Earth

Glaciers are a sensitive indicator of climate change - and one that can be easily observed. Regardless of altitude or latitude, glaciers have been melting at a high rate since the mid-?20th century. Until now, however, the full extent of ice loss has only been partially measured and understood. Now an international research team led by ETH Zurich and the University of Toulouse has authored a comprehensive study on global glacier retreat, which was published online in Nature on 28 April. This is the first study to include all the world's glaciers - around 220,000 in total - excluding the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The study's spatial and temporal resolution is unprecedented - and shows how rapidly glaciers have lost thickness and mass over the past two decades.

Rising sea levels and water scarcity
What was once permanent ice has declined in volume almost everywhere around the globe. Between 2000 and 2019, the world's glaciers lost a total of 267 gigatonnes (billion tonnes) of ice per year on average - an amount that could have submerged the entire surface area of Switzerland under six metres of water every year. The loss of glacial mass also accelerated sharply during this period. Between 2000 and 2004, glaciers lost 227 gigatonnes of ice per year, but between 2015 and 2019, the lost mass amounted to 298 gigatonnes annually. Glacial melt caused up to 21 percent of the observed rise in sea levels during this period - some 0.74 millimetres a year. Nearly half of the rise in sea levels is attributable to the thermal expansion of water as it heats up, with meltwaters from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and changes in terrestrial water storage accounting for the remaining third.

Among the fastest melting glaciers are those in Alaska, Iceland and the Alps. The situation is also having a profound effect on mountain glaciers in the Pamir mountains, the Hindu Kush and the Himalayas. "The situation in the Himalayas is particularly worrying," explains Romain Hugonnet, lead author of the study and researcher at ETH Zurich and the University of Toulouse. "During the dry season, glacial meltwater is an important source that feeds major waterways such as the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Indus rivers. Right now, this increased melting acts as a buffer for people living in the region, but if Himalayan glacier shrinkage keeps accelerating, populous countries like India and Bangladesh could face water or food shortages in a few decades." The findings of this study can improve hydrological models and be used to make more accurate predictions on a global and local scales - for instance, to estimate how much Himalayan glacier meltwater one can anticipate over the next few decades.

To their surprise, the researchers also identified areas where melt rates slowed between 2000 and 2019, such as on Greenland's east coast and in Iceland and Scandinavia. They attribute this divergent pattern to a weather anomaly in the North Atlantic that caused higher precipitation and lower temperatures between 2010 and 2019, thereby slowing ice loss. The researchers also discovered that the phenomenon known as the Karakoram anomaly is disappearing. Prior to 2010, glaciers in the Karakoram mountain range were stable - and in some cases, even growing. However, the researchers' analysis revealed that Karakoram glaciers are now losing mass as well.

Study based on stereo satellite images
As a basis for the study, the research team used imagery captured on board NASA's Terra satellite, which has been orbiting the Earth once every 100 minutes since 1999 at an altitude of nearly 700 kilometres. Terra is home to ASTER, a multispectral imager with two cameras that record pairs of stereo images, allowing researchers to create high-?resolution digital elevation models of all the world's glaciers. The team used the full archive of ASTER images to reconstruct a time series of glacial elevation, which enabled them to calculate changes in the thickness and mass of the ice over time.

Lead author Romain Hugonnet is a doctoral student at ETH Zurich and the University of Toulouse. He worked on this project for nearly three years and spent 18 months analysing the satellite data. To process the data, the researchers used a supercomputer at the University of Northern British Columbia. Their findings will be included in the next Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is due to be published later this year. "Our findings are important on a political level. The world really needs to act now to prevent the worst-?case climate change scenario," says co-?author Daniel Farinotti, head of the glaciology group at ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL.

Alongside the University of Toulouse, ETH Zurich and WSL, other institutions that participated in the study include Ulster University in the UK, the University of Oslo in Norway and the University of Northern British Columbia in Canada (please refer to the study for a complete list).

Reference
Hugonnet R, McNabb R, Berthier E, Menounos B, Nuth C, Girod L, Farinotti D, Huss M, Dussaillant I, Brun F, Kääb A. Accelerated global glacier mass loss in the early twenty-?first century, Nature, published online April 28th 2021. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-?021-03436-z

Spreading of the seafloor in the Red Sea basin is found to have begun along its entire length around 13 million years ago, making its underlying oceanic crust twice as old as previously believed.

The formation history and age of the Red Sea basin has long been contested, largely because the crust under the sea is widely overlain by thick layers of salt and sediment, making it difficult to observe directly.

"Existing geological models of the Red Sea often contradict each other, largely due to limited high-resolution data and the influence of overlaying salt layers," says Froukje van der Zwan from KAUST, who worked on the project. "For example, magnetic methods do not work well because of the salt layers, where lava erupting under the salt blankets develops significantly different magnetic signatures than those from other oceans."

"We decided to start afresh without preconceptions and make use of gravity and earthquake data, which allowed us to 'see through' the salt layers to the crust beneath," explains van der Zwan.

Areas of thick crust, such as mountains and volcanoes, and denser rock types have a high gravity index, and oceanic crust displays different gravity properties compared with continental crust. These differences are mapped by satellites monitoring the gravitational field of the Earth, and the resulting "vertical gravity gradient" (VGG) data are readily available.

The international team combined VGG data with high-resolution seafloor maps, rock chemistry and earthquake data to gain a comprehensive overview of the basin. Their results indicate that the Red Sea has the fairly simple geological structure of a young ocean, with large volcanoes running the length of the slow-spreading rift. These features are typical of mid-ocean ridges around the world and suggest that the entire Red Sea is not a young sea, but rather a maturing "teenage" ocean basin of around 13 million years old.

"Most of the basin is underlain by oceanic crust, and the continental crusts on either side are further apart than previously indicated," says van der Zwan.

The new model explains features found in the northern Red Sea that are unaccounted for in earlier models. Furthermore, dating the spreading of the seafloor changes the understanding of the region's geological history and could help researchers better understand the formation of other oceans, such as the South Atlantic.

"With a stronger sense of where the earth plate boundaries are, we may improve our understanding of regional seismic activity," says van der Zwan. "Our model will enable us to conduct detailed studies of the ocean crust, active fault systems and the volcanic explosion craters that we found."

During the first wave of the corona pandemic, 36 per cent fewer men were diagnosed with prostate cancer in Sweden than in previous years. On the other hand, the number of patients receiving curative treatment for prostate cancer was unaffected. This is shown by a new register study led by Uppsala University researchers, whose results are published in the Scandinavian Journal of Urology.

"We think the number of cases diagnosed fell because, early on, the Public Health Agency of Sweden urged older people to minimise their social contacts and, by the same token, refrain from non-urgent health care. At the same time, the working group for the Swedish guidelines for prostate cancer care recommended that only men with prostate cancer symptoms should seek medical attention. The results of the study indicate that the recommendations were heeded," says Pär Stattin, Professor of Urology at Uppsala University and register holder for the National Prostate Cancer Register (NCPR).

The study is based on data from NCPR, which contains particulars for 98 per cent of the approximately 10,000 men annually diagnosed with prostate cancer in Sweden. Also included in this register are detailed accounts of cancer characteristics and the primary treatment.

When the researchers compared the period of the first pandemic wave, March-June 2020, with the corresponding months in the years 2017-19, they found that a marked decrease in the number of registered prostate cancer cases had taken place in spring 2020. Most pronounced, 51 per cent, was the fall among men aged 75 and over. In men below the age of 70, the corresponding figure was 28 per cent. Preliminary, as yet unpublished data from autumn 2020 show that the number of cases declined less markedly during the second pandemic wave than in the first.

"The effect this decline will have on the prognosis for men whose cancer was not diagnosed in 2020 now depends partly on whether the health care services get a chance to 'catch up' in diagnosing them. Since most prostate cancer progresses slowly, it's reasonable to believe that some delay will have only a minor effect," Stattin says.

Simultaneously, the study shows that no change took place in the number of men who underwent surgery for their cancer. This can be explained partly by the fact that it was possible to shorten waiting lists for care when fewer diagnoses were made. The number of men being given curatively intended radiation treatment was as much as 32 per cent higher than in previous years. According to the researchers, this reflects a continuation of the upward trend in recent years, in which radiation therapy has been increasingly used in prostate cancer, in particular locally advanced cancer.

"Our study suggests that Swedish health care prioritised cancer treatment during the pandemic, and that prostate cancer care in this country was less affected than was reportedly the case in other European countries," Stattin says.

Microalgae of the dinoflagellate group are known for their ability to survive in other animal cells. These tiny single-cell organisms have engaged in mutually beneficial relationships with corals since primeval times. By passing on critical nutrients to their hosts, dinoflagellates allow corals to thrive even in barren areas. A research team from the Centre for Organismal Studies (COS) of Heidelberg University recently discovered that such symbioses within the cell essentially depend on the ability of the algae to suppress the immune system of their host cell and thereby avoid being "spit out" again. At the same time, the researchers found indications that this cellular immune response is an evolutionarily ancient immune mechanism that is more widespread than previously assumed.

This mechanism is known as vomocytosis. Contrary to previous assumptions, microalgae ingested by corals are not digested by the cell if they prove unsuitable as symbionts - that is, partners in a symbiotic relationship. Instead, they are "spit out" again in the process of vomocytosis. Special dinoflagellates are able to specifically suppress this immune response of their host cells in order to remain in the cell. A study led by cell biologist Prof. Dr Annika Guse at the COS demonstrated how they are able to do that. "The challenge for the corals is to differentiate between beneficial and potentially harmful microorganisms. For their part, the algae have to circumvent the immune response of the host cell, establish an intracellular niche where they can survive, and coordinate their own cell functions with those of their host to efficiently exchange nutrients," explains the researcher.

Until now, there has been no experimental evidence that could explain any of the conventional theories. Using the model system Exaiptasia diaphana (Aiptasia) of the sea anemone species, Prof. Guse's team recently uncovered how immune suppression by the symbionts helps the host cell to recognise suitable microalgae and tolerate them for the long term. The Aiptasia anemone larvae ingest the symbionts from the environment in the same way as coral larvae. Furthermore, their size and transparency make the larvae of this sea anemone perfect for high-resolution imaging and cellular experiments.

Aiptasia continually ingests various particles from the environment without differentiating between suitable and unsuitable particles or organisms. Incompatible particles are "spit out" again after a certain amount of time. Symbionts avoid this process of vomocytosis, presumably by disrupting the signal pathways of the toll-like receptors (TLRs) of the host cell. These receptors play a critical role in activating the cell's own immune system and ensure that unwelcome intruders are detected and removed. In most animals, the toll-like receptors are controlled by the MyD88 gene. "We were able to prove that the algae symbionts suppress MyD88 and thus initiate symbiosis. That is how they elude vomocytosis," explains Prof. Guse.

At the same time, the findings of the Heidelberg researchers indicate that vomocytosis involves a mechanism that is more widespread than assumed. Until now, it was believed that the expulsion of harmful intruders was self-initiated to evade the in part highly specialised immune responses of the potential host cell. The study of the Aiptasia model, however, suggests that this process can also be triggered by the host cell. The researchers therefore assume that vomocytosis is an evolutionarily ancient immune mechanism that corals or cnidarians like Aiptasia use to select appropriate symbionts. Prof. Guse: "This suggests that vomocytosis is an important process that led in the first place to the emergence of the intracellular lifestyle of the coral symbionts."

Archeologists have learned a lot about our ancestors by rummaging through their garbage piles, which contain evidence of their diet and population levels as the local flora and fauna changed over time.

One common kitchen scrap in Africa -- shells of ostrich eggs -- is now helping unscramble the mystery of when these changes took place, providing a timeline for some of the earliest Homo sapiens who settled down to utilize marine food resources along the South African coast more than 100,000 years ago.

Geochronologists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Berkeley Geochronology Center (BGC) have developed a technique that uses these ubiquitous discards to precisely date garbage dumps -- politely called middens -- that are too old to be dated by radiocarbon or carbon-14 techniques, the standard for materials like bone and wood that are younger than about 50,000 years.

In a paper published this month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, former UC Berkeley doctoral student Elizabeth Niespolo and geochronologist and BGC and associate director Warren Sharp reported using uranium-thorium dating of ostrich eggshells to establish that a midden outside Cape Town, South Africa, was deposited between 119,900 and 113,100 years ago.

That makes the site, called Ysterfontein 1, the oldest known seashell midden in the world, and implies that early humans were fully adapted to coastal living by about 120,000 years ago. This also establishes that three hominid teeth found at the site are among the oldest Homo sapiens fossils recovered in southern Africa.

The technique is precise enough for the researchers to state convincingly that the 12.5-foot-deep pile of mostly marine shells -- mussels, mollusks and limpets -- intermixed with animal bones and eggshells may have been deposited over a period of as little as 2,300 years.

The new ages are already revising some of the assumptions archeologists had made about the early Homo sapiens who deposited their garbage at the site, including how their population and foraging strategies changed with changing climate and sea level.

"The reason why this is exciting is that this site wouldn't have been datable by radiocarbon because it is too old," Niespolo said, noting that there are a lot more such sites around Africa, in particular the coastal areas of South Africa.

"Almost all of this sort of site have ostrich eggshells, so now that we have this technique, there is this potential to go and revisit these sites and use this approach to date them more precisely and more accurately, and more importantly, find out if they are the same age as Ysterfontein or older or younger, and what that tells us about foraging and human behavior in the past," she added.

Because ostrich eggshells are ubiquitous in African middens -- the eggs are a rich source of protein, equivalent to about 20 chicken eggs -- they have been an attractive target for geochronologists. But applying uranium-thorium dating -- also called uranium series -- to ostrich shells has been beset by many uncertainties.

"The previous work to date eggshells with uranium series has been really hit and miss, and mostly miss," Niespolo said.

Precision dating pushed back to 500,000 years ago

Other methods applicable to sites older than 50,000 years, such as luminescence dating, are less precise -- often by a factor of 3 or more -- and cannot be performed on archival materials available in museums, Sharp said.

The researchers believe that uranium-thorium dating can provide ages for ostrich eggshells as old as 500,000 years, extending precise dating of middens and other archeological sites approximately 10 times further into the past.

"This is the first published body of data that shows that we can get really coherent results for things well out of radiocarbon range, around 120,000 years ago in this case," said Sharp, who specializes in using uranium-thorium dating to solve problems in paleoclimate and tectonics as well as archeology. "It is showing that these eggshells maintain their intact uranium-series systems and give reliable ages farther back in time than had been demonstrated before."

"The new dates on ostrich eggshell and excellent faunal preservation make Ysterfontein 1 the as-yet best dated multi-stratified Middle Stone Age shell midden on the South African west coast," said co-author Graham Avery, an archeozoologist and retired researcher with the Iziko South African Museum. "Further application of the novel dating method, where ostrich eggshell fragments are available, will strengthen chronological control in nearby Middle Stone Age sites, such as Hoedjiespunt and Sea Harvest, which have similar faunal and lithic assemblages, and others on the southern Cape coast."

The first human settlements?

Ysterfontein 1 is one of about a dozen shell middens scattered along the western and eastern coasts of Western Cape Province, near Cape Town. Excavated in the early 2000s, it is considered a Middle Stone Age site established around the time that Homo sapiens were developing complex behaviors such as territoriality and intergroup competition, as well as cooperation among non-kin groups. These changes may be due to the fact that these groups were transitioning from hunter-gatherers to settled populations, thanks to stable sources of high-quality protein -- shellfish and marine mammals -- from the sea.

Until now, the ages of Middle Stone Age sites like Ysterfontein 1 have been uncertain by about 10%, making comparison among Middle Stone Age sites and with Later Stone Age sites difficult. The new dates, with a precision of about 2% to 3%, place the site in the context of well-documented changes in global climate: it was occupied immediately after the last interglacial period, when sea level was at a high, perhaps 8 meters (26 feet) higher than today. Sea level dropped rapidly during the occupation of the site -- the shoreline retreated up to 2 miles during this period -- but the accumulation of shells continued steadily, implying that the inhabitants found ways to accommodate the changing distribution of marine food resources to maintain their preferred diet.

The study also shows that the Ysterfontein 1 shell midden accumulated rapidly -- perhaps about 1 meter (3 feet) every 1,000 years --- implying that Middle Stone Age people along the southern African coast made extensive use of marine resources, much like people did during the Later Stone Age, and suggesting that effective marine foraging strategies developed early.

For dating, eggshells are better

Ages can be attached to some archeological sites older than 50,000 years through argon-argon (40Ar/39Ar) dating of volcanic ash. But ash isn't always present. In Africa, however -- and before the Holocene, throughout the Middle East and Asia -- ostrich eggshells are common. Some sites even contain ostrich eggshell ornaments made by early Homo sapiens.

Over the last four years, Sharp and Niespolo conducted a thorough study of ostrich eggshells, including analysis of modern eggshells obtained from an ostrich farm in Solvang, California, and developed a systematic way to avoid the uncertainties of earlier analyses. One key observation was that animals, including ostriches, do not take up and store uranium, even though it is common at parts-per-billion levels in most water. They demonstrated that newly laid ostrich shells contain no uranium, but that it is absorbed after burial in the ground.

The same is true of seashells, but their calcium carbonate structure -- a mineral called aragonite -- is not as stable when buried in soil as the calcite form of calcium carbonate found in eggshell. Because of this, eggshells retain better the uranium taken up during the first hundred years or so that that they are buried. Bone, consisting mostly of calcium phosphate, has a mineral structure that also does not remain stable in most soil environments nor reliably retains absorbed uranium.

Uranium is ideal for dating because it decays at a constant rate over time to an isotope of thorium that can be measured in minute amounts by mass spectrometry. The ratio of this thorium isotope to the uranium still present tells geochronologists how long the uranium has been sitting in the eggshell.

Uranium-series dating relies on uranium-238, the dominant uranium isotope in nature, which decays to thorium-230. In the protocol developed by Sharp and Niespolo, they used a laser to aerosolize small patches along a cross-section of the shell, and ran the aerosol through a mass spectrometer to determine its composition. They looked for spots high in uranium and not contaminated by a second isotope of thorium, thorium-232, which also invades eggshells after burial, though not as deeply. They collected more material from those areas, dissolved it in acid, and then analyzed it more precisely for uranium-238 and thorium-230 with "solution" mass spectrometry.

These procedures avoid some of the previous limitations of the technique, giving about the same precision as carbon-14, but over a time range that is 10 times larger.

"The key to this dating technique that we have developed that differs from previous attempts to date ostrich egg shells is the fact that we are explicitly accounting for the fact that ostrich eggshells have no primary uranium in them, so the uranium that we are using to date the eggshells actually comes from the soil pore water and the uranium is being taken up by the eggshells upon deposition," Niespolo said.

In August 2016 a massive storm on par with a Category 2 hurricane churned in the Arctic Ocean. The cyclone led to the third-lowest sea ice extent ever recorded. But what made the Great Arctic Cyclone of 2016 particularly appealing to scientists was the proximity of the Korean icebreaker Araon.

For the first time ever, scientists were able to see exactly what happens to the ocean and sea ice when a cyclone hits. University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers and their international colleagues recently published a new study showing that sea ice declined 5.7 times faster than normal during the storm. They were also able to prove that the rapid decline was driven by cyclone-triggered processes within the ocean.

"Generally, when storms come in, they decrease sea ice, but scientists didn't understand what really caused it," said lead author Xiangdong Zhang from the UAF International Arctic Research Center.

There was general speculation that sea ice declined solely from atmospheric processes melting ice from above. Zhang and his team proved this theory incomplete using "in-situ" observations from directly inside the cyclone. The measurements reflected things like air and ocean temperature, radiation, wind and ocean currents.

It was a stroke of good luck for science, and perhaps a bit nerve-racking for those onboard, that the icebreaker was in position to capture data from the cyclone. Usually ships try to avoid such storms, but Araon had just sailed into the middle of an ice-covered zone and was locked in an ice floe.

Thanks to the ship's position so close to the storm, Xiangdong and his team were able to explain that cyclone-related sea ice loss is primarily due to two physical ocean processes.

First, strong spinning winds force the surface water to move away from the cyclone. This draws deeper warm water to the surface. Despite this warm water upwelling, a small layer of cool water remains directly beneath the sea ice.

That's where a second process comes into play. The strong cyclone winds act like a blender, mixing the surface water.

Together, the warm water upwelling and the surface turbulence warm the entire upper ocean water column and melt the sea ice from below.

Although the August storm raged for only 10 days, there were lasting effects.

"It's not just the storm itself," explained Zhang. "It has lingering effects because of the enhanced ice-albedo feedback."

The enlarged patches of open water from the storm absorb more heat, which melts more sea ice, causing even more open water. From Aug. 13-22, the amount of sea ice in the entire Arctic Ocean declined by 230,000 square miles, an area more than twice the size of the state of Arizona.

Xiangdong is now working with a new computer model for the Department of Energy to evaluate whether climate change will lead to more Arctic cyclones. Previous research shows that over the past half-century, the number and intensity of cyclones in the Arctic have increased. Some of those storms, like the biggest Arctic cyclone on record in 2012, also led to record low sea ice extent.

Tomorrow's cutting-edge technology will need electronics that can tolerate extreme conditions. That's why a group of researchers led by Michigan State University's Jason Nicholas is building stronger circuits today.

Nicholas and his team have developed more heat resilient silver circuitry with an assist from nickel. The team described the work, which was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Program, on April 15 in the journal Scripta Materialia.

The types of devices that the MSU team is working to benefit -- next-generation fuel cells, high-temperature semiconductors and solid oxide electrolysis cells -- could have applications in the auto, energy and aerospace industries.

Although you can't buy these devices off the shelf now, researchers are currently building them in labs to test in the real world, and even on other planets.

For example, NASA developed a solid oxide electrolysis cell that enabled the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover to make oxygen from gas in the Martian atmosphere on April 22. NASA hopes this prototype will one day lead to equipment that allows astronauts to create rocket fuel and breathable air while on Mars.

To help such prototypes become commercial products, though, they'll need to maintain their performance at high temperatures over long periods of time, said Nicholas, an associate professor in the College of Engineering.

He was drawn to this field after years of using solid oxide fuel cells, which work like solid oxide electrolysis cells in reverse. Rather than using energy to create gases or fuel, they create energy from those chemicals.

"Solid oxide fuel cells work with gases at high temperature. We're able to electrochemically react those gases to get electricity out and that process is a lot more efficient than exploding fuel like an internal combustion engine does," said Nicholas, who leads a lab in the Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Department.

But even without explosions, the fuel cell needs to withstand intense working conditions.

"These devices commonly operate around 700 to 800 degrees Celsius, and they have to do it for a long time -- 40,000 hours over their lifetime," Nicholas said. For comparison, that's approximately 1,300 to 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, or about double the temperature of a commercial pizza oven.

"And over that lifetime, you're thermally cycling it," Nicholas said. "You're cooling it down and heating it back up. It's a very extreme environment. You can have circuit leads pop off."

Thus, one of the hurdles facing this advanced technology is rather rudimentary: The conductive circuitry, often made from silver, needs to stick better to the underlying ceramic components.

The secret to improving the adhesion, the researchers found, was to add an intermediate layer of porous nickel between the silver and the ceramic.

By performing experiments and computer simulations of how the materials interact, the team optimized how it deposited the nickel on the ceramic. And to create the thin, porous nickel layers on the ceramic in a pattern or design of their choosing, the researchers turned to screen printing.

"It's the same screen printing that's used to make T-shirts," Nicholas said. "We're just screen-printing electronics instead of shirts. It's a very manufacturing-friendly technique."

Once the nickel is in place, the team puts it in contact with silver that's melted at a temperature of about 1,000 degrees Celsius. The nickel not only withstands that heat -- its melting point is 1,455 degrees Celsius -- but it also distributes the liquified silver uniformly over its fine features using what's called capillary action.

"It's almost like a tree," Nicholas said. "A tree gets water up to its branches via capillary action. The nickel is wicking up the molten silver via the same mechanism."

Once the silver cools and solidifies, the nickel keeps it locked onto the ceramic, even in the 700 to 800 degree Celsius heat it would face inside a solid oxide fuel cell or a solid oxide electrolysis cell. And this approach also has the potential to help other technologies, where electronics can run hot.

"There are a wide variety of electronic applications that require circuit boards that can withstand high temperatures or high power," said Jon Debling, a technology manager with MSU Technologies, Michigan State's tech transfer and commercialization office. "These include existing applications in automotive, aerospace, industrial and military markets, but also newer ones such as solar cells and solid oxide fuel cells."

As a technology manager, Debling works to commercialize Spartan innovations and he's working to help patent this process for creating tougher electronics.

"This technology is a significant improvement -- in cost and temperature stability -- over existing paste and vapor deposition technologies," he said.

For his part, Nicholas remains most interested in those cutting-edge applications on the horizon, things like solid oxide fuel cells and solid oxide electrolysis cells.

"We're working to improve their reliability here on Earth -- and on Mars," Nicholas said.

The brain possesses a complex architecture of functional networks as its information-processing machinery. Is the brain’s network architecture itself a target of disease? If so, which networks are associated with which diseases? What can this tell us about the underlying causes of brain disorders?

Building on the extraordinary progress in neuroscience made over the past 30 years, researchers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UT Health San Antonio) published a study of 43 brain disorders – both psychiatric and neurologic – and strongly affirmed a theory termed the “network degeneration hypothesis.” According to this theory, disease-related structural damage invades the functional networks used in human behavior and also recapitulates within “co-alteration networks.”

Assessing metabolic demand within these networks, the study postulated metabolic stress in high-traffic hubs (“nodal stress”) as a key underlying cause of network-based degeneration.

The research, published March 8 in the Nature journal Communications Biology, utilized BrainMap, a database of more than 20,000 published functional and structural neuroimaging experiments. The Research Imaging Institute at UT Health San Antonio is the birthplace and academic home of BrainMap. Confirming the impact of the BrainMap project, the National Institutes of Health in April renewed funding this work for four more years (years 14-17 of the project). This is a $2.4 million award.

The Communications Biology article was a meta-analysis of tens of thousands of experiments retrieved from BrainMap’s database, said Peter T. Fox, MD, professor and director of the Research Imaging Institute. Dr. Fox and co-authors compared the connectivity patterns of large-scale functional networks used in normal behaviors with disease-related co-alteration networks and found striking overlap.

“The scope of structural and functional network correspondence is impressive,” Dr. Fox said. “Fourteen of the 20 disease-related co-alteration networks observed spatially conformed to functional networks involved in normal behaviors – such as movement, perception, emotion, language, problem solving, and memory encoding and recall – to a highly significant degree.”

Among the paper’s findings:

Atrophy or hypertrophy of gray matter follows network-based principles.
Neurological diseases have stronger network associations than psychiatric diseases.
Some diseases have more diffuse effects across networks than others. Huntington’s disease, for example, affects nine networks and schizophrenia affects seven, whereas major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder affect two each.

“Researchers can take these multi-dimensional results as a roadmap for more specific investigations, since biologically meaningful regions of interest can be derived from the component maps shared in our study,” Dr. Fox said.

Continued funding of the BrainMap initiative is crucial. “Part of the upcoming work is working with the Texas Advanced Computing Center at UT Austin to create a high-performance computing BrainMap Community Portal, a tool to make large-scale, complex, multivariate analyses of this type more readily performed by the research community at large,” Dr. Fox said.

Brain pathology recapitulates physiology: A network meta-analysis

Thomas J. Vanasse, Peter T. Fox, P. Mickle Fox, Franco Cauda, Tommaso Costa,
Stephen M. Smith, Simon B. Eickhoff and Jack L. Lancaster

First published: March 8, 2021, Communications Biology

https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-021-01832-9

The Long School of Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio is named for Texas philanthropists Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long. The school is the largest educator of physicians in South Texas, many of whom remain in San Antonio and the region to practice medicine. The school teaches more than 900 students and trains 800 residents each year. As a beacon of multicultural sensitivity, the school annually exceeds the national medical school average of Hispanic students enrolled. The school’s clinical practice is the largest multidisciplinary medical group in South Texas with 850 physicians in more than 100 specialties. The school has a highly productive research enterprise where world leaders in Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, cancer, aging, heart disease, kidney disease and many other fields are translating molecular discoveries into new therapies. The Long School of Medicine is home to a National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center known for prolific clinical trials and drug development programs, as well as a world-renowned center for aging and related diseases.

The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, also referred to as UT Health San Antonio, is one of the country’s leading health sciences universities and is designated as a Hispanic-Serving Institution by the U.S. Department of Education. With missions of teaching, research, patient care and community engagement, its schools of medicine, nursing, dentistry, health professions and graduate biomedical sciences have graduated more than 37,000 alumni who are leading change, advancing their fields, and renewing hope for patients and their families throughout South Texas and the world. To learn about the many ways “We make lives better®,” visit www.uthscsa.edu.

Stay connected with The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube.

To see how we are battling COVID-19, read inspiring stories on Impact.

Journal

Communications Biology

DOI

10.1038/s42003-021-01832-9

Adult mantis shrimp pack an explosive punch that can split water, but no crustacean emerges fully formed. Minute larvae can undergo six or seven transformations before emerging as fully developed adults and limbs and manoeuvres develop over time. So, when do mantis shrimp larvae acquire the ability to pulverise their dinner and how powerful are the punches that these mini crustaceans pack? 'We knew that larval mantis shrimp have these beautiful appendages; Megan Porter and Eve Robinson at the University of Hawaii had captured normal videos of a couple of strikes a few years ago', says Jacob Harrison from Duke University, USA. So, he packed up Sheila Patek's high-speed camera and high-resolution lens and travelled to Hawai'i to investigate the developing crustacean's manoeuvres. The team publish their discovery that minute mantis shrimp larvae can begin unleashing their ballistic blows as little as 9-days after hatching in Journal of Experimental Biology at https://journals.biologists.com/jeb, and show that the limbs reach blistering accelerations of 22 million deg/s2, moving at ~0.385mm/s, which is 5-10 times faster than the larval snacks they dine on

'The larvae can be incredibly tricky to collect', says Harrison, recalling how he and Porter lured the microscopic creatures into their nets at night with lights. The problem was that the crustaceans came along with a Noah's ark of other larval critters. 'It can be incredibly challenging to sift through a bucket teeming with larval crabs, shrimp, fish and worms to find the mantis shrimp', laughs Harrison. He then needed a technique for securing the Gonodactylaceus falcatus larvae in place for the camera. 'I had to superglue a 4 mm sized larva onto a toothpick, place it on a custom-designed rig and orient the individual within view of the camera lens before I could even start collecting data. It took about a year to troubleshoot the right way to set up the camera before we knew that we could capture these videos', Harrison recalls.

Analysing the high-speed movies, Harrison, Patek and Matt McHenry (University of California, Irvine, USA) could see a region on the first portion of the appendage bending to store energy - like a spring - as the larvae wound in the club-like limb ready for a flick. Then, the larvae released an internal latch that had held the appendage in place, releasing the stored energy and catapulting the limb into action. In fact, the larvae's appendage and the way it operates is remarkably similar to that in the adults, just scaled down. Most excitingly, the team realised that they could see the minute muscles within the larvae's glassy bodies contracting as they bowed the exoskeleton, something that could only be imagined in adult mantis shrimp: 'We were amazed', Harrison says.

But when did the minute larvae develop their ability to annihilate prey with a single blow? Venturing off the Hawaiian shore, Harrison located an egg-laden female and retrieved her mat of eggs, but by the time they arrived at Duke University, the eggs had hatched. 'We weren't sure we could keep the larvae alive in the lab', Harrison recalls. However, he nurtured the youngsters patiently until they developed successfully to 28-day old larvae and discovered that the limb only became fully operational when the youngsters began feeding, at around 9-15days. It also turned out that the larvae could hurl the limb at rotational speeds of ~16,500deg/s, with eyewatering accelerations as fast as the adults. However, their smaller stature meant that the limb moved at ~0.385m/s, which is slower than the adults, but still quite speedy for a 4.2mm long creature. Even at their smallest, there is no escaping these spring-powered predators.

Research shows that children who experience puberty earlier than their peers are more likely to begin drinking alcohol at a young age and early alcohol exposure is also known to be related to alcohol dependence later in life. Specifically, adolescents who mature early are two to three times more likely to drink than other youth. In addition, early maturing girls are two to three times more likely to drink until intoxication and three times as likely to have an alcohol use disorder. A new study examined why early developing 14-year-old adolescents are more likely to drink alcohol compared to those whose pubertal development is on-time or late. The findings show these adolescents are more likely to have peers who drink alcohol and are also given greater permission to drink by their parents.

The findings were published in a Child Development article, written by researchers at The Pennsylvania State University.

"Peer drinking and parent permissiveness explained a substantial percentage of the links between early puberty and alcohol use," said Rebecca Bucci, doctoral candidate in the department of sociology and criminology at The Pennsylvania State University. "This is important because early alcohol exposure is known to be related to alcohol dependence later in life."

The study included intergenerational, nationally representative data from over 11,000 adolescents (5,799 girls and 5,757 boys) in the United Kingdom followed since infancy in the ongoing Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). The current study relied on data collected when the children were aged 9 months, 7, 11, and 14 years. At age 14, adolescents self-reported information about the following:

Alcohol use: Whether they had ever (in their lifetime) had a drink of alcohol. If yes, they were asked: frequency (3+ times in the prior year denoted frequent drinking given the seriousness of alcohol at age 14) and if they binge drank (consumed 5 or more alcoholic drinks at a time).

Perceived Pubertal Timing: Girls and boys both reported on personal growth spurts, skin changes, and body hair for boys and girls. Gender-specific questions queried breast development and menstruation for girls and voice changes and facial hair for boys.

Friend Risk Behavior: To assess risk factors from their peers, adolescents were asked about their friends' drinking behavior, other-sex friends, and dating from age 11 to 14.

To help assess other childhood risk factors that could contribute to alcohol use, parents and children self-reported information about the following:

Parental Behavior between the ages of 11 to 14 years: Permissiveness about alcohol use, parental drinking frequency, lack of parental knowledge (how often the parent knew where the child was going, what they were doing, and who they were with), child-parent distance (how close adolescents were to both their mother and father), and unsupervised time.

Childhood at 9 months and 7 years: Low birth weight was reported on by parents when the children were age 9 months. In addition, parental education and occupational status, single parent household, biological father absence, parental psychological distress, and childhood externalizing, and internalizing behavior problems were measured at age 7.

The findings showed that at age 14, boys and girls who had experienced early puberty were more likely to have consumed alcohol in their lifetime, to drink frequently and to binge drink. They were also more likely to have peers who drank alcohol and parents who permitted them to drink. Later puberty was protective against drinking at age 14. The data showed that only 11% of parents allowed late developing adolescents to drink but 17% of parents of early puberty boys and 22% of parents of early puberty girls allowed them to drink at age 14.

"Children who experience early puberty are no more mature with respect to social or cognitive development than those who experience puberty later, and the potential harms of alcohol are greater at younger ages," said Jeremy Staff, professor of sociology and criminology at The Pennsylvania State University. "Parents deserve support to continue age-appropriate monitoring throughout adolescence. Looking more like an adult does not mean a teen can drink safely. Being more permissive about alcohol use does not prevent future problems."

Additionally, the authors suggest that schools and communities should invest in evidence-based universal prevention efforts regarding alcohol use and medical providers and should follow American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines to begin universal screening for alcohol exposure at age 11. Providers can support parents in aiming for alcohol-free childhoods.

Researchers note that the context of the analysis is based in the UK which differs from alcohol and pubertal timing studies conducted in the United States (UK alcohol use among teens is high - around 70% of 16-year-olds reported alcohol consumption in 2007). The authors also acknowledge that other unobserved factors may contribute to the association between early pubertal timing and adolescent drinking including hormonal changes and structural and functional changes to the brain. Future research should parse out further nuances regarding parental alcohol permissiveness, such as whether parents supplied alcohol for parties or only allowed the child to drink in their presence. Future studies could also be strengthened by using clinician (rather than self-report) of pubertal timing and peer reports of their own alcohol use (rather than peer use as perceived by the child who is the focus of the study).

Frequent use of exemptions may undermine public health protections of oil and gas setback policies, according to a new study led by researchers at the research institute PSE Healthy Energy, Harvard University, and Nicholas Institute for Environmental Solutions at Duke University. The study, published April 28, 2021 in Energy Policy, is the first to assess the effectiveness of distance-based setback regulations for unconventional natural gas development (UNGD) or "fracking."

"Setback regulations are commonly employed to protect public health, so we wanted to test if they're effective in practice," said lead author Drew Michanowicz, DrPH, MPH, CPH Senior Scientist at PSE Healthy Energy and visiting scientist with the Center for Climate, Health, and Global Environment at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health (Harvard Chan C-CHANGE). "From our assessment of PA's 2012 setback policy, existing well pad exemptions and waivers seem to occur frequently enough that we didn't see much change in how wells were sited in relation to nearby buildings."

Previous studies have associated adverse health impacts with residents' proximity to UNGD wells, including birth defects, premature births, asthma, migraines, and fatigue. As a result, policymakers across the United States use setback requirements to establish development-free zones around well sites. To assess the effectiveness of setbacks in protecting public health, the study focused on Pennsylvania's Act 13--a 2012 statewide law restricting new unconventional wells within 500 ft. of non-industrial buildings. Through a detailed spatial analysis, researchers observed trends in wellhead locations and proximity to likely occupied buildings both before and after Act 13.

Despite the regulation's intent, the study found no significant change in how wells were sited after Act 13 took effect in 2012. These findings suggest that exemptions, variances, and consent waivers provide opportunities to avoid or weaken well siting requirements. This results in wells placed within PA's setback distance (500 .)-a distance that has been previously found to be insufficient to protect against routine exposures to toxic substances such as benzene, hydrogen sulfide, and PM2.5 from UNGD. "The effectiveness of setback policies depends not just on the distance, but also on the ease and frequency with which exemptions are granted," Michanowicz said. "To protect public health and safety, regulators should complement setbacks with other emission controls and other operational and safety performance standards."

"With the myriad of health effects occurring in communities near hydraulic fracturing-increased hospitalizations to respiratory irritation to birth defects-it's important to ensure that these setback regulations are actually effective at protecting public health," said Jonathan Buonocore, Sc.D., research scientist at Harvard Chan C-CHANGE.

Of the 31 oil and gas production states across the country, an estimated 21 have some form of minimum surface setback in place. For states considering strengthened setbacks, these findings demonstrate the impact that setback exemptions and waivers can have in practice. For states with existing setback regulations, regulators could report well siting exemption rates and rationales and if warranted, consider changes to narrow exemptions that may be used too frequently.

Today at the Microbiology Society's Annual Conference, Yang Liu, researcher at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, will discuss a new technique to trap and recover microplastics.

The method uses bacterial biofilms, a sticky substance created by micro-organisms, to trap microplastic particles. The biofilm is then processed and dispersed, releasing the microplastic particles for processing and recycling.

Liu and colleagues led by Professor Song Lin Chua and James Kar-Hei Fang used the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa to capture microplastics in a bioreactor. This species of bacteria is found in all environments and has previously been shown to colonise microplastics in the environment.

P. aeruginosa biofilms cause the microplastics to aggregate together, eventually causing them to sink. In bioreactors, this makes the microplastics more convenient to collect, according to Liu. Once the microplastics were captured by the biofilms and had sunk to the bottom of the reactor, the researchers used a biofilm-dispersal gene, which caused the biofilm to release the microplastics. Liu explained that this "allows convenient release of microplastics from the biofilm matrix, which is otherwise difficult and expensive to degrade, so that the microplastics can be later recovered for recycling."

Microplastics are hugely problematic and pose a major risk to food chains and human health, according to Liu: "They are not easily bio-degradable, where they retain in the ecosystems for prolonged durations. This results in the uptake of microplastics by organisms, leading to transfer and retention of microplastics down the food chain. Due to their huge surface area and adsorption capacity, microplastics can adsorb toxic pollutants, such as pesticides, heavy metals, and drug residues at high concentrations. This leads to biological and chemical toxicity to organisms in the ecosystems and humans after prolonged unintended consumption of such microplastics. Moreover, microplastics are also difficult to remove in wastewater plants, resulting in their undesired release into the environment."

The next steps of the research - which was published in the Chemical Engineering Journal earlier this year - are moving the proof-of-concept from the lab, to an environmental setting "we next plan to isolate and identify natural pro-biofilm forming bacterial isolates either from the sewage or from aquatic environments, where they display heightened abilities to colonise and form biofilms on microplastics."

Liu and colleagues hope the technique will eventually be used in wastewater treatment plants to help stop microplastics escaping into the oceans. They also have to find natural compounds to stimulate biofilm dispersal of the pro-biofilm forming bacterial isolates, saying "this provides a basis for future applications in wastewater treatment plants, where microplastics can be removed in a safe and environmentally friendly manner".

Microplastics are a huge problem, and more techniques are needed to safely remove them from our environment, Liu states the importance of this, saying "it is imperative to develop effective solutions that trap, collect, and even recycle these microplastics to stop the 'plastification' of our natural environments".

Biofilms occur when communities of bacteria group together and create a shield, or biofilm, from sticky exopolymeric substances. Biofilms can be problematic as they protect the bacteria from against outside influences such as environmental changes and antibiotics.

Microplastics are plastic particles less than 5mm in diameter. They can enter the environment through a number of sources including the breakdown of larger plastic pieces, washing of synthetic clothing, breakdown of car tires and plastic waste directly from industry. The current methods for microplastic disposal, such as incineration or storage in landfill, are limited and have their own disadvantages.

Age may adversely affect women's fertility by impairing levels of RNA molecules which in turn alter the function of genes involved in key biological pathways during the final maturation stage of a human egg cell, according to the findings of a new study published today in the journal Aging Cell.

Researchers from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), the Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico (CNAG-CRG) and Clínica Eugin sequenced the RNA molecules, also known as the transcriptome, within oocytes to understand which genes are affected in their activity by age. They used single-cell sequencing to analyse the transcriptome of 72 individual oocytes from 37 donors between 18 and 43 years of age.

They found that the number of transcripts for genes involved in chromosome segregation and RNA processing increased progressively with age, while the number of transcripts related to mitochondrial metabolism decreased.

However, these age-related changes to the transcriptome only occurred when egg cells reached their final stage of development during in vitro maturation. The transcriptome was less affected by age in immature egg cells. According to the researchers, the findings suggest that age may influence an oocyte's ability to process gene products critical for the last steps of their development.

Further analyses revealed a number of potential master regulator genes, which are genes that occupy the very top of a regulatory hierarchy, that are affected by age. Future work will test whether these genes play a critical role in oocyte aging.

"Here we show that the final step of oocyte maturation itself might be negatively affected by age, which is critical for reproduction because it provides the material early embryos need to develop normally and survive," says Bernhard Payer, AXA Professor of Risk prediction in age-related diseases and Group Leader at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) and co-author of the study. "What we don't know yet, is which of these changes are merely a consequence of the aging process and which may directly contribute to the quality drop in oocytes with age."

The researchers also used donor height and weight information to assess the impact of body mass index (BMI) on the transcriptome. Unlike age, abnormal BMI mostly affected the transcriptome of immature oocytes. According to the authors, the finding suggests that the fertility decline caused by age might have different root mechanisms than the one caused by abnormal BMI.

Women's fertility generally declines with age. One of the main reasons for this is due to depleted ovarian reserves, as baby girls are born with all the oocytes, from which mature eggs will develop, during their lifetime. Another reason is that the quality of eggs lowers with age, which is thought to be one of the main reasons for higher rates of infertility after the age of 35. Being overweight or underweight has also been associated with poor oocyte quality and reproductive outcome.

The authors conclude that though more studies are required, their findings may result in the future development of new diagnostic tools to better assess oocyte quality in reproductive medicine, as well as potential drug treatments that modulate the affected pathways to rejuvenate aged oocytes.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Parents of teens who went through puberty early may be more lenient when it comes to letting them consume alcohol, according to a new Penn State study. But the researchers said that even if adolescents appear more mature, drinking alcohol is still not safe for them.

Rebecca Bucci, a PhD candidate in criminology at Penn State, said the study -- published today (April 28) in Child Development -- aimed to discover why adolescents who go through puberty early are more likely than their peers to drink alcohol.

"A surprising proportion of parents in our study allowed their early-developing children to drink alcohol at the age of 14 -- in fact, one in seven," Bucci said. "It is important to remember that early puberty does not mean the child is more advanced in cognitive or brain development. They are not older in years or more socially mature. So allowing them freedoms common for young adults is risky."

According to the researchers, previous studies have found that adolescents who go through puberty early compared to their peers are at a greater risk for problem behaviors, including being two to three times as likely to drink alcohol.

While prior studies often didn't delve into why these heightened risks exist, the researchers said there are theories. For example, adolescents who develop earlier than their peers may have weaker relationships with their parents or have less parental supervision.

To this point, Bucci said there are conflicting theories about how to parent adolescents who are more physically mature than their peers.

"Parents want to do what is best for their children, and some may wonder whether a child who starts looking older should begin to have some adult freedoms," said Jennifer Maggs, professor of human development and family studies. "Ultimately, we wanted to understand why adolescents who experience puberty at younger ages drink more than others, including factors involving the parents."

The researchers used data from more than 11,000 adolescents in the Millennium Cohort Study -- a nationally representative sample of children in the United Kingdom. Data was collected at various checkpoints throughout the children's lives, including information on whether they'd ever drank alcohol, how often they drank and whether they had ever drank five or more drinks on one day.

They also gathered information about whether the parents permitted alcohol use, as well as the adolescents' "perceived pubertal timing."

"In our study, the measure of pubertal timing is based on adolescents' reports of their own pubertal changes," said Lorah Dorn, professor of nursing. "Adolescents were asked a series of questions about their physical development and we averaged these scores for each person and compared them to the scores of same-sex adolescents who were very close to them in age."

The researchers then grouped participants into three perceived pubertal timing groups -- early, on-time and late.

After analyzing the data, the researchers found that adolescents who experienced early puberty were more likely to drink at age 14 than their on-time peers. 

Girls who went through puberty early were 29% more likely to have ever drank and 55% more likely to frequently drink. Among boys, the results were 22% and 61% more likely, respectively. Boys who developed early were also 78% more likely to have binge drank compared to boys who went through puberty on time.

Additionally, the researchers found that adolescents who experienced earlier puberty were more likely to be allowed to drink by their parents.

Specifically, while 15 percent of parents overall allowed their adolescents to drink alcohol at age 14, this was largely driven by parents of adolescents who went through puberty early -- 20 percent of those parents allowed their children to drink. Teens who developed early were also more likely to have friends who drank and more likely to be allowed to hang out with peers without adult supervision.

According to the researchers, these factors partially explained why adolescents with early puberty had higher rates of drinking.

Bucci said the results suggest that parents can have a hand in helping their teens avoid early drinking.

"This further instills the idea that parents should consider not allowing their child to drink alcohol, even if they appear more physically mature," said Jeremy Staff, professor of sociology, criminology, and demography. "Even if their child starts to look like a teenager or adult at a young age, parents should maintain the level of support and structure that matches their child's actual age and developmental maturity level."

CLEVELAND, Ohio (April 28, 2021)--Hot flashes are a hallmark of the menopause transition. Yet, they don't strike with the same frequency or severity for all women. A new study suggests that some of the same genetic factors that affect a woman's reproductive life cycle may also help predict her likelihood of having bothersome hot flashes. Study results are published online today in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS).

Despite multiple studies on the subject, questions still remain as to why some women are more affected than others by hot flashes and night sweats during the menopause transition. Genetics may be one reason, because black women have more problems with hot flashes than white women do, and Chinese and Japanese women seem to suffer the least with symptoms. Prior studies have also attempted to address why some women experience hot flashes much earlier in the menopause transition than other women who have more frequent hot flashes postmenopause. Still there are others who consistently experience hot flashes for more than a decade.

In this study involving more than 1,200 women of various ethnicities, researchers concluded that some of the same genetic factors that predict reproductive aging may also be associated with hot flashes, thus suggesting that genetics may play a role in predicting the severity and frequency of a woman's hot flashes.

Factors shown to affect reproductive aging and likely to influence a woman's experience with hot flashes include the age at menarche and the age at menopause. Some studies have also previously suggested an association between body mass index and the frequency and severity of hot flashes, although this relationship is described as complex and dependent on the stage of reproductive aging. Lower estrogen levels have also been associated with more prevalent and frequent hot flashes. Although a number of these studies provided evidence of some overlap in genes associated with age at menarche and age at natural menopause, no prior studies focused on how these factors affected hot flashes.

Researchers believe that understanding the effect of genetic variants is critical to identifying future treatments for managing bothersome hot flashes. They created a video highlighting their results that can be found at https://links.lww.com/MENO/A761.

Results are published in the article "Genetic variants predictive of reproductive aging are associated with vasomotor symptoms in a multiracial/ethnic cohort."

"This study found that genetic factors associated with aging of the reproductive system may be linked to vasomotor symptoms during the menopause transition and differ across racial/ethnic groups. These findings move us one step closer to being able to predict a woman's experience with menopause symptoms and, subsequently, to provide management recommendations based, in part, on her genetics. In addition, researchers may be able to use these specific genetic variations as targets for the development of new drugs to alleviate vasomotor symptoms," says Dr. Stephanie Faubion, NAMS medical director.