Earth

These motions were measured by analyzing 10 years of observations from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Using computer models, the scientists have shown that the newly discovered oscillations are resonant modes and owe their existence to the Sun's differential rotation. The oscillations will help establish novel ways to probe the Sun's interior and obtain information about our star's inner structure and dynamics. The scientists describe their findings in today's issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

In the 1960s the Sun'ss high musical notes were discovered: The Sun rings like a bell. Millions of modes of acoustic oscillations with short periods, near 5 minutes, are excited by convective turbulence near the solar surface and are trapped in the solar interior. These 5-minute oscillations have been observed continuously by ground-based telescopes and space observatories since the mid 1990s and have been used very successfully by helioseismologists to learn about the internal structure and dynamics of our star - just like seismologists learn about the interior of the Earth by studying earthquakes. One of the triumphs of helioseismology is to have mapped the Sun's rotation as a function of depth and latitude (the solar differential rotation).

In addition to the 5-minute oscillations, much longer-period oscillations were predicted to exist in stars more than 40 years ago, but had not been identified on the Sun until now. "The long-period oscillations depend on the Sun's rotation; they are not acoustic in nature", says Laurent Gizon, lead author of the new study and director at the MPS. "Detecting the long-period oscillations of the Sun requires measurements of the horizontal motions at the Sun's surface over many years. The continuous observations from the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) onboard SDO are perfect for this purpose."

The team observed many tens of modes of oscillation, each with its own oscillation period and spatial dependence. Some modes of oscillation have maximum velocity at the poles, some at mid-latitudes, and some near the equator. The modes with maximum velocity near the equator are Rossby modes, which the team had already identified in 2018. "The long-period oscillations manifest themselves as very slow swirling motions at the surface of the Sun with speeds of about 5 kilometers per hour - about how fast a person walks", says Zhi-Chao Liang from MPS. Kiran Jain from NSO, together with B. Lekshmi and Bastian Proxauf from MPS, confirmed the results with data from the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG), a network of six solar observatories in the USA, Australia, India, Spain, and Chile.

To identify the nature of these oscillations, the team compared the observational data to computer models. "The models allow us to look inside the Sun's interior and determine the full three-dimensional structure of the oscillations", explains MPS graduate student Yuto Bekki. To obtain the model oscillations, the team began with a model of the Sun's structure and differential rotation inferred from helioseismology. In addition, the strength of the convective driving in the upper layers, and the amplitude of turbulent motions are accounted for in the model. The free oscillations of the model are found by considering small-amplitude perturbations to the solar model. The corresponding velocities at the surface are a good match to the observed oscillations and enabled the team to identify the modes.

"All of these new oscillations we observe on the Sun are strongly affected by the Sun's differential rotation", says MPS scientist Damien Fournier. The dependence of the solar rotation with latitude determines where the modes have maximum amplitudes. "The oscillations are also sensitive to properties of the Sun's interior: in particular to the strength of the turbulent motions and the related viscosity of the solar medium, as well as to the strength of the convective driving," says Robert Cameron from MPS. This sensitivity is strong at the base of the convection zone, about two hundred thousand kilometers beneath the solar surface. "Just like we are using acoustic oscillations to learn about the sound speed in the solar interior with helioseismology, we can use the long-period oscillations to learn about the turbulent processes", he adds.

"The discovery of a new type of solar oscillations is very exciting because it allows us to infer properties, such as the strength of the convective driving, which ultimately control the solar dynamo", says Laurent Gizon. The diagnostic potential of the long-period modes will be fully realized in the coming years using a new exascale computer model being developed as part of the project WHOLESUN, supported by a European Research Council 2018 Synergy Grant.

New findings from zoologists working with birds in Southeast Asia are shining fresh light on the connections between animal behaviour, geology, and evolution - underlining that species can diversify surprisingly quickly under certain conditions.

The zoologists, from Trinity College Dublin's School of Natural Sciences, sequenced DNA and took measurements and song recordings from Sulawesi Babblers (Pellorneum celebense), shy birds that live in the undergrowth on Indonesian islands.

Although these islands were connected by land bridges just tens of thousands of years ago, and although the babblers look so similar that they are currently all considered a single subspecies, the new study shows that their DNA, body size and song have all changed in what is a very brief period of time from an evolutionary perspective.

The zoologists believe that this evolutionary divergence is likely facilitated by the babblers' understorey lifestyle, which limits the birds' movements even though they could easily fly between the islands if they chose to.

In the short time these islands have been isolated, the babbler subspecies have evolved to vary genetically from each other by as much as 1/3 as they do from more distantly related bird species that separated millions of years ago.

Fionn Ó Marcaigh, first author on the paper and a PhD Candidate in Trinity's School of Natural Sciences, said:

"Everyone has heard of Darwin's finches evolving completely different bill shapes on the Galápagos islands. The Galápagos are isolated out in the Pacific, so the birds there have had millions of years to evolve separately. But sometimes evolution can occur on much smaller scales of time and space and can be harder to detect just by looking at the animals in question.

"Unlike the Galápagos, the islands we looked at are just 20 km or less from the mainland. The more we study biodiversity, the more we realise is out there, as species and islands that have never been examined closely can turn out to be full of surprises.

"And a lot of it is under threat: in our study, the islands with the most distinct populations were those made of a particular rock type. This ultramafic rock is full of minerals like nickel, which get into the soil and change which plants can grow, to which the birds have to adapt. But that same nickel is being sought by mining companies so time is running out for the islands' biodiversity before we've even captured a full picture of it or understood how it's evolved."

Hydropower has massive potential as a source of clean electricity, and the Indus basin can be a key player in fulfilling long-term energy storage demands across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. IIASA researchers explored the role the Indus basin could play to support global sustainable development.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the growth of hydropower plants worldwide is set to slow down this decade. This puts at risk the ambitions of countries across the globe aiming to reach net-zero emissions while ensuring reliable and affordable energy supplies for their citizens. Even so, there are thousands of dams planned to be built this next decade. New hydropower dams installed worldwide are forecasted to increase global hydroelectricity capacity from the current 1,200 gigawatt (GW) to around 1,700 GW. Many of these dams are being built in countries with emerging economies, such as those in the Balkan region, Ethiopia, and Pakistan. Hydropower is very important in reaching net zero goals, not only because of its ability to produce clean energy, but also because of its capabilities in terms of energy storage. The Indus basin, which stretches across parts of Afghanistan, China, India, and Pakistan, is one area with huge hydropower potential due to its high altitudes and large water availability.

According to Pakistan's State of Industry Report, 100% of Pakistan's hydropower already comes from the Indus basin, and much of the region's potential has yet to be tapped into. Additionally, an investigation into medium sized hydropower projects in Pakistan revealed that the Indus basin is the region with the largest and cheapest seasonal energy storage potential.

IIASA researchers explored the future of hydropower in the Indus region in a new paper published in the Journal of Energy Storage. They focused much of their research on the costs and benefits of hydropower, water storage, and long-term and short-term energy storage in the Indus Basin. They considered the potential and costs of conventional hydropower dams, as well as seasonal pumped hydropower storage. Unlike conventional dams, which are built in the cross sections of main rivers, seasonal pumped hydropower storage plants act as artificial reservoirs off the main river usually at higher altitudes with a built in power or pumping station that generates hydroelectric power or fills up the reservoir.

According to the researchers, many of the challenges faced in the Indus region regarding hydropower are due to larger water management issues. These issues stem from high population growth seen in the area coinciding with rapid urbanization, industrialization, environmental degradation, lack of water storage infrastructure, and outdated irrigation systems. The seasonality of the Indus region is something else the team had to consider. The Indus River deals with droughts in the winter and monsoon season, and melting snow and ice masses from the mountains in the summer. This considerably increases the flow of the river with many regular flooding events also occurring. Land changes from climate change and reduced groundwater levels further exacerbate flooding events and water scarcity.

To gather their data, the researchers used different models estimating power potentials as well as their corresponding costs. They incorporated five essential components: the physical features of the area, the river network and water flow data, infrastructure cost estimation, and project design optimization.

The researchers' models and analysis concluded that the Indus region has the potential to play a similar role in energy storage for Asia as the Alps does in Europe.

"We found that the levelized energy storage cost in the Indus region is US $1 per megawatt hour (MWh) for conventional hydropower and $2/MWh for seasonal pumped storage, which is the lowest cost long-term energy storage alternative in the world. Even cheaper than natural gas reinjection in empty gas reservoirs, these low costs can justify the use of seasonal pumped hydropower storage to store energy in a yearly, two-year, or three-year energy cycle. The levelized costs of energy storage with batteries is around $100/MWh. This makes hydropower energy storage 100 times cheaper and seasonal pumped hydropower storage 50 times cheaper. For this reason, these are good solutions for long-term energy storage," explains study lead-author Julian Hunt.

As more countries industrialize and develop their economies, growing energy demands are sure to follow. Having long-term energy storage using low emission methods like hydropower is important, especially during the era of climate change. The Indus basin can serve as a global supply.

"During the summer when there is high availability of water in the Indus basin, for example, excess solar power in northern hemisphere countries can be used to pump water in seasonal pumped hydropower storage plants in the basin, so that hydropower can be generated during the winter. With an integrated hydrogen and battery economy in the future, the region could serve as the world's long-term energy storage hub," Hunt concludes.

The sight of felled trees and logging activity can be jarring for nature lovers, but from those sites can sprout young forest growth that's especially attractive to a familiar inhabitant of wooded areas throughout the Northeast - bats.

New findings from researchers at the UConn College of Agriculture, Health, and Natural Resources, published in Forest Ecology and Management, finds that a number of bat species native to the Northeast are highly active in newly created forest spaces, foraging for food at higher rates than is typical of mature forests.

Little is known about how different bat species use forests of varying ages, but Natural Resources and the Environment researchers - including Dan Wright '20 (CAHNR) MS, associate Professor Tracy Rittenhouse, and Assistant Professor in Residence Chad Rittenhouse - sought to learn more. What they found sheds new light on how forests can be managed to support bat populations, most of which are threatened or in decline, says Chad Rittenhouse.

"The reason people haven't worked on this (summer habitat) in bats is due to white nose syndrome and the spread of the disease causing the rapid decline of populations," he says. "The conservation efforts around bats, rightfully so, were really focused in on the hibernaculum caves where the mortality was happening, and where the disease contact between individuals is happening. However, there is this whole foraging and young-rearing period that hasn't been looked at, and we don't know the details of what happens."

Chad Rittenhouse explains that this research focusing on bats sprang from similar research he did in graduate school with birds.

"There was an emphasis on what's called post-fledging ecology of birds, basically finding out what birds do after they leave the nest but before they migrate," he says. "When the young leave the nest, they are going for canopy gaps and small openings within the forest. We didn't really know that previously and through radio telemetry studies and observational studies found that that they were doing that because there is more sunlight, which means more vegetative growth, which means more insects feeding on the vegetation growth, which means young birds can grow more quickly through increased insect consumption. There's also a lot of structure, vertical and horizontal, that was providing cover from predators."

The researchers knew the DEEP Wildlife Division has a bat monitoring program that mainly tracks bats along roadways, where they often forage and commute, says Chad Rittenhouse. Reminded of the fledging bird research, they thought about applying methods that have been used on birds to learn about how bats use forested habitats, and in areas where forest management treatments have been applied.

"Why not look at bats off roads? Why not look at bats in these cut areas? We thought we should look at bats and clear cuts and regenerating forests and just see what's going on. A quick peek at the scientific literature revealed literally only a handful of studies that have looked at this issue."

Tracy Rittenhouse explains the experimental setup, which took place in northwestern Connecticut and southwestern Massachusetts: "We picked sites that were embedded, meaning the sites had mature forest, with a smaller -- depending on how you define smaller - harvested stands embedded within mature forests."

The forest locations varied in age from one to 12 years of regrowth since trees were cut, where researchers then recorded bat foraging calls at night. Through this passive acoustic sampling, they were able to track bat foraging behaviors and identify which species were present.

"We paired every one of our sites that was a cut site with a nearby control site, typically within 100 meters or so which was not cut. What we have is a nice comparison of how bats are using the mature forest and the cut forest," says Chad Rittenhouse.

Tracy Rittenhouse says the results showed a strong pattern where bat foraging activity was the highest in younger forests, and that it steadily declines as the forests age. By day, bats can roost in a variety of structures, resting up before their nocturnal foraging acrobatics, from the eaves of houses or beneath curls of bark on shagbark hickory trees.

"We tend to think that old growth forests must be good for bats, because we know they contain roosting sites, but within 24 hours [of a tree cut], they're roosting and foraging."

Wright adds, "After a cut happens in the forest, bats are really active, using it as both commuting and foraging habitat. As the cuts continue to age, the vegetation height increases, and the foraging space, up in the air, where bats typically forage is not as suitable anymore."

With knowledge of the bat foraging preferences, Tracy Rittenhouse says future studies will include taking a closer look at roosting preferences, but what is clear is that homogenous forest age does not meet the range of needs for everyone.

Though cut trees and logging can be a jarring sight, studies like this one illustrate the importance of management and the impacts on animal populations, says Chad Rittenhouse.

"An important point is that young forest is still forest. I think a lot of people don't think of it that way, but to get to replacement of old trees, we need young trees too. We've been beating this drum about young forests being really important because there are lots of species that are associated with and dependent on young forests."

Wright says, "Forest management in terms of harvesting trees can be a huge asset to wildlife, wildlife conservation, in general. I think our work is pretty great in helping to manage forests and manage sustainability with productivity."

The Indian Ocean has been warming much more than other ocean basins over the last 50-60 years. While temperature changes basin-wide can be unequivocally attributed to human-induced climate change, it is difficult to assess whether contemporary heat and freshwater changes in the Indian Ocean since 1980 represent an anthropogenically-forced transformation of the hydrological cycle. What complicates the assessment is factoring in natural variations, regional-scale trends, a short observational record, climate model uncertainties, and the ocean basin's complex circulation.

A new review paper takes a broad look at whether heat and freshwater changes in the Indian Ocean are consistent with the increase in rainfall that is expected in response to anthropogenic global warming or whether these changes are due to natural variability on multi-decadal and other timescales along with other factors. That distinction has "big implications for climate risk assessment and for the densely populated regions around the Indian Ocean that are vulnerable to the effects of climate change," says Caroline Ummenhofer, lead author of the paper, Heat and freshwater changes in the Indian Ocean region, published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment.

The paper brings together various scientific expertise, tools, and data sources to address key questions regarding climate change in the Indian Ocean, says Ummenhofer, associate scientist in the Physical Oceanography Department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). "The different scientific communities need to come together and have very open discussions about what we can tell from our data, how we can compare apples and oranges, and how we can bring all of this information together to have a better understanding of the entire Indian Ocean system," she says.

"Rather than rely on climate models that struggle to accurately represent the complex circulation, we look at many different observational records including measurements of sea level, and the ocean surface and subsurface temperature and salinity," says co-author Janet Sprintall, a research oceanographer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego.

While some changes in the Indian Ocean appear to be a consistent response to anthropogenic global warming, "in general our ocean observational records are still far too short to distinguish the naturally driven variability from the man-made changes," says Sprintall. "This tells us that we need to continue measuring our oceans--particularly below the surface--so that we can better understand these long-term changes and their causes, and so that we can improve our prediction and response to them."

Quantifying the changes in the Indian Ocean heat and freshwater balance warrants a multi-pronged approach across temporal and spatial scales that integrates in situ observations (including Argo floats robotically programmed to measure ocean temperature, salinity, and other properties; moorings; and buoys), remote sensing by satellites to measure rainfall and sea surface salinity, improved numerical modelling simulations, and paleoclimate proxy networks, the authors note.

Corals are an important paleoclimate archive in the ocean because their calcium carbonate skeletons incorporate the chemical properties of past oceans and so reflect past climate and environmental conditions. "Corals are unique environmental archives that allow us to extend our understanding of Indian Ocean variability centuries farther back in time than the observational record," says co-author Sujata Murty, WHOI adjunct scientist and assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at the University at Albany, State University of New York. "Including the long-term perspective provided by corals alongside that of observations and remote sensing data enriches our understanding of complex climate and ocean systems and improves our ability to anticipate future changes in a warming world."

Maintaining and expanding current remote sensing, in situ observations, and a network of paleo proxies is "crucial" for "disentangling the effects of multi-decadal natural variability and anthropogenic change on heat and freshwater changes" in the Indian Ocean and the Maritime Continent region between the Indian and Pacific oceans, according to the paper.

The Indian Ocean, the paper notes, "is particularly vulnerable to anthropogenic climate change," in part because the ocean is bounded to the north by the Asian continent. This means that heat from the Pacific Ocean that enters the Indian Ocean through the Indonesian Seas cannot easily exit the basin.

The basin "could be a kind of canary in a coal mine," says Ummenhofer, because those changes now being observed in the Indian Ocean also could happen in other oceans. "We can all benefit from having better observations and a better understanding of the ocean so that we can know whether the changes are a climate change signal or part of a natural cycle."

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Scientists who study glacier ice have found viruses nearly 15,000 years old in two ice samples taken from the Tibetan Plateau in China. Most of those viruses, which survived because they had remained frozen, are unlike any viruses that have been cataloged to date.

The findings, published today in the journal Microbiome, could help scientists understand how viruses have evolved over centuries. For this study, the scientists also created a new, ultra-clean method of analyzing microbes and viruses in ice without contaminating it.

"These glaciers were formed gradually, and along with dust and gases, many, many viruses were also deposited in that ice," said Zhi-Ping Zhong, lead author of the study and a researcher at The Ohio State University Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center who also focuses on microbiology. "The glaciers in western China are not well-studied, and our goal is to use this information to reflect past environments. And viruses are a part of those environments."

The researchers analyzed ice cores taken in 2015 from the Guliya ice cap in western China. The cores are collected at high altitudes - the summit of Guliya, where this ice originated, is 22,000 feet above sea level. The ice cores contain layers of ice that accumulate year after year, trapping whatever was in the atmosphere around them at the time each layer froze. Those layers create a timeline of sorts, which scientists have used to understand more about climate change, microbes, viruses and gases throughout history.

Researchers determined that the ice was nearly 15,000 years old using a combination of traditional and new, novel techniques to date this ice core.

When they analyzed the ice, they found genetic codes for 33 viruses. Four of those viruses have already been identified by the scientific community. But at least 28 of them are novel. About half of them seemed to have survived at the time they were frozen not in spite of the ice, but because of it.

"These are viruses that would have thrived in extreme environments," said Matthew Sullivan, co-author of the study, professor of microbiology at Ohio State and director of Ohio State's Center of Microbiome Science. "These viruses have signatures of genes that help them infect cells in cold environments - just surreal genetic signatures for how a virus is able to survive in extreme conditions. These are not easy signatures to pull out, and the method that Zhi-Ping developed to decontaminate the cores and to study microbes and viruses in ice could help us search for these genetic sequences in other extreme icy environments - Mars, for example, the moon, or closer to home in Earth's Atacama Desert."

Viruses do not share a common, universal gene, so naming a new virus - and attempting to figure out where it fits into the landscape of known viruses - involves multiple steps. To compare unidentified viruses with known viruses, scientists compare gene sets. Gene sets from known viruses are cataloged in scientific databases.

Those database comparisons showed that four of the viruses in the Guliya ice cap cores had previously been identified and were from virus families that typically infect bacteria. The researchers found the viruses in concentrations much lower than have been found to exist in oceans or soil.

The researchers' analysis showed that the viruses likely originated with soil or plants, not with animals or humans, based on both the environment and the databases of known viruses.

The study of viruses in glaciers is relatively new: Just two previous studies have identified viruses in ancient glacier ice. But it is an area of science that is becoming more important as the climate changes, said Lonnie Thompson, senior author of the study, distinguished university professor of earth sciences at Ohio State and senior research scientist at the Byrd Center.

"We know very little about viruses and microbes in these extreme environments, and what is actually there," Thompson said. "The documentation and understanding of that is extremely important: How do bacteria and viruses respond to climate change? What happens when we go from an ice age to a warm period like we're in now?"

Every spring, the Daylight Saving Time shift robs people of an hour of sleep - and a new study shows that DNA plays a role in how much the "spring forward" time change affects individuals.

People whose genetic profile makes them more likely to be "early birds" the rest of the year can adjust to the time change in a few days, the study shows. But those who tend to be "night owls" could take more than a week to get back on track with sleep schedule, according to new data published in Scientific Reports by a team from the University of Michigan.

The study uses data from continuous sleep tracking of 831 doctors in the first year of post-medical school training when the time shift occurred in spring 2019. All were first-year residents or "interns" in medical parlance, and taking part in the Intern Health Study based at the Michigan Neuroscience Institute.

From the large UK Biobank dataset, the researchers calculated genomic "chronotype" predisposition information, also known as the Objective Sleep Midpoint polygenic score. People with low scores were genomically predisposed to be "early birds" and those with high scores were genomically "night owls."

The team then applied these genomic scores in the intern sample and focused on the two groups of about 130 physicians each that had the strongest tendencies to be "early birds" and "night owls" based on their scores. The researchers looked at how their sleep patterns changed from the week before DST to the weekend after it.

In general, the difference in post-DST weekday wakeup times between the two groups was not large - probably because first-year medical residents have very strict work schedules.

In fact, the stressful duties and demanding schedules that interns endure is what made this population such an interesting one to study, and the larger Intern Health Study that the data come from has yielded important findings about the relationship between stress, sleep, genetics, mood and mental health.

But the time they got to sleep on the nights before workdays, and both sleep and wake times on the weekend, varied significantly between the two groups. The DST change made the differences even more pronounced.

Early birds had adjusted their sleep times by Tuesday, but night owls were still off track on the following Saturday.

Margit Burmeister, Ph.D., the U-M neuroscientist and geneticist who is the paper's senior and corresponding author, says the study gives one more strong reason for abolishing Daylight Saving Time.

"It's already known that DST has effects on rates of heart attacks, motor vehicle accidents, and other incidents, but what we know about these impacts mostly comes from looking for associations in large data pools after the fact," she says. "These data from direct monitoring and genetic testing allows us to directly see the effect, and to see the differences between people with different circadian rhythm tendencies that are influenced by both genes and environment. To put it plainly, DST makes everything worse for no good reason."

The study's first author is Jonathan Tyler, Ph.D., a postdoctoral assistant professor of mathematics at U-M.

Sleep schedules depend on a combination of many factors - but the fact that people can react so differently to the same abrupt change in time makes it important to study further.
The researchers also looked at the "fall back" time change in autumn and found no significant differences between early birds and night owls in how they reacted to the abrupt addition of an hour of sleep.

The findings have implications not just for the annual spring time change, but also for shift workers, travelers across time zones and even people deciding which profession to choose, the researchers note. Burmeister says she hopes to look further at differences between people in different professions in future studies.

Co-author Srijan Sen, M.D., Ph.D. who leads the Intern Health Study and directs the Frances and Kenneth Eisenberg and Family Depression Center at U-M, continues to lead other studies of how each year's crop of interns at over 100 hospitals react to the stresses of their training. The interns in the newly published study, like all interns, are in general chronically sleep-deprived because of the number of hours they need to be on duty or preparing for duty.

"This study is a demonstration of how we much we vary in our response to even relatively minor challenges to our daily routines, like DST," he said. "Discovering the mechanisms underlying this variation can help us understand our individual strengths and vulnerabilities better."

LAWRENCE -- A new paper appearing the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences gives new detail and understanding to the cultivation of corn, one of the United States' biggest cash crops.

The research by a team at the University of Kansas centers on "hybrid vigor," also known as "heterosis," a well-known phenomenon where crosses between inbred lines of corn and other crops produce offspring that outperform their parents in yield, drought resistance and other desirable qualities. Yet, the mechanisms underpinning heterosis are little understood despite over a century of intensive research.

The new PNAS research examines the relationship between heterosis and soil microbes, showing, in most cases, heterosis is facilitated by a microbial community.

"Hybrid vigor is super important in agriculture because one of the reasons for the great increases in crop productivity over the last several decades has been the use of hybrid cultivars, which tend to be much more productive and stronger and healthier than inbred cultivars," said lead author Maggie Wagner, assistant scientist at the Kansas Biological Survey & Center for Ecological Research and assistant professor with the KU Department of Ecology & Evolutionary biology. "Despite how important this is we still don't fully understand why hybrids are so superior to inbreds. A lot of focus has been on the genetics of hybrid vigor, which makes sense because hybridization is a genetic process -- but there's been some evidence the environment is important as well for affecting the strength of hybrid vigor. In this paper, we showed microbes living in the soil are one of the environmental factors that have a really important effect on hybrid vigor."

In a series of experiments, Wagner and her co-authors found in most cases inbred parent lines and hybrid crosses perform similarly under sterile conditions, without the presence of microbes -- but heterosis "can be restored by inoculation with a simple community of seven bacterial strains." The researchers saw the same results for seedlings inoculated with "autoclaved versus live soil slurries in a growth chamber and for plants grown in steamed or fumigated versus untreated soil in the field."

Wagner's co-authors at KU were Kayla Clouse and Laura Phillips. Other co-authors were Clara Tang, Fernanda Salvato, Alexandria Bartlett, Simina Vintila, Manuel Kleiner, Mark Hoffmann, Shannon Sermons and Peter Balint-Kurti at North Carolina State University. Sermons and Balint-Kurti also work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

"In lab experiments, we essentially grew the plants inside plastic bags in order to provide a completely sterile environment for them," Wagner said. "That allowed us to completely control which microbes, if any, were interacting with the plants. So, it's just some basic microbiology, along with a new kind of growth environment. But then in the field, we tried several different approaches to sterilize the soil, including just steam fumigation, which is used often, especially in fruit and vegetable production. It's not really generally used for corn growth, but for this experiment it made sense for us to do that. And we tried some chemical fumigants as well, and got similar results with all those methods."

In the soil-steaming experiment at the KU Field Station -- which temporarily eliminates or reduces microbes -- the researchers found the steaming "increased rather than decreased heterosis, indicating that the direction of the effect depends on community composition, environment or both."

"It's complicated, and we don't fully understand what's going on yet," Wagner said. "The first three experiments all showed the exact same direction of the effect. But then for the fourth experiment, we again found that microbes influenced heterosis but it was in the opposite direction, where the hybrid had a more positive reaction to sterile conditions. We think that this could just be due to some something particular to the microbial community in the soil for this one experiment, but we're not sure yet."

The new paper is to be followed by research in the same vein supported by a $900,000 new grant from the National Science Foundation involving many of the same personnel, with Wagner acting as one of the principal investigators.

The grant work will follow three lines of investigation: testing a range of microbes for their ability to boost hybrid vigor in corn; finding genetic variants and regions of the corn genome that respond to soil microbes; and researching how microbes behave within the roots of inbred and hybrid corn at the molecular level. The investigators hope their work could lead to better techniques in agriculture and conservation.

"We have this very basic observation of microbes affecting hybrid vigor, but we weren't able to follow up on it without some funding -- this grant is going to push the same line of research forward," Wagner said. "My collaborators are Manuel Kleiner at N.C. State who is an expert in metaproteomics, which is a way to measure the protein expression of microbes inside plant roots. We're hoping to learn more about how hybrids and inbreds are interacting with microbes differently, possibly by influencing the microbes' behavior. Our other collaborator is Peter Balint-Kurti with the USDA. He's an expert in the maize immune system and the genetic basis of disease resistance, so he's going to map some genes related to hybrids' responses to microbes. Here at Kansas, a graduate student in my lab, Kayla Clouse, will look at some of the broader patterns of this phenomenon -- for example, we don't know yet if all maize hybrids will react to microbes in the same way. So far, we've only confirmed this in one hybrid, so we need to figure out how generalizable it is -- and we're also hoping to figure out what is it about the microbial community that that can affect this response in either direction. A lot of her future dissertation work will be related to this project."

Work under the NSF grant will continue through 2024.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - As children made fewer visits to health facilities and engaged in social distancing and other COVID-19 mitigation measures, a smaller number of them also received prescription drugs, a new study suggests.

Overall, medications prescribed for children dropped by more than a quarter during the first eight months of the pandemic compared to the previous year, with the steepest declines in infection-related medicines like antibiotics and cough-and-cold drugs.

Antibiotic dispensing to children and teens plunged by nearly 56 % between April and December 2020 compared with the same period in 2019. Researchers also found declines in prescriptions for chronic diseases, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and asthma, but no change in prescriptions for antidepressants, according to the findings in Pediatrics.

"The decline in the number of children receiving antibiotics is consistent with the large decreases in infection-related pediatric visits during 2020," said lead author Kao-Ping Chua, M.D., Ph.D., a pediatrician and researcher at University of Michigan Health C.S. Mott Children's Hospital and the Susan B. Meister Child Health Evaluation and Research Center.

"Because antibiotics have important side effects, the dramatic decreases in antibiotic dispensing may be a welcome development," he added. "However, declines in dispensing of chronic disease drugs could be concerning."

Dispensing of infection-related drugs declined sharply

Researchers analyzed national prescription drug dispensing data from 92% of U.S pharmacies to assess changes in dispensing to children ages 0-19 during COVID-19.

Between January 2018 and February 2020, nearly 25.8 million prescriptions were dispensed to children a month. Dispensing totals during the first 8 months of the pandemic dropped by about 27% compared to the same period in 2019.

Overall, drugs typically prescribed for acute infections, including antibiotics, fell by nearly 51 % while those for chronic diseases fell by 17 %.

"The decrease in antibiotic dispensing most likely reflects reductions in infections, such as colds and strep throat, due to COVID-19 risk-mitigation measures like social distancing and face masks," Chua said.

"As a result, children had fewer infection-related visits and had fewer opportunities to receive antibiotic prescriptions, whether for antibiotic-appropriate conditions or antibiotic-inappropriate conditions."

Chua's previous research has suggested that nearly a quarter of antibiotic prescriptions among children and adults may be unnecessary. In children, antibiotics are the leading cause of emergency room visits for adverse drug events, with potential side effects including allergic reactions, fungal infections and diarrhea.

Long term, antibiotic overuse may also contribute to antibiotic-resistant bacteria development, causing illnesses that were once easily treatable with antibiotics to become untreatable and dangerous, Chua said.

Another welcomed development in drug dispensing trends, researchers found, was a decline in prescription medicines to treat symptoms of the common cold, particularly to suppress coughs. Findings suggest a nearly 80 % drop in these medications (known as antitussive drugs) during the 2020 study period.

"These drugs have little benefit but are associated with potentially harmful side effects, particularly in young children," Chua said.

"From the perspective of health care quality, the sharp decline in dispensing of cough-and-cold medications may represent a silver lining of the COVID-19 pandemic."

While dispensing of infection-related drugs to children could rebound as social distancing measures are lifted and infections increase, it may still not necessarily return to pre-pandemic levels soon, Chua said. If COVID-19 risk-mitigation measures continue in schools and day cares, for example, this may lower the incidence of conditions for which antibiotics are frequently prescribed, such as ear infections, sinusitis, and upper respiratory infections.

Dispensing of chronic disease drugs

The study found a modest 11% decline in dispensing of prescriptions for ADHD.

"Whether this decline is concerning needs to be studied further," Chua said. "For example, it is unclear whether the decline in ADHD prescriptions reflect a reduced need for medications at school due to the transition to remote learning, disruptions in medication access, or delays in diagnosis."

There were also large declines in dispensing of asthma medications, such as albuterol and inhaled steroids, according to the research

National data suggest that the number of asthma attacks in children has dropped sharply during the pandemic, Chua said. Given this, the decline in medication dispensing likely reflects better control of asthma.

Researchers need more data to better understand the lack of change in antidepressant dispensing to children during the pandemic.

"An optimistic view is that few children on established antidepressant regimens discontinued use," Chua said.

"Studies, however, suggest that the mental health of children has worsened during the pandemic, particularly among adolescents. Given this, our findings might suggest that antidepressant dispensing has not risen to meet this increased need."

Clinicians may be able to use electronic health records to identify decreases in the frequency of refill requests among children on established drug regimens for chronic disease, Chua said. Clinicians could then call families to determine if there is a reason for concern - such as medications not being affordable for them - or if the changes reflect improved disease control.

Dispensing totals declined more sharply for prescriptions paid with cash than for other payer types. Chua believes that this finding suggests that uninsured children faced greater financial-related barriers to accessing medical care and prescription drugs during the pandemic.

The decreased dispensing in kids is consistent with the drop in total number of prescriptions dispensed to adult Americans, which declined sharply during the pandemic but subsequently rebounded. However, the study indicates dispensing to children has not rebounded to the same degree, Chua said.

"This study provides a national picture of prescription drug dispensing to children before and during the pandemic," he said. "It will be important to monitor whether the reductions we demonstrate are temporary or sustained."

The development of an ultrathin magnet that operates at room temperature could lead to new applications in computing and electronics - such as high-density, compact spintronic memory devices - and new tools for the study of quantum physics.

The ultrathin magnet, which was recently reported in the journal Nature Communications , could make big advances in next-gen memories, computing, spintronics, and quantum physics. It was discovered by scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley.

"We're the first to make a room-temperature 2D magnet that is chemically stable under ambient conditions," said senior author Jie Yao, a faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and associate professor of materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley.

"This discovery is exciting because it not only makes 2D magnetism
possible at room temperature, but it also uncovers a new mechanism to realize 2D magnetic materials," added Rui Chen, a UC Berkeley graduate student in the Yao Research Group and lead author on the study."

The magnetic component of today's memory devices is typically made of magnetic thin films. But at the atomic level, these magnetic films are still three-dimensional - hundreds or thousands of atoms thick. For decades, researchers have searched for ways to make thinner and smaller 2D magnets and thus enable data to be stored at a much higher density.

Previous achievements in the field of 2D magnetic materials have brought promising results. But these early 2D magnets lose their magnetism and become chemically unstable at room temperature.

"State-of-the-art 2D magnets need very low temperatures to function. But for practical reasons, a data center needs to run at room temperature," Yao said. "Theoretically, we know that the smaller the magnet, the larger the disc's potential data density. Our 2D magnet is not only the first that operates at room temperature or higher, but it is also the first magnet to reach the true 2D limit: It's as thin as a single atom!"

The researchers say that their discovery will also enable new opportunities to study quantum physics. "Our atomically thin magnet offers an optimal platform for probing the quantum world," Yao said. "It opens up every single atom for examination, which may reveal how quantum physics governs each single magnetic atom and the interactions between them. With a conventional bulk magnet where most of the magnetic atoms are deeply buried inside the material, such studies would be quite challenging to do."

The making of a 2D magnet that can take the heat

The researchers synthesized the new 2D magnet - called a cobalt-doped van der Waals zinc-oxide magnet - from a solution of graphene oxide, zinc, and cobalt. Just a few hours of baking in a conventional lab oven transformed the mixture into a single atomic layer of zinc-oxide with a smattering of cobalt atoms sandwiched between layers of graphene. In a final step, graphene is burned away, leaving behind just a single atomic layer of cobalt-doped zinc-oxide.

"With our material, there are no major obstacles for industry to adopt our solution-based method," said Yao. "It's potentially scalable for mass production at lower costs."

To confirm that the resulting 2D film is just one atom thick, Yao and his team conducted scanning electron microscopy experiments at Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry to identify the material's morphology, and transmission electron microscopy imaging to probe the material atom by atom.

With proof in hand that their 2D material really is just an atom thick, the researchers went on to the next challenge that had confounded researchers for years: Demonstrating a 2D magnet that successfully operates at room temperature.

X-ray experiments at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source characterized the 2D material's magnetic parameters under high temperature. Additional X-ray experiments at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory's Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource verified the electronic and crystal structures of the synthesized 2D magnets. And at Argonne National Laboratory's Center for Nanoscale Materials, the researchers imaged the 2D material's crystal structure and chemical composition using transmission electron microscopy.

As a whole, the research team's lab experiments showed that the graphene-zinc-oxide system becomes weakly magnetic with a 5-6% concentration of cobalt atoms. Increasing the concentration of cobalt atoms to about 12% results in a very strong magnet.

To the researchers' surprise, a concentration of cobalt atoms exceeding 15% shifts the 2D magnet into an exotic quantum state of "frustration," whereby different magnetic states within the 2D system are in competition with each other.

And unlike previous 2D magnets, which lose their magnetism at room temperature or above, the researchers found that the new 2D magnet not only works at room temperature but also at 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit).

"Our 2D magnetic system shows a distinct mechanism compared to previous 2D magnets," said Chen. "And we think this unique mechanism is due to the free electrons in zinc oxide."

True north: Free electrons keep magnetic atoms on track

When you command your computer to save a file, that information is stored as a series of ones and zeroes in the computer's magnetic memory, such as the magnetic hard drive or a flash memory. And like all magnets, magnetic memory devices contain microscopic magnets with two poles - north and south, the orientations of which follow the direction of an external magnetic field. Data is written or encoded when these tiny magnets are flipped to the desired directions.

According to Chen, zinc oxide's free electrons could act as an intermediary that ensures the magnetic cobalt atoms in the new 2D device continue pointing in the same direction - and thus stay magnetic - even when the host, in this case the semiconductor zinc oxide, is a nonmagnetic material.

"Free electrons are constituents of electric currents. They move in the same direction to conduct electricity," Yao added, comparing the movement of free electrons in metals and semiconductors to the flow of water molecules in a stream of water.

The researchers say that new material - which can be bent into almost any shape without breaking, and is 1 millionth the thickness of a single sheet of paper - could help advance the application of spin electronics or spintronics, a new technology that uses the orientation of an electron's spin rather than its charge to encode data. "Our 2D magnet may enable the formation of ultra-compact spintronic devices to engineer the spins of the electrons," Chen said.

"I believe that the discovery of this new, robust, truly two-dimensional magnet at room temperature is a genuine breakthrough by Jie Yao and his students," said co-author Robert Birgeneau, a faculty senior scientist in Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division and professor of physics at UC Berkeley who co-led the study's magnetic measurements. "In addition to its obvious significance to spintronic devices, this 2D magnet is fascinating at the atomic level, revealing for the first time how cobalt magnetic atoms interact over 'long' distances" through a complex two-dimensional network, he added.

"Our results are even better than what we expected, which is really exciting. Most of the time in science, experiments can be very challenging," he said. "But when you finally realize something new, it's always very fulfilling."

What The Study Did: These results suggest that substantial proportions of Latinx immigrants have immigration concerns about engaging in COVID-19-related testing, treatment and contact tracing.

Authors: Carol L. Galletly, J.D., Ph.D., Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, 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.2021.17049)

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.

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A new USC study of a common, yet poorly understood type of white blood cell reveals the immune cell's response to pathogens differs greatly by sex and by age.

In this mouse study, males proved much more susceptible to a condition called sepsis than females. However, the scientists also found that the female disease-defense system is hardly perfect; their system changes with age to become nearly as harmful as the males'.

Those are the key findings in a study that appears today in Nature Aging.

The study has important implications for studying disease and cures, especially for sepsis, a condition in which the body's defense system turns harmful to itself. It also suggests that the quest for precision medicine may be overlooking more obvious disease determinants: age and sex.

"A big take-home message is that with the push for personalized medicine, people focus on minute genetic differences, but we find that biological sex - the biggest genetic difference of all - is actually a great predictor for immune response seldom taken into account," said Bérénice Benayoun, assistant professor at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and principal investigator of the study.

Benayoun and her team focused on cells called "neutrophils," which make up about 50% to 70% of our white blood cells and are critical to fighting off infections. Understanding sex- and age-based differences in how neutrophils function could help us understand similar disparities in human illnesses, such as why older people -- and men in particular-- are more likely to get severe symptoms with COVID-19 or why women are more likely to have autoimmune disorders, she added.

Different defensive tactics

Neutrophils respond to infections in a few different ways, such as by engulfing and digesting an invading pathogen--or by degranulation in which they secrete proteins that destroy the invader.

Another method discovered in 2004 is "NETosis," in which neutrophils expel strands of their own coagulated DNA, called chromatin, which act as a trap outside of the cell. These neutrophil extracellular traps, or so-called "NETs," ensnare and destroy pathogens.

Benayoun and colleagues discovered differences in neutrophil activity between young and old mice, as well as between male and female mice. Males appeared to have more degranulation activity, as evidenced by higher levels of a protein, neutrophil elastase. Meanwhile females exhibited more NETosis on average.

High degranulation activity can cause damage to surrounding tissues, and these findings could illustrate why sepsis affects men more than women, Benayoun said.

"With sepsis, what kills you is not actually the bacteria; it's your response to the bacteria," she noted. "And we know that males in general have much worse odds during sepsis than females, and neutrophil elastase, which is one of the main components of degranulation, is one of the big things that can be produced at very high level during sepsis."

On the other hand, higher NETosis activity could contribute to the body's immune system attacking healthy cells, Benayoun added. Antibodies targeting the body's own DNA have been found in many autoimmune disorders, which could have been developed after neutrophils produced too many NETs. Thus, higher NET activity in females could be related to higher rates of autoimmune disorders in women.

"If you make NETs for no good reason, it can promote autoimmunity," Benayoun said. "It's a known fact that women are more prone to autoimmune disease, like a 9:1 ratio compared to men."

With age, female neutrophils became more reactive, in contrast to male neutrophils. "In general, genetic programs seem to 'age' at a faster rate in male neutrophils," she said. "These findings suggest that sex differences can become amplified with aging, at least for neutrophils."

A new resource for immune system study

Neutrophils have historically been difficult to study because they are so short-lived, lasting less than a day. The cells' short lifespans are spent as the immune system's first responders, working quickly to trap and destroy pathogens at the first sign of an infection and sacrificing themselves in the process.

Applying machine learning techniques to the data, the team has begun to identify genetic pathways involved in the regulation of immune response that could explain why there are such dramatic differences between the sexes, also called sex dimorphism, in immune system activity.

Sex dimorphism in immunity has played out in the current pandemic: Most of the severe COVID-19 cases and deaths were men, Benayoun noted. With other literature indicating a possible role of sex hormones in immunity, studying these interactions could lead scientists to discover new techniques to fight severe illness.

"If these differences are driven by the hormonal effects on immune cells, then in theory, you could try to intervene in early sepsis, maybe with anti-androgens in the short term, to bring down the response," Benayoun mused. "You could tailor medicine just by using the fact that this patient has more androgens or this person has more estrogen."

Michigan State University ecologists led an international research partnership of professional and volunteer scientists to reveal new insights into what's driving the already-dwindling population of eastern monarch butterflies even lower.

Between 2004 and 2018, changing climate at the monarch's spring and summer breeding grounds has had the most significant impact on this declining population. In fact, the effects of climate change have been nearly seven times more significant than other contributors, such as habitat loss. The team published its report July 19 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

"What we do is develop models to understand why monarchs are declining and what's happening to biodiversity in general," said Erin Zylstra, the study's lead author. Zylstra is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Integrative Biology and the Ecology, Evolution and Behavior Program, both in MSU's College of Natural Science.

"A lot of it is not good news. But in understanding the reasons why a species is declining, there is also a message of hope: there's something we can do about it," said Zylstra. "We did this study not just to say what's causing changes in the monarch butterfly population, but also learn how we can make it better."

Understanding the monarch decline and doing what we can to reverse it is important not just for preserving biodiversity, but also because insects are prolific pollinators. The eastern population of monarchs migrates between Mexico and the eastern half of the U.S. and southern Canada every year -- with summer layovers in Michigan and other U.S. states. Since the mid-1990s, though, there has been a dramatic decline in their population, with worst-case estimates projecting that the current population is a mere 20% of what it was just a few decades ago.

The mid-1990s through the mid-2000s saw the most dramatic decline, coinciding with a period when glyphosate weed killers became hugely popular in the agricultural industry. Farmers grew crops that were engineered to be resistant to glyphosate, allowing them to apply the chemical widely, decimating milkweed plants that are the sole host and food source for monarch caterpillars.

The prevailing theory during that period has been that the loss of milkweed from agricultural areas was responsible for the severe declines. Since then, monarch populations have continued to fall. Although glyphosate-driven milkweed loss remained one possible explanation, other theories emerged over time. Today, researchers are divided on what's stunting the monarch's population.

About a decade ago, however, Leslie Ries of Georgetown University and Elise Zipkin, now an associate professor of integrative biology at MSU, came to a realization. Researchers and volunteers were collecting an increasing amount of data that could help make a more definitive determination of what's driving the monarch population decline.

"People have different hypotheses," said Zipkin, the senior author on the new study and director of the Ecology, Evolution and Behavior Program. "So we tried to come in as an impartial team, take the time and put all these pieces together to really parse out the contributions of various stressors."

Part of what makes it so difficult to understand the decline is the eastern monarch's complicated life cycle. These monarchs spend their winters, November through February, in central Mexico. When the weather starts to warm, they head north to the southeastern U.S., particularly eastern Texas.

Once there, the adults breed, lay eggs and then die. It's the next generation that continues the migration, starting in about May, flying to the Midwest and parts of Canada, where they produce two to three more generations. The butterflies that develop in late August shut down their reproductive systems and spend their energy migrating south back to Mexico, where the cycle begins anew.

With support from the National Science Foundation, the team analyzed data from more than 18,000 surveys of monarchs in different locations across the midwestern U.S., central Mexico and southern Canada between 1994 and 2018. Most of these surveys were performed by local volunteers who helped count adult butterflies.

"Almost all of those data were not collected by professional scientists and that is really, really cool," Zipkin said. "There is no group of scientists out there that could collect all the data that we needed. But these volunteers go out every year and record data in a very structured way. That's the only way we could do this analysis."

"The level of expertise among the volunteers is really incredible," said Zylstra.

Zylstra led the effort to develop a model based on these observations and draw meaningful conclusions. In particular, the team was interested in what the data said about the three leading theories behind the eastern monarch's population decline: milkweed habitat loss, mortality during the autumn migration and resettlement on the overwintering grounds, and climate change's detrimental impact on monarch breeding success.

"I think that everyone is partially right. All of these things do play some role. With monarchs, everything is nuanced, and everything is tricky," said Zylstra. "But in recent years, as glyphosate applications have remained more stable, although still very high, there is strong evidence that population changes are driven by climate on the spring and summer breeding grounds."

Each of these hypotheses can contribute to lost butterflies at smaller scales, Zylstra explained. But looking at the problem holistically -- across many years and multiple countries -- makes it clear that climate change has been the dominant disruptive force since 2004. Unfortunately, there isn't enough data in agricultural regions to definitively determine what happened between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, the period of the most pronounced decline.

To get the full picture of the population decline, the team needed to understand the dynamics of many generations in many locations. Hence the need for thousands upon thousands of surveys. The herculean effort of collecting and making sense of this data has also reaped two large rewards.

First, by proving the model's potential to tease out population dynamics for something as complicated as the eastern monarch, the team is optimistic it can adapt the model to understand what's driving population changes in other species, too.

Secondly, this understanding should help inform where conservation efforts can provide the greatest benefit for the eastern monarch's numbers.

"This study gives us information on where to spend our limited dollars on restoration," Zylstra said.

Although we can't simply turn off climate change, we can, for example, focus on restoring milkweed in the regions that remain most conducive to monarch reproduction despite warming temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns, she said. That said, anything we can do to curb climate change will also improve the outlook for both monarchs and humanity, she added.

And although curbing climate change is a huge lift, Zipkin pointed out that this study reminds us of the power of partnerships to confront large challenges.

"We're talking about three countries that this is directly affecting: the U.S., Canada and Mexico. It's not something that we have to do alone," Zipkin said. "Partnerships do matter."

Working out what's behind the population decline proved that. Between the professional scientists and volunteer data collectors, residents of all three countries made this study possible.

"You need those kinds of partnerships. You need people with different expertise. We showed that's how we can figure out what's going on. Now, what can we do with conservation?" Zipkin asked. "We can work together."

When it comes to making eggs, female flies and female humans are surprisingly similar. And that could be a boon for women seeking better birth control methods, a UConn researcher reports in the July 5 issue of PNAS.

There are about 61 million women of reproductive age in the US, and about 43 million of them are sexually active but don't want a pregnancy right now, according to the Guttmacher Institute. And while there are a dozen or so different methods of birth control available, most have undesirable side effects for some of the women who try them. Despite the need, pharmaceutical companies are not investing in new birth control research. Private funders such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have stepped up to fill the gap, and their efforts are bearing fruit in the lab of UConn physiologist and geneticist Jianjun Sun, an associate professor in the Department of Physiology and Neurobiology.

Sun and his colleagues have shown that compounds that stop fruit flies from ovulation (the process of releasing a viable egg) also prevent mice from doing so. And if a drug stops ovulation in both flies and mice, it's likely to work in humans, too. And that could make it much easier to screen potential birth control drugs quickly and effectively.

Several years ago, Sun's lab figured out how fruit flies ovulate. In a fly, as in a mouse or a human, many potential eggs mature inside the ovary. But to be fertilized, the eggs need to break out of the little cocoons, called follicles, they've been developing inside. Not all the eggs do this successfully; in humans it's usually just one per cycle. Sun's lab figured out exactly how successful eggs break out. Then he had a thought: now that we know how they break out, might it be possible to stop them? Stopping the egg from breaking out of the follicle would be a brand new form of birth control.

He applied for the Gates Foundation's Grand Challenges Explorations Award for birth control research, and won $100,000 in 2016 for a proof of principle experiment: could fruit flies really be used to screen potential birth control drugs?

The answer, Sun found, is yes. He and collaborators at UConn Pharmacy, Northwestern University, University of Rutgers, and Michigan State University put fruit fly follicles in a dish and tested compounds from FDA's drug library. If the drug inhibited the fruit fly eggs from ovulating, they then tested it on mice follicles. Of the 1,170 drugs they tried, six worked in flies. When they tested four of those in mice, three of them worked! And two seemed to work without affecting hormone levels. And one of those two drugs, chlorpromazine, is classified as a presumed human reproductive toxicant by the Netherlands due to its potential damage to human fertility; all the work so far has involved animal models.

Chlorpromazine, usually used to treat schizophrenia, is not a good candidate for birth control because of its psychoactive effects. But it does prove the concept: fruit fly ovaries can be used effectively to screen compounds for non-hormonal birth control.

Sun went on to win $1 million from the Gates Foundation to broaden his work and test many more candidate compounds. He has also received grants from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). His lab is now partnering with Calibr at Scripps Research in San Diego to test 13,000 compounds in their library as potential non-hormonal birth control drugs.

(Edmonton, AB) Firefighters at the centre of the battle against the massive Fort McMurray wildfire in 2016 have persistent lung damage, according to new findings published by a University of Alberta occupational health research team.

"Those who were dealing with burning organic matter were exposed to a barrage of small particles in the smoke, and the ones with the highest exposure have long-term consequences," said principal investigator Nicola Cherry, an occupational epidemiologist, professor of medicine and Tripartite Chair of Occupational Health in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry.

The firefighters had more than double the risk of developing asthma compared with the general population. They also exhibited a number of changes in lung function tests supportive of an effect on the lungs, including greater lung hyperreactivity and increased thickening of the bronchial wall.

"The impact was correlated to exposure--those who had more exposure had more effects," said Cherry.

For three years after the fire, Cherry's team followed 1,234 Alberta firefighters.The firefighters' exposure to fire-related particles was estimated based on the hours they worked on the blaze, the dates they were there, the firefighting tasks they were performing, and Alberta Environment estimates of particulate matter at different locations.

The Fort McMurray fire broke out in May 2016 and was under control by the fall, but it was not officially declared out until the following year. The highest exposure to particulate matter happened during the first week, Cherry said. Firefighters were deployed from across Alberta from crews that specialize in structural fires (i.e., buildings), oil and gas industry fires and wildland fires.

Many did not have sufficient supplies of specialized lung protection equipment or were not able to wear it while fighting the Fort McMurray fire, Cherry said.

"It was an extraordinarily violent fire," she said. "It's very difficult to rush uphill pulling equipment behind you if you have a heavy mask on that doesn't let you breathe."

Cherry modelled her study, which was funded by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research and the Government of Alberta, on studies that examined the respiratory health of first responders following the World Trade Center collapse in New York City in September 2001.

"It's not easy to do this kind of study during a catastrophe," said Cherry, who had serendipitously taken delivery of a mobile lung assessment lab the week before the Fort McMurray fire broke out.

"At the World Trade Center, the exposure was mainly to inorganic dust, whereas in Fort McMurray it was burning vegetation, as well as buildings," Cherry said. "It's interesting that we saw similar results from very different exposure."

Cherry's research team looked at three main sources of evidence about the lung health of the firefighters before and after the fire. First, they asked for permission to link to their administrative health record, which showed doctor's visits and diagnoses. The records for each firefighter were matched with five patients from the general population of similar age, sex, geographic location and health status as a control group for comparison.

The team also measured the firefighters' lung function, which shows how much air goes in and out of the lungs. Finally, some of the firefighters with no history of chronic respiratory disease or smoking were randomly selected for clinical followup, including CT scans of their lungs and methacholine challenge testing, used to check for asthma.

This is one of several papers Cherry has published on the mental and physical health of the Fort McMurray firefighters.

"They take enormous risks," she said. "This study shows clearly that it is possible for exposures to cause changes in the lung that don't get better over time."

Cherry said she will continue to study the occupational health of firefighters--including crews currently fighting wildfires in the interior of British Columbia and Alberta--in hopes of recommending ways to make the work safer. She is studying whether wearing a mask or washing skin more often could reduce exposure to chemicals from smoke. Putting more crews through shorter rotations at fire scenes might also help to lessen health impacts, she said.

"We are trying to come up with clinical indicators that could be helpful to firefighters whose lungs have been damaged, such as the combination of bronchial reactivity and thickening that we see in this study," she said.