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DURHAM, N.H.-- Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have found that more than 50% of children in high-risk populations in the United States are not receiving behavioral health services that could improve their developmental outcomes when it comes to mental and physical health problems.

In their study, recently published online by JAMA Network Open, researchers looked at a national cross-section of 11,896 young children and teens. They focused on those with high levels of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), high distress symptoms, or both - for example, children with symptoms like depression, anxiety, anger, post-traumatic stress and dissociation. The researchers found the untreated portion of high-risk juveniles ranged between 41% to 63%. Among those aged two to nine years, no clinical services were reported for 57% of the group with high ACEs and 53% of the group with high distress symptoms. Among those aged ten to 17 years, the no clinical contact group comprised of 63% of the adolescents with high ACEs and 52% of those with high distress symptoms.

"These findings show a large percentage of children who need treatment are not getting it," said David Finkelhor, professor of sociology and director of UNH's Crimes against Children Research Center. "Better ways are needed to identify these at-risk youth populations and help them get intervention resources that we know improves their physical and mental health."

The researchers say the group receiving the least number of services was young Black children with significantly lower levels of clinical contact compared with non-Hispanic white children.

"There are lots of barriers to receiving these services," said Finkelhor. "For example, there is a dearth of services or long waiting times in some areas. Some schools and medical providers do a better job than others of identifying need and making referrals. Some families can't access care because they lack transportation or time and some find the idea of such services stigmatizing or have had bad experiences in the past."

According to the researchers, making such services more easily accessed in familiar places like schools and medical practices has been shown to increase service utilization.

"Lots of kids are suffering from problems we have solutions for," said Finkelhor. "We just have to up our game and get it to them."

The Journal of Anthropological Research has just published a new article on the development of linguistic documentation among heritage language speakers: "Articulating Lingual Life Histories and Language Ideological Assemblages: Indigenous Activists within the North Fork Mono and Village of Tewa Communities."

Specifically, it focuses on the biographical information of individual speakers, and the significance they place on the language in question. Author Paul V. Kroskrity focused his research on two specific communities - the North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians in California and the Village of Tewa, First Mesa, Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona - and in both cases used specific elders with unique qualifications in heritage language. The ultimate goal was to further identify a link between simply using a heritage language (such as speaking it regularly) and promoting its documentation and continued use in future generations.

The elders in question were Rosalie Bethel, who spoke Western Mono, and Dewey Healing, who represented the Village of Tewa who speak a minority language on the Hopi Reservation. In both cases, the subjects possessed unique qualities that rendered their cases particularly insightful. Bethel was the product of a mixed-language household (her mother was Mono, her father a German immigrant) whose parents thrived despite their language differences. Early trauma in institutionalized educational facilities led her to the Western Mono language as a means of healing and connecting to her heritage. She made it central to her identity, and participated in the Taitaduhaan (CD-ROM) Project: performing and recording stories, songs, and prayers in Western Mono.

"Her participation..." Kroskrity says, "[was] offered as teaching examples for a language community lacking in fluent elders." It made her a paragon among the Western Mono community.

In Healing's case, he grew up central to his culture (as opposed to Bethel, whose upbringing was suspended between white and native cultures) and embraced multilingualism while modernizing his culture. In so doing, he used the benefits of integration as a means of preserving the language and traditions of the Tewa people. He focused on ceremonial life, particularly the performance of tribal dances, and he was also extremely active in Hopi political life. Like Bethel, he recorded songs, poetry, and other examples of Tewa language, which included new original works as well as traditional older ones.

In both cases, the subjects used their heritage language not only to help retain the traditions of their people, but revitalize them and give them more of a modern role in their respective communities. Literacy in the Tewa and Hopi languages is on the rise and the communities recognize the need for language revitalization as a means of maintaining the culture as it moves forward.

Their work illustrates what the article refers to as the personal "meanings of language use that individuals draw on as they selectively reproduce and influence their social worlds through their own emergent linguistic activity." By better understanding their personal experiences, and how they apply to lives as they as they are lived, it can illuminate the push and pull between minority cultures and more dominant ones, as well as the ways that individuals reject, resist and adapt their use of heritage languages within indigenous communities. "Lingual life histories clearly provide a means for relating the personal milieu of individuals to the language ideological assemblages in which they are enmeshed," Kroskrity writes. That, in turn, can provide increased insight into the maintenance and revitalization of those cultures: a road map to the future as well as illumination of the past.

Researchers at the University of Ottawa have debunked the decade-old myth of metals being useless in photonics - the science and technology of light - with their findings, recently published in Nature Communications, expected to lead to many applications in the field of nanophotonics.

"We broke the record for the resonance quality factor (Q-factor) of a periodic array of metal nanoparticles by one order of magnitude compared to previous reports," said senior author Dr. Ksenia Dolgaleva, Canada Research Chair in Integrated Photonics (Tier 2) and Associate Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at the University of Ottawa.

"It is a well-known fact that metals are very lossy when they interact with light, which means they cause the dissipation of electrical energy. The high losses compromise their use in optics and photonics. We demonstrated ultra-high-Q resonances in a metasurface (an artificially structured surface) comprised of an array of metal nanoparticles embedded inside a flat glass substrate. These resonances can be used for efficient light manipulating and enhanced light-matter interaction, showing metals are useful in photonics."

"In previous works, researchers attempted to mitigate the adverse effect of losses to access favorable properties of metal nanoparticle arrays," observed the co-lead author of the study Md Saad Bin-Alam, a uOttawa doctoral student in EECS.

"However, their attempts did not provide a significant improvement in the quality factors of the resonances of the arrays. We implemented a combination of techniques rather than a single approach and obtained an order-of-magnitude improvement demonstrating a metal nanoparticle array (metasurface) with a record-high quality factor."

According to the researchers, structured surfaces - also called metasurfaces - have very promising prospects in a variety of nanophotonic applications that can never be explored using traditional natural bulk materials. Sensors, nanolasers, light beam shaping and steering are just a few examples of the many applications.

"Metasurfaces made of noble metal nanoparticles - gold or silver for instance - possess some unique benefits over non-metallic nanoparticles. They can confine and control light in a nanoscale volume that is less than one quarter of the wavelength of light (less than 100 nm, while the width of a hair is over 10 000 nm)," explained Md Saad Bin-Alam.

"Interestingly, unlike in non-metallic nanoparticles, the light is not confined or trapped inside the metal nanoparticles but is concentrated close to their surface. This phenomenon is scientifically called 'localized surface plasmon resonances (LSPRs)'. This feature gives a great superiority to metal nanoparticles compared to their dielectric counterparts, because one could exploit such surface resonances to detect bio-organisms or molecules in medicine or chemistry. Also, such surface resonances could be used as the feedback mechanism necessary for laser gain. In such a way, one can realize a nanoscale tiny laser that can be adopted in many future nanophotonic applications, like light detection and ranging (LiDAR) for the far-field object detection."

According to the researchers, the efficiency of these applications depends on the resonant Q-factors.

"Unfortunately, due to the high 'absorptive' and 'radiative' loss in metal nanoparticles, the LSPRs Q-factors are very low," said co-lead author Dr. Orad Reshef, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Physics at the University of Ottawa.

"More than a decade ago, researchers found a way to mitigate the dissipative loss by carefully arranging the nanoparticles in a lattice. From such 'surface lattice' manipulation, a new 'surface lattice resonance (SLR)' emerges with suppressed losses. Until our work, the maximum Q-factors reported in SLRs was around a few hundred. Although such early reported SLRs were better than the low-Q LSPRs, they were still not very impressive for efficient applications. It led to the myth that metals are not useful for practical applications."

A myth that the group was able to deconstruct during its work at the University of Ottawa's Advanced Research Complex between 2017 and 2020.

"At first, we performed numerical modelling of a gold nanoparticle metasurface and were surprised to obtain quality factors of several thousand," said Md Saad Bin-Alam, who primarily designed the metasurface structure.

"This value has never been reported experimentally, and we decided to analyze why and to attempt an experimental demonstration of such a high Q. We observed a very high-Q SLR of value nearly 2400, that is at least 10 times larger than the largest SLRs Q reported earlier."

A discovery that made them realize that there's still a lot to learn about metals.

"Our research proved that we are still far from knowing all the hidden mysteries of metal (plasmonic) nanostructures," concluded Dr. Orad Reshef, who fabricated the metasurface sample. "Our work has debunked a decade-long myth that such structures are not suitable for real-life optical applications due to the high losses. We demonstrated that, by properly engineering the nanostructure and carefully conducting an experiment, one can improve the result significantly."

INDIANAPOLIS -- The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is keeping millions of Americans from their usual offices, as they find themselves still working at home. Even with the vaccine now being distributed, working from home may still be the future for some, and new research suggests the resulting work loneliness negatively impacts employee well-being.

Stephanie Andel, an assistant professor of psychology in the School of Science at IUPUI, along with collaborators at York University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, recently published a study finding that feelings of work loneliness during the pandemic were associated higher depression and fewer voluntary work behaviors. The research appears in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology.

"We wanted to understand what factors are driving feelings of work loneliness, and to understand how this work loneliness influenced employees' psychological health and work behaviors," Andel said. "We looked at three different factors that we thought might drive work loneliness: perceptions of job insecurity, telecommuting frequency and insufficient communication from their companies about how they were responding to the pandemic.

"We found each of those factors contributed to feelings of work loneliness, and we also found that work loneliness was associated with depression and fewer voluntary helping behaviors at work."

Participants in the study came from a wide range of industries including manufacturing; technology, such as computer programming; retail; and education. The results are based on weekly surveys of these individuals from mid-March to mid-May 2020.

When people feel lonely, the study found, they experience more depressive symptoms, and they are less likely to go above and beyond in their jobs, such as helping a co-worker -- something many organizations may have hoped their employees would do during the pandemic.

But there is hope -- in the form of self-compassion. Andel and colleagues found self-compassion, or being kind to yourself during times of suffering, can mitigate some of the negative effects of work loneliness.

"We found that self-compassion helps protect employees from some of the negative effects of work loneliness," Andel said. "We suspect this is because self-compassion leads individuals to be kinder to themselves, makes them more likely to recognize that they are not alone in their feelings and helps them to be aware of -- but not consumed by -- their negative feelings."

Individuals who reported having higher levels of self-compassion exhibited fewer depressive symptoms following feelings of work loneliness in comparison to those with lower levels of self-compassion. But they also engaged in fewer helping behaviors, which surprised the study's authors.

"We originally thought if you were more self-compassionate, you might have the energy and mental resources to engage in more helping behaviors at work," Andel said. "However, it turns out that the pattern is opposite of what we expected. Instead, those who were higher in self-compassion were more likely to give themselves a necessary break. We suspect that this may ultimately help them to feel better and help more in the future."

Although self-compassion has been studied quite a bit in the field of clinical psychology, it has rarely been examined in the workplace context. Andel is optimistic about its potential to enhance the health and well-being of employees.

"It will be very interesting for future research to continue investigating the power of self-compassion in the workplace," she said. "For instance, it would be great to see if managers who promote self-compassion at work foster a better working experience for their employees. Ultimately, my collaborators and I hope to develop self-compassion interventions that can be utilized by companies to help their employees feel and perform better at work."

For companies that want to help their employees struggling right now with work loneliness, Andel provides the following suggestions:

* Provide consistent and clear communication regularly to employees regarding the company's response to the pandemic and be transparent about structural or financial changes that may affect employees' job security or income.

* Host virtual social gatherings for employees. These should not be mandatory, but rather voluntary social activities aimed at enhancing employee morale and promoting a sense of belonging among employees.

* Create an organizational climate that promotes and encourages employee self-compassion.

For individuals who want to take the initiative themselves to enhance their own self-compassion, Andel suggests that in times of perceived failure or suffering, one should try to avoid negative self-talk and instead, give the same kindness and compassion to oneself that you would give to a good friend.

"This is an exciting and important step in bringing self-compassion to the organizational literature, and my collaborators and I look forward to building on this research," Andel said.

Anyone who has watched an infant's eyes follow a dangling trinket dancing in front of them knows that babies are capable of paying attention with laser focus.

But with large areas of their young brains still underdeveloped, how do they manage to do so?

Using an approach pioneered at Yale that uses fMRI (or functional magnetic resonance imaging) to scan the brains of awake babies, a team of university psychologists show that when focusing their attention infants under a year of age recruit areas of their frontal cortex, a section of the brain involved in more advanced functions that was previously thought to be immature in babies. The findings were published March 16 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Attention is the gateway to what infants perceive and learn," said Nick Turk-Browne, professor of psychology at Yale and senior author of the paper. "Attention is the bouncer at the door, determining what information gets into the brain, which eventually creates memories, language, and thought."

Most previous research related to attention in babies has depended upon tracking their gaze while they are presented with visual stimuli, a process that theoretically offers insights into what is going on in their minds. Left unanswered are questions about which sections of the brain are involved in these responses, and how and why they allocate attention in these ways.

Attention in babies could depend upon on sensory areas of the brain, which process stimuli such as touch and visual stimuli and helps them react to the external world. These brain regions develop earlier in infancy than regions of the frontal cortex, which are usually associated with internal functions such as control, planning, and reasoning.

The ability to use brain imaging with infants allowed "us to look behind the mirror," for the neural origins of attention, Turk-Browne said.

For the study, they used the new fMRI technology to track the neural activity of 20 babies aged from 3 to 12 months, tracking which regions of their brains were activated as they focused their attention in response to a series of images.

In a series of tests, the babies were shown a screen on which a target would appear on either the left or right side. In each case, these appearances were preceded by one of three visual cues signaling where the target would appear: on the same side that the target would appear, on both sides of the screen (thus uninformative), or on the opposite side. Researchers monitored the babies' eye movements as they completed these tasks.

See a video of the experiment.

As expected, the babies were much quicker to move their eyes to the target when first presented the correct cue, confirming that the cues had focused their attention. Simultaneously, the researchers used brain imaging technology to see which areas of the brain were recruited during these tasks. In addition to sensory areas of the brain, they found that activity also increased in two areas of the frontal cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the middle frontal gyrus, areas of the brain that when fully developed are involved in controlling adult attention.

"This doesn't mean these regions play the same role in babies as in adults, but it does show that infants use them to explore their visual world," said Cameron Ellis, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at Yale and first author of the paper.

Studying how the brain is enlisted during development "will help researchers uncover the foundations of human learning, which could one day help improve early-childhood education and reveal the roots of neurodevelopmental disorders," Ellis said.

During a pandemic like COVID-19, vulnerable countries are traditionally the focus of global attention and concern. However, new research suggests that we need to rebuild our understanding. A study published in KeAi's Global Health Journal, examined the relationship between state vulnerabilities (measured using the Fragile States Index (FSI) from Fund for Peace) and COVID-19 incidence and death rates in 146 countries. The FSI consists of 12 specific indicators covering cohesion, economy, politics and society. "When using the total FSI score for statistical analysis, we were surprised to find that, overall, the more fragile countries had lower cumulative incidence and fatality rates for COVID-19," explains one of the study's authors, Yangmu Huang.

However, according to Huang, in-depth analysis revealed that vulnerabilities in three specific FSI indicators increased the impact of COVID-19: State Legitimacy (the public's confidence in their state's institutions), External Intervention (influence and impact of external factors), and Security Apparatus (domestic and international security threats to a state).

Huang explains: "State Legitimacy and External Intervention were associated with cumulative incidence rates, while Security Apparatus was associated with the risk of death. This indirectly reflects the important role of health security infrastructure, government leadership and international support in the fight against the pandemic."

Another key finding of the study was that countries with higher levels of economic development were more likely to contract infectious diseases than countries that are more fragile based on the FSI. "This seemingly contradictory finding also has a reasonable explanation: the more developed countries have superior transportation systems, larger population densities, and more free communication, which is conducive to the spread of the virus," says Huang.

She added: "The initial goal of this study was to explore the impact of a broader range of national environmental factors on COVID-19. We searched all the available scoring metrics, and finally chose the FSI, because it was one of the most comprehensive indicators. This finding has significant implications for both political leaders and health professionals. It shows that the impact of socioeconomic and political measures can be more important than healthcare in protecting people from diseases and promoting health. And that it is prudent to balance economic development and human health."

In new findings published online March 18, 2021 in the journal Cancer Cell, an international team of researchers, led by scientists at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center, describe how pancreatic cancer cells use an alternative method to find necessary nutrients, defying current therapies, to help them grow and spread.

Pancreatic cancer accounts for roughly 3 percent of all cancers in the United States, but it is among the most aggressive and deadly, resulting in 7 percent of all cancer deaths annually. Pancreatic cancer is especially deadly once it metastasizes, with the number of people who are alive five years later declining from 37 percent to just 3 percent.

All cancer cells require a constant supply of nutrients. Some types of cancer achieve this by creating their own vascular networks to pull in nutrients from the host's blood supply. But other cancers, notably pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, are surrounded by a thick layer of connective tissue and extracellular molecules (the so-called tumor stroma) that act not just as a sort of a dividing line between malignant cells and normal host tissues, but also as a hindrance to cancer cells obtaining sufficient resources, including blood supply.

As a result, pancreatic and other nutritionally stressed cancers employ a number of adaptive mechanisms to avoid death by starvation, a risk particularly high in rapidly growing tumors. One such mechanism is autophagy or self-eating. Autophagy allows nutritionally stressed cancers to digest intracellular proteins, especially denatured or damaged proteins, and use the liberated amino acid building blocks as an energy source to fuel their metabolism.

Past research indicating autophagy is elevated in pancreatic cancer gave rise to the idea that inhibiting self-eating might be used to starve tumors. Yet, multiple clinical trials using compounds that inhibit autophagic protein degradation combined with traditional chemotherapy, did not produce any added therapeutic benefit compared to chemotherapy alone, said Michael Karin, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology and Pathology at UC San Diego School of Medicine.

In the new study, Hua Su, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in Karin's lab and first author of the study, and collaborators investigated why pancreatic cancers survive autophagy and, in fact, appear to thrive. They found that inhibition of autophagy resulted in rapid upregulation or increased activity of a different nutrient procurement pathway called macropinocytosis, derived from the Greek for "large drinking or gulping."

Macropinocytosis enables autophagy-compromised and nutritionally stressed cancer cells to take up exogenous proteins (found outside the cell), digest them and use their amino acids for energy generation. "This explains why autophagy inhibitors fail to starve pancreatic cancer and cannot induce its regression," said Su. "Once autophagy is inhibited, cancer cells simply resort to a different mechanism to feed themselves."

In experiments using mouse cancer models and human pancreatic cancers grown in mice, Su and colleagues found that a combination of autophagy and macropinocytosis inhibitors resulted in rapid and nearly complete tumor regression.

"These results provide another example of the plastic nature of pancreatic cancer metabolism," said senior author Karin. "It also shows that combined inhibition of the two major nutrient procurement pathways can result in a successful blockade of energy supply resulting in tumor starvation and consequent shrinkage."

Study co-author Andrew Lowy, MD, chief of the Division of Surgical Oncology at Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health and a professor of surgery at UC San Diego School of Medicine, said the new data demonstrate the promise of targeting tumor metabolism as a treatment strategy and that success will likely require combining multiple agents for multiple targets.

"I believe that these findings are exciting and support the idea that we will make significant impact against this very difficult disease in the near-future," Lowy said.

DALLAS, March 17, 2021 -- Immediate angiography, rather than the standard computed tomography (CT scan), reduced stroke treatment time and was linked to improved recovery, according to late-breaking science presented today at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2021. The virtual meeting is March 17-19, 2021 and is a world premier meeting for researchers and clinicians dedicated to the science of stroke and brain health.

Standard emergency department treatment for stroke patients involves a CT scan, which uses X-rays to pinpoint the presence and location of a blood clot. Angiography is an advanced X-ray imaging method that uses a catheter, or thin tube, inserted into the blood vessel to find the location and size of the blockage. Since every minute counts during a stroke, this study focused on determining if immediate angiography improved treatment time and recovery, compared to standard CT scans.

"Our study is the first clinical trial that shows the superiority of direct transfer to an angiography suite," said lead study author Manuel Requena, Ph.D., a neurologist and neurointerventionalist fellow at Vall d'Hebron Hospital in Barcelona, Spain. "Our findings were close to what we expected, and we were surprised that they occurred so early in the study. We trust that they will be confirmed in ongoing, multicenter, international trials."

Beginning in October 2018, stroke patients who were admitted to Vall d'Hebron Hospital within six hours of stroke symptom onset with a suspected blocked blood vessel were randomly assigned to receive angiography or a cardiac CT scan. There were a total of 150 stroke patients by November 2020; the average age of the patients was 73 years, and more than half were male.

In this interim analysis, stroke patients assigned to angiography underwent testing within 19 minutes of entering the hospital -- less than half of the 43 minutes for the patients who received a CT scan. Similarly, stroke patients assigned to angiography received endovascular treatment to restore blood flow 54 minutes faster, on average, compared to CT scan recipients.

At 90 days post-stroke, angiography patients were more likely than CT scan patients to show a 1-point improvement on the 6-point scale that measures stroke disability.

"Stroke patients transferred directly to an angiography suite were less likely to be dependent for assistance with daily activities compared to the stroke patients who received the current standard of care - CT scan," Requena said. "More frequent and more rapid treatment can help improve outcomes for our stroke patients."

Many national and international professional organizations including the American Stroke Association have suggested general stroke recommendations based on the currently available evidence to monitor the time from emergency room arrival until blood flow is restored to the blocked brain artery in order to reduce the risk of severe disability and death. However, data demonstrating the urgent need for continued research on treatment of ischemic stroke is limited.

A limitation of this study is that the hospital already had extensive experience with immediate angiography, so findings may differ at hospitals or care centers with less angiography expertise or experience. Another limitation is that the results of the study were not monitored by an external review group.

Bottlenose dolphins learn to cope with coastal construction activities. That is the conclusion of a study published in Frontiers in Marine Science. The study is the first to provide a longitudinal perspective on the cumulative impacts of coastal construction. Dolphins adapted to the construction of a bridge by establishing feeding locations outside of the construction zone, and by shifting the timings of behaviors to a time in the day when construction activities were minimized.

Marine coastal development is characterized by unsustainable practices. Coastal development exposes 47% of coastal marine mammal species and 51% of core marine mammal habitats to extensive anthropogenic disturbance. Human activities along coastlines and in marine habitats can lead to pollution, vessel strikes, entanglement, by-catch, and debris ingestion, which disturb and harm marine wildlife.

Two of the most damaging human practices are dredging and pile driving. Dredging, the removal of sediment and debris from bodies of water, is lethal to fish eggs and larvae. Pile driving causes severe noise pollution, which interferes with the behaviors of marine wildlife. Many fish species and cetaceans depend on sound to navigate, search for prey, avoid predators, and communicate with conspecifics.

These practices and their effects lead to stress, fatal stranding, and acute avoidance in cetaceans. Due to unprecedented levels of construction, coastal zones are becoming the noisiest and most endangered ecosystems on the planet. Plus, as these activities never happen individually, they can have cumulative effects.

Bottlenose dolphins are strongly tied to their coastal habitats and are more vulnerable to human pressures, as it exposes them to the greatest number of cumulative effects. Dr Ann Weaver, John's Pass Dolphin Study/Jaasas Academic Press, Florida, researched how bottlenose dolphins were impacted by a bridge replacement project in John's Pass, St Petersburg in west central Florida. John's Pass is a narrow tidal inlet connecting the Gulf of Mexico and the Intracoastal Waterway, and served as prime bottlenose dolphin habitat because it provided rich feeding grounds. The bridge replacement project occurred in 2 phases over a 5-year period.

Weaver collected observational data several times weekly for 11 years to obtain before, during, and after construction data. Measurements of 'total numbers of dolphins', 'dolphin presence versus absence', and 'number of dolphins engaged in predetermined behavior states' before construction were compared to the same measurements during and after construction.

The construction project included pile driving and dredging and brought about light and noise pollution. The study showed two ways in which dolphins appeared to adapt to these human activities. First, the dolphins stopped using John's Pass as a feeding ground, instead shifting to areas outside of the construction zone. This adaptation also led to a decrease in social interactions between dolphins in the construction zone. These behavioral changes remained across the 5 years after construction was finalized, and never recovered.

Second, during the first phase of construction, the dolphins shifted the timings of behaviors to a time in the day when construction minimized. By the second phase of construction, the dolphins appeared to have learned to cope with human disturbance, as their behavior in areas being developed showed some change back to pre-construction habits. Weaver adds, "Adaptation may also have been related in part to the way construction was managed. This two-phase exposure to construction may have allowed the dolphins to become familiar with construction in the first phase and perhaps enabled them to adapt a "new normal" during the second phase."

Weaver concludes: "These results provide a two-sided key to managing future coastal construction projects by mandating the following conservation policies. First, study the wildlife before construction begins to learn their habits. Second, apply that knowledge: Plan coastal construction activities accordingly to give them a chance to adapt and help the dolphins maintain their historic habits as much as possible."

A new study in Behavioral Ecology, published by Oxford University Press, finds that women are less likely to procreate in urban areas that have a higher percentage of females than males in the population.

Although the majority modern cities have more women than men and thus suffer from lower fertility rates, the effects of female-biased sex ratios - having more women than men in a population - is less studied than male-biased ratios. Researchers here analyzed how female-biased sex ratios are linked to marriages, reproductive histories, dispersal, and the effects of urbanization on society.

The research team from University of Turku, University of Helsinki and Pennsylvania State University used a massive internal migration event that occurred in Finland during WWII, when 10% of Finnish territory was ceded to the Soviet Union and over 400,000 citizens were evacuated. The Finnish government implemented a settlement act to provide land for farmers to replace the territory they lost. Each village in the ceded territory was assigned to a specific location in western Finland to keep communities together, though evacuees were not required to move to their assigned location. Researchers consulted a database of the evacuees, which was compiled of interviews of evacuees between 1968 and 1970. The database entries list the name, sex, date of birth, birthplace, occupation, year of marriage, reproductive records, and the years and names of all places the evacuee lived from birth until the time of the interview.

Researchers followed the annual reproductive and dispersal decisions of 8,296 evacuee women from 1945 to 1955 who were between the ages of 19 and 42 during this time, were unmarried when the war ended in 1945, and whose reproductive status and annual place of residence were known. Researchers measured the sex ratios in the locations these women lived throughout this period and estimated women's probability to start a family or disperse.

The study found that the likelihood of reproducing was strongly influenced by local sex ratio but that this relationship differed between rural and urban environments. While female biased population sex ratio lowered women's probability to reproduce for the first time in urban environments this was not the case in rural areas. However, women did not move into areas with more men, instead they were more likely to relocate to urban areas, despite the sex ratio being strongly female-biased in these locations. The researchers concluded that women probably moved to urban areas for work and education opportunities, but then experienced a competitive market for finding a spouse and thus were less likely to have children than women who lived outside of urban areas. Overall, women were 15% less likely to reproduce in urban areas compared to rural areas. In towns, every percentage of increase of men in the population increased women's probability to have first child by 2.7% whereas in rural areas increase was only 0.4%.

Researchers also noted that while the population they studied is historical, the findings can be applicable to present day urban environments. Women outnumber men in many cities across the developing and developed world, and they may be finding themselves in the same predicament experienced by Finnish women many decades ago.

The results, published in the renowned scientific journal The Cryosphere, have made it possible to reliably describe snow trends at up to 2000 metres above sea level. Higher than that, there are too few measuring stations to be able to extract reliable information for the entire Alpine region. This consistent data set spans five decades and was created through the collaboration of more than 30 scientists from each of the Alpine states. The results and data collected represent a valuable aid for future studies, especially those which centre on climate change.

"This study analyses the snow cover in the Alps quantitatively, for the first time and for the entire mountain range. It shows the distribution of snow - which, we have seen, accurately reflects the major climatic zones in the Alps - and what has changed over the past 50 years," explains Michael Matiu, researcher at Eurac Research's Institute for Earth Observation, who together with colleague Alice Crespi, conceived the study. The data shows that snow is unevenly distributed and does not decrease everywhere to the same extent. In the Southern Alps, which already have less snow than their northern counterparts, snow depth below 2000 metres decreased more than in the Northern Alps. Regional trends sometimes differ considerably, but decadal variability is similar throughout the Alpine region: the 1970s and 1980s were generally snowy, followed by a period of snow scarce winters in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Since then, although snow depths have increased again to some extent, they have not reached the level of the 1970s. And everywhere, there is less snow in spring, as Crespi points out: "While in winter there is a wide range of variation in trends depending on location and altitude, even with isolated increases in snow at higher altitudes, in spring, almost all the stations recorded decreases". Below 2,000 metres, the snow season decreased by 22-34 days during the last 50 years and snow on the ground tends to appear later in winter and disappear earlier as spring approaches. This is a direct result of climate change, as Matiu explains: 'In this study we did not look explicitly at the formal attribution, but it is clear that snow melts earlier and faster due to higher temperatures and that precipitation occurs as rain rather than snow'.

For climatological studies, this comprehensive and unified data collection is an especially valuable tool. The authors are making it available to the entire research community and hope that it can be enriched through future studies.

As their name suggests, by-the-wind sailor jellyfish know how to catch a breeze. Using a stiff, translucent sail propped an inch above the surface of the ocean, these teacup-sized organisms skim along the water dangling a fringe of delicate purple tentacles just below the surface to capture zooplankton and larval fish as they travel.

At the mercy of the wind, these jellies can wash ashore and strand -- sometimes numbering in the trillions -- on beaches around the world, including up and down the U.S. West Coast. And while these mass stranding events are hard to miss, very little actually is known about how or why they happen.

Now, thanks to 20 years of observations from thousands of citizen scientists, University of Washington researchers have discovered distinct patterns in the mass strandings of by-the-wind sailors, also called Velella velella. Specifically, large strandings happened simultaneously from the northwest tip of Washington south to the Mendocino coast in California, and in years when winters were warmer than usual. The results were published March 18 in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.

"Citizen scientists have collected the largest and longest dataset on mass strandings of this jelly in the world," said senior author Julia Parrish, a professor in the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and executive director of the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team, known as COASST.

"This paper contributes to fundamental scientific knowledge of this organism in a way that traditional 'mainstream' marine science has been unable to do. Thousands of trained, dedicated observers are better than any satellite because they know their beach and can alert us if something is weird or unusual."

COASST's citizen scientists are trained to search for and identify carcasses of marine birds that have washed ashore at sites from northern California to the Arctic Circle. Participants are asked to record and submit photos of anything strange or different they see on their stretch of beach.

In 2019, program managers received an email from COASSTers in Oregon who had expected to see Velella on their beach based on past observations, but hadn't. That prompted COASST scientists to comb the database -- 23,265 surveys in total -- to see if others had taken note of these jellies over the years. This "data-mining" returned 465 reports of Velella littering 293 beaches, often in more than one year.

"On the water, Velella are beautiful, fragile creatures. When they wash ashore, these jellies quickly dry to the consistency of potato chips. During a mass stranding it's like walking on a crunchy carpet," Parrish said. "So of course, COASSTers reported in. Suddenly, we realized we had the largest dataset about Velella velella anywhere in the world."

In analyzing the citizen science observations, UW researchers discovered that most by-the-wind sailors wash ashore on West Coast beaches during the spring, when the winds shift and push the organisms to shore. However, their analysis also revealed truly massive stranding events in 2003-2005 and again in 2015-2019. During the later years, jelly carcasses covered more than 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) of continuous coastline, all within a single two-week window between mid-March to mid-April.

The second period corresponds with the timing of the long-lasting marine heat wave known as "the blob" -- also to blame for the largest seabird die-off of common murres, as well as mass die-offs of Cassin's auklets, sea lions and baleen whales.

The researchers hypothesized that warmer winters during these years allowed for populations of by-the-wind sailors to spike in the open ocean. Then, when the winds shifted in the spring, massive numbers of the jellies were swept to shore and stranded.

Put another way -- and though many ultimately end up dying on beaches -- the jellies appear to be "winners" during warmer periods, because they can amass more numbers in the ocean. There's some evidence that warmer-than-average winters are also calmer and less wavy in the open ocean, allowing increasingly large Velella aggregations to persist, Parrish explained.

"This paper and our data really do suggest that in a warming world, we're going to have more of these organisms -- that is, the ecosystem itself is tipping in the direction of these jellies because they win in warmer conditions," Parrish said. "A changing climate creates new winners and losers in every ecosystem. What's scary is that we're actually documenting that change."

As warmer winters are expected to increase with climate change, these findings could have clear implications for this jelly population, as well as for the fish they eat and the beaches where they strand and die.

Due to their tissue-like mechanical properties, hydrogels are being increasingly used for biomedical applications; a well-known example are soft contact lenses. These gel-like polymers consist of 90 percent water, are elastic and particularly biocompatible. Hydrogels that are also electrically conductive allow additional fields of application, for example in the transmission of electrical signals in the body or as sensors. An interdisciplinary research team of the Research Training Group (RTG) 2154 "Materials for Brain" at Kiel University (CAU) has now developed a method to produce hydrogels with an excellent level of electrical conductivity. What makes this method special is that the mechanical properties of the hydrogels are largely retained. This way they could be particularly well suited, for example, as a material for medical functional implants, which are used to treat certain brain diseases. The group's findings were now published in the journal Nano Letters.

"The elasticity of hydrogels can be adapted to various types of tissue in the body and even to the consistency of brain tissue. This is why we are particularly interested in these hydrogels as implant materials," explains materials scientist Margarethe Hauck, a doctoral researcher in RTG 2154 and one of the study's lead authors. As such, the interdisciplinary collaboration of materials and medical scientists focuses on the development of new materials for implants, for example for the release of active substances to treat brain diseases such as epilepsy, tumors or aneurysms. Conductive hydrogels could be used to control the release of active substances in order to treat certain diseases locally in a more targeted manner.

In order to produce electrically conductive hydrogels, conventional hydrogels are usually mixed with current-conducting nanomaterials that are made of metals or carbon, such as gold nanowires, graphene or carbon nanotubes. To achieve a good level of conductivity, a high concentration of nanomaterials is often required. However, this alters the original mechanical properties of the hydrogels, such as their elasticity, and thus impacts their interaction with the surrounding cells. "Cells are particularly sensitive to the nature of their environment. They feel most comfortable with materials around them whose properties correspond as closely as possible to their natural surroundings in the body," explains Christine Arndt, a doctoral researcher at the Institute for Materials Science at Kiel University and also lead author of the study.

Production method requires less graphene than previous approaches

In close collaboration with various working groups, the research team was now able to develop a hydrogel that boasts an ideal combination: it is not only electrically conductive but also retains its original level of elasticity. For conductivity, the scientists used graphene, a material that has already been used in other production approaches. "Graphene has outstanding electrical and mechanical properties and is also very light," says Dr Fabian Schütt, junior group leader in the Research Training Group, thus emphasising the advantages of the ultra-thin material, which consists of only one layer of carbon atoms. What makes this new method different is the amount of graphene used. "We are using significantly less graphene than previous studies, and as a result, the key properties of the hydrogel are retained," says Schütt about the current study, which he initiated.

In order to achieve this objective, the scientists thinly coated a fine framework structure of ceramic microparticles with graphene flakes. Then they added the hydrogel polyacrylamide, which enclosed the framework structure, which was finally etched away. The thin graphene coating in the hydrogel remains unaffected by this process. The entire hydrogel is now streaked with graphene-coated microchannels, similar to an artificial nervous system.

Special 3D images by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht (HZG) demonstrate the highly electronic conductivity of the channel system: "Due to a multitude of connections between the individual graphene tubes, electrical signals always find their way through the material and make it extremely reliable", says Dr Berit Zeller-Plumhoff, Head of Department for Imaging and Data Science at HZG and an associate member in the RTG. With the help of high-intensity X-rays the mathematician took the images in a short time frame at the imaging beamline operated by the HZG at the storage ring PETRA III at the Deutsche Elektronensynchrotron DESY. And the three-dimensional network has yet another advantage: its stretchability enables it to adapt relatively flexibly to its environment.

Further fields of application in biomedicine and soft robotics conceivable

"With the collaborations between different working groups, the RTG offers ideal conditions for biomedical research questions that require an interdisciplinary approach," says Christine Selhuber-Unkel, first spokesperson of the RTG and now Professor of Molecular Systems Engineering at Heidelberg University. "This is a complex field of research as it combines both materials science and medicine and is likely to further develop enormously over the coming years, while the national and international demand for qualified specialists will increase - and this is what we want to prepare our doctoral researchers for in the best possible way," adds her successor Rainer Adelung, Professor of Functional Nanomaterials at Kiel University and spokesperson of the RTG since 2020.

In the future, various additional applications of the new conductive hydrogel are possible: Margarethe Hauck plans to develop a hydrogel that reacts to small changes in temperature and could release active substances in the brain in a controlled manner. Christine Arndt is working on how electrically conductive hydrogels can be used as biohybrid robots. The force that cells exert on their environment could be used here to drive miniaturised robotic systems.

Forces acting inside the Earth have been constantly reshaping the continents and ocean basins over millions of years. What Alfred Wegener published as an idea in 1915 has finally been accepted since the 1960s, providing a unifying view about our planet. The fact that the theory of plate tectonics took so long to gain acceptance had two simple reasons. First, the geological formations that are most important for its understanding lie at the bottom of the oceans. Secondly, forces controlling the processes act below the seafloor and are hence hidden from our view. Many details of plate tectonics are therefore still unclear today.

Today, five scientists from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, the Southern University of Science and Technology (Shenzhen, China) and GeoModelling Solutions GmbH (Switzerland) publish a study in the international scientific journal Nature that questions a previous basic assumption of plate tectonics. It is about so-called transform faults. "These are large offsets in the mid-ocean ridges. So far, they have been assigned a purely passive role within plate tectonics. However, our analyses show that they are definitely actively involved in shaping the ocean floors," explains Prof. Ingo Grevemeyer from GEOMAR, lead author of the study.

A look at a global overview map of the ocean floors helps to understand the study. Even at low resolution, several tens of thousands of kilometres long mid-ocean ridges can be recognised on such maps. They mark the boundaries of the Earth's plates. In between, hot material from the Earth's interior reaches the surface, cools down, forms new ocean floor and pushes the older ocean floor apart. "This is the engine that keeps the plates moving," explains Prof. Grevemeyer.

However, the mid-ocean ridges do not form unbroken lines. They are cut by transverse valleys at almost regular intervals. The individual segments of the ridges each begin or end in an offset at these incisions. "These are the transform faults. Because the Earth is a sphere, plate movements repeatedly cause faults that produce these ridge offsets," explains Prof. Lars Rüpke from GEOMAR, co-author of the study.

Earthquakes can occur at the transform faults and they leave long scars, so-called fracture zones, on oceanic plates. Until now, however, research assumed that the two plates only slide past each other at transform faults, but that seafloor is neither formed nor destroyed in the process.

The authors of the current study have now looked at available maps of 40 transform faults in all ocean basins. "In all examples, we could see that the transform valleys are significantly deeper than the adjacent fractures zones, which were previously thought to be simple continuations of the transform valleys," says co-author Prof. Colin Devey from GEOMAR. The team also detected traces of extensive magmatism at the outer corners of the intersections between transform valleys and the mid-ocean ridges.

Using sophisticated numerical models, the team found an explanation for the phenomenon. According to this, the plate boundary along the transform fault is increasingly tilted at depth, so that shearing occurs. This causes extension of the seafloor, forming the deep transform valleys. Magmatism at the outer corners to the mid-ocean ridges then fills up the valleys, so that the fracture zones become much shallower. Oceanic crust that forms at the corners is therefore the only crust in the ocean that is formed by two-stage volcanism. What effects this has on its composition or, for example, the distribution of metals in the crust is still unknown.

Since transform faults are a fundamental type of plate boundary and frequent phenomenon along active plate boundaries in the oceans, this new finding is an important addition to the theory of plate tectonics and thus to understanding our planet. "Actually, the observation was obvious. But there are simply not enough high-resolution maps of the seafloor yet, so no one has noticed it until now," says Prof. Grevemeyer.

Tucson, Ariz. (March 16, 2021) - This week, a new, peer-reviewed scientific study finds that there is far more potential jaguar habitat in the U.S. than was previously thought. Scientists identified an area of more than 20 million acres that could support jaguars in the U.S., 27 times the size of designated critical habitat.

The results, published in the journal Oryx, are based on a review of 12 habitat models for jaguars within Arizona and New Mexico, conclusively identifying areas suitable for the recovery of these wild cats. Based on the expanded habitat area, the authors conclude that findings uncover new opportunities for jaguar conservation in North America that could address threats from habitat loss, climate change, and border infrastructure.

Bryan Bird, Director for Southwest Programs at Defenders of Wildlife and one of the study's co-authors, issued this statement:

"This fresh look at jaguar habitat in the U.S. identifies a much larger area that could support many more of these big cats. This expanded area of the Southwest is 27 times larger than the current designated critical habitat. We hope these findings will inspire renewed cooperation and result in more resident jaguars in the U.S."