19 has and continues to impact our world," said Sen Roy.

Although the application is specific to the pandemic, she noted that the framework could be modified rather easily to create a similar application for natural disasters--as long as appropriate data sets are available.

"Understanding historic mobility patterns, both under normal circumstances and in response to extreme events like a pandemic or a natural disaster, is surely needed for policy makers to make informed decisions regarding transportation systems and more," she said. "In this context, we hope that our application can be of use."

The fungus Fusarium verticillioides is one of the causes of red rot, the most serious sugarcane disease. Losses average around USD 1 billion per harvest in Brazil alone.

The traditional approach to the etiology of this disease is that it is triggered by Diatraea saccharalis, a moth usually referred to as the sugarcane borer. In the caterpillar stage, this insect bores into the stem of the plant, which is later infected opportunistically by the fungus.

However, a study conducted in Brazil by the University of São Paulo's Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture (ESALQ-USP) has turned this model upside down, showing that the trigger is not the insect but the fungus. "It's the first scientifically demonstrated case of a pathogenic fungus manipulating both its vector [the insect] and host [the plant] for its own benefit," José Maurício Simões Bento, a professor at ESALQ-USP and one of the principal investigators for the study, told.

An opportunistic fungus does not depend on vectors but infects the host by entering it through a lesion in its structure. This case is different. F. verticillioides changes the characteristics of the vector and host to promote its dissemination. "We establish a new paradigm for the association plant-insect-fungus in sugarcane plantations," Bento said.

The research was supported by São Paulo Research Foundation - FAPESP via grants for two Thematic Projects (Grants 14/50275-9 and 14/50871-0), as well as a PhD scholarship and a master's scholarship awarded to members of the research group.

The group's findings are reported in an article entitled "Fungal phytopathogen modulates plant and insect responses to promote its dissemination", set to publish on June 14 in the prestigious ISME Journal, the official Journal of the International Society for Microbial Ecology, owned by Springer Nature.

"Previously the moth was the target and the idea was that the fungus merely took advantage of holes made in the stem by its caterpillars. We discovered this is not the case. The fungus manipulates the insect in order to penetrate the plant and manipulates the plant to attract more insects," said Márcio de Castro Silva Filho, also a professor at ESALQ-USP and co-principal investigator for the study.

Through several experiments, the researchers discovered that sugarcane plants infected by F. verticillioides produce volatile compounds that are irresistible to pregnant females of the moth Diatraea saccharalis. Attracted by these compounds, the moths lay their eggs in the plants. When the caterpillars hatch, they penetrate the stems and are themselves attracted by the volatile compounds, which they ingest. When they enter the pupal stage and develop into adult moths, they are already carriers of the fungus.

"These infected young moths transmit the fungus to the next generation via their eggs," Silva Filho said. "Unlike healthy moths, they're attracted by the volatile compounds in healthy uninfected plants, which they infect by laying eggs in them. The fungus thereby manipulates both the plant and the insect to promote its dissemination."

Instrumentalized by the volatile compounds, females that do not carry the fungus prefer to lay their eggs in infected plants, while infected females prefer healthy plants. Red rot spreads to more and more cane plantations via this insidious mechanism.

Red rot destroys between 50% and 70% of the sucrose content of infected sugarcane stems. "Our study revolutionizes the science of this disease, considered the most serious threat to sugarcane and responsible for huge losses to ethanol and sugar producers," Silva Filho said. "We show that the caterpillar is the vector, in contrast with the view that the fungus enters the plant via the holes made by the caterpillar."

Reston, VA (Embargoed until 5:00 p.m. EDT, Sunday, June 13, 2021) - A new imaging technique has the potential to detect neurological disorders--such as Alzheimer's disease--at their earliest stages, enabling physicians to diagnose and treat patients more quickly. Termed super-resolution, the imaging methodology combines position emission tomography (PET) with an external motion tracking device to create highly detailed images of the brain. This research was presented at the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging's 2021 Virtual Annual Meeting.

In brain PET imaging, the quality of the images is often limited by unwanted movements of the patient during scanning. In this study, researchers utilized super-resolution to harness the typically undesired head motion of subjects to enhance the resolution in brain PET.

Moving phantom and non-human primate experiments were performed on a PET scanner in conjunction with an external motion tracking device that continuously measured head movement with extremely high precision. Static reference PET acquisitions were also performed without inducing movement. After data from the imaging devices were combined, researchers recovered PET images with noticeably higher resolution than that achieved in the static reference scans.

"This work shows that one can obtain PET images with a resolution that outperforms the scanner's resolution by making use, counterintuitively perhaps, of usually undesired patient motion," said Yanis Chemli, MSc, PhD, candidate at the Gordon Center for Medical Imaging in Boston, Massachusetts. "Our technique not only compensates for the negative effects of head motion on PET image quality, but it also leverages the increased sampling information associated with imaging of moving targets to enhance the effective PET resolution."

While this super-resolution technique has only been tested in preclinical studies, researchers are currently working on extending it to human subjects. Looking to the future, Chemli noted the important impact that super-resolution may have on brain disorders, specifically Alzheimer's disease. "Alzheimer's disease is characterized by the presence of tangles composed of tau protein. These tangles start accumulating very early on in Alzheimer's disease--sometimes decades before symptoms--in very small regions of the brain. The better we can image these small structures in the brain, the earlier we may be able to diagnose and, perhaps in the future, treat Alzheimer's disease," he noted.

Abstract 34. "Super-Resolution in Brain PET Using a Real Time Motion Capture System," Yanis Chemli, LTCI, Telecom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Paris, France, and Gordon Center for Medical Imaging, Boston, Massachusetts; Marc-Andre Tetrault, Computer Engineering, Universite de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada; Marc Normandin, Georges El Fakhri, Jinsong Ouyang and Yoann Petibonn, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts; and Isabelle Bloch, Sorbonne Universite, CNRS, LIP6, Paris, France, and LTCI, Telecom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Paris, France.

For decades, the ice shelf helping to hold back one of the fastest-moving glaciers in Antarctica has gradually thinned. Analysis of satellite images reveals a more dramatic process in recent years: From 2017 to 2020, large icebergs at the ice shelf's edge broke off, and the glacier sped up.

Since floating ice shelves help to hold back the larger grounded mass of the glacier, the recent speedup due to the weakening edge could shorten the timeline for Pine Island Glacier's eventual collapse into the sea. The study from researchers at the University of Washington and British Antarctic Survey was published June 11 in the open-access journal Science Advances.

"We may not have the luxury of waiting for slow changes on Pine Island; things could actually go much quicker than expected," said lead author Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the UW Applied Physics Laboratory. "The processes we'd been studying in this region were leading to an irreversible collapse, but at a fairly measured pace. Things could be much more abrupt if we lose the rest of that ice shelf."

Pine Island Glacier contains approximately 180 trillion tons of ice -- equivalent to 0.5 meters, or 1.6 feet, of global sea level rise. It is already responsible for much of Antarctica's contribution to sea-level rise, causing about one-sixth of a millimeter of sea level rise each year, or about two-thirds of an inch per century, a rate that's expected to increase. If it and neighboring Thwaites Glacier speed up and flow completely into the ocean, releasing their hold on the larger West Antarctic Ice Sheet, global seas could rise by several feet over the next few centuries.

These glaciers have attracted attention in recent decades as their ice shelves thinned because warmer ocean currents melted the ice's underside. From the 1990s to 2009, Pine Island Glacier's motion toward the sea accelerated from 2.5 kilometers per year to 4 kilometers per year (1.5 miles per year to 2.5 miles per year). The glacier's speed then stabilized for almost a decade.

Results show that what's happened more recently is a different process, Joughin said, related to internal forces on the glacier.

From 2017 to 2020, Pine Island's ice shelf lost one-fifth of its area in a few dramatic breaks that were captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites, operated by the European Space Agency on behalf of the European Union. The researchers analyzed images from January 2015 to March 2020 and found that the recent changes on the ice shelf were not caused by processes directly related to ocean melting.

"The ice shelf appears to be ripping itself apart due to the glacier's acceleration in the past decade or two," Joughin said.

Two points on the glacier's surface that were analyzed in the paper sped up by 12% between 2017 and 2020. The authors used an ice flow model developed at the UW to confirm that the loss of the ice shelf caused the observed speedup.

"The recent changes in speed are not due to melt-driven thinning; instead they're due to the loss of the outer part of the ice shelf," Joughin said. "The glacier's speedup is not catastrophic at this point. But if the rest of that ice shelf breaks up and goes away then this glacier could speed up quite a lot."

It's not clear whether the shelf will continue to crumble. Other factors, like the slope of the land below the glacier's receding edge, will come into play, Joughin said. But the results change the timeline for when Pine Island's ice shelf might disappear and how fast the glacier might move, boosting its contribution to rising seas.

"The loss of Pine Island's ice shelf now looks like it possibly could occur in the next decade or two, as opposed to the melt-driven subsurface change playing out over 100 or more years," said co-author Pierre Dutrieux, an ocean physicist at British Antarctic Survey. "So it's a potentially much more rapid and abrupt change."

Pine Island's ice shelf is important because it's helping to hold back this relatively unstable West Antarctic glacier, the way the curved buttresses on Notre Dame cathedral hold up the cathedral's mass. Once those buttresses are removed, the slow-moving glacier can flow more quickly downward to the ocean, contributing to rising seas.

"Sediment records in front of and beneath the Pine Island ice shelf indicate that the glacier front has remained relatively stable over a few thousand years," Dutrieux said. "Regular advance and break-ups happened at approximately the same location until 2017, and then successively worsened each year until 2020."

What The Study Did: This study of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 examines the association of anticoagulation treatment with mortality rates.

Authors: Valerie M. Vaughn, M.D., M.Sc., of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, is the corresponding author.

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

(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.11788)

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

What The Study Did: Researchers compared the association between symptoms and SARS-CoV-2 RNA levels in children and adults.

Authors: Erin Chung, M.D., of the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, is the corresponding author.

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

(doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2021.2025)

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

So-called "good fatty acids" are essential for human health and much sought after by those who try to eat healthily. Among the Omega-3 fatty acids, DHA or docosahexaenoic acid is crucial to brain function, vision and the regulation of inflammatory phenomena.

In addition to these virtues, DHA is also associated with a reduction in the incidence of cancer. How it works is the subject of a major discovery by a multidisciplinary team of University of Louvain (UCLouvain) researchers, who have just elucidated the biochemical mechanism that allows DHA and other related fatty acids to slow the development of tumours. This is a major advance that has recently been published in the prestigious journal Cell Metabolism.

Key to the discovery: interdisciplinarity

In 2016, Olivier Feron's UCLouvain team, which specialises in oncology, discovered that cells in an acidic microenvironment (acidosis) within tumours replace glucose with lipids as an energy source in order to multiply. In collaboration with UCLouvain's Cyril Corbet, Prof. Feron demonstrated in 2020 that these same cells are the most aggressive and acquire the ability to leave the original tumour to generate metastases. Meanwhile, Yvan Larondelle, a professor in the UCLouvain Faculty of Bioengineering, whose team is developing improved dietary lipid sources, proposed to Prof. Feron that they combine their skills in a research project, led by PhD candidate Emeline Dierge, to evaluate the behaviour of tumour cells in the presence of different fatty acids.

Thanks to the support of the Fondation Louvain, the Belgian Cancer Foundation and the Télévie telethon, the team quickly identified that these acidotic tumour cells responded in diametrically opposite ways depending on the fatty acid they were absorbing. Within a few weeks, the results were both impressive and surprising. "We soon found that certain fatty acids stimulated the tumour cells while others killed them," the researchers explained. DHA literally poisons them.

A fatal overload

The poison acts on tumour cells via a phenomenon called ferroptosis, a type of cell death linked to the peroxidation of certain fatty acids. The greater the amount of unsaturated fatty acids in the cell, the greater the risk of their oxidation. Normally, in the acidic compartment within tumours, cells store these fatty acids in lipid droplets, a kind of bundle in which fatty acids are protected from oxidation. But in the presence of a large amount of DHA, the tumour cell is overwhelmed and cannot store the DHA, which oxidises and leads to cell death. By using a lipid metabolism inhibitor that prevents the formation of lipid droplets, researchers were able to observe that this phenomenon is further amplified, which confirms the identified mechanism and opens the door to combined treatment possibilities.

For their study, UCLouvain researchers used a 3D tumour cell culture system, called spheroids. In the presence of DHA, spheroids first grow and then implode. The team also administered a DHA-enriched diet to mice with tumours. The result: tumour development was significantly slowed compared to that in mice on a conventional diet.

This UCLouvain study shows the value of DHA in fighting cancer. "For an adult," the UCLouvain researchers stated, "it's recommended to consume at least 250 mg of DHA per day. But studies show that our diet provides on average only 50 to 100 mg per day. This is well below the minimum recommended intake."

Reston, VA (Embargoed until 11:00 a.m. EDT, Friday, June 11, 2021)--Preclinical trials of a new radiopharmaceutical to treat ovarian cancer have produced successful results, dramatically limiting tumor growth and decreasing tumor mass. Designed specifically for ovarian cancers that are resistant to traditional therapies, the new radiopharmaceutical can be produced in 25 minutes at low cost, which leads to better efficiency compared with alternative methods. This research was presented at the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging 2021 Annual Meeting.

According to the American Cancer Society, more than 20,000 women are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year and nearly 14,000 will die from the disease. Ovarian cancer patients have a five-year survival rate of 49.1 percent. It is the fifth leading cause of cancer-related death among women.

In the study, researchers utilized a new generator system to develop the targeted alpha-therapy Pb-214-TCMC-trastuzumab to treat HER2-postive ovarian cancer. Ovarian cancer cells and mice bearing ovarian cancer tumors were split into three groups: those treated with Pb-214-TCMC-trastuzumab, those treated with Pb-214-TCMC-IgG and an untreated control group. All groups were imaged over time to determine the effectiveness of the treatment.

Compared to the Pb-214-TCMC-IgG and control groups, the tumor signal for mice and cells treated with Pb-214-TCMC-trastuzumab decreased dramatically over the course of the study, signaling the efficacy of the therapy. There were no adverse side effects from the treatment as determined by weight loss of all animals surviving.

"The short 27-minute half-life of Pb-214 is ideal for fractioned alpha particle therapeutic applications," stated Mike Zamiara, study author and president of Niowave Inc. in East Lansing, Michigan. "The generator system can provide Pb-214 every hour, potentially providing a new source of alpha particle therapy to patients at lower cost. In the future, the generator system will be available for many therapeutic products in a turn-key system under development, providing reliable doses for improved patient care."

Abstract 93. "Therapeutic Efficacy of Pb-214-labeled Trastuzumab in a Preclinical Model of Ovarian Cancer," Abdullah Metebi, Comparative Medicine and Integrative Biology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; Chelsea Nayback, Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; Jinda Fan, Departments of Radiology and Chemistry, Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; Nathan Johnson, John Diemer, Terry Grimm, Mike Zamiara, Niowave, Inc., Lansing, Michigan; and Kurt Zinn, Radiology and Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan.

The internet era that we live in depends completely on the transfer of vast information over optical fibers. Optical fibers are literally everywhere. In fact, the overall length of optical fibers installed on our planet is sufficient to reach planet Uranus and back. However, the transfer of information from point A to point B is not enough. The information that we send and receive must also be processed. Light waves take up an increasing role in addressing that task as well. In addition, optical fibers can do more for us than just relay information: They constitute an exceptional sensing platform. Optical fibers support measurements from a long stand-off distance, simply installed within structures, and suitable for hazardous environments. Optical fibers also support spatially distributed mapping, in which every section serves as an independent node of a sensory network. In both signal processing and sensing tasks, the operation of optical fibers can be significantly aided by an ex-factor that is initially surprising: ultrasound.

Prof. Avi Zadok from the Faculty of Engineering of Bar-Ilan University, Israel, explains: "We are accustomed to think of the propagation of light and ultrasound as two separate realms. However, this would be an oversimplification. The propagation of light down a fiber, for example, can excite ultrasonic elastic waves. At the same time, the same ultrasonic waves affect and scatter light." Such inter-relation goes beyond an academic exercise. Prof. Zadok continues: "Ultrasound waves can make optical fibers do a better job. They can help us select specific information that belongs to specific users. They can also perform sensing measurements beyond the boundaries of the fiber itself, where light does not reach." The formulation and employment of such interaction between light and sound waves is therefore of much potential consequence.

In a paper published recently in Light: Science and Applications [1], a team of researchers from Prof. Zadok's group analyze and measure the interplay of light and ultrasound in a particularly interesting class of fibers. Doctoral student Gil Bashan explains: "The most standard optical fibers are called single-mode fibers. In those, the opportunities for tailoring the light-and-ultrasound interplay are rather limited. In this study we turned to fibers that are called polarization maintaining, or PM fibers. Such fibers are still readily available and employed on a very large scale, so there is no difficulty of gaining access to them. However, they give us more options to play with."

They key factor in PM fibers is that like can propagate in two different ways. Gil Bashan continues: "Light that is polarized in the vertical direction inside the fiber takes up a certain speed, however light that is polarized in the horizontal direction takes up another one. This property of PM fibers was not meant to assist in ultrasonics. Nevertheless, we find it very interesting and useful for our purposes. When light can be either 'fast' or 'slow' along the PM fiber, we have more options to chose from, and larger freedom to design and employ the interplay of light and ultrasound."

One particularly interesting result is the removal of symmetry between directions of propagation. Fellow student Hagai Diamandi describes what this means: "In standard conditions, light should propagate the same way either from left to right, or from right to left. The physics knows no difference. The ultrasonic waves supported by PM fibers are able to change that. Once introduced, they may lead to non-reciprocity. Light in one direction gets switched between the vertical and horizontal states, but that does not happen at the opposite direction of propagation." Non-reciprocal propagation is fundamentally intriguing, but they may also assist in advanced sensor networks, as explained in [1]. Hagai Diamandi concludes: "There have been brilliant reports on non-reciprocal propagation of light due to ultrasound before. However previous demonstrations required specialty fibers or photonic circuits that are custom-made in research labs. These PM fibers come off the shelf."

PHILADELPHIA-- The prevalence of genetic mutations associated with breast cancer in Black and white women is the same, according to a new JAMA Oncology study of nearly 30,000 patients led by researchers in the Basser Center for BRCA at the Abramson Cancer Center. About five percent of both Black and white women have a genetic mutation that increases their risk of breast cancer.

"The findings challenge past, smaller studies that found Black women face a greater genetic risk and the suggestion that race should be an independent factor when considering genetic testing," said first author Susan Domchek, MD, executive director of the Basser Center for BRCA. "We shouldn't make changes to testing guidelines based on race alone. Rather, our efforts should focus on ensuring equal access to and uptake of testing to minimize disparities in care and outcomes."

Black women are more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer before age 50 or with estrogen receptor (ER)-negative and triple-negative breast cancer than non-Hispanic white women. It has remained unclear whether these disparities are related to racial differences in germline genetic pathogenic variants (PVs) in known breast cancer genes and if race should inform strategies for genetic testing.

The latest multi-institutional effort--which follows a 2020 study that investigated relative breast cancer risk in Black women but with no direct comparison to white women--analyzed data from seven population-based studies in the CARRIERS consortium. The researchers measured the prevalence of PVs in 12 genes known to confer breast cancer risk. The CARRIERS consortium is a group of 17 large epidemiology studies in the U.S. focused on women in the general population who develop breast cancer.

Among 3,946 Black and 25,287 non-Hispanic White women, there was no statistically significant difference in PVs by race: 5.65 percent of Black women vs. 5.06 percent of non-Hispanic White women had PVs in the 12 genes. The researchers also found that younger age and ER-negative breast cancer were risk factors in the most impactful genes, including BRCA1, BRCA2, and PALB2, for both white and Black women.

Compared to white women, Black women are much less likely to undergo genetic counseling and testing, largely due to differences in physician recommendations or access to care.

To help close that gap, the Basser Center launched its Black & BRCA initiative in 2020 to bring tailored resources and support to the Black community for genetic counseling and testing. The outreach effort provides tools to collect family history, addresses myths, and educates providers.

"At a time when Black men and women are more likely to be diagnosed with cancer at later stages when it is less treatable, Black & BRCA seeks to empower people to understand their family health history and take action to prevent cancer from one generation to the next," Domchek said.

The Multivariable Integrated Evaluation (MVIE) method can help meteorologists to quantitatively evaluate the overall performance of a climate model in simulating multiple variables like air temperature, precipitation, and vector wind, against observed ones.

Recently, researchers from Nanjing University and the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed a simple-to-use Multivariable Integrated Evaluation Tool (MVIETool) coded with Python/NCL to facilitate climate model evaluation and models inter-comparison, improving the MVIE method.

The study was published in Geoscientific Model Development.

"The improved MVIE method can provide a more comprehensive and precise evaluation of climate model performance. With the support of the MVIETool, one can easily evaluate model performance in terms of each individual variable and/or multiple variables," said Mengzhuo Zhang from the School of Atmospheric Sciences, Nanjing University, the first author of the study.

In the improved method, the area-weighting is taken into the definition of statistics in MVIE, which makes the evaluation results of spatial fields more accurate. "The method allows a mixed evaluation of scalar and vector fields," said Prof. Zhongfeng Xu from IAP, the corresponding author of the study. "A multivariable integrated skill score is proposed as a flexible and normalized index to quantitatively measure a model's ability to simulate multiple fields."

In addition to climate model evaluation, the improved MVIE method may also be applied to other areas, e.g., machine learning. One may use the MVIE method to measure the overall accuracy of multiple variables generated by a machine learning model relative to the target values.

The build-up of calcium in a major blood vessel is linked with a 39 per cent higher risk of serious falls in older women, new Edith Cowan University (ECU) research has found.

This calcium build-up, known as abdominal aortic calcification (AAC), is a hardening of the abdomen's largest artery, which can be identified early on a commonly used bone density machine scan.

The study's findings could help health professionals to identify people at risk of serious falls early to prevent future falls and their potentially life changing consequences.

Foiling future falls

Falls are a growing public health concern, causing the deaths of an estimated 680,000 people globally each year. They are also one of the leading causes of injury and disability in Australia, particularly in older people, with approximately one person hospitalised every five minutes due to a fall.

Co-lead author, ECU PhD candidate Abadi Gebre, said the findings offer a new pathway for falls prevention.

"We found more than 7 out of 10 women in our study had AAC, which is an alarming number of people at risk of suffering a really serious fall," said Mr Gebre.

"Falls can not only cause fractures and other injuries, they can also result in loss of mobility and independence. When you lose your independence, you lose quality of life and social connection. This often leads to a rapid deterioration of physical and mental health."

According to Mr Gebre, the study is the first-time researchers have investigated whether AAC assessed on scans from bone density machines can identify women at a higher risk of serious falls.

"More than half a million older Australians undergo routine bone mineral density testing every year to detect osteoporosis," said Mr Gebre.

"If we can capture an additional scan to look for evidence of AAC at the same time, we can potentially identify and prevent future harmful falls.

"We often wait until a person suffers a fall to intervene and at that point the damage is already done."

Getting to the heart of falling

The study's senior author Associate Professor Joshua Lewis, a National Heart Foundation Future Leader Fellow at ECU, said the findings demonstrate the importance of detecting AAC early.

"We know that AAC identifies women at a higher risk of heart attacks and strokes, but our research now shows that it also identifies women at a higher falls risk, independent of other falls risk factors and muscle strength," he said.

The researchers say the next step is to find out how and why AAC and falls are linked and if specific dietary and lifestyle interventions may prevent the risk of both cardiovascular disease and falls.

The study, funded by the Rebecca L. Cooper Medical Research Foundation, examined how blood vessel disease is linked to falls and fractures in 1,053 Western Australian women with an average age of 75 years. The Perth Longitudinal Study of Aging in Women (PLSAW), is cohort study of Western Australian women who agreed to provide epidemiological data over 15 years. The researchers acknowledge their important contribution.

The research is part of a collaboration with Professor Richard Prince from the University of Western Australia and builds on ECU's research into the association between AAC and an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

ECU is also conducting an NHMRC-funded study that is investigating how artificial intelligence could be used in conjunction with bone density scans to identify blood vessel disease.

'Abdominal aortic calcification is associated with increased risk of injurious fall-related hospitalisations in older Australian women' was published today in Atherosclerosis.

With the onset of the 4th industrial revolution, artificial intelligence has recently been utilized in smartphone cameras, providing functions such as auto-focusing, face recognition, and 100x zoom, to dramatically improve our daily life. It has also been applied to research and development of new materials.

A joint research team from POSTECH and Korea Institute of Materials Science (KIMS) has applied deep learning to the scanning electron microscopy (SEM) system to develop a technique that can detect and improve the quality of SEM images without human oversight. The EMS is an essential material analysis equipment used for developing new materials. The findings from this research were recently published in Acta Materialia, the most authoritative journal in the field of metal materials.

The SEM is one of the most advanced material analysis equipment crucial to investigating the correlation between the microstructural and physical, chemical, and mechanical properties of materials by providing their microstructural image data. However, in order to obtain high-quality, clear SEM images, the operator must be highly-skilled to maneuver the system with high precision - otherwise, it can lead to low-quality microscopy images. The quality of these images needs to be improved because they directly affect the subsequent material analysis processes.

To this, the joint research team developed a deep learning-based refocusing method that automatically detects and improves the quality of the microscopy images. This technology is based on multi-scale deep neural network and it demonstrated that the image quality can be improved on blind settings without any prior knowledge or assumptions of the degree of blurring on the level of image degradation. In addition, the researchers also proposed a technique to train the network to learn not only how but also where to refocus in non-uniformly defocused images, moving a step closer to commercializing AI-based material analysis equipment.

"We expect the cost and time for developing new materials to be reduced by automating the SEM imaging process of the scanning electron microscopy, which is widely used for research and development of new materials," remarked Professor Seungchul Lee who led the study.

An inter-university research group has succeeded in constructing the gene expression network behind the vascular development process in plants. They achieved this by performing bioinformatics analysis using the 'VISUAL' (*1) tissue culture platform, which generates vascular stem cells (*2) from leaf cells. In this network, they also discovered a new BES/BZR transcription factor (*3), BEH3, which regulates vascular stem cells. In addition, they illuminated a novel vascular cell maintenance system whereby BEH3 competes with other transcription factors from the same BES/BZR family in order to stabilize vascular stem cell multiplication and differentiation.

The joint research group consisted of scientific researcher FURUYA Tomoyuki and Associate Professor KONDO Yuki et al. (of Kobe University's Graduate School of Science), Kyushu University's Professor SATAKE Akiko, Specially Appointed Professor TANOKURA Masaru and Specially Appointed Associate Professor MIYAKAWA Takuya (of the University of Tokyo's Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences), and Associate Professor YAMORI Wataru (of the University of Tokyo's Institute for Sustainable Agro-ecosystem Services).

The researchers hope to identify more regulatory factors for stem cells, which will contribute towards our understanding of the molecular basis behind continuous stem cell activity in plants.

These research results were published in the American plant sciences journal The Plant Cell on June 1, 2021.

Main Points

The researchers extracted a total of 394 genes specific to vascular stem cells from extensive gene expression datasets. Among these, they discovered BEH3, a novel stem cell regulatory factor belonging to the BES/BZR family of transcription factors.

They discovered that unlike the other BES/BZR transcription factors, BEH3 has almost no functional domains and competitively inhibits the activity of these other factors.

The research group showed that this competitive relationship between BES/BZR transcription factors stabilizes the multiplication and differentiation of vascular stem cells, illuminating the regulatory system that maintains vascular stem cells' continuous activity.

Research Background

Plants take form by self-replicating their stem cells and differentiating these stem cells so that they have specialized functions for constructing parts of the plant, such as its organs and tissues. Unlike animals, plants continue to regenerate and grow by producing stem cells throughout their life. For example, trees such as cryptomeria can have long lifespans (the Jomon Cedar Tree on Japan's Yakushima Island is at least 2000 years old), and each year they promote secondary growth which results in another tree ring around their trunks. This secondary growth is occurs inside a region of meristem tissue called the cambium layer where vascular stem cells multiply and differentiate into xylem cells (*4) and phloem cells (*5), enabling the trunk to grow wider. In other words, plant must continuously produce vascular stem cells throughout their lives in order to keep growing, and it is vital for them to maintain the balance between stem cell multiplication and differentiation.

In recent years, studies using the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana have been conducted into how the multiplication and differentiation of stem cells are regulated from the perspectives of genetics, life sciences and informatics research. However, the mechanism by which plants regulate and maintain the appropriate balance of stem cells has yet to be understood.

Research Methodology and Findings

In order to analyze the process by which vascular stem cells differentiate into xylem cells and phloem cells (Figure 1), Associate Professor Kondo et al.'s research group developed the tissue culture system 'VISUAL' to artificially generate stem cells from leaf cells. VISUAL has many benefits that make it suitable for research on vascular stem cells, for example, it is easy to genetically analyze plants that have a particular gene function removed (i.e. mutants) and it is also possible to observe the temporal progression of vascular stem cell differentiation. In this study, the researchers collected data on multiple mutants and carried out large-scale analyses of gene expression at various time points. They conducted gene co-expression network analysis (*6) on similarities in the expression patterns to evaluate the relationship between different genes. From this analysis, they succeeded in identifying the distinctive groups of genes in xylem cells, phloem cells and vascular stem cells (Figure 1). Using VISUAL, this research group previously revealed that the BES/BZR transcription factors BES1 and BZR1 play an important role in vascular stem cell differentiation. This time, they identified another BES/BZR transcription factor, BEH3, in the vascular stem cell gene group through network analysis, and also examined its vascular stem cell suppressing function.

Next, the researchers investigated vascular formation using mutants with BEH3's function removed. They found that the mutants had large variations in vascular size compared to the wild type (non-mutant plant) and concluded that BEH3 stabilizes vascular stem cells. The research group had previously found that strengthening the function of BES1 (which promotes vascular cell differentiation) caused the number of vascular cells to decrease, however they found that when they strengthened the function of BEH3 opposite occurred and the number of vascular stem cells increased. Upon researching this further, the research group discovered that even though BEH3 could bind to the same DNA motif (*7, BRRE motif) as the other BES/BZR transcription factors, BEH3's ability to regulate the expression of downstream genes was significantly weaker. These results showed that BEH3 hinders the activity of other BES/BZR transcription factors (Figure 2), and the researchers inferred from this relationship that BEH3's function in vascular stem cells is opposed to that of the factors in the same family, including BES1. A mathematical model was used to verify and simulate this competitive relationship between BEH3 and the other BES/BZR transcription factors, and the results indicated that the presence of BEH3 in vascular stem cells contributes towards stabilizing vascular size (Figure 3).

Further Developments

There are thought to be many important gene candidates in this research group's vascular stem cell gene expression network that will contribute towards understanding of vascular development and functions. It is hoped that the valuable information obtained through this study will accelerate vascular research. In addition, further illuminating the relationships between BEH3 and other BES/BZR transcription factors and their respective differences will deepen our understanding of the mechanism by which plants maintain the balance between stem cell multiplication and differentiation.

In the future, this knowledge could contribute towards biomass production techniques, and other areas that require large-scale stable plant growth.

A team of archaeologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU) made a rare discovery when they unearthed a small clay seal impression dating back some 7000 years. The impression, with two different geometric stamps imprinted on it, was discovered in Tel Tsaf, a prehistoric village located in Israel's Beit She'an Valley up north.

The discovery was made as part of a dig that took place between 2004 and 2007 and was led by HU's Professor Yosef Garfinkel along with two of his students, Professor David Ben Shlomo and Dr. Michael Freikman, both of whom are now researchers at Ariel University. One hundred and fifty clay sealings were originally found at the site, with one being particularly rare and of distinct, historic importance. The object was published in the journal Levant.

Sealings, also known as bulla, are made of a small piece of clay were used in historical times to seal and sign letters and to prevent others from reading their contents. The sealing found in Tel Tsaf is particularly significant because it is the first evidence of the use of seals to mark shipments or to close silos or barns. When a barn door was opened, its seal impression would break - a telltale sign that someone had been there and that the contents inside had been touched or taken. "Even today, similar types of sealing are used to prevent tampering and theft," explained Garfinkel. "It turns out that this was already in use 7,000 years ago by land owners and local administrators to protect their property."

Measuring less than a centimeter wide, the fragment was found in great condition due to the dry climate of the Beit She'an valley. The sealing is marked by symmetrical lines. While many sealings found in First Temple Jerusalem (ca. 2,600 years ago) include a personal name and sometimes biblical figures, the sealing from Tel Tsaf is from a prehistoric era, when writing was not yet in use. Those seals were decorated with geometric shapes instead of letters. The fact that there are two different stamps on the seal impression may indicate a form of commercial activity where the two different people were involved in the transaction.

The found fragment underwent extensive analysis before researchers could determine that it was indeed a seal impression. According to Garfinkel, this is the earliest evidence that seals were used in Israel approximately 7,000 years ago to sign deliveries and keep store rooms closed. While seals have been found in that region dating back to 8,500 years ago, seal impressions from that time have not been found.

Based on a careful scientific analysis of the sealing's clay, the researchers found it wasn't locally sourced but came from a location at least ten kilometers away. Other archeological finds at the site reveal evidence that the Tel Tsaf residents were in contact with populations far beyond ancient Israel. "At this very site we have evidence of contact with peoples from Mesopotamia, Turkey, Egypt and Caucasia," Garfinkel added. "There is no prehistoric site anywhere in the Middle East that reveals evidence of such long-distance trade in exotic items as what we found at this particular site."

The site also yielded clues that the area was home to people of considerable wealth who built up large stores of ingredients and materials, indicating considerable social development. This evidence points to Tel Tsaf as having been a key position in the region that served both local communities and people passing through. "We hope that continued excavations at Tel Tsaf and other places from the same time period will yield additional evidence to help us understand the impact of a regional authority in the southern Levant," concluded Garfinkel.