Earth

Washington State University researchers have shown the fundamental mechanisms that allow tiny pieces of plastic bags and foam packaging at the nanoscale to move through the environment.

The researchers found that a silica surface such as sand has little effect on slowing down the movement of the plastics, but that natural organic matter resulting from decomposition of plant and animal remains can either temporarily or permanently trap the nanoscale plastic particles, depending on the type of plastics.

The work, published in the journal Water Research, could help researchers develop better ways to filter out and clean up pervasive plastics from the environment. The researchers include Indranil Chowdhury, assistant professor in WSU's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, along with Mehnaz Shams and Iftaykhairul Alam, recent graduates of the civil engineering program.

"We're looking at developing a filter that can be more efficient at removing these plastics," Chowdhury said. "People have seen these plastics escaping into our drinking water, and our current drinking water system is not adequate enough to remove these micro and nanoscale plastics. This work is the first fundamental way to look at those mechanisms."

Around since the 1950s, plastics have properties that make them useful for modern society. They are water resistant, cheap, easy to manufacture and useful for a huge variety of purposes. However, plastics accumulation is becoming a growing concern around the world with giant patches of plastic garbage floating in the oceans and plastic waste showing up in the most remote areas of the world.

"Plastics are a great invention and so easy to use, but they are so persistent in the environment," Chowdhury said.

After they're used, plastics degrade through chemical, mechanical and biological processes to micro- and then nano-sized particles less than 100 nanometers in size. Despite their removal in some wastewater treatment plants, large amounts of micro and nanoscale plastics still end up in the environment. More than 90% of tap water in the U.S. contains nanoscale plastics, Chowdhury said, and a 2019 study found that people eat about five grams of plastic a week or the amount of plastic in a credit card. The health effects of such environmental pollution is not well understood.

"We don't know the health effects, and the toxicity is still unknown, but we continue to drink these plastics every day," said Chowdhury.

As part of the new study, the researchers studied the interactions with the environment of the tiniest particles of the two most common types of plastics, polyethylene and polystyrene, to learn what might impede their movement. Polyethylene is used in plastic bags, milk cartons and food packaging, while polystyrene is a foamed plastic that is used in foam drinking cups and packaging materials.

In their work, the researchers found that the polyethylene particles from plastic bags move easily through the environment - whether through a silica surface like sand or natural organic matter. Sand and the plastic particles repel each other similarly to like-poles of a magnet, so that the plastic won't stick to the sand particles. The plastic particles do glom onto natural organic material that is ubiquitous in natural aquatic environment but only temporarily. They can be easily washed off with a change in chemistry in the water.

"That's bad news for polyethylene in the environment," said Chowdhury. "It doesn't stick to the silica surface that much and if it sticks to the natural organic matter surface, it can be re-mobilized. Based on these findings, it indicates that nanoscale polyethylene plastics may escape from our drinking water treatment processes, particularly filtration."

In the case of polystyrene particles, the researchers found better news. While a silica surface was not able to stop its movement, organic matter did. Once the polystyrene particles stuck to the organic matter, they stayed in place.

The researchers hope that the research will eventually help them develop filtration systems for water treatment facilities to remove nanoscale particles of plastics.

The subseafloor constitutes one of the largest and most understudied ecosystems on Earth. While it is known that life survives deep down in the fluids, rocks, and sediments that make up the seafloor, scientists know very little about the conditions and energy needed to sustain that life.

An interdisciplinary research team, led from ASU and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), sought to learn more about this ecosystem and the microbes that exist in the subseafloor. The results of their findings were recently published in Science Advances, with ASU School of Earth and Space Exploration assistant professor and geobiologist Elizabeth Trembath-Reichert as lead author.

To study this type of remote ecosystem, and the microbes that inhabit it, the team chose a location called North Pond on the western flank of the mid-Atlantic Ridge, a plate boundary located along the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

North Pond, at a depth of over 14,500 feet (4,500 meters) has served as an important site for deep-sea scientists for decades. It was most recently drilled hundreds of feet through the sediment and crust by the International Ocean Discovery Program in 2010 to create access points for studying life and chemistry beneath the seafloor.

With support from the National Science Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations, the team sampled the crustal fluid samples from the borehole seafloor observatories with the deep sea remotely operated vehicle Jason II on the research vessel Atlantis.

These unique samples from the pristine, cool basaltic seafloor were then brought back to the lab and analyzed using a Nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometer (NanoSIMS), which was used to measure their elemental and isotopic composition.

"Our experiments use specialized tracers that can only be observed if a microorganism eats something on the buffet of options we provide," explains Trembath-Reichert. "If we see these tracers in the microbes, then we know they must have been active and eating during our experiments and we get an idea of what food sources they can use to survive."

Through these analyses, the team discovered that the subseafloor microbial community is active and poised to eat, despite an environment with low biomass and low-carbon conditions.

"The microbes we studied are extremely adaptable and are able to make a living in what seems like a really harsh environment to surface dwellers, like ourselves," says Trembath-Reichert.

One of the most surprising discoveries was how the microorganisms use carbon dioxide. Trembath-Reichert and her team expected the microorganisms to use widely available carbon dioxide the way plants do, by 'fixing' it into other forms of organic carbon that they can then use to grow on. But the findings suggest the microbes in this isolated environment with low nutrients were being more crafty.

"Our theory is that these microbes are being resourceful and using the carbon dioxide directly as a building block without having to convert it into a food source first," says Trembath-Reichert. "And this could have major implications for the deep ocean carbon cycle."

"This work highlights how little we know about the lifestyle of microbes within oceanic crust and the importance of carrying out experiments with sensitive detection limits, such as NanoSIMS," adds senior author Julie Huber of WHOI.

The next steps for Trembath-Reichert and her team are to design experiments to better understand the full diversity of ways carbon dioxide can be used by microbes. As a more readily available food source for microorganisms, they will be looking into the ways carbon dioxide can be used for survival and growth in the Earth's largest aquifer beneath the seafloor.

Chinese scientists have made direct observations in face-centered cubic VCoNi (medium)-entropy alloys (MEA) and for the first time proposed a convincing identification of subnanoscale chemical short-range order (CSRO). This achievement undisputedly resolves the pressing question of if, what and why CSRO exists, and how to explicitly identify CSRO.

This work, published in Nature on April 29, was conducted by Prof. WU Xiaolei from the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in collaboration with Prof. MA En's team from Xi'an Jiaotong University and Prof. ZHU Jing's team from Tsinghua University.

Multi-principal element alloys--also known as high (medium)-entropy alloys (HEAs/MEAs)--are a hot and frontier topic in multidisciplinary fields. In these HEAs/MEAs, enthalpic interactions among constituent elements may induce various degrees of local chemical order (LCO), of which CSRO is arguably the most difficult to decipher.

"CSRO is the crucial cut-in point for understanding the unique mechanical and physical behaviors of these HEAs/MEAs. However, a monumental challenge lies in how to see CSROs. Seeing is believing," said Prof. WU Xiaolei, leader of the research team.

"The identification of CSROs demands not only irrefutable diffraction evidence, but more importantly, also intricate chemical information on subnanometer-length scale regarding the different preferences of constituent species for occupying certain lattice planes/sites in the first and second nearest-neighbor atomic shell(s). Such concrete evidence of CSRO has been sorely missing thus far," said Prof. MA.

In this study, the researchers used a complete suite of tools and methods to analyze correlations and justify their origin, in order to avoid missing links or interference from artifacts.

These tools unequivocally nailed down the CSRO, including its spatial extent, atomic packing configuration and preferential lattice occupancy by chemical species.

Modeling of CSRO order parameters and correlations reveals that the CSROs originate from the nearest-neighbor preference for unlike (V-Co and V-Ni) pairs and avoidance of V-V pairs.

The researchers also used atomic strain mapping to demonstrate the dislocation interactions enhanced by the CSROs. This sheds light on their effects on plasticity mechanisms and mechanical properties upon deformation.

"This work is a significant jump on the CSRO, providing for the community systematic and clear-cut experiments with direct evidence that resolves the debate/uncertainty (or even controversy) left from previous work," said MA.

"Local chemical order develops as an intrinsic feature in HEAs and MEAs. This offers a new knob to turn, i.e., we have an opportunity to tune the degree of CSRO to tailor the mechanical and physical properties of these new materials," said WU.

Organ development in plants mostly occurs through combinatorial activity of so-called meristems. Meristems are plant cells or tissues that give rise to new organs, similar to stem cells in human - including spikelets. Spikelets are components of the spike and form florets (flowers) themselves, which in turn produce grains after fertilisation.

Inflorescence morphogenesis in grasses (Poaceae) is complex and based on a specialised floral meristem, the spikelet meristem, from which all other floral organs arise and which also gives rise to the grain. The fate of the spikelet thus determines not only reproductive success, but also numerous yield-related traits in cereal crops such as wheat and barley. "In view of the goal of creating as much food security as possible for a growing world population, this study is therefore a key contribution", says Prof. Dr. Thorsten Schnurbusch, head of the independent research group Plant Architecture at the IPK, HEISENBERG professor at the IPK and Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and initiator of the project. The results have now been published in the journal Science Advances.

The international research team led by the IPK Leibniz Institute was now interested in identifying and describing regulatory networks, signalling pathways and key regulators of barley floral meristems. "To do this, we first excised the finest tissue parts - and thus particularly pure tissue - in a spatially very limited area using a laser", explained Dr. Johannes Thiel, first author of the study. These excised meristems were subsequently analysed in detail. "We have obtained an unparalleled resolution of the transcripts that convert genes into proteins and are thus ultimately involved in barley floral organ formation", says Dr. Ravi Koppolu, also first author of the study.

Sequence analyses of the floral meristems make it possible to understand whether certain genes are expressed in the spike, i.e. whether the genetic information of a gene is expressed and appears. "So it's about how the genotype of a plant is expressed as a phenotype", says Prof. Dr. Thorsten Schnurbusch.

He is firmly convinced that these findings will be of great importance for further comparative studies in other cereal crops. "This will make more data analyses possible; and thus, an even better understanding of very specific processes of spike formation." For example, in a collaborative effort with Canadian colleagues from the University of Toronto the scientists from the IPK developed a database which enables researchers to find the graphical representation of desired candidate genes and their expression profiles within the barley spike.

"On the one hand, we have gained a deeper understanding of the regulatory networks and, on the other hand, we can now provide the scientific community with an important tool that facilitates follow-up works and faster progress," concludes Prof. Dr. Thorsten Schnurbusch.

Under the background of global warming, the energy budget of the earth is out of balance with more than 90% of additional heat entering the ocean.

The tropical Pacific Ocean has an important influence on the global tropical climate and the climate of China, and the tropical Pacific Western Boundary Currents (WBCs) that flow through it plays an important role in the climate system. Large-scale ocean circulation redistributes ocean heat and mass and is hence one of the basic dynamic processes that shape the earth's Marine environment. The tropical Pacific WBCs system is a key part of the global ocean circulation system. Accurate assessment of the variation of the tropical Pacific WBCs is of much significance for better understanding of the variability of the Earth's climate system.

Recent study has shown that under the background of global warming, the global mean ocean circulation has significantly accelerated over the past 20 years, and this acceleration process is mainly in the global tropical waters. However, it is not clear whether the tropical Pacific WBCs will strengthen or weaken in the context of global warming, and the key to answering this question lies in ocean observations.

Recently, an article titled "Multi-decadal trends in the tropical Pacific western boundary currents retrieved from historical hydrological observations" was published in the Science China Earth Sciences. The research team led by Professor Shijian Hu, who is the first author from Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, evaluate the multi-decadal trends in the tropical Pacific WBCs using historical hydrological observations collected in the past over 60 years.

Hu's team focused on the tropical Pacific region and calculated the geostrophic components of the North Equatorial Current (NEC), North Equatorial Countercurrent (NECC), Mindanao Current (MC), Kuroshio in the origin and the New Guinea Coastal Undercurrent (NGCUC) using decadal mean hydrological observations from the World Ocean Atlas 2018 (WOA18), which is available from 1955 to 2017. Volume transports of the WBCs and their multi-decadal trends are estimated, and contributions of temperature change and salinity change to the trends are discussed. It is found that the NEC, MC and NGCUC show a significant strengthening trend in the past six decades, mainly due to the contribution of temperature change, and the trend pattern of dynamic height is consistent with the WBCs trend. Zonal wind stress averaged over the WBCs' latitudes of the western tropical Pacific is found to accurately reproduce the decadal variability and multi-decade strengthening trend of the WBCs. The authors suggested that the observed intensification of WBCs is attributed to a strengthening of trade winds in the western Pacific Ocean. This study provides important observational evidence for estimating the multi-decadal trend of large-scale ocean circulation in the western Pacific under a rapid climate warming.

It is challenging to analyze proteins at low concentrations, especially for those in a mixture of various conformations such as intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs). A research team led by Prof. HUANG Jinqing, Assistant Professor of Department of Chemistry at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), has developed optical tweezers-coupled Raman spectroscopy that can directly probe the structural features of alpha-synuclein, an IDP closely linked to Parkinson's disease, at the physiological concentration by focusing on individual protein molecules.

IDPs play an important role in biological processes and many of them are associated with incurable neurodegenerative diseases. As a typical IDP, alpha-synuclein lacks a stable 3-D architecture known as secondary structures. It spontaneously undergoes conversions from one secondary structure to another, which could eventually result in the buildup of protein aggregates involved in Parkinson's disease pathology. However, the transient species during the conversion possess various structures and exist in low population among a dynamic equilibrium mixture. Therefore, their structural features are usually buried under the detection results from traditional measurement techniques, which average the signals detected from large sample quantities and long detection time.

In the study, Prof. Huang and her collaborators integrate optical tweezers and surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) in a novel platform to generate tunable and reproducible SERS enhancements with single-molecule level sensitivity in aqueous environments, in order to characterize these IDPs while maintaining their intrinsic heterogeneity with great biological significance. Specifically, a hotspot can be visualized and controlled by optical tweezers to allow proteins to go through in a microfluidic flow chamber, which makes it convenient to adjust the measurement parameters in the real time for the in situ spectroscopic characterizations. It directly identifies the structural features of the transient species of alpha-synuclein among its predominant monomers at physiological concentration of 1?μM by reducing the ensemble averaging in quantity and in time, providing profound insight to understand the initiation of amyloid protein aggregation. Hence, this SERS platform has great potential to reveal the structural information of IDPs in the dynamic, heterogeneous, and complex biological systems.

"Our strategy enables the precise control of the hotspot between two trapped micrometer-size silver nanoparticle-coated silica beads to improve the SERS efficiency and reproducibility in aqueous detections. Except for the tunable SERS enhancement, the integrated optical tweezers also offer sub-nanometer spatial resolution and sub-piconewton force sensitivity to monitor light-matter interactions in the plasmonic hotspot for extra physical insight. More importantly, our method opens a new door to characterize the transient species of IDPs in dilute solutions, which remains a significant challenge in the biophysics community. Ultimately, it will be exciting to fully exploit the precise force manipulation of the integrated optical tweezers to unfold a single protein inside the controllable hotspot and resolve its structural dynamics from the endogenous molecular vibrations by the integrated Raman spectroscopy." said, Prof. Huang.

The study was recently published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

Researchers from the University of Copenhagen, in collaboration with their Swiss colleagues at the University Hospital of Bern, have cracked the code for controlling a group of enzymes that affect our metabolism.

The researchers' findings could help us avoid diseases ranging from high cholesterol to infertility to certain types of cancer, which are all due, among other things, to hormonal imbalances.

They have found a way to influence a special protein called cytochrome P450 reductase (POR) -- popularly characterized as the 'conductor' of the body's protein orchestra, which helps regulate our hormones and makes it possible to break down medicinal products in the liver.

"We have developed a method to control this conductor using small molecules that are able to bind to the POR protein and thereby up- or downgrade the formation of certain hormones or help the degradation of certain drugs in the liver. These processes are important for several types of disease," explains Simon Bo Jensen, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen's Department of Chemistry.

Together with department colleague Associate Professor Nikos Hatzakis, who led the research project, Jensen found three molecules that can bind to the POR protein, and in doing so, influence how the conductor controls the protein orchestra -- and thereby prevent diseases from developing in the body.

"By affecting the POR protein, we can activate or deactivate proteins with different functions -- just as a conductor controls their orchestra. Imagine a violin that controls testosterone levels, a saxophone that affects cholesterol or a cello that is implicated in cancers. Now we can direct them," explains Nikos Hatzakis.

Their findings have just been published in the journal Nature Communications.

A potential prostate cancer remedy

The human body consists of many different proteins. One important group, often involved in several types of disease, is called P450. These proteins are managed by the heavy hand of the POR conductor.

If P450 proteins don't function as they ought to, they can create an imbalance in our sex hormones, which can then lead to prostate cancer or other diseases. Postdoc Simon Bo Jensen explains:

"When it comes to prostate cancer, patients typically have trouble regulating a particular P450 protein known as CYP17. Our new method lets us design a molecule that can bind to the POR conductor and increase or decrease CYP17 without affecting other P450 proteins. By so doing, we can treat diseases like prostate cancer far more effectively, while avoiding serious side effects," he says.

The researchers identified three molecules that can bind to and influence the POR conductor. Two of these are already being used in pharmaceuticals, while the third is a natural product derived from the sorghum plant.

The hope is that these three molecules will pave the way for the design of a greater number of even more effective molecules to prevent or treat diseases.

"By using artificial intelligence to sort data for hundreds of molecules, we can study which molecules bind to the POR conductor and cause it to act the way we want it to. So far, we've found the three mentioned," explains Simon Bo Jensen.

Paving the way for effective medicines of the future

The researchers' quest for just the right molecules to bind to the POR conductor is not over yet.

"We would like to explore whether there are other molecules that are even more effective at influencing the conductor's behavior. For now, we have taken the first step and demonstrated that we can influence the POR conductor. In doing so, we've paved the way for future treatment methods of various types of disease," says Nikos Hatzakis, who concludes:

"So far, we have tested the proteins in isolation, in the laboratory and in cells. When we have a potential drug with promising results, the next step will be to test it on animals and finally, in humans. We hope that our research will lead to the development of medicines in pill form in the near future."

Boston - This year, more than 60,000 adults in the United States will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and, statistically, as few as 10 percent will survive five years after diagnosis, according to the American Cancer Society. Because pancreatic cancer is hidden deep within the body and often symptomless, it's frequently diagnosed after the disease has progressed too far for surgical intervention and/or has spread throughout the body. Research indicates that earlier detection of pancreatic tumors could quadruple survival rates; however, no validated and reliable tests for early detection of pancreatic cancer currently exist.

Now, researchers at the Cancer Research Institute at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have successfully created the first three-dimensional (3D) organoid models of the pancreas from human stem cells. Unlike previous platforms for the study of pancreatic cancer, this first-of-its-kind organoid model includes both the acinar and ductal structures that play a critical role in the majority of pancreatic cancers. The new research platform -- which is not expected to guide patient care at this time -- will shed new light on the origins and development of pancreatic cancer, as well as reveal potential means for discovering markers of early diagnosis and monitoring the disease. The team's report appears in Cell Stem Cell.

"We thought, if we had a way to use human pancreatic cells to forward engineer cancer, we could begin to understand the earliest steps in the development of this disease," said corresponding author Senthil Muthuswamy, PhD, Director of Cell Biology at the Cancer Research Institute at BIDMC. "This model could also serve as a platform to potentially discover biomarkers -- measurable changes linked to disease -- that we hope to use in the clinic to monitor cancer development."

The pancreas is a hormone-secreting organ consisting of ducts and acinar cell, structures. Researchers suspect that the most common kind of pancreatic cancer (pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, or PDAC) arises in the cells lining acinar and ductal structures. However, until now, scientists have not been able to successfully grow and maintain human acinar structures in the lab challenging their ability to test the hypothesis in a model.

To coerce the stem cells down the path to becoming ductal and acinar cells, Ling Huang, Instructor or Medicine at BIDMC in the Muthuswamy laboratory collaborated with Doug Melton's laboratory at Harvard University and methodically tested various combinations of cell growth media used for different lengths of time. The culmination of five-plus years' of work, presented in the study represents the first time researchers successfully generated human acinar cells in culture and maintained them long enough to be able to use them in experiments.

"It's like a cooking recipe -- a complex recipe, with no precedent," said Muthuswamy, who is also Associate Professor Medicine, Harvard Medical School. "Only when you use all the right ingredients in the right proportions and do them in the correct sequence do you get the cells becoming the acinar cells."

Next, Huang and Ridhdhi Desai, a Research Fellow at BIDMC, used the two separate lineages of ductal and acinar organoids, engineered to include gene mutations known to be associated with pancreatic cancer. When the organoids were later implanted into mice, the different lineages behaved in distinct, predictable ways. For example, one mutation caused seven out of 10 of the mice transplanted with acinar-like organoids to develop cellular changes analogous to early pancreatic cancer in humans.

"Understanding the mechanisms that regulate these events will provide important insights into the events regulating the initiation of pancreatic cancer," said Muthuswamy, who stressed that direct use of this acinar organoid technology for patients who have cancer today may be limited. "The idea is to see if we can identify biomarkers to benefit future patients -- including by screening those at high risk for pancreatic cancer, so we can catch it before it's too late."

Anyone researching the global carbon cycle has to deal with unimaginably large numbers. The Southern Ocean - the world's largest ocean sink region for human-made CO2 - is projected to absorb a total of about 244 billion tons of human-made carbon from the atmosphere over the period from 1850 to 2100 under a high CO2 emissions scenario. But the uptake could possibly be only 204 or up to 309 billion tons. That's how much the projections of the current generation of climate models vary. The reason for this large uncertainty is the complex circulation of the Southern Ocean, which is difficult to correctly represent in climate models.

"Research has been trying to solve this problem for a long time. Now we have succeeded in reducing the great uncertainty by about 50 percent," says Jens Terhaar of the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Bern.

Together with Thomas Frölicher and Fortunat Joos, who are also researchers at the Oeschger Centre, Terhaar has just presented in the scientific journal "Sciences Advances" a new method for constraining the Southern Ocean's CO2 sink. The link between the uptake of human-made CO2 and the salinity of the surface waters is key to this. "The discovery that these two factors are closely related helped us to better constrain the future Southern Ocean CO2 sink " explains Thomas Frölicher.

Towards achieving the Paris climate target

A better constraint Southern Ocean carbon sink is a prerequisite to understand future climate change. The ocean absorbs at least one fifth of human-made CO2 emissions, and as such slows down global warming. By far the largest part of this uptake, about 40 percent, occurs in the Southern Ocean.

The new calculations from Bern not only reduce uncertainties in CO2 uptake and thus allow more accurate projections, but also show that by the end of the 21st century the Southern Ocean will absorb around 15 percent more CO2 than previously thought. This is only a tiny bit of help on the extremely challenging path to achieving the Paris temperature goal of 1.5 degree. "The reduction of human-made CO2 emissions resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels remains extremely urgent if we are to achieve the goals of the Paris climate agreement," clarifies Fortunat Joos.

Better model predictions possible

In their study, the three climate scientists show why the salinity content of the ocean surface waters is a good indicator of how much human-made CO2 is transported into the ocean interior. Models that simulate low salinity in the Southern Ocean surface waters have too light waters and therefore transport less water and CO2 into the ocean interior. As a result, they also absorb less CO2 from the atmosphere. Models with higher salinity, on the other hand, show higher absorption of CO2 from the atmosphere. The salinity of the Southern Ocean surface waters, determined through observations, allowed the researchers from Bern to narrow down the uncertainty in the various model projections.

For the first time, researchers have systematically analysed social and clinical factors associated with psychiatric hospital admission of children and adolescents, finding nearly one-quarter (23.6%) were admitted involuntarily. The study was published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health journal.

Researchers also found that children and adolescents who were involuntarily hospitalised were nearly three times more likely to belong to a Black rather than a white ethnic group than those hospitalised voluntarily and more likely to have a diagnosis of psychosis, substance misuse, or intellectual disability.

Involuntary hospitalisation is a legal procedure used to compel an individual to receive inpatient treatment for a mental health disorder against his or her will. Mental health legislation varies nationally and regionally, with different legal criteria for involuntary hospitalisation. There is growing evidence from research into adult psychiatric hospitalisations that factors outside of those described in mental health legislation, including race and ethnicity, can influence whether someone is admitted voluntarily or not. Until now, little research has investigated social and clinical factors that may affect whether children and adolescents are admitted involuntarily to psychiatric hospitals.

Lead author, Dr Susan Walker from UCL, UK said: "This is the first research to systematically examine involuntary admission to psychiatric hospitals for children and adolescents and our results clearly warrant further discussion and analysis to understand what is behind the discrepancies in the use of involuntary over voluntary hospitalisation among different groups. Although involuntary hospitalisation is designed to offer protection to those who are temporarily unable to look after and make decisions for themselves due to the presence of a mental disorder, being admitted against one's will can be a traumatic experience at any age. The number of children and adolescents being admitted to hospital involuntarily is growing in some countries, including the UK, but research into the factors associated with involuntary hospitalisation among young people is surprisingly limited. Understanding why some people may be more likely to be admitted without their consent is key to understanding how we can reduce the numbers of involuntary admissions." [1]

The review identified 23 studies that included information on whether children and adolescents were admitted to hospital voluntarily or involuntarily. The studies were from 11 high-income countries [2], representing 41,271 young inpatients in total. Researchers amalgamated and analysed data from 19 studies (31,212 participants) to assess the association with 10 clinical and social factors [3].

For young people with psychosis, the odds of an involuntary rather than voluntary hospitalisation were more than three times higher than for those without psychosis. However, a diagnosis of anxiety was associated with voluntary rather than involuntary hospitalisation, as was a diagnosis of behavioural problems such as ADHD and conduct disorder. For young people with a primary diagnosis of substance misuse the odds of an involuntarily rather than voluntary hospitalisation were nearly twice as high.

For children and young people, the distinction between voluntary and involuntary hospitalisation is not always clear. For example, children and adolescents can be admitted to hospital under parental consent, and, even if the young person does not agree, this admission would legally be considered voluntary.

The analysis found that a diagnosis of intellectual disability increased the odds of an involuntary rather than voluntary admission by more than three times (233%). Intellectual disability was included in the analysis whether it was a comorbid or primary diagnosis [4]. Psychiatric hospitalisation, whether involuntary or voluntary is rarely appropriate for young people with intellectual disability and this study highlights the need for further investigation into whether this group have been provided with appropriate and timely care in the community.

Young people perceived to be at risk to themselves or others were twice as likely to be involuntarily than voluntarily admitted. No association was found between gender and involuntary hospitalisation in children and adolescents. Older adolescents (16-17 years) were more likely to have been subject to involuntary hospitalisation than younger adolescents (aged 12-15), according to the study.

Three of the studies included ethnicity in their analysis [5]. Analysis of these studies found that the odds of involuntary rather than voluntary hospitalisation among children and young people from Black ethnic groups were nearly twice as high (172%) than for those from white ethnic groups. No difference was found between young people from Asian and other groups compared to young people from white groups.

Dr Walker said, "By providing insight into the factors associated with involuntary hospitalisation our study represents an important step in reducing coercive psychiatric admissions and ensuring equity of care." [1]

She added: "Among adults, there are consistent findings that people from minority ethnic groups are more likely to be diagnosed with severe mental illness than people from white groups. However, recent research in England has shown that children and adolescents from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds are less likely than those from white ethnic backgrounds to have any mental disorder [6]. It is essential that we understand more about the reasons behind the diagnostic discrepancies between different ethnicity and age groups, and how they relate to psychiatric hospitalisation. An assessment of the role of race in involuntary hospitalisation of young people should be a focus of urgent further investigation." [1]

The researchers acknowledge that limited research in this area is one of the main shortcomings of the study. The researchers also highlight that the review includes studies from different countries with different legal criteria for involuntary hospitalisation, alongside different mental health systems and processes. Another limitation is that the studies are all from high-income countries, highlighting the lack of data from low- and middle-income countries. In addition, the studies included in the analysis had little information on children under the care of social services, socio-economic status, and how patients came to be hospitalised (for example, if police were involved), which meant that these factors could not be investigated. The researchers suggest that it would be helpful to investigate the differences between subtypes of voluntary and involuntary admission i.e whether consent is from parents/caregivers or from the patients and how this affects experiences of care and mental health outcomes.

Writing in a linked Comment, Dr Schuyler W Henderson from Bellevue Hospital, USA, who was not involved in the study, said, "This study, in tandem with other studies identified by Walker and colleagues, shows evidence of a systematic bias against Black populations, honing in on a pervasive limitation to our practice. Antiracism initiatives and anti-racist education are required to address one kind of systematic bias that Walker and colleagues expose and discuss."

He added, "What we are seeing in this study is a vision of children and adolescents through the prism of adult systems and adult paradigms. Although clinicians will certainly want to dig into these findings to make sense of them, and Walker and colleagues provide interesting but cautious interpretations of their findings around diagnosis, age, risk of harm to self or others, and so forth, there is a real risk to this speculation, especially when it comes to adults thinking about children. We are too comfortable assuming we know the answers."

The discovery of a novel enzyme that releases a valuable chemical from agricultural waste could provide an important breakthrough in the upscaling of renewable fuels and chemicals, a new study shows.

Researchers - led by the University of York - have discovered an enzyme in a fungus which can act as a catalyst to bring about a biochemical reaction that breaks down lignocellulose

Lignocellulose is found in forestry and agricultural waste like wheat straw, which was used in this research. It has long been considered by scientists that this dry matter could be used as a sustainable resource for the production of fuels and chemicals if a way to break it down could be found so that it can be processed effectively.

Professor Neil Bruce from the Department of Biology and Director of the Centre for Novel Agricultural Products (CNAP) said: "We believe this discovery is important as there is much interest in using lignocellulose as renewable and sustainable resource for the production of liquid fuels and chemicals.

"Although lignocellulose is one of the most abundant forms of fixed carbon in the biosphere, the use of lignocellulose as a material to supply bioindustry has been hampered by its composition and structure, which renders it highly obstinate to degradation.

"This is, in part, due to the presence of lignin, a complex aromatic polymer that encases the structure to block enzyme accessibility."

There are currently no industrial biocatalytic processes for breaking down lignin.

But researchers found that an enzyme produced by a fungus called, Parascedosporium putredinis NO1, can break through the lignin to begin the essential process of degradation needed to ultimately produce biofuels.

Professor Bruce added: "P. putredinis NO1 is able to dominate cultures in the latter stages of wheat straw degradation in a mixed microbial community when easily accessible polysaccharides have been exhausted.

"We demonstrate that treatments with this enzyme can increase the digestibility of lignocellulosic biomass, offering the possibility of producing a valuable product from lignin while decreasing processing costs."

In a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers from Surrey investigated whether the daily consumption of a prebiotic food supplement could improve overall wellbeing in a group of 18 to 25 year-olds. The study found that those who received a daily dose of prebiotics improved mental wellbeing by reducing anxiety levels and had better gut health than the control group.

Researchers studied a group of 64 healthy female participants with no current or previous clinical diagnoses of anxiety. Participants received either a daily dose of the prebiotic galacto-oligosaccharides (GOS) or a placebo for 28 days.

All those involved in the trial completed surveys about their health experiences, including mood, anxiety and sleep quality and provided a stool sample for gut microbiome sequencing analysis.

Dr Kathrin Cohen Kadosh, Reader in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Surrey and Head of the Social Brain and Development Lab, said:

"This new research marks a significant step forward in that we were able to show that we can use a simple and safe food supplement such as prebiotics to improve both the abundance of beneficial gut bacteria in the gut and to improve mental health and wellbeing in young women."

Dr Nicola Johnstone, Research Fellow from the University of Surrey, said:

"This is an exciting study that brings together different dimensions in mental health research; finding prebiotic effects in a sub-clinical group shows promise for translational clinical research on multiple markers of mental health."

A pregnant woman's exposure to tobacco smoke and pollution from road traffic can influence the development of behavioural outcomes in early childhood. This is the conclusion of a recent study led by a team from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by the "la Caixa" Foundation. The study, published in Environmental International, is the first to investigate the impact of the exposome--i.e. the set of all environmental exposures, both chemical and non-chemical, during the prenatal and postnatal stages--on child behaviour. Previous research had assessed the impact of environmental exposures separately but not as a whole.

Childhood is a critical time for people's mental health and well-being, as it is the period when brain development accelerates. Although the causes of behavioural problems are not yet well understood, we do know that the limited genetic component involved in behavioural disorders interacts with multiple social and physical exposures, particularly during the sensitive prenatal and early childhood periods.

The study was based on data from the large European Human Early-Life Exposome (HELIX) project. The study population consisted of six longitudinal birth cohorts from six European countries. A total of 1,287 children between 6 and 11 years of age underwent follow-up to characterise their exposures and assess behavioural problems. The researchers assessed 88 pregnancy exposures and 123 childhood exposures, encompassing the outdoor, indoor, chemical, lifestyle and social domains of the exposome.

Maternal Smoking and Road Traffic

During pregnancy, smoking and traffic were the factors most strongly associated with behavioural problems.

"We found that maternal tobacco smoke exposure during pregnancy was the most important prenatal exposure associated with emotional and behavioural problems in children," explained Léa Maitre, postdoctoral researcher at ISGlobal and lead author of the study. Maternal tobacco smoke exposure "is closely linked to other co-exposures, such as parental psychopathology symptoms, socioeconomic factors, the father's smoking habits and the home environment, in particular the quality of the attachment, support and stimulation that the child is exposed to at home," added Maitre. "This may account for a large part of the effect of maternal smoking during pregnancy on child behaviour."

The study also found that increased residential traffic density on the nearest road during pregnancy was associated with increased externalizing symptoms (i.e. aggressive and rule-breaking behaviours) and a higher attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) index. A biological explanation is plausible, although the exact mechanisms remain elusive.

Postnatal exposure to tobacco smoke and car traffic density were not as strongly associated with child behaviour as prenatal exposures. This finding suggests that pregnancy may be the period most sensitive to the harmful effects of these exposures, due in part to the rapid development of the nervous system during this time window, but also because of exposures that occur in utero, among other hypotheses.

Good Sleep, Healthy Diet and Social Contact

The study also found that children aged 6-12 years who got more hours of sleep, ate a healthy (Mediterranean) diet, and whose parents had strong family and social ties had fewer internalising symptoms, i.e. withdrawal (e.g. not talking), somatisation (headaches), and anxiety or depression (nervousness).

In contrast, greater exposure to lead and copper, indoor air pollution and unhealthy diet were associated with increased behavioural problems.

In particular, a diet of ready­made food, sweets and caffeinated beverages was associated with an increased risk of ADHD symptoms, although impulsivity traits in children with ADHD can also lead to poor dietary choices and emotional eating.

One of the strongest associations with ADHD was in relation to the social and family ties of the parents (especially the mother): children whose parents had contact with family or friends less than once a week were 31% more likely to have ADHD symptoms.

Indoor air pollution in the home and levels of copper and lead in the blood were associated with increased behavioural problems in children.

"Our findings confirm the harmful role of maternal smoking and traffic exposure during pregnancy in childhood behavioural disorders, but they also underscore the potential protective role of a healthy family lifestyle during childhood, in particular diet, sleep and regular social contact," commented Martine Vrijheid, head of the Childhood and Environment Programme at ISGlobal and last author of the study. "Early promotion of healthy family habits and regulation of air quality and lead exposure could help to prevent the future development of mental health disorders."

The second author of the study, Jordi Julvez, a neuropsychologist and researcher at the Pere Virgili Institute of Health Research (IISPV-CERCA), underscored the importance of the study: "For the first time, human behavioural studies are taking into account a wide variety of environmental determinants and lifestyles in a single analysis, from the perspective of child psychological development. This is the closest we have come so far in adjusting our studies to the multifaceted reality of human psychological development."

African waters have been contributing to the global supply of fish for years, with three of the four most productive marine ecosystems in the world near the continent. African countries' Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) contributed over 6 million metric tons of fish to the world's food supply, supporting food security and livelihood in the continent, while generating $15 billion to the African gross domestic product in 2011. Every sovereign state has an EEZ, an area of ocean adjacent to their shores in which they have special rights regarding the exploration and use of marine resources.

Industrial fleets from countries around the world have been increasingly fishing in African waters, but with climate change and increasing pollution threatening Africa's fish stocks, there is a growing concern of the sustainability of these marine fisheries if they continue to be exploited by foreign countries.

A new study used Automatic Identification System (AIS) satellite data from Global Fishing Watch to describe and characterize the spatial characteristics of African and foreign industrial fishing activities within these African EEZs. Mi-Ling Li, assistant professor in the University of Delaware's School of Marine Science and Policy in the College of Earth, Ocean and Environment (CEOE), served as the lead author on the paper, which was published in the Fish and Fisheries scientific journal.

Industrialized foreign fishing

Countries in Africa have a short-term economic incentive to grant foreign countries access to fish in their waters. Those foreign countries have to make direct payments to acquire permits to fish in a country's EEZ.

"There has been controversy over foreign fishing in African waters, but there hasn't been a quantitative assessment of how they act," said Li. "It's difficult because a lot of the African countries do not have good surveillance of their fisheries."

The study described spatial and temporal characteristics for both African and foreign industrial fishing activities -- examining boats that were large enough to carry AIS trackers.

"African fisheries desperately need better information and data for management," said David Kroodsma, Director of Research and Innovation at the Global Fishing Watch and a co-author of the paper. "It is exciting to be able to use vessel GPS data to help solve this challenge and reveal fishing activity across the continent."

The paper highlights where and how long the boats spent most of their time and what fish they reported catching in those locations.

The EEZs fished by a large number of countries were generally located in West Africa, with the EEZs of Western Sahara and Mauritania fished by the highest number of foreign countries.

The resources of specific fish stocks could determine where vessels would fish. Vessels from Japan, for instance, spent most of their time fishing in eastern Africa for tuna, with an estimated 75% of total reported Japanese catches coming from the waters of Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, and Seychelle.

"This paper shows that fisheries and their management in Africa are globally interconnected, highlighting the need for international cooperation to address the challenges that fisheries in the continent are facing," said William Cheung, professor at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia who is a co-author of the study. "We demonstrate the importance of having accessible data, including those from new technology, to generate knowledge that is necessary to address these challenges."

One puzzle piece

While the AIS data can show where and how long the vessels were fishing, there is a reliance on the reporting data from the vessels themselves to confirm what they are catching. Sometimes, the data does not always correlate, pointing to the possibility of illegal, unreported or unregulated (IUU) fishing.

The study used Namibia, an African country in that region, as a case study.

Unlike some other African countries, Namibia requires fleets in their EEZ to land their catches in their domestic ports. Not all fishing fleets followed that regulation, however. While 20 fishing entities were identified by AIS as being in Namibian waters, not all of the vessels recorded having caught fish in those waters.

"Namibia has a relatively good surveillance system, and they require every fleet who fishes there to land in their docks," said Li. "But even with those regulations, we find a big discrepancy in who reported fishing and catch there and who we detected by AIS. This is a big issue with regards to illegal fishing in African waters."

Rockville, Md. (April 27, 2021)--The popular herbicide Roundup® has been in the news because of concerns its main ingredient, glyphosate, might cause cancer. Now researchers from Florida Atlantic University (FAU) are evaluating the pesticide for potential neurological impacts. This week, the scientists will present their work virtually at the American Physiological Society's (APS) annual meeting at Experimental Biology 2021.

The roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) is a microscopic worm that lives in soil and feeds on bacteria. Scientists have studied it extensively since the 1960s to better understand fundamental physiological processes of the animal kingdom. Because roughly 38% of its genes have counterparts in humans, findings in C. elegans can inform our understanding of human biology.

The FAU researchers exposed the C. elegans to varying formulations of Roundup®, glyphosate and saline controls. They then induced seizure-like behavior in the worms and measured how long it took for them to resume normal behavior. Exposure to Roundup® doubled the duration of the convulsions in the worms. The concentration of Roundup® in the study were 1,000 times lower than that approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for use in humans.

In some trials, the researchers administered sodium valproate, an anti-epileptic drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The sodium valproate ameliorated the effects of the Roundup® in the worms. The fact that a drug known to alleviate seizures in humans also alleviated the seizure-like behavior in the C. elegans implies that the mechanism being disrupted by the Roundup® is one humans share with the worms. Lead author Akshay Naraine, MSc, calls for further study of these effects in mammalian models "to further evaluate both physiological and behavioral risks in humans."

In addition to demonstrating a potential risk for humans, these findings "could have enormous implications for ... the ecology where Roundup® is used," Naraine explains. "The broader implications of our work raise serious concern over the ecological impact that trace concentrations of glyphosate pose to invertebrate organisms in the soil. Taken in a translational light, these findings spur further exploration into how glyphosate and Roundup® affect seizure and behavioral symptomology in mammals."