Earth

The research team of Gero, a Singapore-based biotech company in collaboration with Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo NY, announces a publication in Nature Communications, a journal of Nature portfolio, presenting the results of the study on associations between aging and the loss of the ability to recover from stresses.

Recently, we have witnessed the first promising examples of biological age reversal by experimental interventions. Indeed, many biological clock types properly predict more years of life for those who choose healthy lifestyles or quit unhealthy ones, such as smoking. What has been still unknown is how quickly biological age is changing over time for the same individual. And especially, how one would distinguish between the transient fluctuations and the genuine bioage change trend.

The emergence of big biomedical data involving multiple measurements from the same subjects brings about a whole range of novel opportunities and practical tools to understand and quantify the aging process in humans. A team of experts in biology and biophysics presented results of a detailed analysis of dynamic properties of the fluctuations of physiological indices along individual aging trajectories.

Healthy human subjects turned out to be very resilient, whereas the loss of resilience turned out to be related to chronic diseases and elevated all-cause mortality risks. The rate of recovery to the equilibrium baseline level after stresses was found to deteriorate with age. Accordingly, the time needed to recover was getting longer and longer. Being around 2 weeks for 40 y.o. healthy adults the recovery time stretched to 6 weeks for 80 y.o. on average in the population. This finding was confirmed in two different datasets based on two different kinds of biological measurements - blood test parameters on one hand and physical activity levels recorded by wearable devices on the other hand.

"Calculation of resilience based on physical activity data streams has been implemented in GeroSense iPhone app and made available for the research community via web-based API." - commented the first author of the study, Tim Pyrkov, head of the mHealth project at Gero.

If the trend holds at later ages, the extrapolation shows a complete loss of human body resilience, that is the ability to recover, at some age around 120-150 y.o. The reduced resilience was observed even in individuals not suffering from major chronic disease and led to the increase in the range of the fluctuations of physiological indices. As we age, more and more time is required to recover after a perturbation, and on average we spend less and less time close to the optimal physiological state.

The predicted loss of resilience even in the healthiest, most successfully aging individuals, might explain why we do not see an evidential increase of the maximum lifespan, while the average lifespan was steadily growing during the past decades. The divergent fluctuations of physiological indices may mean that no intervention that does not affect the decline in resilience may effectively increase the maximum lifespan and hence may only lead to an incremental increase in human longevity.

Aging in humans is a complex and multi-stage process. It would, therefore, be difficult to compress the aging process into a single number, such as biological age. Gero's work shows that longitudinal studies open a whole new window on the aging process and produce independent biomarkers of human aging, suitable for applications in geroscience and future clinical trials of anti-aging interventions.

"Aging in humans exhibits universal features common to complex systems operating on the brink of disintegration. This work is a demonstration of how concepts borrowed from physical sciences can be used in biology to probe different aspects of senescence and frailty to produce strong interventions against aging.", - says Peter Fedichev, co-founder and CEO of Gero.

Accordingly, no strong life extension is possible by preventing or curing diseases without interception of the aging process, the root cause of the underlying loss of resilience. We do not foresee any laws of nature prohibiting such an intervention. Therefore, the aging model presented in this work may guide the development of life-extending therapies with the strongest possible effects on healthspan.

"This work by the Gero team shows that longitudinal studies provide novel possibilities for understanding the aging process and systematic identification of biomarkers of human aging in large biomedical data. The research will help to understand the limits of longevity and future anti-aging interventions. What's even more important, the study may help to bridge the rising gap between the health- and life-span, which continues to widen in most developing countries." - says Brian Kennedy, Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Physiology at National University Singapore.

"This work, in my opinion, is a conceptual breakthrough because it determines and separates the roles of fundamental factors in human longevity - the aging, defined as progressive loss of resilience, and age-related diseases, as "executors of death" following the loss of resilience. It explains why even most effective prevention and treatment of age-related diseases could only improve the average but not the maximal lifespan unless true antiaging therapies have been developed" - says prof. Andrei Gudkov, PhD, Sr. Vice President and Chair of Department of Cell Stress Biology at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, a co-author of this work and a co-founder of Genome Protection, Inc., a biotech company that is focused on the development of antiaging therapies/.

"The investigation shows that recovery rate is an important signature of aging that can guide the development of drugs to slow the process and extend healthspan." - commented David Sinclair, Harvard Medical School professor of genetics.

"The research from Gero surprisingly comes to a similar quantification of human resilience - a proposed biomarker of ageing - based on two very different kinds of data: blood test parameters on one hand and physical activity levels recorded by wearable devices on the other hand. I'm very excited to see how Person-generated Health Data, including data from commercial wearables, can help create individual, longitudinal profiles of health that will be instrumental to shed light on lifetime-scale health phenomena, such as ageing." - commented Luca Foschini, Co-founder & Chief Data Scientist at Evidation Health.

Two aging markers

The authors characterized the dynamics of physiological parameters on time scales of human lifespan by a minimum set of two parameters. The first is an instant value, often referred to as the biological age, and is exemplified in this work by the Dynamic Organism State Index (DOSI). The quantity is associated with stresses, lifestyles and chronic diseases and can be computed from a standard blood test.

The other parameter - the resilience - is new and reflects the dynamic properties of the organism state fluctuations: it informs how quickly the DOSI value gets back to the norm in response to stresses.

When does aging start?

Age-related changes in physiological parameters start from birth. However, various parameters change in different ways at different stages of life, see, e.g., a previous work by the same authors published in Aging US in 2018).

The data from the Nature Communications work shows that there is a good differentiation between the growth phase (mostly complete by the age of 30 and following the universal growth theory by Geoffrey West and aging. At 40+ years, aging manifests itself as a slow (linear, sub-exponential) deviation of physiological indices from their reference values.

How often should one measure biological age?

Physiological parameters are naturally subject to fluctuations around some equilibrium level. Glucose levels rise and drop after having a meal, the number of sleeping hours is slightly different each day. Yet, one can collect a longitudinal dataset, that is a series of such measurements for the same person, and observe that the average levels are different between individuals. Resilience also requires repeated measurements, since one needs to know exactly when recovery was achieved to calculate the resilience.

Importantly, resilience also provides a convenient guide on how often repeated measurements should be taken. As a rule of thumb, the period of observation required for the robust bioage determination should comprise multiple stress and recovery events. For the most healthy individuals such an observation period would amount to several months and should increase with age. During that time, a robust bioage determination would require several data points per recovery time, that is ideally one measurement in a few days.

Wearable technology comes into play

In 2021, the only practical way to achieve a high (once-per-day or better) sampling rate is to use mobile/wearable sensor data.

In another paper, the authors have focused on wearable/mobile sensor data. They have built "wearable DOSI", which they called GeroSense and reported its validation tests in Pyrkov et al. Aging (Albany NY) 13.6 (2021): 7900. GeroSense can be used to compute resilience. Population study shows that the number of individuals showing signs of the loss of resilience increases exponentially with age and doubles every 8 years at a rate matching that of the Gompertz mortality law (the observation by B. Gompertz from 1827, who observed for the first time that the all-cause mortality rate doubles every 8 years).

As devices continue to be built on an increasingly small scale, scientists are looking toward developing ways to engineer materials at the atomic level. In a breakthrough that will contribute to this, published in Nature Communications, researchers from the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research and RIKEN Center for Advanced Photonics, along with collaborators, have developed a way to use a "dry transfer technique"--a technique that uses no solvent--to position optical quality carbon nanotubes in a precise way.

Carbon nanotubes are a promising type of materials with potential uses in applications such as light-emitting diodes, single-electron transistors, or as single photon sources. They are essentially tubes made up of graphene twisted in specific ways, and the way they are twisted is critical for allowing the desired properties to emerge. Creating devices with desired properties requires precise manipulation of the position and orientation of the nanotubes, along with a property known as "chirality," which essentially describes how much it is twisted. It is difficult to manipulate the molecules precisely, however, as using solvents or high-temperature treatment inevitably leaves the nanotubes dirty, hampering their optical characteristics.

To solve this issue, the researchers looked for a way to engineer the nanotubes without using solvents. They experimented with using anthracene, a chemical derived from oil, as a sacrificial material. Essentially, they picked up the nanotube on a scaffolding of anthracene to carry it wherever they wanted, and then used heat to sublimate the anthracene, leaving the nanotube in an optically pristine condition. They also developed a method for monitoring the photoluminescence of the nanotubes during the transfer, ensuring that a nanotube with the desired optical properties would be placed at a right location.

The group confirmed that following the dry transfer, the remaining nanotubes has bright photoluminescence, up to 5,000 times as bright as the original molecule, a quality that makes them ideal for optical devices. In addition, the group was able to precisely position the nanotube on top of a nanosized optical resonator, enhancing the light emission properties.

According to Keigo Otsuka from the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research, the first author of the paper, "We believe that this technology could contribute not only to the creation of nanodevices from carbon nanotubes with desired properties, but also to the construction of higher-order systems that are based on the free combination of atomic layer materials and other nanostructures."

"Beyond that," says Yuichiro Kato, the leader of the group, "this technology has the potential to contribute to the development of atomically defined technologies that go beyond nanotechnology, in which materials with precise structures at the atomic level are used as building blocks to design and build functions that are different from those of existing materials."

WASHINGTON (May 25, 2021)--A new report summarizes the findings from a national survey of frontline health care workers during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, finding that many reported unsafe working conditions and retaliation for voicing their concerns to employers. The survey, launched in May 2020 by staff and student researchers at the George Washington University, provides a snapshot of the experiences of frontline health care workers providing care for millions of Americans during the pandemic.

"This survey gives a voice to US health care workers who have been on the frontlines of COVID-19," David Michaels, a professor of environmental and occupational health at the George Washington University and former administrator of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, said. "Health care workers have valuable first-hand knowledge about this pandemic and this report offers recommendations that could help keep the U.S. on a steady course now and in the future."

There are more than 18 million health care workers in the U.S. and those on the frontlines of the pandemic have much to say about what should be done to prevent future exposures to the virus and other issues. The GW researchers developed an online survey to better understand the experiences of health care workers, including questions about working conditions and safety related concerns.

About 1,200 health care workers from all 50 states and the District of Columbia took the survey and the GW researchers analyzed the data collected during a two-month period from the beginning of May 2020 until the end of June 2020.

The following concerns were repeatedly mentioned in survey responses:

Frustration with unsafe working conditions, especially failed access to adequate personal protective equipment.

Instances of retaliation and at times bullying for voicing their safety concerns to employers.

Perceptions that employers prioritized hospital profits over worker safety and created an unhealthy work environment where workers felt devalued and threatened.

Many of the survey respondents were nurses and the majority worked in a hospital setting. For safety concerns, many health care workers mentioned the lack of personal protective equipment during the early days of the pandemic. Respondents also said they lived with the fear of losing their job if they voiced their concerns and they also expressed frustration with constantly changing employer and national guidelines.

"The responses to the survey contain important insights that cannot be gleaned from statistics alone," Nathan L. McCray, a lead author of the report, said. "Workers voiced a range of experiences during the first few months of pandemic, including those that were positive and others that were excruciating." McCray worked on the report while a research associate at the GW Milken Institute School of Public Health.

For example, some workers reported that their employer had taken steps to provide them with the protective equipment they needed to stay safe while others described being devalued or treated as disposable. Still others said they were afraid of getting sick or bringing the virus home to vulnerable family members.

"This survey was anonymous and health care workers said they appreciated having a safe space to share their concerns," Brenda M. Trejo Rosas, a research associate and doctoral student at the GW Milken Institute School of Public Health, as well as lead author, said. "Our report exposes the impact of power dynamics in the work environment."

The survey also asked frontline workers for solutions to some of the problems they described in the survey. Health care workers stressed the need for improved communication and worker protection policies based on scientific evidence.

They also recommended that the federal government step up and increase the national stockpile of personal protective equipment. Such a stockpile would help the nation better prepare for the next wave of this pandemic or a future pandemic, they said.

In addition, the health care workers who participated in the survey called for employers to treat them with respect and asked for labor rights such as time off, mental health care and zero tolerance for bullying or retaliation.

Authors of the report include McCray, Trejo Rosas, Shamet Qejvani, Shateara Hall, Bani Bhattacharya, Laura M. Neumann and Ans Irfan--all of whom worked on the survey as part of the GW Milken Institute School of Public Health Department of Environmental and Occupational Health. Multiple Milken Institute School of Public Health students also assisted with the qualitative coding and promotion of the survey.

Michaels and Melissa Perry, a professor and chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, provided guidance in producing the report. The McElhattan Foundation and the Institute for New Economic Thinking provided financial support for the survey and the report.

The report, "COVID-19 National Health Worker Survey," can be accessed here.

PULLMAN, Wash. - Before the huge potential of tiny nanocarriers for highly targeted drug delivery and environmental clean-up can be realized, scientists first need to be able to see them.

Currently researchers have to rely on attaching fluorescent dyes or heavy metals to label parts of organic nanocarrier structures for investigation, often changing them in the process. A new technique using chemically-sensitive "soft" X-rays offers a simpler, non-disruptive way of gaining insight into this nano-world.

In a study published by Nature Communications, a research team demonstrates the capability of the X-ray method on a smart drug delivery nanoparticle and a polysoap nanostructure intended to capture crude oil spilled in the ocean.

"We have developed a new technique to look at nanocarrier internal structure, chemistry and environmental behavior without any labeling at all - a new capability that up to now has not been possible," said Brian Collins, a Washington State University physicist and corresponding author on the study. "Currently, you need fluorescent tags to see inside nanocarriers, but this can modify their structure and behavior, especially if they're made out of carbon-based materials. With this new technique, we've been able to look inside these nanocarriers, analyze their chemical identities and concentrations - and do this all in their fully natural state, including their water environment."

Organic nanocarriers used for drug delivery are often created out of carbon-based molecules, which either love or loathe water. These so-called hydrophilic and hydrophobic molecules are bonded together and will self-assemble in water with the water-hating part hiding inside a shell of the water-loving segments.

Hydrophobic drugs will also insert themselves into the structure, which is designed to open up and release the drug only in the diseased environment. For instance, nanocarrier technology has the potential to allow chemotherapy that only kills cancer cells without making the patient sick, enabling more effective doses.

While nanocarriers can be created this way, researchers cannot easily see the details of their structures or even how much drug is staying inside or leaking out. The use of fluorescent labels can highlight parts of nanocarriers - even make them twinkle - but they also change the carriers in the process, sometimes significantly.

Instead, the technique Collins and his colleagues have developed uses soft resonant X-rays to analyze the nanocarriers. Soft X-rays are a special type of light that lies between ultraviolet light and hard X-rays, which are the kind used by doctors to view a broken bone. These special X-rays are absorbed by almost everything, including the air, so the new technique requires a high vacuum environment.

Collins' team adapted a soft X-ray method to investigate printable, carbon-based, plastic electronics, so that it would work on these water-based organic nanocarriers - penetrating a thin slice of water to do it.

Each chemical bond absorbs a different wavelength or color of soft X-rays, so for this study, researchers selected X-ray colors to illuminate different parts of a smart medicine nanocarrier through their unique bonds.

"We essentially tuned the X-ray color to distinguish between the bonds already there in the molecule," said Collins.

This allowed them to evaluate how much and what type of material was in its inner core, the size and water-content in the surrounding nano-shell as well as how the nanocarrier responded to a changing environment.

They also used the soft X-ray technique to investigate a polysoap nanocarrier that was developed to capture crude oil spilled in the ocean. Polysoaps can create a nanocarrier from a single molecule, maximizing their surface area for capturing hydrocarbons such as those found in an oil spill. Using the new technique, the researchers discovered that the open sponge-like structure of a polysoap can persist from high to low concentrations, which will make it more effective in real-world applications.

"It's important for researchers to be able to examine all these structures up close, so they can avoid costly trial and error," said Collins.

This technique should allow researchers to assess behavior of these structures in different environments, Collins said. For instance, for smart drug delivery, there can be different temperatures, pH levels and stimuli in the body, and researchers want to know if the nanostructures stay together until the conditions are right to apply the drug. If they can determine this early in the development process, they can be more certain the nanocarriers will work before investing in time-intensive medical studies.

"We envision this new technique will enable a much faster pace and higher precision in design and development of these exciting new technologies," Collins said.

A team of UBC Okanagan researchers is looking at strategies that could help the homeless during a pandemic.

John Graham, director of UBC Okanagan's School of Social Work, says while many populations have been targeted with guidelines to keep them safe, homeless people have been mostly overlooked.

While this research project began a few years ago, Graham says his team quickly turned their attention to the impact of COVID-19. His team looked at peer-reviewed publications, dating back to 1984, that examined how homeless populations were impacted by other highly contagious or communicable illnesses such as tuberculous, H1NI and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

"Those experiencing homelessness do not fare well in terms of general health and this risk rises during public health outbreaks," says Graham. "Research findings have shown that homeless people under the age of 65 have a mortality rate five to 10 times higher compared to the general population."

Before this research, Graham, who is principal investigator of the Kelowna Homelessness Research Initiative, says no one really knew how pandemics historically impacted services for the homeless sector.

"It's important to remember that when public health officials make recommendations and response to a community they don't necessarily take into account all populations," he says. "Some of the methods of response are not easily transferable to the homeless populations -- that's partially because of their transient nature. But it is not unusual for homeless individuals to have a number of underlying illnesses, which could leave them more susceptible to virus obtainment, transmission and mortality."

Postdoctoral researcher Jordan Babando says they looked at a range of journal articles from across the world and identified six key themes that particularly affect the homeless: education and outreach, structure of services provided, screening and contact tracing, transmission and prevention strategies, shelter protocols and finally treatment, adherence and vaccination.

"Those experiencing homelessness often live in low?capacity shelters or transient locations that likely have no access to hygienic resources. This places them at increased risk of obtaining and spreading viruses in comparison to the general population," says Babando.

Shelter overcrowding, poor ventilation and an accumulation of clients with predispositions to infection increase the risk factors for virus and also complicate detection and tracing procedure, he explains.

"These concerns provide extraordinary considerations for developing and implementing pandemic and outbreak response planning and protocols," says Babando. "Trying to get the homeless population to come into the clinic for a vaccine and adhere to stay at home or social distancing regulations is difficult."

The goal of this research paper, says Graham, is to help public health agencies and homelessness sectors formulate a pandemic response to homeless populations.

"We need to move the needle as quickly as possible when it comes to our homeless situation," he says. "COVID-19 is extraordinarily significant for all of us, but most especially our vulnerable people. We hope these findings will contribute further to the dialogue help to end homelessness."

It is said that 10 to 15% of the world's agricultural production loss is caused by diseases, which is equivalent of the food for about 500 million people. And since 70-80% of this plant disease is caused by filamentous fungi, protecting crops from filamentous fungi is an important issue in effectively feeding the world population. In order for pathogenic fungi to infect plants, they must break through the epidermal cells of the plant and invade the interior. In other words, plant epidermal cells act as the first barrier to stop the attack of pathogenic fungi in the environment. So what kind of defense functions do epidermal cells have?

Interestingly, it was known that the epidermis of plants contain small chloroplasts that are not so involved in photosynthesis. However, it was unclear what function it had. Why are there small chloroplasts in the epidermis of plants that do not contribute much to photosynthesis?

Assistant Professor Hiroki Irieda of the Faculty of Agriculture, Shinshu University and Professor Yoshitaka Takano, Graduate School of Agriculture, Kyoto University, found that small chloroplasts in the epidermis of plants control the entry of fungal pathogens. The duo discovered that the small chloroplasts move inside the cell dramatically to the surface layer in response to the fungal attack and is involved in such defense response. Furthermore, the duo found that multiple immune factors involved in the defense response of plants are specifically found in the epidermal chloroplast, which contributes to the enhancement of resistance to the invasion of pathogen filamentous fungi. Based on this research, they hope to develop crop protection technology to enhance and control the chloroplast function of the plant epidermis, which functions as a barrier against foreign invaders, and to increase the immunity of plants, which will hopefully lead to reduction of disease damage and improvement of food production.

In this study, the duo first investigated what kind of pathogenic fungi the epidermal chloroplasts respond to. As a result, they found that multiple pathogenic filamentous fungi cause surface migration of epidermal chloroplasts. Interestingly, it was also found that these pathogenic filamentous fungi were the so-called “nonadapted” and were blocked from invading epidermal cells. On the other hand, adapted pathogenic fungus is more likely to invade the epidermis in plants in which the epidermal chloroplasts have stopped migrating to the surface layer.

Next, they succeeded in finding plant proteins involved in the surface migration of epidermal chloroplasts. When a plant that overproduces this protein was created by gene introduction, epidermal chloroplasts did not move to the surface layer against pathogenic filamentous fungi. In this transgenic plant, the immunity to the epidermal invasion of pathogenic filamentous fungi is reduced. These results indicate that the migration of epidermal chloroplasts to the surface layer is involved in the defense response that blocks the invasion of pathogenic fungi.

Furthermore, it was revealed that multiple factors involved in plant immunity are specifically found in the epidermal chloroplast. In addition, in mutant plants in which these immune factors did not function, migration of epidermal chloroplasts to the surface layer was confirmed, but the invasion rate of pathogenic fungi increased.

Based on the results of this study, the duo hopes to develop technology to enhance and control the function of epidermal chloroplasts, such as increasing the intracellular migration efficiency of epidermal chloroplasts when attacked by pathogenic filamentous fungi.

China has made remarkable gains in reducing the number of women who die during childbirth and boosting child survival rates over the past 70 years, according to new review.

The Lancet report brought together China's health research institutions alongside its international colleagues from Australia, the UK and the US to review the country's progress in maternal, newborn, child and adolescent health and nutrition since 1949.

Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI) Professor George Patton, one of the international researchers, said over the past 70 years China had made a remarkable transition from where the survival of women and children was the priority to one where children and adolescents now have similar health profiles to young Australians.

"This progress has been driven by rapid socioeconomic development and reducing poverty, the country's capacity for top-down leadership such as the reorganisation of social health insurance and systematic public health planning," he said.

"China population policy over the past seven decades, including its previously one-child policy, has profoundly affected its age structure. But its growing focus on the health of children and young people reflects a need to invest in its next generation. This is something that we will increasingly see in other countries across the region including Australia."

The study found rapid reductions in the maternal death ratio from about 1500 cases per 100,000 births in 1949 to 17.8 cases per 100,000 births in 2019. The infant death rate has lowered from about 200 cases per 1000 births in 1949 to 5.6 cases per 1000 births in 2019.

Professor Patton said in some aspects China was a model for what other low- and middle-income countries could achieve.

"Some elements of China's success such as good quality antenatal and postnatal care, scaling up of childhood vaccination and delivering a good health education in schools are relevant almost everywhere," he said. "But it's questionable how successful China's strategies might be in countries with different cultural norms and political systems."

However, the report also found a series of emerging or neglected conditions in China that now required a greater focus including infertility, advanced maternal age, stillbirth, child protection, mental health, and sexual and gender-based violence, as well as emerging infectious diseases such as COVID-19.

Professor Patton said several barriers remained in addressing maternal depression and child and adolescent mental health.

"Mental health problems are still poorly understood and stigmatised in China," he said. "Pregnant women are reluctant to seek help and mental health problems among children and adolescents are neglected. There is also a shortage of health service providers including child psychiatrists and counsellors, especially in rural areas where the mental health problems of children left-behind by parents migrating to the cities for work are considerable."

Professor Patton said maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health would continue to be vital for the healthy development of the next generation in China.

"The next 10 years will be crucial for China's goal of universal health coverage, particularly in addressing disparities and inequities in marginalised and disadvantaged communities," he said.

Popular television shows and movies can bolster teenagers' mental health and help them cope with bullying, sexual assault, suicidal thoughts, substance abuse and depression when these issues are depicted with empathy and appropriate resources are provided, a report published by UCLA's Center for Scholars and Storytellers shows.

And the need is great. Recent research has shown that children between the ages of 11 and 17 are more likely than any other age group to report moderate to severe anxiety and depression, said Yalda Uhls, founder and executive director of the center and an adjunct assistant professor of psychology.

Even before the pandemic, teen suicide rates were rising, along with reported symptoms of anxiety and depression, she noted. At the same time, nearly half of young adults say they still perceive a stigma attached to receiving mental health treatment.

The center conducted several studies examining Netflix's controversial series "13 Reasons Why," a teen drama that first aired in 2017 and drew both worldwide acclaim and condemnation for its graphic depictions of suicide, sexual assault, domestic violence, bullying, homelessness and school shootings. Uhls and her team wanted to learn how the program impacted the mental health of teens who viewed it.

In a study of 157 children between the ages of 13 and 17 from across the country, 68 watched Season 3 of "13 Reasons Why," while the others did not. All participants completed a survey at the beginning of the study about mental health, depression, bullying, sexual assault and related topics and another at the end that asked, among other questions, whether they had sought out information about these issues.

The group that watched the show also answered questions about whether, and with whom, they discussed the show and whether what they viewed led them to seek further information on the topics raised.

Nearly all the teens -- 62 of 68 -- who watched the program reported having looked for information on mental health topics related to what they saw. A vast majority of them also reported discussing the issues it raised with others -- especially suicide, mental health and bullying.

"Our research found that when teens watch TV shows that portray mental health issues, they actually talk about it with their peers, parents and partners," Uhls said. "Our results demonstrate that these kinds of challenging and realistic stories inspire youth to talk about and learn more about mental health."

The average age of participants was 15; 52% were female and 48% male. About 55% were white, 19% were Hispanic, 17% were Black and slightly more than 6% identified as multiracial.

The study, which is highlighted in the Center for Scholars and Storytellers report, has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Medical Internet Research and is scheduled to be published in August.

The center also commissioned a study by media research and analytics company MarketCast that tracked more than 1.29 million Twitter mentions of "13 Reasons Why" over a total of three weeks to examine the conversation surrounding the show on social media.

Among the findings: Social engagement was particularly high when the show's actors provided mental health resources, like when Devin Druid, who plays one of the main characters, posted resources and shared an article in which he discussed sexual assault. Viewers also used posts of emotionally charged scenes and behind-the-scenes content on social media to engage in conversations about difficult subjects.

In addition, the show's producers created a website featuring videos by the actors, crisis-line numbers and links to resources to help viewers navigate the topics raised in various episodes.

The report recommends that, like the producers of "13 Reasons Why," studios create and provide credible, engaging resources with accurate information to accompany TV shows and films designed for teens that address mental health and related issues. Examples include toolkits developed by public health experts that are designed to support teens as they discuss these issues with parents and friends.

Uhls said she hopes the center's new research will inspire efforts by film and television executives to produce meaningful shows that improve viewers' lives.

"Together, we can normalize talking about mental health by bringing together scholars and content creators to unlock the power of research-informed storytelling," she said. "This study provides much-needed evidence to advance the conversation about how a popular show can impact adolescent mental health and the lessons to be drawn from it. Accurate information combined with compelling storytelling works well."

QUT researchers have used experimental x-ray techniques at the Australian Synchrotron to gain fundamental insights into how gypsum dehydrates under pressure and the processes that create earthquakes.

In the study published in the Nature Research journal Communications Materials, QUT researchers Dr Christoph Schrank, Dr Oliver Gaede, from the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and Master of Science graduate Katherine Gioseffi teamed up with the Australian Synchrotron and colleagues from the University of New South Wales and the University of Warsaw to study how gypsum dehydrates much faster under pressure.

"Dehydration is a process in which minerals shed the water bound in their crystal lattices due to heating," Dr Schrank said.

"The rocky shell of our planet, the lithosphere, contains many rocks rich in hydrous minerals. The water produced by dehydration of the lithosphere has a tremendous impact on geological processes such as the formation of volcanoes, ore deposits, and earthquakes."

In the study, the researchers used a unique high-pressure cell with synchrotron transmission X-ray scattering which employs extremely bright X-rays to reveal how rock samples transform under high temperatures and pressures at the scale of nanometres (one billionth of a metre).

The ANSTO Australian Synchrotron, in Melbourne, is located in a building the size of a football stadium and is able to use electrons to produce intense beams of light more than a million times brighter than the sun.

In the research centre, the electron beams travel through tunnels at just under the speed of light in a circular orbit that is "synchronised" by the application of strong magnetic fields.

Mineral dehydration, also referred to as calcination, is important in industrial processes. For centuries people dehydrated gypsum (CaSO4·2H2O) to create hemihydrate (CaSO4·0.5H2O), better known as plaster of Paris.

The construction industry produces about 100 billion kg of plaster of Paris every year for products including cement and mortars, and it is used in medical scenarios for casts for the immobilisation of fractured bones.

There is also ongoing scientific debate about the origins of large deposits of gypsum and hemihydrate on Mars.

In this study, the researchers tested if the speed at which gypsum rock dehydrates is influenced by small changes in stress, such as the pressure changes in the operation of plate tectonics.

"Much to our surprise, we found that if we clamped our samples with a slightly tightened vice, the rocks lost their water twice as fast than without clamping," Dr Gaede said.

"This finding has important implications for geological processes. When tectonic plates collide along their boundaries, tectonic stresses within the plates slowly build up over time."

Dr Schrank said the new research suggests that a small growth in tectonic stress can speed up the release of water within the plates and therefore promote earthquakes and the formation of new minerals.

The research findings could help engineers to design more energy-efficient calcination processes.

Professor UEYAMA Takehiko (Biosignal Research Center, Kobe University) and the inner ear research group (Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine) have identified the cell types in the inner ear cochlea (*1) responsible for the production of superoxide (Nox3*2-expressing cells). They achieved this by using genetically modified mice that they developed. The researchers discovered that these superoxide-producing cells increase in number in response to aging, noise damage, and ototoxic drugs, thus causing age-related, noise-induced and drug-induced hearing loss. In addition, they were able to suppress the onset of these three types of acquired hearing loss in genetically modified mice with no Nox3 expression (Nox3 knockout).

These results are expected to contribute towards the development of the world's first drug-based treatment for hearing loss. Future treatments could involve removing reactive oxygen species from the cochlea, suppressing their production, or the development of Nox3 inhibitors.

These research results were published in the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience 'Journal of Neuroscience' on April 12, 2021.

Main Points

It is known that NADPH oxidase 3 (Nox3) is only expressed in the inner ear; however, it was not known which cells are involved in this, nor when or how Nox3 is expressed. In a world first, this research team has revealed the cells in the inner ear responsible for Nox3 expression and its mode of expression by using the genetically modified mice that they developed.

It was discovered that Nox3-expressing cells increase gradually with age, and suddenly in response to noise damage and ototoxic drugs.

The researchers were able to control the onset of age-related, noise-induced, and drug-induced hearing loss in Nox3 knockout mice, in which Nox3 is unable to be expressed. In particular, they were able to significantly suppress the onset of age-related and drug-induced hearing loss.

If a drug to suppress the expression and/or activity of Nox3 could be developed, this would aid the development of effective treatment methods for the many patients with the abovementioned major types of acquired hearing loss.

Research Background

Sensorineural hearing loss (*3) is the most common type of sensorineural impairment. Around 5% of the global population have some kind of hearing impairment; however, there are still no established treatments, particularly pharmacological interventions, for these conditions.

It is said that hearing loss related to aging occurs in between 25%-40% of adults over 65, and there are around 10 million people with this condition in Japan alone. Noise-induced hearing loss is still one of the most common aftereffects experienced by former soldiers; however, they are not the only people who develop this impairment. According to a statement by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2019, around 50% of young people aged 12-35 (1.1 billion people) are at risk of suffering from noise-induced hearing loss in the future due to overexposure to high noise levels resulting from the popularization of portable media players, such as smartphones. There is also drug-induced hearing loss, which can occur as a side effect of taking medications such as antibiotics, anticancer drugs, diuretics, painkillers and anti-inflammatory drugs. Consequently, the number of people with hearing loss is increasing in modern society, and developing treatments for this has become a pressing issue.

Superoxide, a kind of reactive oxygen species, produced by NADPH oxidases (Noxs) contribute towards the development of different types of sensorineural hearing loss. Among the seven types of Noxs found in humans, Nox3, which is specifically expressed in the inner ear, has been reported to be the origin of superoxide. However, the cell types in the inner ear cochlea that express Nox3 was not known, and it was not understood when nor how Nox3 is expressed. The mechanism by which it causes hearing loss was also unclear.

Research Methodology and Findings

This research group has created many mouse models using gene manipulation in order to investigate the causes of hearing loss in patients and develop treatments for them. For this experiment, they developed a mouse model (Nox3-Cre;tdTomato), in which red fluorescent light-emitting proteins (tdTomato) would be expressed in the Nox3-expressing cells, and a Nox3 knockout mouse line (Nox3-KO), in which Nox-3 is unable to be expressed. Using these mice, they were able to identify the Nox3-expressing cells in the inner ear cochlea (which is responsible for hearing), in other words the cells responsible for producing superoxide (Figures 1 and 2). Furthermore, they also revealed that Nox3 plays an important role in the onset of all of the following major types of acquired hearing loss (*4): age-related hearing loss, noise-induced hearing loss and drug-induced hearing loss (Figure 3).

First, the researchers used the mice with red fluorescent tdTomato proteins in Nox3-expressing cells, and a fluorescence microscope to track the temporal expression of red fluorescence in the cells of the mice after birth. They discovered increased red fluorescence in the following cells inside the cochlea (which is responsible for hearing): hair cells (*5), various types of supporting cells (that provide anatomical support to hair cells) and spiral ganglion neurons (the first afferent neuron for hearing connected to hair cells) (Figures 1 and 2).

Of the two types of hair cell inside the inner ear; outer hair cells are more vulnerable to various outside stimuli than the inner hair cells. A loss of outer hair cells is a known manifestation in many cases of hearing impairment. The research team investigated this in detail using two different types of genetically modified mice: mice that retained the Nox3-mediated ability to produce superoxide (heterozygous Nox3-Cre/-;tdTomato) and mice with this ability removed (homozygous Nox3-Cre+/+;tdTomato). In the first group of mice, which retained the ability to produce superoxide, the inner hair cells emitted red fluorescence from tdTomato protein (in other words, they expressed Nox3). However, Nox3 was not observed in the outer ear cells, regardless of aging, noise, or cisplatin inducement (cisplatin is a well-known anticancer agent that has hearing loss as a side effect). Using the latter group of mice (that were unable to produce superoxide), the researchers found that the number of cells expressing fluorescent tdTomato protein (in other words, cells that originally had the ability to express Nox3) increased in response to aging, noise, and drug inducement. From these results, they determined that Nox3-expressing (i.e. superoxide producing) outer hair cells are poisoned by superoxide and die (apoptosis). In addition, the researchers revealed that loss of outer hair cells could also result from superoxide produced by surrounding supporting cells expressing Nox3, even if the outer hair cell didn't express Nox3 itself.

The team used Nox3-KO mice to investigate the effects of Nox3 on age-related, noise-induced and drug-induced hearing loss, and found that it was easier to suppress both the onset and degree of all these types of hearing loss in Nox3-KO mice than in wild-type mice. They also found that they could suppress age-related and drug-induced hearing loss to a greater degree than noise-induced hearing loss.

Additionally, the researchers discovered that cisplatin-induced increases in Nox3-expressing cells and the subsequent onset of drug-induced hearing loss were weaker in older mice. This result corresponds with clinical data showing that cisplatin-induced hearing loss is more frequent in children under 15 years old.

This research identified the cells in the inner ear cochlea that express Nox3 (in other words, the origin of superoxide in the cochlea) and discovered that induced Nox3 expression causes outer hair cell apoptosis (loss/death) resulting in hearing loss (aging, noise, and drug related). Consequently, the researchers revealed that inhibiting Nox3's expression or function could provide a promising approach for preventing the onset of acquired hearing loss.

Further Developments

Hearing loss is the most common sensorineural impairment and is only expected to increase in the future; however, there is a need to develop pharmacological interventions for these conditions. This research has revealed that superoxide produced by Nox3 in the inner ear cochlea causes the apoptosis (loss/death) of outer hair cells, which causes at least the following types of acquired hearing loss: age-related, noise-induced, and drug-induced. The results also show that there is a possibility of preventing the onset of the major types of acquired hearing loss by inhibiting Nox3 expression and function in the cochlea. Fortunately, if such a Nox3 inhibitor were to be developed, its side effects on the rest of the body are likely to be mild because Nox3 has been reported to be specifically expressed in the inner ear.

As for genetic sensorineural hearing loss, progress is being made in developing treatments for each specific disorder separately. However, there are far fewer patients with genetic hearing loss compared to those with acquired hearing loss.

If a pharmacological treatment method were to be developed for the abovementioned three main types of acquired hearing impairment, it would not only be the first drug-based treatment for hearing loss in the world, but could also aid the development of such treatments for genetic hearing loss as well.

The results of this study represent a breakthrough in the development of drugs to treat hearing loss and will be of great benefit to society.

From shamans and mystics to cult leaders and divine kings, why have people throughout history accorded high status to people believed to have supernatural powers?

According to a study led by researchers from the University of Oxford, this tendency to attribute social dominance to such individuals is rooted in early development.

As part of the study, 48 infants aged 12 to 16 months watched a series of animated videos in which two characters competed for a reward. In each scenario, one character displayed physically counterintuitive methods of making progress across the screen - flying or teleporting in the direction of the reward; the other moved more intuitively in continuous paths sticking to the ground, thus lacking any special powers.

The children generally found the events unexpected (they looked longer at the screen) when the character using physically intuitive methods of propulsion outcompeted the one employing physically counterintuitive methods, expecting the latter to 'win' instead. Further experimental manipulations showed that infants' expectations were not simply motivated by how efficiently goals were achieved, but whether supernatural capabilities were deployed in any given scenario.

Co-first author Dr Xianwei Meng, of the Graduate School of Human Sciences at Osaka University, said: 'Studies in developmental science have shown that from the first year of life infants are sensitive to both social dominance and to events violating intuitive understanding of the physical world. They expect characters who have relatively larger body-size, more allies, or who are located at a higher elevation to prevail in situations of conflict. They also expect objects to fall earthwards and move in continuous trajectories. Our experiments combined these existing procedural paradigms to show, for the first time, that observing an efficiently goal-directed event that violates intuitive principles of gravity and continuity triggers expectations of social dominance.'

Co-first author Dr Yo Nakawake, of the Kochi University of Technology and also research affiliate at the University of Oxford, added: 'Further research is needed to explore the inferences made by young children with regard to other properties commonly attributed to supernatural agents such as shapeshifting, omniscience or immortality. We would also want to see how infants react to counterintuitive displays from individuals who are not competing for a reward, just to understand if a supernatural act alone elicits expectations of social dominance. One other important question that remains unanswered is whether infants perceive these otherworldly figures to not only be socially dominant, but also more knowledgeable, trustworthy, competent, or prosocial.'

According to Professor Harvey Whitehouse, Director of the Centre for the Study of Social Cohesion (CSSC) at the University of Oxford and senior author on the paper: 'Anthropologists have long been aware of the link between supernatural power and social dominance in cultures from all around the world. But this is the first time we have seen evidence for such a link at such an early stage in the socialization process, even before language skills are well developed, suggesting that it may be a natural consequence of the way human minds work.'

About 14 billion years ago, our universe changed from being a lot hotter and denser to expanding radically - a process that scientists have named 'The Big Bang'.

And even though we know that this fast expansion created particles, atoms, stars, galaxies and life as we know it today, the details of how it all happened are still unknown.

Now a new study performed by researchers from University of Copenhagen reveals insights on how it all began.

"We have studied a substance called Quark-Gluon Plasma that was the only matter, which existed during the first microsecond of Big Bang. Our results tell us a unique story of how the plasma evolved in the early stage of the universe," explains You Zhou, Associate Professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen.

"First the plasma that consisted of quarks and gluons was separated by the hot expansion of the universe. Then the pieces of quark reformed into so-called hadrons. A hadron with three quarks makes a proton, which is part of atomic cores. These cores are the building blocks that constitutes earth, ourselves and the universe that surrounds us," he adds.

From fluent and smooth to the strong building blocks of life

The Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) was present in the first 0.000001 second of Big Bang and thereafter it disappeared because of the expansion.

But by using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, researchers were able to recreate this first matter in history and trace back what happened to it.

"The collider smashes together ions from the plasma with great velocity - almost like the speed of light. This makes us able to see how the QGP evolved from being its own matter to the cores in atoms and the building blocks of life," says You Zhou.

"In addition to using the Large Hadron Collider, the researches also developed an algorithm that is able to analyze the collective expansion of more produced particles at once, than ever possible before. Their results show that the QGP used to be a fluent liquid form and that it distinguishes itself from other matters by constantly changing its shape over time.

"For a long time researchers thought that the plasma was a form of gas, but our analysis confirm the latest milestone measurement, where the Hadron Collider showed that QGP was fluent and had a smooth soft texture like water. The new details we provide is that the plasma has changed its shape over time, which is quite surprising and different from any other matter we know and what we would have expected," says You Zhou.

One step closer to the truth about Big Bang

Even though this might seem like a small detail, it brings us one step closer to solving the puzzle of the Big Bang and how the universe developed in the first microsecond, he elaborates.

"Every discovery is a brick that improves our chances of finding out the truth about Big Bang. It has taken us about 20 years to find out that the Quark-Gluon Plasma was fluent before it changed into hadrons and the building blocks of life. Therefore our new knowledge on the ever changing behavior of the plasma, is a major breakthrough for us," You Zhou concludes.

The study has just been published in the journal Physics Letters B and is performed by You Zhou together with Zuzana Moravcova, who is a PhD at the Niels Bohr Institute at University of Copenhagen.

Cells sense and respond to the mechanical properties of the cellular microenvironment in the body. Changes in these properties, which occur in a number of human pathologies, including cancer, can elicit abnormal responses from cells. How the cells adapt to such changes in the mechanical microenvironment is not well understood.

A team of researchers at Texas A&M University are working to understand cellular mechanosensing -- the ability to sense and respond to the mechanical properties of the microenvironment -- in a unique way. Dr. Tanmay Lele, Unocal Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering and the Department of Translational Medical Sciences, partnered with Dr. Charles Baer, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Florida. Together they used methods of experimental cellular evolution as a means to understand cellular adaptation to biomaterials of controlled mechanical properties.

The experiments were led by doctoral student Purboja Purkayastha from the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering and technical laboratory coordinator Kavya Pendyala from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M.

"Before our work, it was basically unknown if cells would evolve in controlled mechanical environments," Lele said. "We set out to test this possibility."

Cells are products from hundreds of millions of years of evolution, and their response to environments -- whether chemical or mechanical -- has likely evolved through a process of natural selection. Chemical constraints are well known to exert selection pressure on cell populations, but whether the mechanical properties of a cell's environment constitutes a significant agent of natural selection has never been investigated before.

Many types of animal cells exhibit "phenotypic plasticity" -- they look and function differently -- in different mechanical environments. There are two possible explanations for the plasticity of cells in different mechanical environments. First, the phenotypes may be optimal, such that there is no better way for a cell to function in each environment. Alternatively, the plasticity may be a compromise such that the phenotypic trait is optimal for a given mechanical context, but suboptimal in other mechanical contexts.

The team's research demonstrated that cellular mechanosensing is, in fact, not optimal but a tradeoff. Using a combination of experimental cellular evolution on biomaterials of controlled stiffness, genome sequencing, simulations and gene expression analysis, the team showed that cells evolve under selection pressure from biomaterials of controlled mechanical stiffness.

The team's research was recently published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.

Lele said that experimental cell evolution is a good approach to better understand the mechanisms underlying cellular mechanosensing.

"We are currently using experimental cellular evolution to understand how cancer cells, which have great genomic variation, respond to the altered mechanical stiffness and other mechanical properties of tumor microenvironments," Lele said. "Further, the fact that cells can be evolved on biomaterials of controlled properties in vitro opens up new ways to generate engineered cells with properties optimal for those properties."

New effective compounds, which can be endogenous donors of a signaling molecule - hydrogen sulfide in the body, were synthesized by SUSU scientists. Due to this property, the obtained compounds are potential drugs with a cancer-preventing effect. The research work was published in the Russian Chemical Bulletin (Q3).

Organosulfur compounds with anticancer, antibacterial, and antirheumatic properties have been studied for some years by scientists from South Ural State University and N.D. Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences. In the latest study, they attempted to search for new derivatives of 1,2-dithiol-3-thiones - compounds with various biological activities.

Several years ago, scientists proved that the 1,2-dithiol-3-thione fragment is an efficient endogenous donor of hydrogen sulfide in the body. It means that it can increase the gas content in human blood and tissues. One of the most studied hydrogen sulfide donors in the world is 5- (4-hydroxyphenyl) -3H-1,2-dithiol-3-thione. Scientists have previously developed an effective method for producing the compound. In the last work, the researchers reflected the strategy of a fundamentally new way of introducing a dithiolthione fragment based on the previously synthesized 4,5-dichloro-1,2-dithiol-3-thione into hybrid molecules.

"Cellular hydrogen sulfide regulates important functions of the cardiovascular, immune, nervous, respiratory and gastrointestinal systems. A fundamentally new achievement was the introduction of a new heterocyclic fragment containing a dithiolothionic cycle to obtain an endogenous hydrogen sulfide donor containing a natural non-toxic thioglycoside molecule," Doctor of Chemistry, Professor Oleg Rakitin said.

G. B. Elyakov carried out the synthesis and proof of the structure of new compounds in the joint laboratory of SUSU and the Institute of Organic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences, with his colleagues from the Pacific Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry. The scientists tested the efficacy in mouse epidermal cell models (JB6 Cl41 P +) and in soft agar human leukemia cell models. The study of cancer preventive (anticancer) activity was carried out at the Pacific Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry. The cooperation of groups working in various fields of science has become a distinctive feature of research.

As a result, the scientists synthesized six new acetylthioglycoside derivatives of 4-chloro-1,2-dithiol-3-thione. It has been established that all of them can be used as potential drugs with anti-cancer effects.

The research is fundamental. In the future, scientists intend to obtain other compounds, fragments of which can release two or even three endogenously produced signaling molecules of hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, and nitric oxide. The findings can create a breakthrough in obtaining multipurpose drugs and are of interest to organizations specializing in cancer preventive therapy.

Ecology, the field of biology devoted to the study of organisms and their natural environments, needs to account for the historical legacy of colonialism that has shaped people and the natural world, researchers argued in a new perspective in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

To make ecology more inclusive of the world's diverse people and cultures living in diverse ecosystems, researchers from University of Cape Town, North West University in South Africa and North Carolina State University proposed five strategies to untangle the impacts of colonialism on research and thinking in the field today.

"There are significant biases in our understanding of ecology and ecosystems because of this colonial framework of thinking," said perspective co-author Madhusudan Katti, associate professor for leadership in public science, and forestry and environmental resources at NC State. "We are challenging ecologists to understand and address the legacies of colonialism, and to start engaging in an active process of 'decolonizing science.'"

The researchers described emerging research documenting impacts of European colonialism - the migration, settlement and exploitation of the Americas, Africa, Asia and other parts of the world by people from Europe - on people and the natural world, and on ecology.

Katti said examples of how ecological research reflects the impact of colonialism include patterns of vegetation in cities that reflect patterns of racial segregation and discrimination, or in the use of names of prominent European scientists or their patrons in the scientific names for bird species and other organisms rather than names used by Indigenous people.

"Indigenous names are often based on observations of behavior or ecology, or represent cultural significance of species, but that traditional ecological knowledge is lost when names are changed," Katti said. "This is bad for both the colonized people and the science of ecology itself."

The researchers challenged the field to address colonial legacies using five strategies:

* Decolonize the mind. Researchers said this should be done by understanding other knowledge systems from colonized cultures.

* Know your history, or understand the history of colonialism in influencing Western ecology, and its role in promoting oppression of other people and in shaping the environment. "Ecology is about organisms living in their ecosystems - that's what we study," Katti said. "If you want to study ecology, that includes people. To understand how people shape ecosystems, we have to understand how political power works. Western ecologists have to acknowledge how science has been aligned with colonial power, and how it has been used to perpetuate systems of oppression that continue to this day."

* Decolonize information. They suggest this should be done by increasing access to academic information, and understanding power dynamics in the way data is owned and disseminated.

* Decolonize expertise by recognizing more diverse voices in the field of ecology.

* Establish diverse and inclusive teams to help overcome biases in future research. "The world is enriched by diverse perspectives," Katti said. "We need scientific teams where everybody is equally empowered to set a robust research agenda, and ensure more robust testing of these ideas. If the person with a different hypothesis is not in the room, then you're never challenged to test and prove their hypothesis, and you're subject to your own bias."