Earth

Living tissue can heal itself from many injuries, but giving similar abilities to artificial systems, such as robots, has been extremely challenging. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Nano Letters have developed small, swimming robots that can magnetically heal themselves on-the-fly after breaking into two or three pieces. The strategy could someday be used to make hardier devices for environmental or industrial clean up, the researchers say. Watch a video of the self-healing swimmers here.

Scientists have developed small robots that can "swim" through fluids and carry out useful functions, such as cleaning up the environment, delivering drugs and performing surgery. Although most experiments have been done in the lab, eventually these tiny machines would be released into harsh environments, where they could become damaged. Swimming robots are often made of brittle polymers or soft hydrogels, which can easily crack or tear. Joseph Wang and colleagues wanted to design swimmers that could heal themselves while in motion, without help from humans or other external triggers.

The researchers made swimmers that were 2 cm long (about the width of a human finger) in the shape of a fish that contained a conductive bottom layer; a rigid, hydrophobic middle layer; and an upper strip of aligned, strongly magnetic microparticles. The team added platinum to the tail, which reacted with hydrogen peroxide fuel to form oxygen bubbles that propelled the robot. When the researchers placed a swimmer in a petri dish filled with a weak hydrogen peroxide solution, it moved around the edge of the dish. Then, they cut the swimmer with a blade, and the tail kept traveling around until it approached the rest of the body, reforming the fish shape through a strong magnetic interaction. The robots could also heal themselves when cut into three pieces, or when the magnetic strip was placed in different configurations. The versatile, fast and simple self-healing strategy could be an important step toward on-the-fly repair for small-scale swimmers and robots, the researchers say.

Many children of low-income families across the country do not have access to quality health care. Lack of health care can have a domino effect, affecting educational outcomes in the classroom.

School-based telehealth could offer a sustainable and effective solution, according to a new report in the Journal for Nurse Practitioners by Kathryn King Cristaldi, M.D., the medical director of the school-based telehealth program, and Kelli Garber, the lead advanced practice provider and clinical integration specialist for the program.

The program through the MUSC Health Center for Telehealth has effectively served over 70 schools across the state of South Carolina. Evaluating a child at school via telehealth is a time-efficient process that removes the geographic and transportation barriers many families face when accessing health care for their children.

"When a family wants their child to have a visit, the school nurse requests a visit from the telehealth provider group," said Garber. "Our goal is to ensure a connection between the school nurse and the provider group in 15 minutes, but our average time is three to six minutes. Using the telehealth equipment in the nurse's office, we evaluate the child, and then most of the time, we return the child to class and send any prescriptions to the local pharmacy."

The school-based telehealth program is particularly effective for children with asthma.

"I think that's where telehealth really shines," said Cristaldi. "A typical in-office provider visit for a patient with asthma would involve ordering a controller inhaler and seeing the patient in three months. Through telehealth, there are more touch points with a patient. If a child has exacerbated asthma, we could start steroids today and see them tomorrow to ensure treatment is working."

Additionally, school nurses are on hand to administer daily medication to children.

"We really thought a lot about one thing we could change to reduce the number of emergency room visits for children with asthma, and that one thing was using their controller medication every single day," said Cristaldi. "Getting the school nurse involved with daily medication has been a game changer."

Thanks to the program, underserved communities across South Carolina, including those in some of the poorest and most rural parts of the state, now have access to care.

"Children in Williamsburg County, Sumter County and Cherokee County now have access to care," said Cristaldi. "We are making incremental changes in the health care structure for children in South Carolina and supporting providers across the state who are, one by one, making profound differences."

When kids' health improves, they do better in school. This was shown when underserved children were provided with health care at school-based health centers across the US. Their academic performances improved, and they were less likely to be absent from school. Children with asthma also required fewer Emergency Department visits. Unfortunately, funding for these centers has been inconsistent. School-based telehealth offers a more sustainable alternative to these programs while providing many of the same benefits.

The report by Cristaldi, Garber and colleagues provides a roadmap for other institutions considering a school-based telehealth program. It gives a detailed overview of the school-based telehealth workflow and tips for circumventing challenges, ranging from school nurse and provider availability to missed class time for students, which are unique to delivering health care in an educational environment. However, each region has its own needs and challenges, and Cristaldi and Garber encourage people to reach out to their regional telehealth centers for more information about school-based telehealth implementation in their local areas. More information on regional telehealth centers can be found at https://telehealthresourcecenter.org/.

Family-centered prevention programs that foster protective caregiving can buffer the negative effects of racial discrimination on young Black people, according to a study published by University of Georgia researchers.

Research shows that Black youth exposed to various levels of racial discrimination--including slurs, threats and false accusations--are at a high risk for poor mental health outcomes such as hopelessness, conduct problems, drug use and depression. After participating in family-oriented programs, high school-age adolescents who encountered high levels of racial discrimination and received supportive caregiving evinced fewer increases in conduct problems and depression/anxiety symptoms two years later.

"This research shows that receipt of high levels of warmth and emotional support and parental involvement provides a shield that allows young Black people to better cope with the negative and pernicious effects of racial discrimination," said Gene Brody, founder and director of UGA's Center for Family Research.

The paper, published March 24 in the Journal of American Medical Association Network, is the first to report that prevention programs aimed at enhancing supportive parenting may offset mental health risks and help protect young people from some of the negative effects of racial discrimination.

"We know that children respond differently to encounters with racial discrimination, so we wanted to know what's the contribution of protective caregiving," said Brody, a Regents' Professor. "The results showed that young people who encountered high levels of racial discrimination and participated in these prevention programs were less likely to develop behavioral problems and symptoms of anxiety and depression."

The research analyzed data from randomized trials testing two family-centered programs on Black youth in 12 rural Georgia communities. The Strong African-American Families-Teen program worked with adolescents in 10th grade and their primary caregivers, while the Adults in the Making program worked with high school seniors and their caregivers.

Caregivers, through exercises and video demonstrations of parenting practices, learned about adolescent development and tools to protect teenagers from negative life events, including racial discrimination. The youth learned about setting goals and persisting toward them as well as how to resist peer pressure and communicate with parents.

"Since our programs were designed to enhance protective caregiving, we wanted to see if adolescents were protected, and we were able to show two years later they did protect the mental health of these young people," said Brody, who added these programs are being implemented in about 50 communities throughout the nation.

While the study analyzed data from programs implemented in the mid-2000s, Brody believes the results have a significant relevance in a time of heightened attention on social and racial justice in America.

"The rate of racial discrimination that young people were exposed to in the early 2000s was high and prevalent in the communities that we studied, and as we all know they're high and prevalent in the nation," Brody said. "So we think that the results of these studies are probably very relevant, but we need to do more studies with people growing up today in this country."

The largest flightless bird ever to live weighed in up to 600kg and had a whopping head about half a metre long - but its brain was squeezed for space.

Dromornis stirtoni, the largest of the 'mihirungs' (an Aboriginal word for 'giant bird'), stood up to 3m high and had a cranium wider and higher than it was long due to a powerful big beak, leading Australian palaeontologists to look inside its brain space to see how it worked.

The new study, just published in the journal Diversity, examined the brains of the extinct giant mihirungs or dromornithid birds that were a distinctive part of the Australian fauna for many millions of years, before going extinct around 50,000 years ago.

"Together with their large, forward-facing eyes and very large bills, the shape of their brains and nerves suggested these birds likely had well-developed stereoscopic vision, or depth perception, and fed on a diet of soft leaves and fruit," says lead author Flinders University researcher Dr Warren Handley.

"The shape of their brains and nerves have told us a lot about their sensory capabilities, and something about their possible lifestyle which enabled these remarkable birds to live in the forests around river channels and lakes across Australia for an extremely long time.

"It's exciting when we can apply modern imaging methods to reveal features of dromornithid morphology that were previously completely unknown," Dr Handley says.

The new research, based on fossil remains ranging from about 24 million years ago to the last in the line (Dromornis stirtoni), indicates mihirung brains and nerves are most like those of modern day chickens and Australian mallee fowl.

"The unlikely truth is these birds were related to fowl - chickens and ducks - but their closest cousin and much of their biology still remains a mystery," says vertebrate palaeontologist and senior author Associate Professor Trevor Worthy.

"While the brains of dromornithids were very different to any bird living today, it also appears they shared a similar reliance on good vision for survival with living ratities such as ostrich and emu."

The researchers compared the brain structures of four mihirungs - from the earliest Dromornis murrayi at about 24 million years ago (Ma) to Dromornis planei and Ilbandornis woodburnei from 12 Ma and Dromornis stirtoni, at 7 Ma.

Ranging from cassowary in size to what's known as the world's largest bird, Flinders vertebrate palaeontologist Associate Professor Worthy says the largest and last species Dromornis stirtoni was an "extreme evolutionary experiment".

"This bird had the largest skull but behind the massive bill was a weird cranium. To accommodate the muscles to wield this massive bill, the cranium had become taller and wider than it was long, and so the brain within was squeezed and flattened to fit.

"It would appear these giant birds were probably what evolution produced when it gave chickens free reign in Australian environmental conditions and so they became very different to their relatives the megapodes - or chicken-like landfowls which still exist in the Australasian region," Associate Professor Worthy says.

The large, flightless birds Dromornithidae - also called demon ducks of doom or thunder birds - existed from the Oligocene to Pleistocene Epochs.

During prehistory, the body sizes of eight species of dromornithids became larger and smaller depending climate and available feed.

The Flinders researchers used the skulls of fossil birds to extract endocasts of the brains to describe how these related to modern birds such as megapodes and waterfowl. Brain models were also made from CT scans of five other dromornithid skulls from fossil sites in Queensland and the Northern Territory. The oldest 25 Ma Dromornis murrayi specimen was found in the famed Riversleigh World Heritage Area in Queensland.

Have you ever wondered why you are able to hear a sentence and understand its meaning - given that the same words in a different order would have an entirely different meaning? New research involving neuroimaging and A.I., describes the complex network within the brain that comprehends the meaning of a spoken sentence.

"It has been unclear whether the integration of this meaning is represented in a particular site in the brain, such as the anterior temporal lobes, or reflects a more network level operation that engages multiple brain regions," said Andrew Anderson, Ph.D., research assistant professor in the University of Rochester Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience and lead author on of the study which was published in the Journal of Neuroscience. "The meaning of a sentence is more than the sum of its parts. Take a very simple example - 'the car ran over the cat' and 'the cat ran over the car' - each sentence has exactly the same words, but those words have a totally different meaning when reordered."

The study is an example of how the application of artificial neural networks, or A.I., are enabling researchers to unlock the extremely complex signaling in the brain that underlies functions such as processing language. The researchers gather brain activity data from study participants who read sentences while undergoing fMRI. These scans showed activity in the brain spanning across a network of different regions - anterior and posterior temporal lobes, inferior parietal cortex, and inferior frontal cortex. Using the computational model InferSent - an A.I. model developed by Facebook trained to produce unified semantic representations of sentences - the researchers were able to predict patterns of fMRI activity reflecting the encoding of sentence meaning across those brain regions.

"It's the first time that we've applied this model to predict brain activity within these regions, and that provides new evidence that contextualized semantic representations are encoded throughout a distributed language network, rather than at a single site in the brain."

Anderson and his team believe the findings could be helpful in understanding clinical conditions. "We're deploying similar methods to try to understand how language comprehension breaks down in early Alzheimer's disease. We are also interested in moving the models forward to predict brain activity elicited as language is produced. The current study had people read sentences, in the future we're interested in moving forward to predict brain activity as people might speak sentences."

A new study co-authored by a Tulane University geoscientist shows that human efforts to tame the Mississippi River may have had an unintended positive effect: more rapid transport of carbon to the ocean.

The paper, published in AGU Advances, describes the work of a team of researchers who set out to learn more about the fate of organic carbon that is transported in large quantities by the Mississippi River. Organic carbon is mainly derived from plant remains, soils, and rocks, throughout the drainage basin of the Mississippi River that covers about 40% of the United States.

"We estimate that over the past century, the amount of organic carbon lost to the atmosphere during Mississippi River transport to the Gulf of Mexico has been reduced by at least 2.5 billion pounds (over one million metric tonnes) per year," said co-author Torbjörn Törnqvist, Vokes Geology Professor in the Tulane Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.

The researchers used a novel approach by measuring not only the age of carbon that has accumulated in Mississippi Delta sediments, but also the time of deposition of the sediment itself. They found that around 1,000 years ago, the carbon was generally more than 5,000 years older than the sediment in which it occurred. In historic time it is less than 3,000 years older.

"This shows that during prehistoric times, organic carbon took a much longer time to make it down to the mouth of the river, and a lot of it was lost along the way," Törnqvist said.

"The main reason that this has dramatically changed is that we have built levees, which prevents flooding and the dispersal of organic matter onto the vast floodplain where much of it would degrade and return back into the atmosphere."

The question is whether this also means that carbon is now buried at higher rates in the Gulf of Mexico than in the past. In February 2020, Törnqvist participated in an oceanographic cruise off the Louisiana coast which aimed to better understand what happens with organic carbon from the Mississippi River once it enters the ocean. Results from this expedition are expected in coming years.

The newly published study has potential implications for the global carbon cycle, considering the rapid changes to other large rivers - such as those in the tropics - that transport significant amounts of carbon.

Boulder, Colo., USA: When geobiology graduate student Katie Maloney trekked into the mountains of Canada's remote Yukon territory, she was hoping to find microscopic fossils of early life. Even with detailed field plans, the odds of finding just the right rocks were low. Far from leaving empty-handed, though, she hiked back out with some of the most significant fossils for the time period.

Eukaryotic life (cells with a DNA-containing nucleus) evolved over two billion years ago, with photosynthetic algae dominating the playing field for hundreds of millions of years as oxygen accumulated in the Earth's atmosphere. Geobiologists think that algae evolved first in freshwater environments on land, then moved to the oceans. But the timing of that evolutionary transition remains a mystery, in part because the fossil record from early Earth is sparse.

Maloney's findings were published yesterday in Geology. She and her collaborators found macroscopic fossils of multiple species of algae that thrived together on the seafloor about 950 million years ago, nestled between bacterial mounds in a shallow ocean. The discovery partly fills in the evolutionary gap between algae and more complex life, providing critical time constraints for eukaryotic evolution.

Although the field site was carefully chosen by Maloney's field team leader, sedimentologist Galen Halverson, who has worked in the region for years, the discovery was an unexpected stroke of luck.

"I was thinking, 'maybe we'll find some microfossils,'" Maloney said. The possibility of finding larger fossils didn't cross her mind. "So as we started to find well-preserved specimens, we stopped everything and the whole team gathered to collect more fossils. Then we started to find these big, complex slabs with hundreds of specimens. That was really exciting!"

Determining if traces like the ones Maloney found are biogenic (formed by living organisms) is a necessary step in paleobiology. While that determination is ultimately made in the lab, a few things tipped her off in the field. The traces were very curvy, which can be a good indicator of life, and there were visible structures within them. The fact that there were hundreds of them twisted together sealed the deal for her.

Few people would likely have noticed the fossils that day.

"We were really lucky that Katie was there to find them because at first glance, they don't really look like anything," Maloney's advisor, Marc Laflamme, said. "Katie is used to looking at very weird looking fossils, so she has a bit of an eye for saying, 'This is something worth checking out.'"

Maloney and her colleagues in the field wrestled the heavy slabs into their helicopter for safe transport back to the lab at the University of Toronto-Mississauga. She, Laflamme, and their collaborators used microscopy and geochemical techniques to confirm that the fossils were indeed early eukaryotes. They then mapped out the specimens' cellular features in detail, allowing them to identify multiple species in the community.

While Maloney and her coauthors were writing up their results, they were confident they had found the first macroscopic specimens from this critical time period. During the peer review process, though, they received word from a collaborator that another group in China had made a similar discovery at about the same time--macrofossils from a similar period. That did not dissuade them.

"What's a few hundred million years between friends?" Laflamme laughed. "I think our fossils have more detail, which makes them easier to interpret... They're beautiful. They're huge, they're well detailed, there's anatomy. Your eyes are just drawn to them."

Ultimately, having two sets of macrofossils from approximately the same time can only improve the timeline of eukaryotic evolution, serving as critical calibration points for DNA-based biologic dating techniques. The new fossils also push back the time when algae were living in marine environments, indicating that evolution had already occurred in lakes on land. But for Maloney, an expert in sedimentology, they also raise questions about what gets preserved in the rock record and why.

"Algae became really important early on because of their role in oxygenation and biogeochemical cycles," Maloney said. "So why does it take them so long to show up reliably in the fossil record? It's definitely making us think more about animal ecosystems and whether or not we're seeing the whole picture, or if we're missing quite a bit from a lack of preservation."

The whole project has been engaging for Maloney, who pivoted to algae from more recent biota. "I never expected to be fascinated by algae," she said. "But I was pleasantly surprised as I started investigating modern algae, finding what an important role they play in sustainability and climate change--all these big issues that we're dealing with today. So it's been amazing contributing to algae's origin story."

Researchers have succeeded in revealing the arsenal used by protozoans of the genus Leishmania in human cells to make leishmaniasis more severe, especially in cases of the mucocutaneous variety of the disease, which can cause deformations in patients. The discovery points the way to a search for novel treatments for the disease as well as casting light on a key mechanism involved in other diseases.

The mechanism involves Leishmania, macrophages and a virus that lives endosymbiotically in the parasite and is known as the Leishmania RNA virus (LRV). According to a study published in the journal iScience, the parasite inhibits activation of caspase-11 via LRV-induced autophagy. Caspases are a family of enzymes that play essential roles in programmed cell death and the innate immune system. LRV, therefore, prevents defense cells from blocking progression of the disease. 

Infectious and not contagious, leishmaniasis is considered endemic to some regions of Brazil. The mucocutaneous form of the disease, caused in the Neotropics by species such as L. guyanensis and L. braziliensis, is characterized by skin lesions that affect the mucous membranes of the nose, mouth and throat. In severe cases, it can lead to cartilage and bone erosion and cause deformations. Some 20,000 cases of tegumental leishmaniasis, which includes the cutaneous and mucocutaneous forms, are reported each year in Brazil. 

The study showing how LRV blocks caspase-11 via autophagy was part of the Ph.D. research of Renan V. H. de Carvalho, with Dario Zamboni as thesis advisor. Zamboni is a professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Biology and Pathogenic Bioagents at the University of São Paulo’s Ribeirão Preto Medical School (FMRP-USP) in Brazil. 

“Using macrophages and mice, we discovered that LRV inhibits activation of caspase-11 by Leishmania, and this extends our understanding of the mechanisms used by the virus to exacerbate the disease,” Zamboni said.

The study, which belongs to a series already published by the group, innovated by showing the link between caspase-11 and diseases caused by parasites. Hitherto the enzyme was thought to be involved only in diseases caused by bacteria. 

An article by the group published in 2019 in Nature Communications showed that the most severe cases of mucocutaneous leishmaniasis are caused by the LRV-infected parasite. Both studies were supported by FAPESP and conducted under the aegis of the Center for Research on Inflammatory Diseases (CRID), a Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center (RIDC) funded by FAPESP and hosted by FMRP-USP. 

Almost all immune cells contain a protein complex called the inflammasome, Zamboni explained. When one of the proteins, such as a caspase, detects a threat to the organism, the defense system is activated. “We had already shown that LRV exacerbates the disease by subverting innate immunity via inhibition of the TLR3-mediated NLRP3 inflammasome. In this latest report, we showed that autophagy blocked the inflammasome via caspase-11.”

For Carvalho, currently a researcher at the Rockefeller University’s Laboratory of Lymphocyte Dynamics in New York, “the iScience article solidifies our understanding that caspase-11 is extremely important to the pathogenesis of leishmaniasis”. This had not yet been described, he told Agência FAPESP.

Scenario

Mucocutaneous leishmaniasis is transmitted by sandflies of the genus Phlebotomus, which feed on blood. Prevention, therefore, depends mainly on combating the insect, just as Aedes aegypti must be combated to prevent the spread of dengue fever. Both leishmaniasis and dengue are classed as neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). 

Some 1.5 billion people are thought to be affected by NTDs in over 150 countries, particularly in regions with insufficient potable water, basic sanitation, and primary healthcare services. On the other hand, less than 2% of the world’s drug development resources are devoted to combating these diseases, according to the nonprofit organization Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi).

There are no vaccines for some NTDs, and many of the available treatments focus on drug repositioning, which entails the use of medications originally developed for other applications, a strategy that heightens the risk of severe adverse side-effects for patients. To try to improve the situation, in February the World Health Organization (WHO) issued Ending the neglect to attain the sustainable development goals: A road map for neglected tropical diseases 2021–2030, proposing actions and programs to prevent and control 20 NTDs, including leishmaniasis.

“Everything we’ve shown about this system involving Leishmania, viruses and macrophages can have an impact on the fight against other diseases,” Carvalho said. “Hence the importance of basic science. Understanding biology serves as a foundation for the rapid future development of new therapies for diseases that already exist or could emerge in the future.” 

He went on to cite the current example of COVID-19 vaccines. “A key factor in having vaccines ready so quickly was the work done by research groups around the world to study the spike protein in other coronaviruses that hitherto haven’t infected people,” he said. “This basic science helped us develop vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 soon after it was detected.”

This link between previous discoveries and the advances brought by new studies is the focus of a FAPESP-funded Thematic Project, for which Zamboni is the principal investigator. The work on Leishmania was done under its aegis, as was a more recent research project on COVID-19.

The latter was reported in Journal of Experimental Medicine at end-2020. The authors showed for the first time that in COVID-19 patients the inflammasome participates in activation of the inflammatory process that can damage several organs and even lead to death (read more at: agencia.fapesp.br/34732).

SAN ANTONIO (March 23, 2021) -- More than half of all health care workers worldwide are experiencing burnout that, if not addressed, could cause many to leave their fields in favor of less-stressful occupations or choose early retirement. And the COVID-19 pandemic has only made it worse.

That's the warning of a surgeon from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio in a letter and a call for global action published March 22 in the Lancet journal EClinicalMedicine.

"A recent survey done in Medscape of nearly 7,500 physicians globally showed that burnout has reached a very high rate," said Dharam Kaushik, MD, associate professor of urology in the university's Joe R. and Teresa Lozano School of Medicine and surgeon with the Mays Cancer Center, home to UT Health San Antonio MD Anderson.

Physicians aren't alone. Dr. Kaushik's letter also references a large study of burnout and trauma in nurses during the pandemic.

"I'm talking about global health care workers," he said. "We have to look at the whole health care work force and what we can do in communities and countries to prevent a downward spiral of burnout."

Combination of factors

Health care workers are under tremendous mental distress, with symptoms of loneliness, depression and anxiety. "The rising death toll, post-traumatic stress, long work hours and the initial slow vaccine rollout in different countries are creating a ripple effect of burnout in this vital workforce," Dr. Kaushik said.

Women in health care are suffering the most, his editorial states. "Gender inequity is flourishing, and more female health care workers, especially in critical care and infectious disease, are getting burned out at a very high rate," Dr. Kaushik said.

There is a predicted shortage of health care workers by 2030. The COVID-19 pandemic may amplify the shortfall, cost billions and impact the quality of care.

"I reference a Lancet article that estimates there will be a shortage of 18 million health care workers by 2030 that could cost $47 trillion, and those projections were made before the pandemic," Dr. Kaushik said. "Imagine what the pandemic has done."

The loss of health care workers to other industries and retirement is "unsustainable," he said.

Policymakers need to work with the scientific community to understand the implications of burnout and develop a comprehensive burnout prevention strategy, he said.

"Remember, if there is no health care workforce, we cannot recover from any pandemic," Dr. Kaushik said. "We have to learn the lessons from the current pandemic, have effective burnout prevention strategies in place, and better prepare for the future."

WASHINGTON, March 23, 2021 -- 5G, or the fifth-generation technology standard for broadband cellular networks, is touted as having finally arrived for ultrafast download speeds, an end to dropped calls and buffering, and greater connectivity to advance autonomous vehicle development, remote surgery, and the Internet of Things.

In truth, 5G technology adoption is still in its early stages, according to Michael Hill, technical director of Skyworks Solutions, a California-based advanced-semiconductor company. In their paper, published in Applied Physics Letters, by AIP Publishing, Hill and his colleagues provide an overview on nascent 5G technologies and show how enhancing ceramic materials could play a pivotal role in 5G development.

5G operates in two frequency bands: 3-6 gigahertz for long-distance links and a much higher frequency band in the millimeter wave region (20-100 GHz) for ultrafast data speeds.

Accommodating the lower frequency band, closer to the 4G spectral regions, is less problematic than the significant changes needed to fully realize 5G capability in the higher frequency ranges. For example, frequency type is tied to overall signal strength. The higher the frequency, the shorter the distance the wave can travel.

Ceramic materials have long been used in wireless communications network technologies for both mobile devices and base stations. Enhancing ceramics, therefore, has been a central focus in improving 5G capability. For their part, Hill's research group has developed a ceramic to enhance a device that is critical for 5G applications, called a circulator.

Typically made of insulating ceramic materials based on yttrium iron garnet, circulators are three-port devices that serve as traffic circles to keep the signal flowing in one direction and enable a receiver and a transmitter to share the same antenna.

To significantly increase the energy density to accommodate the higher frequencies, the researchers have partially replaced yttrium with bismuth, a heavy element that increases the dielectric constant of the ceramic. The bismuth substitutions also enable the miniaturization of circulators.

As the 5G technology battle continues to heat up, circulators could be supplanted by high-power gallium nitride-based switches, which shows just how early the stage still is for 5G technology development.

"Millimeter-wave technology is likely to be the wild west for some time, as one technology may dominate only to be quickly supplanted by a different technology," Hill said.

BINGHAMTON, NY -- When it comes to local government, does the gender of a mayor or county executive matter in sustainability policymaking? Yes, but only in certain ways, according to new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York.

Kristina Lambright, associate professor of public administration, and George Homsy, associate professor of public administration and director of the environmental studies program, explored the correlation between female leadership and local government adoption of sustainability policies in "Beyond community characteristics: a leader's gender and local government adoption of energy conservation practices and redistributive programmes," published recently in Local Environment: The International Journal and Justice Sustainability.

In Lambright and Homsy's study sample, local governments with a female leader adopted 29.2% more community energy policies than communities with male leaders. This group of policies focuses on helping citizens, non-profits and businesses reduce energy consumption by, for example, providing or funding energy audits and weatherization programs.

The researchers also found a 12.7% increase in the number of redistributive programs in communities headed by women. These programs support vulnerable populations by bolstering the social safety net. This type of program includes incentivizing affordable housing and funding childcare.

With a third set of policies, Lambright and Homsy found no correlation between a leader's gender and the adoption of government energy conservation practices. This group of policies includes such measures as updating streetlights with energy efficient bulbs and purchasing hybrid vehicles for the municipal fleet.

"There's a pretty well-documented literature of past research that indicates women and men do look at issues differently," Lambright said. "I am intrigued that there is this difference in the general population, with women being generally more pro-environment, but that doesn't translate when they're in positions of power into greater support for government energy conservation efforts. I'm really interested in why that is, why this area."

The pair used data from the 2015 Local Government Sustainability Practices Survey conducted by the International City/County Management Association, which was completed by 1,672 local governments across the country. There are fewer women heading local governments than men, although the numbers have improved significantly through the decades, from 1% in 1974 to 17% in 2018. In addition to gender, the researchers took into account the impact of other variables, such as political party.

Democratic leaders were 18.5% more likely to adopt social welfare programs, but these municipalities were no more likely to have energy conservation measures of either type. Looking at national trends, you would expect that Democrats would be more supportive of all three sustainability practices than Republicans. National trends, however, don't necessarily influence the day-to-day operations of local governments, which provide such services as road maintenance and trash pickup.

"In most local governments, it doesn't matter whether they are Republican or Democrat, they still have to provide lighting and plow the streets," Lambright explained.

Collective thinking and conservation

There are theories that explain the gender differences in politics. Women, for example, are more likely to find themselves in a vulnerable income position, and thus would benefit from social safety programs. Socialization may also play a role: women are often expected to assume caregiving roles and to consider the welfare of others -- in other words, thinking of the collective good rather than the individual.

This female socialization could lend itself to female policymakers' support of measures that require collective thinking, such as the adoption of social welfare programs and community energy saving measures.

Local governments must make significant investments to implement these initiatives. However, municipalities do not directly financially benefit from these efforts; instead, community residents and businesses do, Homsy explained.

By contrast, efforts to conserve a government's energy use will save a municipality itself money in the long run, perhaps making it an easy choice for elected officials regardless of whether they prioritize collective interests or not.

"A good question to examine and one possible explanation is, 'Are women leaders more collectively minded?'" Homsy said.

Next steps

Lambright and Homsy also found that municipalities are more likely to adopt sustainability measures if they are in a good financial position. The larger they are, the more resources they have to draw on in terms of government facilities, people and more. Smaller, cash-strapped communities might not feel able to pursue these avenues.

Size also matters in another way: jurisdictions with more than 100,000 people are a little more likely to have female leadership. Fourteen percent of female leaders serve in communities of this size, compared to 9% of male leaders, according to their research data.

Are places with an established interest in sustainability more likely to elect female leaders in the first place? Does the size of the community contribute significantly to both sustainability and female leadership? Were sustainability policies adopted under a woman's leadership or years before?

Lambright and Homsy don't know -- yet. Their current data show correlation, but not causation, leading them to their next project.

"In this next phase of our research, we are going to talk to male and female leaders in places where they have done something positive about the environment and find out how the project came about, what barriers they faced and how they dealt with those challenges," Homsy said.

They plan on interviewing around 60 local government officials, divided equally between women and men, who are involved with local environmental sustainability initiatives in New York state. Right now, they're working to identify these officials through news articles in New York state's largest daily newspapers. Ideally, the interview subjects will represent government at different levels, ranging from village to county, and will be selected randomly.

The researchers will probe their experience with sustainability issues, but also explore their management and communication styles and the particular challenges they faced. In addition, they will look at the sustainability initiatives themselves.

"Will we see differences between how men and women lead?" Lambright asked. "We will focus on sustainability policymaking, but we're also looking to see if there are differences in how men and women leaders approach leadership more generally."

Plant species with short generation times are more sensitive to climate change than those with long generation times. This is one of the findings of a synthesis study by researchers from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ). The international team comprehensively compiled worldwide available data, mostly from Europe and North America, to address the question of how plant populations react to climate change. The study, published in Nature Communications, shows that plant characteristics such as generation time can predict how sensitive species are to changing climates. This has important implications for predicting which plant species need the most conservation attention regarding climate change.

Climate change is considered to be one of the greatest threats to plant species diversity. To set the right priorities in nature conservation policy, it is crucial to know which regions of the world and which types of species are particularly threatened by climate change.

As part of the iDiv synthesis centre sDiv, which brings together international experts in workshops, a working group compiled all long-term studies on plants that quantify population growth rate. They assessed how the climate factors during those years of study, in particular precipitation and temperature, influenced population growth rate. Afterwards, they tested how features of the plant species, such as the length of a generation, influence how responsive the plant population growth rates were to climate variation in the past.

"We were able to show that generation duration is a useful indicator value for a species' susceptibility to climate change," said first author Dr Aldo Compagnoni, a postdoctoral researcher at iDiv and MLU. For example, the scientists found that especially plants with short lifespans, such as those that only live a few years on average, suffered from climate extremes much worse than long-lived species. The analyses also showed that the main limiting factor of climate change is not the temperature increase itself. On average, precipitation had a three times greater impact on plant populations than temperature.

"This work helps us identify which species might be climate-vulnerable, even if we have limited information about those species," says last author Prof Tiffany Knight from iDiv, MLU and UFZ. „For example, while we have long-term population data for a small subset of plant species on Earth, we can estimate the approximate generation duration for most plant species. This is an important first step towards determining species' vulnerability to climate change at a global scale."

However, there are important data gaps that limit the ability to make general predictions on a global scale. The researchers found appropriate long-term datasets only for 62 of the 350,000 plant species on Earth, and the vast majority of these were species occurring in temperate zones of the USA and Western Europe. Apart from a few tree and shrub species, the data set included only grasses and herbs. To be able to make reliable predictions about the consequences of climate change for all regions of the world and all known species, new population ecology research is needed on woody plant species and on plants in the tropics, the researchers conclude.

Imperial physicists are part of a team that has announced 'intriguing' results that potentially cannot be explained by our current laws of nature.

The LHCb Collaboration at CERN has found particles not behaving in the way they should according to the guiding theory of particle physics - the Standard Model.

The Standard Model of particle physics predicts that particles called beauty quarks, which are measured in the LHCb experiment, should decay into either muons or electrons in equal measure. However, the new result suggests that this may not be happening, which could point to the existence of new particles or interactions not explained by the Standard Model.

Physicists from Imperial College London and the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge led the analysis of the data to produce this result, with funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council. The result was announced today at the Moriond Electroweak Physics conference and published as a preprint.

Beyond the Standard Model

The Standard Model is the current best theory of particle physics, describing all the known fundamental particles that make up our Universe and the forces that they interact with.

However, the Standard Model cannot explain some of the deepest mysteries in modern physics, including what dark matter is made of and the imbalance of matter and antimatter in the Universe.

Researchers have therefore been searching for particles behaving in different ways than would be expected in the Standard Model, to help explain some of these mysteries.

Dr Mitesh Patel, from the Department of Physics at Imperial and one of the leading physicists behind the measurement, said: "We were actually shaking when we first looked at the results, we were that excited. Our hearts did beat a bit faster.

"It's too early to say if this genuinely is a deviation from the Standard Model but the potential implications are such that these results are the most exciting thing I've done in 20 years in the field. It has been a long journey to get here."

Building blocks of nature

Today's results were produced by the LHCb experiment, one of four huge particle detectors at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The LHC is the world's largest and most powerful particle collider - it accelerates subatomic particles to almost the speed of light, before smashing them into each other. These collisions produce a burst of new particles, which physicists then record and study in order to better understand the basic building blocks of nature.

The updated measurement questions the laws of nature that treat electrons and their heavier cousins, muons, identically, except for small differences due to their different masses.

According to the Standard Model, muons and electrons interact with all forces in the same way, so beauty quarks created at LHCb should decay into muons just as often as they do to electrons.

But these new measurements suggest the decays could be happening at different rates, which could suggest never-before-seen particles tipping the scales away from muons.

Dr Paula Alvarez Cartelle, of the University of Cambridge, was one of the leaders of the team that found the result. She said: "This new result offers tantalising hints of the presence of a new fundamental particle or force that interacts differently with these different types of particles.

"The more data we have, the stronger this result has become. This measurement is the most significant in a series of LHCb results from the past decade that all seem to line up - and could all point towards a common explanation.

"The results have not changed, but their uncertainties have shrunk, increasing our ability to see possible differences with the Standard Model."

Not a foregone conclusion

In particle physics, the gold standard for discovery is five standard deviations - which means there is a 1 in 3.5 million chance of the result being a fluke. This result is three deviations - meaning there is still a 1 in 1000 chance that the measurement is a statistical coincidence. It is therefore too soon to make any firm conclusions.

Dr Konstantinos Petridis of the University of Bristol's School of Physics was one of the leading physicists behind the measurement.

He said: "This has been a seven-year saga. Over this period, we have been seeing clues of a new unexplained process at work, but the effects were too subtle to draw any conclusions. The latest result from LHCb however offers for the first-time evidence that there could be something wrong with our current understanding of particle physics.

"We are very excited about this result but remain cautious as well. PhD students in the Bristol particle physics group are leading the studies required to confirm or refute these exciting results.

"The discovery of a new force in nature is the holy grail of particle physics. Our current understanding of the constituents of the Universe falls remarkably short - we do not know what 95 percent of the Universe is made of or why there is such a large imbalance between matter and anti-matter."

It is now for the LHCb collaboration to further verify their results by collating and analysing more data, to see if the evidence for some new phenomena remains. The LHCb experiment is expected to start collecting new data next year, following an upgrade to the detector.

The last glacial period, which lasted about 100,000 years, reached its peak about 20,000 to 25,000 years ago: Huge ice sheets covered large parts of northern Europe, North America and northern Asia, some of them kilometres thick, and the sea level was about 125 metres below today's level. The Earth looked very different during this so-called Last Glacial Maximum than it does today. This relatively recent period of the last maximum ice extent has long been of interest to researchers and subject to intensive research. What actually led to this extreme glacier growth, however, has remained unclear until now. Through findings of special cave deposits in the Obir Caves in Bad Eisenkappel located in the Austrian state of Carinthia Christoph Spötl, head of the Quaternary Research Group at the Department of Geology at the University of Innsbruck, together with his colleague Gabriella Koltai, made an interesting observation for an interval within the Last Glacial Maximum that lasted about 3100 years. During this period, the ice volume in the Alps reached its maximum. The data are based on small, inconspicuous crystals, so-called cryogenic cave carbonates (CCC): "These calcite crystals formed when the Obir Caves were ice caves with temperatures just below zero. CCC are reliable indicators of thawing permafrost. These findings mean that, paradoxically, during one of the coldest periods of the last glacial period, the permafrost above these caves slowly warmed up," says Christoph Spötl. Since climate warming can be ruled out at this time, there is only one way for geologists to explain this phenomenon. "There must have been a major increase in solid precipitation in the Alps between 26,500 and 23,500 years ago: There is no permafrost in places with a stable thick snow cover."

Föhn wind caused large amounts of snow

Cold periods are typically also dry, but in the Alpine region this was not the case during this interval, which lasted about 3100 years. "The largest advance of Alpine glaciers in the entire last glacial period took place during this time interval. Precipitation was the key source for the growth of the ice giants - and there must have been a lot of it, especially in autumn and early winter, as the CCC show," says Spötl. "A snow cover of about half a metre has already a strong insulating effect, shields the ground below from the very cold winter air and thus leads to an increased temperature in the subsurface. The permafrost above the Obir caves gradually thawed at that time. This thermal phenomenon, triggered by the shift from an Arctic-dry to a significantly wetter climate, remained preserved in the underground in the form of the CCC until today." Since the North Atlantic - today a major source of precipitation - was ice-covered in winter at the time, the team assumes a strong southerly flow from the Mediterranean that brought the moisture to the Alps, driven by pronounced southerly föhn conditions. "We consider massive snowfall due to this strong southerly flow as the cause of the growth of glaciers in the Alpine region at the peak of the Last Glacial Maximum. And our data allow us to even pin down the season: autumn and early winter," concludes Christoph Spötl.

Cryogenic cave carbonates have long been overlooked even by experienced speleologists, however, Koltai and Spötl are convinced: "In Austria alone, around 17,500 caves are known, and further discoveries of CCC are only a matter of time. That's why we work closely with speleologists, in the case of the Obir caves with the specialist group for karst and speleology of the Natural Science Association for Carinthia".

A gene not previously linked to cancer has been shown to play a key role in the spread of certain cancers to the lungs, new research from scientists at the Wellcome Sanger Institute has shown. The team found that when the gene LRRN4CL was over-expressed in mice, the skin cancer melanoma was more likely to metastasise to the lungs.

The study, published today (23 March 2021) in Communications Biology, also confirmed that over-expression of LRRN4CL was linked to metastasis of colon, breast and bladder cancers to the lung.

Several factors make LRRN4CL an attractive drug target. It encodes a protein found on the surface of cancer cells, making it easier to target with drugs. And because it is expressed at low levels elsewhere in the body, it may be possible to target LRRN4CL without causing serious side effects for the patient.

Metastasis is when cancers spread from one organ to other parts of the body via the blood and lymphatic systems. Once cancer cells are mobile, they can take root in other organs and form secondary tumours, most commonly in the lungs.

Metastasis makes cancers much harder to treat and is associated with much poorer outcomes for patients. Metastasis is the reason why melanoma, which accounts for around five per cent of skin cancers, also accounts for the majority of skin cancer deaths. Whereas basal cell skin cancer, which is the most common form of the disease, rarely spreads and is rarely life-threatening*.

In this study, scientists at the Wellcome Sanger Institute set out to identify genes whose over-expression - an increase in activity compared to the gene's normal functioning - resulted in the increased ability of melanoma cells to spread to the lungs in mice.

They conducted a CRISPR activation (CRISPRa) screen on genes that encode proteins on the surface of the cell, boosting the level of expression of the genes one by one to observe which had an effect.

The team found that over-expression of the gene LRRN4CL increased the ability of mouse and human melanoma cells to metastasise to the lungs. They also tested cell models for colon, breast and bladder cancer, confirming the role of LRRN4CL in metastasis to the lungs in all of them. This is the first time that LRRN4CL has been linked to cancer.

Dr Louise van der Weyden, first author of the paper from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said: "Metastasis is a complex phenomenon, and metastatic cells can have different characteristics depending on the original cancer type, the secondary tumour location and even the age of the patient. However, our findings show that when metastatic cancer cells of the skin, colon or breast express high levels of LRRN4CL, it makes them uniquely able to survive and grow in the lung."

The researchers also checked databases of gene expression in patient tumours and found that melanomas with elevated expression of LRRN4CL correlated with poorer patient outcomes.

Dr Anneliese Speak, an author of the paper from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said: "Our results suggest that reducing the expression of the LRRN4CL gene could help to prevent metastasis to the lungs, which would already make it a potential drug target. The added bonus is that this gene is expressed at very low levels elsewhere in the body, so hopefully targeting LRRN4CL wouldn't have severe side effects for patients."

Genes that encode cell surface proteins are often attractive drug targets, as the drug only needs to be delivered to the exterior of the cell rather than the interior, making drug design less complex.

Dr David Adams, senior author of the paper from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said: "Prior to this study, there was nothing in the scientific literature to link the LRRN4CL gene to cancer, much less to suggest that it plays such a pivotal role in metastasis. Part of the power of CRISPR screens is that they don't require a clear hypothesis to create new insights. This is an important discovery that marks LRRN4CL as a promising drug target to help prevent the spread of cancer to the lungs and improve outcomes for patients."

In additional work recently published in Nature Communications, the team used combinatorial CRISPR screening to define gene pairs that represent therapeutic targets in melanoma, thus providing additional targets to treat this complex disease.