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Rockville, Md. (April 27, 2021)--High-intensity cycling in very short bursts can lead to performance and health benefits in just 10 minutes a day, according to a new study to be presented virtually this week at the American Physiological Society's (APS) annual meeting at Experimental Biology 2021.

Young adult volunteers participated in high-intensity cycling three times a week for eight weeks. They cycled at maximum effort for four seconds and rested for 15 to 30 seconds before beginning another four-second sprint. Each sprint-rest bout was repeated up to 30 times in a single workout session, for a total of 10 minutes.

By the end of the trial period, the participants had increased their maximum oxygen consumption, which indicates an improvement of aerobic exercise endurance. Their anaerobic power (strength) and total blood volume increased as well. Both athletic performance and cardiovascular health can improve with a boost in blood volume, explained Remzi Satiroglu, MS, first author of the study from the University of Texas at Austin.

These results may encourage people to exercise because the total workout time is very short, Satiroglu explained. "[People] often claim they don't have enough time to squeeze [exercise] in. We offer people a workout that only take 10 minutes total and shows results when completed three times per week," he said.

What makes the human brain special? It's not the time it takes to mature, according to new research. Scientists report the human frontal cortex, the part of the brain involved in higher-level thinking and reasoning, follows a developmental trajectory similar to that of other primates including chimpanzees and macaques.

"We find no evidence that frontal cortex maturation is unusually extended in humans," said Christine Charvet, PhD, assistant professor at Delaware State University and the study's lead author. "Overall, our studies converge to demonstrate a surprising level of similarity in brain structure and development between humans and other studied primates."

Charvet will present the research at the American Association for Anatomy annual meeting during the Experimental Biology (EB) 2021 meeting, held virtually April 27-30. Some of the findings were recently published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Charvet and colleagues integrate data on gene expression, brain structure and behavioral markers to comprehensively analyze brain development across species. While previous researchers have applied these approaches in isolation, each approach has limitations, so combining them provides a more complete picture. The researchers used their integrated approach to compare frontal cortex development in humans and chimpanzees. In total, they had acquired 137 time points from 44 days after conception to 55 years of age.

"It's only by merging information across scales of biological organization that we can conclusively say how old a chimpanzee is in human days," said Charvet. In addition to chimpanzees, the team applied similar methods to analyze brain development in mice and macaques, a type of monkey. As expected, the researchers found that mouse brains mature at a much faster rate than human brains, but humans and macaques showed similar patterns of development.

These comparisons offer a reference point that scientists can use to compare ages and better understand how our brains differ from those of other animals. In addition, Charvet says the integrated approach can help researchers map brain circuitry to gain insights into human evolution.

"Integrating across scales of biological organization expands the repertoire of tools available to study biological programs in human evolution and opens new avenues to study connections in health and disease," said Charvet.

The research will be incorporated into a website that catalogues brain development and relative biological ages of a variety of mammalian species.

Charvet will present this research from 3:30-3:45 p.m. Thursday, April 29 (abstract) and in poster R2718 (abstract). Contact the media team for more information or to obtain a free press pass to access the virtual meeting.

Images available.

Findings from a new cell study suggest that the natural plant compound sanguinarine could be a promising tool for targeting triple-negative breast cancer cells. The researchers also found that breast cancer cells derived from people with African American ancestry were more sensitive to sanguinarine than those of European origin.

"Triple negative breast cancer is especially aggressive in African American women, who are also more likely to develop this type of breast cancer than women of European descent," said Samia Messeha, PhD, a research associate in the College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Science at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. "There is intense interest in finding new therapeutic strategies to fight this cancer."

About 10-20% of breast cancers are triple-negative, which means the cancer lacks -- or is negative for -- receptors for estrogen or progesterone and doesn't make excess amounts of a protein called HER2. The absence of hormone receptors means these tumors don't respond to the hormone-based therapies used for other types of breast cancer.

Messeha will present the research at the American Society for Investigative Pathology annual meeting during the virtual Experimental Biology (EB) 2021 meeting, to be held April 27-30.

Sanguinarine, a natural compound found in bloodroot and other medicinal plants, has been shown to have anti-bacterial, anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer effects. To better understand the mechanisms involved in the compound's anti-cancer effects, Messeha and her team used sanguinarine to treat two groups of triple negative breast cancer cells -- one derived from women with African American ancestry and the other from women of European origin.

Although both groups of cancer cells showed reduced cell viability and growth when treated with sanguinarine, the researchers observed more pronounced effects for the cells derived from women with African American ancestry. The researchers also found that the treatment activated different genes in each group of cells, which could help explain why some patients don't respond to certain therapies.

"Our findings suggest that sanguinarine could have therapeutic potential for patients with triple negative breast cancer, particularly African American women with the disease," said Messeha.

The researchers plan to investigate sanguinarine's effects in more triple negative breast cancer cell lines and study the effects of sanguinarine in combination with common drugs used to treat this breast cancer.

Samia Messeha will present the findings from 2:30 p.m.-2:45 p.m. Wednesday April 28 (abstract). Contact the media team for more information or to obtain a free press pass to access the meeting.

Images available.

Taking a break from extreme heat, by visiting a cooling center for example, could help our cells protect themselves from damage, according to preliminary findings from a new study. The research, which focused on older people, suggests temporarily cooling down on a hot day helps cells maintain autophagy, a process cells use to rid themselves of dangerous protein buildups caused by stressors like extreme heat.

"By lessening the time spent in a state of elevated internal body temperature, cooling centers may help to preserve autophagy in older adults, which may translate to greater cellular protection and improved health outcomes during an extreme heat event," said James J. McCormick, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at the Human and Environmental Physiology Research Unit of the University of Ottawa in Canada, and the study's first author.

McCormick will present the research at the American Physiological Society annual meeting during the Experimental Biology (EB) 2021 meeting, held virtually April 27-30.

Sustained elevations in internal body temperature can lead to heat stroke, cardiovascular events and kidney failure. Older people are particularly vulnerable since the body's systems for regulating temperature degrade as we age.

During periods of extreme heat, health agencies recommend that people without home air conditioning spend a few hours in a cooled location, such as a cooling center or heat-relief shelter. However, there has been little research into how visiting a cooling center actually affects the physiological processes associated with heat exposure.

"With climate change, the global population is increasingly exposed to protracted periods of extreme heat," said Robert D. Meade, a doctoral candidate who is part of the research team. "Prolonged exposure to hot temperatures can overwhelm the body's ability to cool itself, particularly in older adults. Thus, there is a crucial need to develop evidence-based guidance for protecting older adults from extreme heat."

The researchers analyzed how older people responded to a simulated heat wave with and without a cooling break. A total of 17 volunteers spent nine hours in a room heated to 40° C (104° F). In the middle of the day, seven of the volunteers had a two-hour break in a room that was a comfortable 23° C (73° F).

While the cooling break did not result in lasting reductions in participants' core body temperature, these participants did show improved markers of autophagic function compared to the group that endured high heat for the full nine hours. The findings suggest that visiting a cooling center could help older people avoid some of the cellular damage that may contribute to serious health impacts of heat exposure, according to researchers.

The researchers plan to conduct further studies to determine whether other cooling strategies, such as using a fan, could also help to preserve autophagic function in older adults.

McCormick will present this research in poster R3744 (abstract). Contact the media team for more information or to obtain a free press pass to access the virtual meeting.

Images available.

The combined effect of rapid ocean warming and the practice of targeting big fish is affecting the viability of wild populations and global fish stock says new research by the University of Melbourne and the University of Tasmania.

Unlike earlier studies that traditionally considered fishing and climate in isolation, the research found that ocean warming and fishing combined to impact on fish recruitment, and that this took four generations to manifest.

"We found a strong decline in recruitment (the process of getting new young fish into a population) in all populations that had been exposed to warming, and this effect was highest where all the largest individuals were fished out," said lead author and PhD candidate, Henry Wootton, from the University of Melbourne.

Mr Wootton and his team established 18 independent populations of fish in their lab and exposed these to either control or elevated temperatures, and to one of three fisheries harvest regimes. They then followed the fate of each population for seven generations, which equates to nearly three years of lab time.

"Our study is the first to experimentally explore the joint impact of fishing and ocean warming on fish populations," Mr Wootton said.

The research is released today in the journal PNAS with researchers saying the solution is less selective fishing, which will help ensure balanced sex ratios and the persistence of valuable bigger females.

Co-author Dr John Morrongiello said: "Wild fisheries provide food for billions of people worldwide, particularly in our Pacific region where fish is the major source of animal-based protein. Past fishing practices have caused spectacular fishery crashes and so it is important that we adopt management approaches that will ensure our oceans continue to maintain sustainable fisheries."

He added: "Sustainable fisheries management in the face of rapid environmental change is a real challenge. Getting it right will not only provide food and economic security for millions of people worldwide but will also help protect our ocean's valuable biodiversity for generations to come."

Dr Asta Audzijonyte, co-author from University of Tasmania and Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation, said it was surprising to find such strong and delayed negative impact of warming on small fish survival.

"We still do not fully understand why this happens, but our findings clearly show that protecting fish size diversity and large fish can increase their resilience to climate change. While reversing climate change is hard, restoring and protecting fish size diversity is one thing that we certainly can do, and we need to do it fast," she said.

Dr Audzijonyte added: "Most experimental research on climate change impacts is done on relatively short timescales, where fish are studied for two or three generations at best. We found that strong negative impacts of warming only became apparent after four generations. This suggests that we might be underestimating the possible impacts of climate change on some fisheries stocks."

Scientific classifications of forest vegetation on the territory of the former USSR, including the Republic of Tatarstan, previously used the dominant approach, traditional for northern countries, taking into account the dominance degree of one or another species in the main tree layer, or similarity in the composition of subordinate layers with the identification of cycles and series of associations. Currently, the classification of plant communities of the Republic of Tatarstan is made on a dominant-determinant basis and is reflected, for example, in the vegetation map of the Atlas of the Republic of Tatarstan and other publications.

The classification of vegetation according to the Braun-Blanquet method takes into account the entire floristic composition of the community and is used mainly in European countries. Since many communities in the European part of Russia are similar to European ones, it is logical to classify our communities in this system as well. In Soviet phytosociology, the Braun-Blanquet system began to be actively used only in the early 1980s, and since 2000, the Russian followers of Braun-Blanquet have authored dozens of articles on vegetation in different regions. In 2005, a preliminary prodromus of vegetation syntaxa of the Raifa site of the Volga-Kama natural biosphere reserve was published.

Therefore, the authors decided to develop a classification of plant communities in the Republic of Tatarstan based on the Braun-Blanquet system.

Steppe oak forests are unique ecotonic communities of great floristic diversity and conservation value; in addition, they are simply gorgeous, so the authors chose these communities to start with. This type of community is quite rare for the territory of Tatarstan. To find it, scientists have developed a mathematical model of potential habitats of steppe oak forests on the territory of the Republic of Tatarstan based on data from other regions. This made it possible to find more points of their habitats in one season than in the entire previous history of study.

The aim of the study is to develop a syntaxonomic classification of xero-mesophytic broad-leaved oak forests of the Republic of Tatarstan with a preliminary analysis of their unique ecological features. A total of 91 phytosociological relevés were processed. They were classified using a modified TWINSPAN algorithm (this is one of the cluster analysis options). Diagnostic, constant and dominant species were identified, which are necessary to determine the syntaxonomic position of these communities. Two new associations were validly (i.e. according to all accepted rules) described: Astragalo ciceri-Quercetum roboris and Sanguisorbo officinalis-Quercetum roboris, which belong to the class Quercetea pubescentis. The uniqueness of these communities was shown in relation to xero-mesophytic European oak forests, oak communities common in the western regions of European Russia (Bryansk, Kursk), as well as steppe oak forests of the Cis-Urals and the Southern Urals.

To date, only these 2 associations from the territory of Tatarstan have been validly published in the scientific press.

The study of the spatio-temporal dynamics of biodiversity is one of the priority tasks of fundamental ecology and biogeography. Changes in the distribution boundaries of tree species are slower than climate change. However, plant communities that have formed at the border of their distribution are the most sensitive to slow and humanly imperceptible climate changes. One of such most "sensitive" objects are steppe oak forests - a widespread and ecologically and floristically delineated type of deciduous forests in Europe and, in particular, in Russia. They have well-pronounced ecological preferences and a relatively narrow ecological amplitude, which makes it possible to consider them as significant indicators of climate change.

In the course of the work in general, as well as the preparation of the manuscript of the article in particular, the researchers got acquainted with colleagues studying these types of communities both in Europe and in Russia. They realized that when the study area is relatively small (for example, on the scale of a Russian region or a separate European country), the classification becomes very confusing and many contradictions arise. Therefore, it was decided to combine the material and carry out a unified revision of all European steppe forests. This project has already started. It includes scientists from the Czech Republic, Austria, Poland, Slovakia, Romania, as well as Russian regions: Bryansk Oblast, Rostov Oblast and the Republic of Bashkortostan. Results are expected in 2023.

Chemotherapy is a drug treatment that uses powerful chemicals to kill fast-growing cancer cells in the body. It is a systemic treatment where drugs travel throughout the body and destroy cancer cells that have spread (metastasized) to parts of the body far away from the original (primary) tumour. As such, chemotherapy remains the main treatment against various cancers. Thus, when cancer cells resist chemotherapeutic drugs, treatment failure results.

The resistance of cancer cells to chemotherapy is marked by changes and increased output of certain proteins. These altered proteins can help doctors to identify patients who will not respond well to chemotherapy and paves the way for the development of therapeutic intervention to "re-sensitise" their cancer cells to treatment.

In a Nature Communications article published mid-April, Associate Professor Zhang Yongliang from NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine's Immunology Translational Research Programme reported the finding of one such altered protein in a study that identified how a molecule called DUSP16 plays an important role in a cancer patient's response to chemotherapeutic drugs.

Assoc Prof Zhang and his study team, in collaboration with clinical scientists including the team led by Professor Goh Boon Cher, Deputy Director of both the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore at NUS and NUS Center for Cancer Research (N2CR), found that an increased expression of DUSP16 led to resistance from cancer cells to chemotherapy in colorectal, nasopharyngeal, gastric and breast cancer. Prof Goh's team studies mainly cancers of the upper aerodigestive tracts (of the head and neck and lung), which are among the most frequent cancers, and seeks to understand these diseases.

These four cancers are among the most common and deadly ones affecting Singaporeans and Southeast Asians. Nasopharyngeal cancer has a high incidence rate in Southeast Asians, while colorectal cancer is the most frequently occurring cancer in Singapore. Breast cancer is the cancer with the highest incidence among women in Singapore and gastric cancer is among the top three cancers causing death worldwide. In addition, the fact that these four cancers manifest as solid tumours with chemotherapy being a common form of post-operative treatment meant that they made for good candidates for the study.

Analysis of head and neck cancer patients, and breast cancer patients showed that those with higher DUSP16 expression in their cancer cells lived for significantly shorter periods compared to patients with lower levels of DUSP16. DUSP16 expression can thus be used as a biomarker for sensitivity of cancer patients to chemotherapy, which will be important for clinicians seeking to design suitable treatment, said Assoc Prof Zhang. This molecule could also be targeted for the development of new therapies to improve the success of chemotherapy treatment. While this discovery is not only relevant to these four types of cancer, more research would be needed to examine other cancer types.

The study also found that chemotherapy drugs are a factor in the increased expression of DUSP16. This means that once chemotherapy begins, the expression of DUSP16 will increase in patients, Assoc Prof Zhang added. In addition, other factors such as stress or infections have also caused increased expression of DUSP16.

While there are no alternative treatments that might be effective in cancer patients who test positive for the increased expression of DUSP16, Assoc Prof Zhang and his team are planning to conduct further research to identify molecules and drugs that can reduce DUSP16 levels in patients.

The NUS Medicine Immunology Translational Research Programme aims to understand the role of the immune system in health and diseases. The programme strives to enable the discovery and development of more effective immunotherapy, new treatment guidelines and diagnostic tests for patients with disease-specific problems such as autoimmune and airway diseases, cancer, chronic inflammation, infections and organ/ tissue transplantation. These goals are to be achieved by fostering collaborative research and advancing latest technologies to probe immunological mechanisms, and enhancing infrastructure for clinical translation.

AMHERST Mass. - Scientists have long sought to invent materials that can respond to the external world in predictable, self-regulating ways. Now, new research conducted at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences brings us one step closer to that goal. For their inspiration, the scientists looked to nature.

Lampreys swimming, horses walking, and insects flying: each of these behaviors is made possible by a network of oscillators--mechanisms that produce a repetitive motion, such as wriggling a tail, taking a stride, or flapping a wing. What's more, these natural oscillators can respond to their environment in predictable ways. In response to different signals, they can rapidly change speed, switch between different modes, or stop changing altogether. "The question," says Hyunki Kim, the paper's co-lead author, along with Boston University's Subramanian Sundaram, a recent recipient of a Ph.D in polymer science and engineering from UMass Amherst, "is can we make soft materials, such as plastics, polymers, and nanocomposite structures, that can respond in the same way?" The answer, as the team documents, is a definitive yes.

One of the key difficulties that the team solved was in getting a series of oscillators to work in unison with each other, a prerequisite for coordinated, predictable movement. "We have developed a new platform where we can control with remarkable precision the coupling of oscillators," says Ryan Hayward, James and Catherine Patten Endowed Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, and one of the paper's co-authors. That platform relies on yet another natural force, known as the Marangoni effect, which is a phenomenon that describes the movement of solids along the interface between two fluids driven by changes in surface tension. A classic, real-world example of the Marangoni effect happens every time you wash the dishes. When you squirt dish soap into a pan filled with water on whose surface is evenly sprinkled the crumbs from your dinner, you can watch as the crumbs flee to the edges of the pan once the soap hits the water. This is because the soap changes the surface tension of the water, and the crumbs are pulled away from areas of low, soapy surface tension, towards the edges of the pan where the surface tension remains high.

"It all comes down to understanding the role of interfaces and the profound impact of combining polymeric and metallic materials into composite structures," says Todd Emrick, co-author and professor in polymer science and engineering at UMass. Instead of soapy water and pans, the team used hydrogel nanocomposite disks made up of polymer gels and nanoparticles of gold, which were sensitive to changes in light and temperature. The result was that the team was able to engineer a diverse array of oscillators that could move in unison with each other and respond predictably to changes in light and temperature. "We can now engineer complex coupled behavior that responds to external stimuli," says Kim.

Much as yeast serves in bakeries as single-celled helper, the bacterium Escherischia coli is a must in every biotechnology lab. A team led by Prof. Dr. Barbara Di Ventura, professor of biological signaling research at the University of Freiburg, has developed a new so-called optogenetic tool that simplifies a standard method in biotechnology: Instead of feeding the bacteria with sugar as commonly done, the researchers can now simply shine light on them. Di Ventura, Prof. Dr. Mustafa Hani Khammash from ETH Zurich/Switzerland and their teams, foremost first authors Edoardo Romano and Dr. Armin Baumschlager, published their results in Nature Chemical Biology.

"We've called the new system BLADE - blue light-inducible AraC dimers in Escherichia coli," explains Romano. Scientists control the expression of a desired gene in the bacterium E. coli using the PBAD promoter, which is part of the genetic network that regulates the metabolism of the sugar arabinose in bacteria. This allows them to selectively produce proteins and study signaling processes in the bacteria. "This new light-guided construct can replace the wide-spread arabinose gene expression system, facilitating the adoption of optogenetics among microbiologists," explains Di Ventura, who is a member of the Clusters of Excellence CIBSS - Centre for Integrative Biological Signalling Studies and BIOSS - Centre for Biological Signalling Studies.

Optogenetics uses proteins that respond to light to regulate cell functions. "BLADE is intended for use in synthetic biology, microbiology, and biotechnology. We show that our tool can be used in a targeted manner, that it is fast and reversible," comments Di Ventura. To demonstrate with what precision BLADE responds to light, Di Ventura and her team made bacteriographs: images created from bacterial cultures. BLADE consists of a light-sensitive protein and a transcription factor: a protein that binds a specific sequence of the DNA found in the so-called promoter region of a gene and controls whether the corresponding gene is read by the cell machinery. The researchers controlled with BLADE the expression of the gene coding for a fluorescent protein to create the bacteriographs.

The Freiburg scientists illuminated the bacterial lawn through a photomask glued to the lid of petri dishes. The bacteria fluoresced at the point at which they were illuminated, because BLADE was activated: The images were created under a fluorescence microscope. In another experiment, the researchers used BLADE to regulate genes that made E. coli cells longer, thicker and rod-shaped. It was even possible to reverse the changes: The cells reverted to their original shape after four hours without light. In this way, the system can be used to study many other genes - even genes that are not from E. coli.

Ecologists at the University of Cologne's Institute of Zoology have for the first time demonstrated the enormously high and also very specific species diversity of the deep sea in a comparison of 20 deep-sea basins in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Over a period of 20 years, a research team led by Professor Dr Hartmut Arndt at the Institute of Zoology has compiled a body of data that for the first time allows for a comparison of the diversity of existing eukaryotes - organisms with a cell nucleus. Sediment samples from depths of 4000 to 8350 meters, the cultivation and sequencing of populations found exclusively in the deep sea, and finally molecular analysis using high-throughput techniques are yielding a comprehensive picture of biodiversity in the deep sea. The research results have been published in Communications Biology under the title 'High and specific diversity of protists in the deep-sea basins dominated by diplonemids, kinetoplastids, ciliates and foraminiferans.'

The deep-sea floor at water depths of more than 1000 metres covers more than 60 per cent of the Earth's surface, making it the largest part of the biosphere. Yet little is known about the diversity, distribution patterns, and functional importance of organisms in this extreme and gigantic habitat. What is certain is that climate change - e.g. through warming, acidification, or oxygen depletion - is already having an impact on this sensitive ecosystem. In addition, the deep sea is under pressure from the growing interest in raw material extraction.

Scientists previously assumed that deep-sea basins, which are all characterized by the same low temperature (0-4°C), salinity (about 3.6 per cent), high pressure (300-500bar depending on depth), and very similar sediment, have relatively low - and also the same - species diversity. Moreover, most deep-sea studies to date have focused on specific habitats such as hydrothermal vents and saltwater lenses. Until now, there has been a lack of data on the diversity of deep-sea plains, which make up by far the largest portion of the seafloor. 'By using a new approach of combined molecular biology and cultivation-based studies, we found substantial, highly specific local differences in organism communities with little overlap to the organism communities of coastal regions,' said Dr Alexandra Schönle, lead author of the study.

Among the life forms, unicellular organisms (protists), which have been mostly overlooked in current deep-sea food web models, dominated. In addition to the calcareous chambered organisms (foraminifera) traditionally considered in studies, whose deposits dominate vast areas of the world ocean, tiny naked protists dominated, including bacterivorous and parasitic flagellates and ciliates, whose diversity significantly exceeded that of multicellular animals. Also surprising was the high proportion of parasitic forms (10 to 20 per cent), which was previously unknown on this scale. Many of them are likely to infect animals such as crustaceans or fish, but others are likely to infect protozoa.

'Our results show that organic matter on the deep-sea floor is recycled through different and previously insufficiently considered components of the microbial food web, and then passed on in the food web. This is crucial for our understanding of global carbon flux,' explains Professor Dr Hartmut Arndt. 'Given the significant differences in the biodiversity of the individual deep-sea basins and their importance in the global context, the economic exploitation and foreseeable devastation of individual deep-sea basins and the sparing of other deep-sea basins seems absurd.'

EUGENE, Ore. -- April 27, 2021 -- The addition of meat alternatives such as poultry and fish is not reducing the global production and consumption of energy-gobbling land-based meats, according to new research.

That conclusion comes from an analysis of 53 years of international data by University of Oregon sociologist Richard York, who focuses on energy consumption in relationship to economic issues such as power and inequalities, and politics. His findings published April 26 in the journal Nature Sustainability.

"If you have increases in the production of poultry and fish, it doesn't tend to compete with or suppress other meat source consumption," York said. "It would be great if more poultry and fish production and consumption would reduce that of beef, but that doesn't seem to be the case."

In 2012, in a study published in Nature Climate Change, York found that the same human behavior played out when new technologies offered renewable energy sources as alternatives to fossil fuel production; adding new sources doesn't substantially suppress an existing, long-used source.

"They end up not in competition," he said. "Adding more wind doesn't really result in using less coal. If we use more energy sources, we use more energy. Likewise, when additional meat choices are offered, that additional variety tends to, more simply, increase overall meat consumption."

The new study, York said, provides a baseline view of meat consumption during the years of rapid post-World War II industrialization. During this period, especially beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, poultry consumption rose fivefold per capita with a growing population, providing an alternative to beef, mutton and lamb -- land-grazing meat sources that require extensive energy to produce.

He also considered the twofold increase in the consumption and production of sea and freshwater fish, as well as aquatic non-fish foods such as crawfish, clams, mussels and shellfish. Pork also rose twofold in the 1961-2013 study period.

The failure of alternative energy and meat sources to suppress original sources, York said, is known as a displacement paradox.

"Consumer demand does not make that big of difference," York said. "Some people reduce their driving to do their part to reduce the consumption of fossil fuel. That doesn't mean that the oil industry is reducing production. If enough people drive less that makes the price of gas go down. That, in turn, means driving more becomes more desirable to others because fuel costs are lower."

From a policy perspective, he said, there needs to a concerted focus on the supply chains.

"Rather than simply increasing renewable energy production, we need to actively suppress fossil fuel production instead of just giving more options," York said. "With meats, we may need to address the level of subsidies given for meat consumption to realize a desired reduction in meat production."

An international, multidisciplinary team that includes faculty members from The University of Texas at Arlington has published a paper in the journal Philosophical Psychology that wades into the debate about whether fish feel pain.

Their conclusion: while fish lack certain regions of the brain typically associated in humans with processing the unpleasantness of pain, this does not offer definitive proof that fish don't experience painful events.

There is a divide among contemporary scientists and philosophers on the issue of animal suffering, particularly in fish. Following the discovery of pain receptors in fish in the early 21st century, scientists developed behavioral experiments that seemed to show that fish feel pain.

However, some researchers continued to highlight the fact that fish lack certain cortical regions in their brains associated with the emotional unpleasantness of pain, or "pain affect."

In the article, "Against Neo-Cartesianism: Neurofunctional Resilience and Animal Pain," the UTA faculty members and their colleagues draw upon contemporary neuroscience to argue that many humans who have suffered brain injuries that impact pain-processing regions still maintain pain affect and self-awareness. This suggests that such cortical regions aren't necessary for pain, or that the brain can compensate to ensure essential functions such as pain affect remain intact.

"Claiming that fish don't feel pain due to the absence of these regions of the brain could be much like concluding they can't swim because they lack arms and legs," said Phil Halper, lead author of the study and an independent researcher in Great Britain.

Kenneth Williford, UTA associate professor and chair of philosophy and humanities, and Perry Fuchs, UTA professor and chair of psychology, are co-authors of the article, along with David Rudrauf of the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

Answering whether fish feel pain is an important part of the quest to understand the complexity of the pain system. Our understanding of these processes could have major implications across our society and can be used to help guide future government, environmental and food industry policies, as well as personal dietary decisions.

The team examined anatomical damage detailed in multiple studies of individuals with brain injuries to determine whether those individuals could still experience pain. One such study featured a patient known as Roger, who had key regions of the brain often associated with pain-processing, destroyed by disease. Roger's ability to experience pain, however, remained intact and in fact even more sensitive than average.

An examination of other individuals with brain injuries led the team to conclude that no single cortical region seems to be necessary for pain affect. This finding supports what Rudrauf calls "neurofunctional resilience," the idea that the brain can flexibly employ multiple different systems to ensure that pain affect and other key functions continue.

"While our study cannot prove that fish feel pain, we can assert that arguments relying on a lack of certain brain structures to deny pain in fish look increasingly untenable," Williford said.

Patients receiving an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) should be regularly screened for anxiety and depression, according to research presented at EHRA 2021, an online scientific congress of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).1

Study author Professor Susanne Pedersen of Odense University Hospital, Denmark said: "Most patients adapt well to living with an ICD. For others it completely changes their life, with worries about shocks from the device, body image, and livelihood as some need to change their job."

Previous studies have shown that anxious or depressed ICD patients have poorer quality of life and increased risks of arrhythmias and death.2,3,4 This study examined how many patients develop anxiety or depression after ICD implantation, as screening tends to be a one-time event.

The study used data from DEFIB-WOMEN, a national, multicentre, prospective, observational study of patients with a first-time ICD.5,6 Patients who received a first-time ICD were recruited consecutively between June 2010 to April 2013 at five hospitals in Denmark and followed up for 24 months.

The study included 1,040 patients who completed questionnaires on anxiety, depression, and physical quality of life at baseline, and 3, 6, 12, and 24 months. Information on demographic and clinical data was obtained from the Danish Pacemaker and ICD Register.

With respect to new onset anxiety, the cumulative incidence over the 24-month follow-up period was 14.5%. With respect to new onset depression, the cumulative incidence over the 24-month follow-up period was 11.3%.

Greater age was associated with a reduced risk of new onset anxiety, with a hazard ratio (HR) of 0.54, while being married, Type D personality, and lower self-reported physical functioning were associated with an increased risk, with HRs of 1.66, 2.50, and 1.48, respectively.

Regarding new onset depression, higher age and higher self-reported physical functioning were associated with reduced risk, with HRs of 0.57 and 0.46, respectively. Smoking, type D personality, and lower self-reported physical functioning were associated with an increased risk, with HRs of 2.13, 2.53, and 1.64, respectively.

"Our results suggest that more regular screening for depression and anxiety could identify patients who might benefit from additional support," said Professor Pedersen. "Taken together, our findings indicate that younger patients, those with poor physical function, and those with type D personality are more likely to become anxious or depressed. People with type D personality tend to worry while not sharing negative emotions with others, which may compromise their mental health."

Professor Pedersen noted that ICD implantation is often a day procedure. While some patients look forward to going home, others become anxious and feel it is too soon as they have had no time to adjust. She said: "One way to remedy this could be digital support, using an app or platform to provide information and reassurance, enabling patients to talk to a health professional if needed, and referring those with high anxiety or depression scores to a psychologist for an online treatment programme. We are piloting this approach, and in my experience, it is a minority of patients who need it, but for those who do, it can mean a world of difference."

As an indicator and "amplifier" of global climate change, the Arctic's health and stability is the cornerstone of the stability of our climate system. It has far-reaching impacts on ecosystems, coastal resilience, and human settlements in the middle and high latitudes.

The Arctic has experienced amplified warming and extensive sea-ice retreat in recent decades. On 15 September 2020, the Arctic sea-ice extent (SIE) reached its annual minimum, which, based on data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center, was about 3.74 million km2 (1.44 million square miles). This value was about 40% less than the climate average (~6.27 million km2) during 1980-2010. It was second only to the record low (3.34 million km2) set on 16 September 2012, but significantly smaller than the previous second-lowest (4.145 million km2, set on 7 September 2016) and third-lowest (4.147 million km2, set on 14 September 2007) values, making 2020 the second-lowest SIE year of the satellite era (42 years of data).

In 2020, a total of 39 institutions and organizations worldwide submitted their Sea Ice Outlook of the pan-Arctic September SIE. From the June to August SIO, the median of all predictions remained quite stable (4.33 million km2 in June, 4.36 million km2 in July, and 4.3 million km2 in August), which were much higher than the observed value of 3.92 million km2. This indicates that most forecasting systems overestimated the coverage of sea ice in September 2020.

Accurate prediction of Arctic SIE is still a worldwide problem. Recently, a commentary published in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters summarized the predictions from 2009 to 2020, and found that most years' observed values (8 out of 12) fell outside the predicted interquartile range of dynamical models, indicating that it is still a grand challenge to accurately predict the Arctic SIE on subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) time scales, especially in extreme years.

"Arctic sea-ice studies require an improved ability to make more accurate predictions and achieve a better understanding of the physics of sea-ice processes", says Prof. Wei, author of this commentary.

In the next step, more efforts should be made to assimilate sea-ice, atmospheric and oceanic observations to generate a skillful initialization. Meanwhile, sea-ice prediction relies on a skillful atmospheric model to produce a high-quality atmospheric forecast. Finally, S2S systems should have the ability to capture changes in sea-ice properties due to global warming, which produces younger and thinner sea ice along with more melt ponds. Thus, improved descriptions of sea-ice processes in sea-ice model components of prediction systems are needed.

Global warming is pushing the Arctic to a dangerous tipping point in which domino-like irreversible processes might be triggered. Therefore, it is essential to develop better Arctic sea-ice prediction systems to serve as the navigation lights to guide us through this uncharted future climate.

Researchers led by Katsunori Tanaka and Kenward Vong at the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research (CPR) in Japan have demonstrated that tumor growth can be reduced by therapy that tags cancer cells with different therapeutic molecules. In one case, the group was able to prevent tumors from forming in mice by targeting cancer cells with a compound that makes it difficult for the cells to clump together and form tumors. For tumors that already existed, they targeted cancer cells with toxic compounds that destroyed them. This study was published on April 23 in Science Advances.

One of the major problems with current cancer treatments is that their effects are not limited to cancerous cells in the body. The side effects of chemotherapy are well known--hair loss, nausea, exhaustion, compromised immune system, and nerve damage. Being able to specifically target cancer cells--and only cancer cells--with therapeutic compounds is a dream that is slowly becoming a reality, and the new study by Tanaka's group at RIKEN CPR is the proof-of-concept. As Tanaka says, "We have succeeded for the first time in treating cancer using metal-catalyzed chemistry in mice."

The process builds on the group's previous work that uses artificial gold-based enzymes--generally called metalloenzymes--to tag proteins inside the body. The tagging agent and the metalloenzyme are both injected into the body, but separately. The metalloenzyme itself is designed to be glycosylated, meaning it has sugar chains called glycans attached to its surface. Specific glycans are chosen so that they can bind to the target cells in the body. For instance, different cancer cells can be identified by the unique types of lectins--glycan-binding proteins--that are embedded in their outer membranes. For this experiment, the researchers built a glycosylated metalloenzyme that would be able to attach itself to the specific lectins that are on the outside of HeLa cancer cells, thus targeting them. After the tagging agent reacts with the metalloenzyme, it can perform the desired function and tag the protein of interest on the cancer cell. In this way, only cancer cells targeted by the glycosylated metalloenzyme can be tagged.

The team performed two major targeted drug-delivery tests. The first test used a form of RGD that became functional after reacting with the artificial enzyme bound to the target cancer cell. RGD was chosen because prior testing indicated that it interferes with the ability of cancer cells to clump together and form tumors. They injected mice with HeLa cancer cells, and then injected them with both the glycosylated metalloenzyme and RGD. Control mice were injected with the artificial enzyme alone, RGD alone, or saline. The mice were monitored for 81 days. While all the controls developed tumors and died well before 81 days had been reached, the mice treated with the selective cell therapy with RGD tagging had a survival rate of 40%. Imaging analysis indicated that tumor onset and progression were disrupted by the treatment.

The second test was designed to attack tumors that had already formed. For this, the team used the same glycosylated metalloenzyme, but with a form of non-toxic doxorubicin that became functional after reacting with the metalloenzyme. Prior testing showed that the agent was harmless until it interacted with the metalloenzyme, at which time it released toxic doxorubicin. In this way, only targeted cancer cells were affected by the drug. Testing in mice was similar to testing with RGD, except that tumors were allowed to develop for a week before injecting the artificial enzyme and tagging agent. Mice receiving the real treatment showed reduced tumor growth and a higher survival rate over the course of 77 days.

"We were able to use our system to carry metalloenzymes to cancer cells in living mice, which reacted with tagging agents to deliver targeted drug therapies that reduced tumor onset and growth," says Tanaka. "The next step is certainly clinical application in humans."