Earth

Gold nanotubes - tiny hollow cylinders one thousandth the width of a human hair - could be used to treat mesothelioma, a type of cancer caused by exposure to asbestos, according to a team of researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Leeds.

In a study published today in journal Small, the researchers demonstrate that once inside the cancer cells, the nanotubes absorb light, causing them to heat up, thereby killing the cells.

More than 2,600 people are diagnosed in the UK each year with mesothelioma, a malignant form of cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. Although the use of asbestos is outlawed in the UK now, the country has the world's highest levels of mesothelioma because it imported vast amounts of asbestos in the post-war years. The global usage of asbestos remains high, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, which means mesothelioma will become a global problem.

"Mesothelioma is one of the 'hard-to-treat' cancers, and the best we can offer people with existing treatments is a few months of extra survival," said Dr Arsalan Azad from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research at the University of Cambridge. "There's an important unmet need for new, effective treatments."

In 2018, the University of Cambridge was awarded £10million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to help develop engineering solutions, including nanotech, to find ways to address hard-to-treat cancers.

In a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and University of Leeds, researchers have developed a form of gold nanotubes whose physical properties are 'tunable' - in other words, the team can tailor the wall thickness, microstructure, composition, and ability to absorb particular wavelengths of light.

The researchers added the nanotubes to mesothelioma cells cultured in the lab and found that they were absorbed by the cells, residing close to the nucleus, where the cell's DNA lies. When the team targeted the cells with a laser, the nanotubes absorbed the light and heated up, killing the mesothelioma cell.

Professor Stefan Marciniak, also from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, added: "The mesothelioma cells 'eat' the nanotubes, leaving them susceptible when we shine light on them. Laser light is able to penetrate deep into tissue without causing damage to surrounding tissue. It then gets absorbed by the nanotubes, which heat up and, we hope in the future, could be used to cause localised cancer-cell killing."

The team will be developing the work further to ensure the nanotubes are targeted to cancer cells with less effect on normal tissue.

The nanotubes are made in a two-step process. First, solid silver nanorods are created of the desired diameter. Gold is then deposited from solution onto the surface of the silver. As the gold builds-up at the surface, the silver dissolves from the inside to leave a hollow nanotube.

The approach advanced by the Leeds team allows these nanotubes to be developed at room temperature, which should make their manufacture at scale more feasible.

Professor Stephen Evans from the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leeds said: "Having control over the size and shape of the nanotubes allows us to tune them to absorb light where the tissue is transparent and will allow them to be used for both the imaging and treatment of cancers. The next stage will be to load these nanotubes with medicines for enhanced therapies."

Former rebel groups who transform into political parties have adopted a moderate stance after gaining power in more democratic political systems, a study shows.

In contrast, the tactics and policies of the former rebel groups remained unchanged if the issue which attracted supporters to them continued to remain. This is exacerbated in nations where there is a tradition of solving conflict outside of formal politics, often in a violent manner, according to the research.

The analysis of the former rebel groups, from Africa, the Balkans, Asia and Latin America, shows how the political environment at the time of the transformation of former rebel groups into political parties, and the timing of their of electoral victory, shapes how these formerly excluded parties behave once in power.

In countries with a legacy of one-party systems, the former rebel groups have been the least moderate, while post-rebel parties entering political systems with a tradition of competitive electoral politics have been comparatively more moderate as their power has been limited by opposition parties, most notably at the time of the first elections held after the conflict

In countries where power is rooted in the use of force - often combined with patronage - the groups eventually also used such methods to maintain power - if not already doing so - mimicking the environment they entered.

The research, by Dr Lise Storm from the University of Exeter, is published in the Open Journal of Political Science.

Dr Storm said: "Post-rebel parties who can no longer rely upon garnering support on the basis of the issues which drove their popularity during conflict are more likely to behave inclusively once in power and remain moderate in the longer term.

"Where the issue which attracted voters to them remained, parties were less likely to moderate as there was not much of an incentive for them to change. Where the importance of the issue driving support disappeared, the former rebel groups became more moderate in order to attract voters and win power."

Some of the groups examined still had an armed wing and some also had not renounced the use of violence. They had obtained government power via the electoral process, and some operated both as political movements and militant groups.

Dr Storm used qualitative data showing electoral success for 12 parties: the African National Congress in South Africa, the Conseil National pour la Défense de la Démocratie in Burundi, the Communist Party of Nepal, the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional in El Salvador, the Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste in East Timor, the Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica in Croatia, the Mouvement Patriotique du Salut in Chad , the National Resistance Movement in Uganda, the Parti Congolais du Travail in Congo Brazzaville, the Partia Demokratike e Kosovës in Kosovo, the Parti du Peuple pour la Reconstruction et la Démocratie in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Front Patriotique Rwandais (Inkotanyi ) in Rwanda.

Dr Storm said: "These findings have important implications for research into the inclusion of Islamist parties into formal politics and the debate on whether such parties are likely to moderate. The evidence from the experiences of the post-rebel parties in power, which share a similar background to the Islamist, shows that the issue is not one of whether such parties should be included or excluded from political participation, but rather how to best create an environment that facilitates Islamist moderation.

"Exclusionary authoritarian contexts breed immoderate post-rebel parties in power, whereas more inclusive, competitive regimes that rely on elections as a means to solve conflict facilitate more moderate behaviour amongst former rebel parties once in national government."

ORLANDO, Oct. 26, 2020 - A University of Central Florida researcher is working to make portable devices and electric vehicles stay charged longer by extending the life of the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries powering them.

Assistant Professor Yang Yang is doing this by making the batteries more efficient, with some of his latest work focusing on keeping an internal metal structure, the anode, from falling apart over time by applying a thin, film-like coating of copper and tin. The new technique is detailed in a recent study in the journal Advanced Materials.

An anode generates electrons that travel to a similar structure, the cathode, inside the battery, thus creating a current and power.

"Our work has shown that the rate of degradation of the anode can be reduced by more than 1,000 percent by using a copper-tin film compared to a tin film that is often used," said Yang, who is with UCF's NanoScience Technology Center.

Yang is an expert in battery improvement including making them safer and able to withstand extreme temperatures.

The technique is unique because of its use of the copper-tin alloy and is an important improvement in stabilizing rechargeable battery performance, Yang says.

It is also scalable for use in the smallest smartphone battery to larger batteries that power electric cars and trucks.

"We are motivated by our most recent research progress in alloyed materials for various applications," he says. "Each alloy is unique in composition, structure and property."

Macrophages, cells that help engulf and destroy harmful organisms in the body, tend to be characterized as the Jekyll and Hyde of the immune system.

Macrophages are essential first responders in fighting off infections and marshalling other immune cells to the scene. But they also play a major role in contributing to the growth and metastasis of many cancers, especially breast and pancreatic cancer.

New studies at the Morgridge Institute for Research paint a far less simple picture of macrophages, however. Rather than just "good" and "bad" populations, they find a surprisingly wide range of functionality, and better defining those differences may lead to more effective immunotherapies to fight cancer.

Writing this week in the journal Cancer Research, Morgridge researcher Tiffany Heaster and colleagues describe using a combination of technologies to better reveal macrophage function and behavior. The team applied fluorescence imaging to measure the precise metabolic activity of cells, then combined it with 3D microfluidic technology allowing them to see, in real time, how the cells migrate and what role they play.

Importantly, the technologies helped them identify a distinct population of macrophage cells that migrate very actively toward cancer cells in their model -- ones that may have outsized importance in promoting cancer growth. They used both mouse and human cells in the study and found comparable results, indicating this could be a powerful tool for examining the therapeutic potential of macrophages.

"There seems to be more of a spectrum of macrophage phenotypes, and it's been really hard to get at what these phenotypes look like with standard measures," says Heaster, who is now a senior researcher at Genentech after completing her PhD in biomedical engineering at UW-Madison. "We really need to understand these better before we can target the bad macrophages and promote the good ones."

Today, scientists classify two types of macrophages that operate in the tumor micro-environment, Heaster says. The first, called M1, actively kill cancer cells through methods such as piercing or eating the cells and stimulating secondary immune responses. The second, M2, actively support tumor growth by suppressing immune recognition and promoting blood vessel growth (angiogenesis).

They also appear to be a major culprit in metastasis. "There have been studies that have visualized how macrophages kind of latch on to each other and direct traffic (of cancer cells) toward the vasculature to escape," she says.

Heaster says there is a very small subset of immunotherapies that target macrophages today, but they have limited uses compared to other immune cells, such as T cells, because they are poorly understood.

Heaster conducted the research in the lab of Melissa Skala, a Morgridge investigator and professor of biomedical engineering at UW-Madison. Skala says the key innovation is the convergence of two powerful technologies that give scientists a new way to study cancer. Skala is the lead developer of photonics-based technologies to develop personalized treatment plans for cancer. The microfluidics advances originated in the lab of Dave Beebe, a UW-Madison biomedical engineer and co-author on this project.

"Tiffany's technology is helpful because it provides that single-cell resolution, and it provides spatial information so you can understand how different populations of macrophages are behaving metabolically, and how they're distributed throughout the tumor," Skala says.

Addressing macrophages with immunotherapy would help precisely because they are so diverse and may behave differently from one patient to the next, Skala says.

"It's one piece in a complex puzzle to promote anti-tumor immunity," Skala says. "Right now, most of the focus is on T-cells. But macrophages also orchestrate this anti-tumor immunity, so I think a lot of the therapies that are targeting immune involvement are also affecting macrophages. We're trying to understand how."

University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science researcher Shane Elipot proposes a new approach to monitoring global sea-level rise. Using the existing NOAA Global Drifter Program array of roughly 1,200 buoys that drift freely with ocean currents, Elipot suggests adding additional instruments to record their height, or the "level of the sea" they ride on, to collect long-term data on the average sea levels across the world's oceans.

Elipot's research, published in the American Geophysical Union's journal Geophysical Research Letters, demonstrates that if these current drifters recorded altitude and transmit that data along with their geographical positions every hour, scientists could better understand global and regional sea-level changes, especially the accelerating sea-level rise associated with climate change and global warming.

"Sea-level rise is a serious threat to our society, especially in coastal areas like Miami," said Elipot, a research assistant professor of ocean sciences. "While tremendous advances have been made in understanding the exact causes of sea level, continuing and resilient monitoring of sea level is necessary for planning and management at local and global scales."

Elipot has secured a research contract with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory to conduct a pilot project to construct buoys that will record their heights as they drift. This pilot project will be conducted with colleagues from NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic Meteorological Laboratory and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. These drifters will be built at Scripps and tested off both the UM Rosenstiel School and Scripps piers.

Immune response is a balancing act: Too much can lead to inflammatory or autoimmune disease; too little could lead to a serious infection. Regulatory T cells, or Tregs, are important players in striking this balance, acting as "brakes" on the immune response so it doesn't go overboard.

Consequently, controlling the numbers and activity of Tregs is crucial in maintaining health. New findings from a multi-institutional team, including the School of Dental Medicine's George Hajishengallis, suggest that targeting the molecule DEL-1, which promotes the generation and immunosuppressive activity of Tregs, could be an effective way to treat conditions where taming an inflammatory or autoimmune response is desired.

The team reported their findings in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

"In earlier work we saw a correlation: During resolution of inflammation, Tregs numbers went up and DEL-1 levels went up," Hajishengallis says. "We wanted to understand how the two were connected."

Hajishengallis and colleagues, including Triantafyllos Chavakis of Technical University Dresden, had earlier used a mouse model of periodontitis, severe gum disease, to show that DEL-1 promotes the resolution of inflammation--in other words, helps the body return to a normal state. In the new study, they relied on this model again to probe the relationship between DEL-1 and Tregs which, like DEL-1, also become abundant during the inflammation-resolution process.

Mice that were bred to lack DEL-1 had significantly lower levels of Tregs than mice with DEL-1. Meanwhile their levels of Th17 cells, a T cell type associated with inflammation, went up. An injection of DEL-1 could restore levels of Tregs in the mice otherwise deficient in the protein.

The correlation offered a clue but not evidence of a direct relationship between DEL-1 and Tregs. "There's a reciprocity between Tregs and Th17 cells," says Hajishengallis. "So with this result we didn't know if DEL-1 is acting on Tregs or Th17 cells."

To firm up this connection, they performed experiments using mouse cells in culture to see whether DEL-1 could influence the development of T cells into either mature Th17 or Treg cells. While DEL-1 did not appear to directly influence the generation of Th17 cells, its effect on Tregs "was striking," Hajishnegallis says. Their findings held when looking in human cells, with the generation of Tregs enhanced in the presence of DEL-1.

What's more, the researchers found that T cells' immunosuppressive function--a characteristic supported by Tregs--was strengthened when DEL-1 was present.

With more confidence that DEL-1 was supporting the activity of Tregs, the researchers pursued a series of additional experiments that unveiled more details about the signalling pathway in which DEL-1 was acting. They found that DEL-1 interacted with a molecule on the T cell surface which induced a transcription factor called RUNX1 that promotes the expression and stability of FOXP3, a "master regulator" of Tregs. "Without FOXP3 you cannot have Tregs," Hajishengallis says.

Their work showed that DEL-1 was also acting epigenetically to stabilize FOXP3 by removing small molecular "tags" known as methyl groups located in the region of this gene.

FOXP3 deficiencies are indeed linked to serious conditions in humans. IPEX syndrome, for example, an X-linked condition caused by a FOXP3 mutation, causes people to have very low numbers of Tregs and, frequently to develop multiple autoimmune diseases.

Though the researchers had begun with a gum disease model, they believed that the link between DEL-1 and Tregs was more universal and thus investigated the link in a mouse model of acute lung inflammation, finding the same pattern: A dearth of DEL-1 was associated with severely reduced numbers of Tregs and a poorer resolution of inflammation.

In future work, Hajishengallis and his collaborators hope to go deeper into the mechanism, testing whether the source of DEL-1 matters in terms of its regulation of Tregs. Other groups, they note, may want to begin to take the findings in a translational direction to apply them in models of autoimmune diseases, which could be tamed by a shift in balance toward immunosuppression.

"I believe DEL-1 is not just for periodontitis and inflammation, but is also a potential target in autoimmune diseases," Hajishengallis says.

An international multi-institution team of scientists has synthesized graphene nanoribbons - ultrathin strips of carbon atoms - on a titanium dioxide surface using an atomically precise method that removes a barrier for custom-designed carbon nanostructures required for quantum information sciences.

Graphene is composed of single-atom-thick layers of carbon taking on ultralight, conductive and extremely strong mechanical characteristics. The popularly studied material holds promise to transform electronics and information science because of its highly tunable electronic, optical and transport properties.

When fashioned into nanoribbons, graphene could be applied in nanoscale devices; however, the lack of atomic-scale precision in using current state-of-the-art "top-down" synthetic methods -- cutting a graphene sheet into atom-narrow strips - stymie graphene's practical use.

Researchers developed a "bottom-up" approach -- building the graphene nanoribbon directly at the atomic level in a way that it can be used in specific applications, which was conceived and realized at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, or CNMS, located at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

This absolute precision method helped to retain the prized properties of graphene monolayers as the segments of graphene get smaller and smaller. Just one or two atoms difference in width can change the properties of the system dramatically, turning a semiconducting ribbon into a metallic ribbon. The team's results were described in Science.

ORNL's Marek Kolmer, An-Ping Li and Wonhee Ko of the CNMS' Scanning Tunneling Microscopy group collaborated on the project with researchers from Espeem, a private research company, and several European institutions: Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Jagiellonian University and Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.

ORNL's one-of-a-kind expertise in scanning tunneling microscopy was critical to the team's success, both in manipulating the precursor material and verifying the results.

"These microscopes allow you to directly image and manipulate matter at the atomic scale," Kolmer, a postdoctoral fellow and the lead author of the paper, said. "The tip of the needle is so fine that it is essentially the size of a single atom. The microscope is moving line by line and constantly measuring the interaction between the needle and the surface and rendering an atomically precise map of surface structure."

In past graphene nanoribbon experiments, the material was synthesized on a metallic substrate, which unavoidably suppresses the electronic properties of the nanoribbons.

"Having the electronic properties of these ribbons work as designed is the whole story. From an application point of view, using a metal substrate is not useful because it screens the properties," Kolmer said. "It's a big challenge in this field - how do we effectively decouple the network of molecules to transfer to a transistor?"

The current decoupling approach involves removing the system from the ultra-high vacuum conditions and putting it through a multistep wet chemistry process, which requires etching the metal substrate away. This process contradicts the careful, clean precision used in creating the system.

To find a process that would work on a nonmetallic substrate, Kolmer began experimenting with oxide surfaces, mimicking the strategies used on metal. Eventually, he turned to a group of European chemists who specialize in fluoroarene chemistry and began to home in on a design for a chemical precursor that would allow for synthesis directly on the surface of rutile titanium dioxide.

"On-surface synthesis allows us to make materials with very high precision and to achieve that, we started with molecular precursors," Li, a senior author of the paper who led the team at CNMS, said. "The reactions we needed to obtain certain properties are essentially programmed into the precursor. We know the temperature at which a reaction will occur and by tuning the temperatures we can control the sequence of reactions."

"Another advantage of on-surface synthesis is the wide pool of candidate materials that can be used as precursors, allowing for a high level of programmability," Li added.

The precise application of chemicals to decouple the system also helped maintain an open-shell structure, allowing researchers atom-level access to build upon and study molecules with unique quantum properties. "It was particularly rewarding to find that these graphene ribbons have coupled magnetic states, also called quantum spin states, at their ends," Li said. "These states provide us a platform to study magnetic interactions, with the hope of creating qubits for applications in quantum information science." As there is little disturbance to magnetic interactions in carbon-based molecular materials, this method allows for programming long-lasting magnetic states from within the material.

Their approach creates a high-precision ribbon, decoupled from the substrate, which is desirable for spintronic and quantum information science applications. The resulting system is ideally suited to be explored and built upon further, possibly as a nanoscale transistor as it has a wide bandgap, across the space between electronic states that is needed to convey an on/off signal.

Kolmer recently joined DOE's Ames Laboratory in a research staff position.

To see wildlife in the Triangle, sometimes you need go no further than your own backyard. A new study helps explain why some animals are sometimes more often found in suburban areas than wild ones: because people are feeding them - sometimes accidentally - and to a lesser degree, providing them with shelter.

"They're using the gardens a little bit, they're using the brush piles a little bit, and they're using the water features, but feeding has the most dramatic influence on animal activity in the backyard," said Roland Kays, research associate professor at North Carolina State University and director of the Biodiversity & Earth Observation Lab at the NC Museum of Natural Resources.

The study, published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, was designed to understand what scientists call the "urban wildlife paradox." While scientists know human development generally causes biodiversity loss, they've also found that moderately developed areas can have an abundance and variety of mammals compared with wild areas.

"There's this idea that nature and humans don't coexist well," Kays said. "But what we've been finding is that when it comes to mammals, especially in North America, they actually do pretty well around people. You end up with high abundance. You expect there to be fewer animals, and there's actually more."

Researchers wanted to know why that is. To test whether food and shelter are attracting animals, researchers set up cameras in the backyards of 58 homes near Raleigh, Durham, and outside of Chapel Hill, as well as in nearby forests in rural and urban areas nearby for comparison. The study was conducted in collaboration with scientists at the University of Montana.

By analyzing the pictures they found, researchers discovered seven species -squirrels, gray and red fox, Virginia opossum, eastern cottontail rabbits, woodchucks and eastern chipmunks - were more frequently seen in yards compared to forests. Eleven species, such as white-tailed deer, squirrels and raccoons, were more common in suburban forests compared to rural ones.

"This basically confirmed the urban-wildlife paradox, showing that some species are more abundant in yards," Kays said. "It's not a big surprise if you live in the suburbs - you see the animals. It's the squirrels, raccoons, deer and opossum."

Feeding animals - mainly at birdfeeders - had the strongest impact on the abundance of animals in a yard. Eastern gray squirrels were the most common sight at feeders. They were more common at feeders than in suburban or rural forests. Other common species at feeders were cottontail rabbits, raccoons and opossums.

"This supports the idea that direct human subsidies are a big part of the explanation for the urban-wildlife paradox," Kays said. "It shows that individual decisions by homeowners and private property owners can have a big impact on the wildlife in the backyard and living in the area."

Predators such as coyotes and foxes were slightly more common in yards when other prey animals, such as squirrels or rabbits, were more abundant. However, the effect wasn't strong - the researchers said it would take the number of prey to increase by 713 times to double the number of predators in the yard. They only observed one coyote and one red fox eating compost.

"There was some attraction to prey, but it was a pretty small effect," Kays said.

Meanwhile, fences were deterrents to fox and other predators, and pets were deterrents to opossums and raccoons.

Kays said the findings raise questions about what homeowners should do, and whether attracting wildlife is good or bad.

"You see widespread recommendations: Don't feed the bears. Where do you draw the line from small birds to squirrels, rabbits and raccoons? When does it become bad to feed the animals, even if you're doing it accidentally?" Kays said. "On one hand many people enjoy having wildlife around and they can help support a healthy local ecosystem; however, they could cause conflict with people."

In recent years, improvements in cancer therapy have led to a significant increase in cancer survivorship. Experts estimate that by 2022, the United States will have 18 million cancer survivors, but a subset of those survivors will have long-term health problems to be addressed.

One rare complication of cancer treatment is the development of a secondary blood cancer -- therapy-related acute myeloid leukemia or myelodysplastic syndrome. These blood cancers are very aggressive and do not respond well to treatment. Historically, doctors thought that cancer treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation caused an accumulation of mutations in the blood that led to these therapy-related cancers.

In recent years, however, researchers have found that these mutations in the blood can also occur spontaneously with increasing age. This phenomenon is called clonal hematopoiesis (CH), and it's found in 10 to 20% of all people over age 70. The presence of CH increases the risk of developing a blood cancer. Using data from MSK-IMPACTTM, Memorial Sloan Kettering's clinical genomic sequencing test, researchers have shown that CH is also frequent in cancer patients.

In a study published in Nature Genetics on October 26, 2020, MSK investigators sought to understand the relationship between CH in cancer patients and the risk of later developing a treatment-related blood cancer. The study included data from 24,000 people treated at MSK. The researchers found CH in about one-third of them.

"Because many people treated at MSK have genetic testing done using MSK-IMPACT, we have this amazing resource that allows us to study CH in cancer patients at a scope that nobody else has been able to do," says physician-scientist Kelly Bolton, lead author of the study.

Decoding Genetic Changes Specific to Cancer Treatment

Focusing on a subset of patients on whom they had more detailed data, the investigators observed increased rates of CH in people who had already received treatment. They made specific connections between cancer therapies such as radiation therapy and particular chemotherapies -- for example certain platinum drugs or agents called topoisomerase II inhibitors -- and the presence of CH.

Unlike the CH changes found in the general population, the team found that CH mutations after cancer treatment occur most frequently in the genes whose protein products protect the genome from damage. One of these genes is TP53, which is frequently referred to as "the guardian of the genome."

The work was supported by the Precision Interception and Prevention (PIP) program at MSK, a multidisciplinary research program focused on identifying people who have the highest risk for developing cancer and improving methods for screening, early detection, and risk assessment.

The authors embarked on a three-year study to understand the relationship between CH and cancer therapy. For this part of the research, more than 500 people were screened for CH when they first came to MSK and then at a later point during their treatment. One finding from the study was that people with pre-existing CH whose blood carried mutations related to DNA damage repair such as TP53, were more likely to have those mutations grow after receiving cancer therapies, when compared to people who did not receive treatment.

"This finding provides a direct link between mutation type, specific therapies, and how these cells progress towards becoming a blood cancer," says Elli Papaemmanuil of MSK's Center for Computational Oncology, one of the two senior authors of the study. "Our hope is that this research will help us to understand the implications of having CH, and to begin to develop models that predict who with CH is at higher risk for developing a blood cancer."

For a subset of patients with CH who developed therapy-related blood cancers, the researchers showed that blood cells acquired further mutations with time and progressed to leukemia. "We are now routinely screening our patients for the presence of CH mutations," adds computational biologist Ahmet Zehir, Director of Clinical Bioinformatics and the study's co-senior author. "The ability to introduce real-time CH screening for our patient population has allowed us to establish a clinic dedicated to caring for cancer patients with CH. As we continue to study more patients in the clinic, we expect to learn more about how to use these findings to find ways to detect treatment-related blood cancers early when they may be more treatable."

Applying Findings to Future Treatments

In the future, this research may help to guide therapy by indicating whether some chemotherapy drugs are more appropriate than others in people with CH. People who are at a high risk of developing a treatment-related leukemia also may benefit from a different treatment schedule. "We hope that this research will allow us to ultimately map which CH mutations a person has and use that information to tailor their primary care and also mitigate the long-term risk of developing blood cancer," Dr. Papaemmanuil says.

"We explored this in collaboration with investigators from the National Cancer Institute, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Moffit Cancer Center, and MD Anderson, and showed that such risk-adapted treatment decisions could achieve significant reduction of leukemia risk, without affecting outcomes for the primary cancer," Dr. Bolton adds.

The investigators also hope to use the data from this study to develop better methods for detecting CH-related blood cancers when they first begin to form -- and potentially to develop new interventions that could prevent CH from ever progressing to cancer. "We're excited about the idea of continuing to grow and expand the CH clinic as part of the integrated vision of PIP," says physician-scientist Ross Levine, who leads MSK's CH clinic and is a member of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program.

"In addition to continuing to follow people who are at the highest risk of developing a secondary cancer, we want to continue to use the clinic as a vehicle for studies like this," he adds. "Our long-term goal is to move toward therapeutic interventions and preventing disease in a way that we've never been able to do before."

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — Although the link may not be obvious, healthcare and climate change — two issues that pose major challenges around the world — are in fact more connected than society may realize. So say researchers, who are increasingly proving this to be true.

Case in point: A new study by UC Santa Barbara’s Andy MacDonald found that improving healthcare in rural Indonesia reduced incentives for illegal logging in a nearby national park, averting millions of dollars’ worth of atmospheric carbon emissions.

The analysis, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that deforestation in the national park declined 70% in the 10 years after an affordable health clinic opened in the area. This equates to more than $65 million worth of avoided carbon emissions when translated to the European carbon market, the study reports.

“The results illustrate a strong link between human health and conservation in tropical forests in the developing world,” said MacDonald, an assistant researcher at the Earth Research Institute who coauthored the study with UC Santa Barbara’s David Lopez-Carr and colleagues at Stanford University, North Carolina State University Raleigh, Oregon Health and Science University, Natural Capital Advisors, and two NGOs involved in the intervention.

The Indonesian clinic accepts barter as payment and gives discounts to villages based on community-wide reductions in logging. Given its success, it could provide a blueprint for preserving the world’s biodiverse carbon sinks while reducing poverty and illness.

“This innovative model has clear global health implications,” said coauthor Michele Barry, senior associate dean of global health at Stanford and director of the Center for Innovation in Global Health. “Health and climate can and should be addressed in unison, and done in coordination with and respect for local communities.”

Every second, more than 100 trees disappear from tropical forests around the world. These forests, some of the world’s most important carbon reservoirs, are crucial to slowing climate change and mass extinction.

The current paradigm for conserving tropical forests – establishing protected areas – often excludes and disenfranchises local communities. This failure to address people’s needs can lead communities with few economic alternatives to illegally log and convert the land. Lack of access to high-quality, affordable healthcare can compound the problem by perpetuating cycles of poor health and expanding out-of-pocket costs.

With this in mind, the nonprofit organizations Alam Sehat Lestari and Health In Harmony in 2007 established a healthcare clinic adjacent to Gunung Palung National Park in West Kalimantan, Indonesia, with the support of the local government. The clinic was able to serve thousands of patients by accepting a range of alternative payments, such as tree seedlings, handicrafts and labor – an approach that was created in collaboration with the communities themselves.

Through agreements with most of the region’s district leaders, the clinic also provided discounts to villages that could show evidence of reductions in illegal logging. Between 1985 and 2001, this region had lost 60% of its forest to this activity. In addition to affordable health care, the intervention provided training in sustainable, organic agriculture and a chainsaw buyback program.

Researchers worked with the two non-profits to analyze more than 10 years of the clinic’s patient health records, coupled with satellite observations of forest cover over that time. “Private foundations funded the interventions, but it’s innovative new programs at Stanford and the University of California that are funding the research,” MacDonald said.

The medical care led to a significant decline in a range of diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and diabetes. At the same time, satellite images of the national park showed a 70% reduction in deforestation, compared to forest loss at control sites, an amount equivalent to more than 6,770 acres of rainforest.

“We didn’t know what to expect when we started evaluating the program’s health and conservation impacts, but we were continually amazed that the data suggested such a strong link between improvements in healthcare access and tropical forest conservation,” said lead author Isabel Jones, who recently earned her doctorate in biology at Stanford. Looking more closely at community-level logging rates, the researchers found that the greatest drop-offs in logging occurred adjacent to villages with the highest rates of clinic usage.

A global blueprint

“This is a case study of how to design, implement and evaluate a planetary health intervention that addresses human health and the health of rainforests on which our health depends,” said coauthor Susanne Sokolow, a senior research scientist at Stanford.

Globally, about 35% of protected areas are traditionally owned, managed, used or occupied by Indigenous and local communities. Yet the perspective and guidance of Indigenous peoples and local communities are rarely considered in the design of conservation and climate mitigation programs. By contrast, the Indonesian clinic’s success grew out of the early and continued input of local communities who identified the mechanisms driving health and environmental problems as well as possible solutions.

Such holistic approaches can have greater long-term effects by preserving and restoring the ecosystem services that protect human health. These include natural filtering processes that reduce the risk of waterborne diseases and shade-providing forest canopies that reduce ground temperature and heat-related illnesses.

“The data support two important conclusions: human health is integral to the conservation of nature and vice versa, and we need to listen to the guidance of rainforest communities who know best how to live in balance with their forests,” said Monica Nirmala, the executive director of the clinic from 2014 to 2018 and current board member of Health In Harmony.

The clinic in West Kalimantan is still active, and the researchers are currently working on a follow-up project to see whether it and similar interventions in Indonesia have alleviated some of the shock from COVID-19 both on human health and deforestation.

“We would expect illegal logging activity to respond to changes in timber market prices or loss of income associated with COVID-19,” MacDonald said. “We want to know whether the interventions buffered communities against these effects, as well as whether they increased the communities’ resilience in terms of health and wellbeing.

“Health in Harmony is also expanding to Madagascar and Brazil”, he added, “and we want to be able to robustly evaluate the impacts of their interventions there.”

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- A growing number of demonstrators taking to the streets to protest police brutality and racial injustice may include teenagers, a new national poll suggests.

One in 12 parents say their teen has attended an event about racism or police reform this year, according to the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health at Michigan Medicine.

And while many parents are addressing the national issue with their children at home, the Mott Poll report indicates racial differences between families when it comes to these interactions.

Three quarters of parents say they've talked with their teen about the ongoing protests. But Black parents are more likely than white parents to report in-depth discussions (39% vs 29%) and to say their teen has attended an event about racism (16% vs 6%).

"Many families are engaging around the topic of racism and what's been happening in the country over recent months, with one in three white parents and two in five Black parents having deep conversations about the protests with their teens," says Mott Poll co-director Sarah Clark, M.P.H.

"Parents may have seen their teen showing a more complex interest in the world around them and a substantial number of these young people appear to have moved beyond discussion to taking action."

Meanwhile, 43% of parents surveyed have had some discussion with teens and 27% say they've had minimal or no conversations about the demonstrations with their kids.

Concerns about teen's safety at demonstrations

The vast majority of parents whose teen attended a demonstration or other event about systemic racism supported their teen's involvement (55 % enthusiastically and 38 % with some reservations); 5% of parents disapproved and 2% did not know about the teen's attendance, according to the report.

White parents are nearly twice as likely than Black parents (57% vs 31%) to believe teens do not belong at these demonstrations.

Parents' top concern is their teen's safety: 73% of parents worry the demonstrators may become violent while 58% are concerned the police may use force against protesters. Concern about demonstrators becoming violent is higher among white parents (76% vs 62%), while concern about police use of force is more common among Black parents (77% vs 49%).

Almost half of parents (45%) say they are worried that their teen does not understand the risks of participating in demonstrations. This includes concern that teens attending demonstrations could get arrested (39%) and don't know their legal rights (35%).

"We saw substantial racial differences involving views on who might instigate violence at a demonstration," Clark says. "Black parents are much more concerned than white parents about the use of force by police while white parents are more concerned about the demonstrators becoming violent.

"This may reflect parents' own experiences, as well as the influence of media portrayals of the demonstrations and the events leading up to them."

More white parents than Black parents believe that teens are too immature to understand the real challenges that police face (46% vs 21%) and that demonstrations show a lack of respect toward police (46% vs 13%).

Black parents were also more likely to say the topic is stressful for their teen, who may have a higher risk of encountering police brutality. Half of Black parents say thinking about police brutality and racism causes stress for their child compared to a quarter of white parents.

"The higher stress level reported by Black parents is understandable. The demonstrations highlighted numerous Black victims of police violence, and Black teens may see themselves at risk," says Clark. "Many Black parents have difficult conversations with their children from early on about how racism may impact their lives.

"Our poll findings reflect families' different lived experiences and perspectives. These experiences will likely shape parents' views on their teens being involved in demonstrations and other actions to address systemic racism."

The national-representative poll is based on 1,025 responses from parents of teens 13-18 years who answered questions about their views on teen involvement in demonstrations.

The first large-scale study of the risks that countries face from dependence on water, energy and land resources has found that globalisation may be decreasing, rather than increasing, the security of global supply chains.

Countries meet their needs for goods and services through domestic production and international trade. As a result, countries place pressures on natural resources both within and beyond their borders.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge used macroeconomic data to quantify these pressures. They found that the vast majority of countries and industrial sectors are highly exposed both directly, via domestic production, and indirectly, via imports, to over-exploited and insecure water, energy and land resources. However, the researchers found that the greatest resource risk is due to international trade, mainly from remote countries.

The researchers are calling for an urgent enquiry into the scale and source of consumed goods and services, both in individual countries and globally, as economies seek to rebuild in the wake of Covid-19. Their study, published in the journal Global Environmental Change, also invites critical reflection on whether globalisation is compatible with achieving sustainable and resilient supply chains.

Over the past several decades, the worldwide economy has become highly interconnected through globalisation: it is now not uncommon for each component of a particular product to originate from a different country. Globalisation allows companies to make their products almost anywhere in the world in order to keep costs down.

Many mainstream economists argue this offers countries a source of competitive advantage and growth potential. However, many nations impose demands on already stressed resources in other countries in order to satisfy their own high levels of consumption.

This interconnectedness also increases the amount of risk at each step of a global supply chain. For example, the UK imports 50% of its food. A drought, flood or any severe weather event in another country puts these food imports at risk.

Now, the researchers have quantified the global water, land and energy use of189 countries and shown that countries which are highly dependent on trade are potentially more at risk from resource insecurity, especially as climate change continues to accelerate and severe weather events such as droughts and floods become more common.

"There has been plenty of research comparing countries in terms of their water, energy and land footprints, but what hasn't been studied is the scale and source of their risks," said Dr Oliver Taherzadeh from Cambridge's Department of Geography. "We found that the role of trade has been massively underplayed as a source of resource insecurity - it's actually a bigger source of risk than domestic production."

To date, resource use studies have been limited to certain regions or sectors, which prevents a systematic overview of resource pressures and their source. This study offers a flexible approach to examining pressures across the system at various geographical and sectoral scales.

"This type of analysis hasn't been carried out for a large number of countries before," said Taherzadeh. "By quantifying the pressures that our consumption places on water, energy and land resources in far-off corners of the world, we can also determine how much risk is built into our interconnected world."

The authors of the study linked indices designed to capture insecure water, energy, and land resource use, to a global trade model in order to examine the scale and sources of national resource insecurity from domestic production and imports.

Countries with large economies, such as the US, China and Japan, are highly exposed to water shortages outside their borders due to their volume of international trade. However, many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, such as Kenya, actually face far less risk as they are not as heavily networked in the global economy and are relatively self-sufficient in food production.

In addition to country-level data, the researchers also examined the risks associated with specific sectors. Surprisingly, one of the sectors identified in Taherzadeh's wider research that had the most high-risk water and land use - among the top 1% of nearly 15,000 sectors analysed - was dog and cat food manufacturing in the USA, due to its high demand for animal products.

"Covid-19 has shown just how poorly-prepared governments and businesses are for a global crisis," said Taherzadeh. "But however bad the direct and indirect consequences of Covid-19 have been, climate breakdown, biodiversity collapse and resource insecurity are far less predictable problems to manage - and the potential consequences are far more severe. If the 'green economic recovery' is to respond to these challenges, we need radically rethink the scale and source of consumption."

A first-of-its-kind global survey shows the initial phase of the COVID-19 lockdown dramatically altered our personal habits, largely for the worse.

"The stay-at-home orders did result in one major health positive. Overall, healthy eating increased because we ate out less frequently. However, we snacked more. We got less exercise. We went to bed later and slept more poorly. Our anxiety levels doubled," said Leanne Redman, PhD, Associate Executive Director for Scientific Education at Pennington Biomedical Research Center.

The global survey evaluated the inadvertent changes in health behaviors that took place under the pandemic's widespread restrictions. Researchers found that the lockdown's effects were magnified among people with obesity.

"Overall, people with obesity improved their diets the most. But they also experienced the sharpest declines in mental health and the highest incidence of weight gain," Dr. Redman said. "One-third of people with obesity gained weight during the lockdown, compared to 20.5 percent of people with normal weight or overweight."

The online survey study ran during the month of April. More than 12,000 people worldwide took a look at the survey and 7,754 completed the detailed online questionnaire. The majority of the respondents were in the United States, with half from Louisiana. Residents of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and more than 50 other countries also responded.

Those who took the survey reacted to the pandemic in largely the same way whether they live in Louisiana, elsewhere in the United States or abroad.

"This study is the first to survey thousands of people across the globe on lifestyle behavior changes in response to stay-at-home orders. Groundbreaking research like this is part and parcel of Pennington Biomedical's mission. The study demonstrates that chronic diseases like obesity affect our health beyond the physical," said Executive Director John Kirwan, PhD. "Dr. Redman's study is just one of many initiatives the center launched to help understand COVID-19's impact and to slow its spread."

The research team would like physicians and scientists to modify the way they manage patients with obesity in two ways, said Emily Flanagan, PhD, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Redman's Reproductive Endocrinology and Women's Health Laboratory.

By increasing the number of mental health screenings during and after the pandemic.

By remaining connected to patients/study participants through remote visits and telehealth to prevent irreversible health effects from the pandemic. So-called virtual visits can assuage patients' concerns about the safety of in-person visits.

Orono, Maine -- The Falkland Islands are a South Atlantic refuge for some of the world's most important seabird species, including five species of penguins, Great Shearwaters, and White-chinned Petrels. In recent years, their breeding grounds in the coastal tussac (Poa flabellata) grasslands have come under increasing pressure from sheep grazing and erosion. And unlike other regions of the globe, there has been no long-term monitoring of the responses of these burrowing and ground nesting seabirds to climate change.

A 14,000-year paleoecological reconstruction of the sub-Antarctic islands led by University of Maine researchers has found that seabird establishment occurred during a period of regional cooling 5,000 years ago. Their populations, in turn, shifted the Falkland Islands ecosystems through the deposit of high concentrations of guano that helped nourish tussac, produce peat and increase the incidence of fire.

This terrestrial-marine link is critical to the islands' grasslands conservation efforts going forward, says Dulcinea Groff, who led the research as a UMaine Ph.D. student in ecology and environmental sciences, and part of a National Science Foundation-funded Interdisciplinary Graduate Education Research Traineeship (IGERT) in Adaptation to Abrupt Climate Change (A2C2). The connection of nutrients originating in the marine ecosystem that are transferred to the terrestrial ecosystem enrich the islands' nutrient-poor soil, thereby making the Falkland Islands sensitive to changes in climate and land use.

The terrestrial-marine linkage in the Falkland Islands was the focus of Groff's dissertation in 2018.

"Our work emphasizes just how important the nutrients in seabird poop are for the ongoing efforts to restore and conserve their grassland habitats. It also raises the question about where seabirds will go as the climate continues to warm," says Groff, who conducted the research in the Falkland Islands during expeditions in 2014 and 2016 led by Jacquelyn Gill, an associate professor of paleoecology and plant ecology in the UMaine Climate Change Institute.

"Our 14,000-year record shows that seabirds established at Surf Bay during cooler climates. Seabird conservation efforts in the South Atlantic should be prepared for these species to move to new breeding grounds in a warmer world, and those locations may not be protected," says Groff, who is now a postdoctoral research scientist at the University of Wyoming.

The UMaine expedition team, which included Kit Hamley, then a master's student in Quaternary studies and a Climate Change Institute Fellow, collected a 476-centimeter peat column from Surf Bay, East Falkland. The 14,000-year record revealed in the undecomposed tussac leaves of the peat column "captures the development of a terrestrial-marine linkage that supports some of the most important breeding colonies of seabirds in the Southern Ocean today," according to the research team, which published its findings in the journal Science Advances.

The absence of seabirds at the East Falklands site prior to 5,000 years ago suggests that seabirds may be sensitive to warmer mediated sea surface temperatures, which can impact their food supply, according to the research team. With a warming South Atlantic today, the question is whether the Falkland Islands, about 300 miles east of South America, will continue to be a seabird breeding "hot spot."

"Our work suggests that as the Southern Ocean continues to warm in the coming decades, the Falkland Islands seabird communities may undergo abrupt turnover or collapse, which could happen on the order of decades," according to the research team, which, in addition to Groff, Hamley (now a UMaine doctoral student) and Gill, involved Trevor Lessard and Kayla Greenawalt of UMaine, Moriaki Yasuhara of the University of Hong Kong, and Paul Brickle of the South Atlantic Environmental Research Institute, all co-authors on the American Association for the Advancement of Science journal article.

The Falkland Islands are at the boundary of a number of potential climate drivers, note the researchers. And P. flabellata peatlands have the world's highest accumulation rates, "providing an unusually high-resolution record capable of recording abrupt change" -- preserved charcoal, seabird guano and pollen data that can be used to analyze fire history, seabird population abundance and vegetation composition, respectively.

In the Falklands, where there are no native mammals or trees, settlers introduced sheep in the 17th century. Today, residents make their livelihoods from fishing, sheep farming and tourism.

The 14,000-year record from East Falkland revealed that for 9,000 years before the arrival of seabirds, the region was dominated by low levels of grasses, a heathland of ferns and dwarf Ericaceous shrubs. About 5,000 years ago, the researchers say, an "abrupt transition" appears to occur. Concentrations in bio-elements such as phosphorus and zinc increase. Grass pollen accumulation rates skyrocket, indicating the establishment of tussac grasslands within 200 years of the establishment of seabird colonies on the island. Also found in the core: increased accumulation rates of peat and charcoal.

It's clear that the addition of seabird populations bringing nutrients from the marine environment to the island drove changes in the terrestrial plant community structure, composition and function, according to the researchers, as well as increased fire activity and nutrient cycling.

What remains unclear is what drove the abrupt ecosystem shift, says Gill, one of the world's leading authorities on paleo-ecosystems, including the impacts of climate change and extinction, and the geographical distribution of living things through space and time.

"We know seabirds arrived at Surf Bay during a time when the climate was becoming cooler in the South Atlantic, though we still don't know for sure what it was they were tracking. We also don't know where these birds took refuge when climates were warmer, and that's concerning as the South Atlantic gets hotter into the future," says Gill, an NSF CAREER researcher who most recently was named a 2020 Friend of the Planet by the National Center for Science Education.

"Our study is also a powerful reminder of why we need to understand how different ecosystems are connected as the world warms," says Gill. "We know that many seabirds in the South Atlantic rely on these unique coastal grasslands, but it turns out that the grasses also depend on the nutrients seabirds provide. Because they rely on ecosystems in the ocean and on land for their survival, seabirds are really good sentinels of global change. We just don't have good long-term monitoring data for most of these species, so we don't know enough about how sensitive they are to climate change. The fossil record can help us fill in the gaps."

PHILADELPHIA - Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disorder that develops as immune cells attack the nervous system. T cells are a critical part of our immune system, with a complex array of subtypes - some drive the autoimmune response, while others try to suppress it.

A team of investigators at Thomas Jefferson University have characterized a new population of T cells called ThGM cells that produce granulocyte macrophage-colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF), a chemical that contributes to the autoimmune response. They had previously shown that increased numbers of ThGM cells are found in the blood and brain of MS patients, indicating that these cells may contribute to the development of autoimmunity. However, very little is known about the genetic properties and function of ThGM cells, making it difficult to understand their role in MS. The team has now uncovered key defining features of these cells and how they behave in an animal model of MS, paving the way for future studies and potential therapies. The study was published in Science Immunology on October 23.

The researchers first sought to characterize the ThGM cells in healthy human subjects and in an animal model of MS. Using various genetic and biochemical techniques, they found that the ThGM cells were abundantly present, but interestingly, lacked the characteristic markers of other populations of T-cells.

"We found that the ThGM cells have a distinct genetic profile compared to other subsets of T cells," says senior author Abdolmohamad Rostami, MD, PhD, professor and Chairman of the department of Neurology at Sidney Kimmel Medical College - Thomas Jefferson University and Vickie and Jack Farber Institute for Neuroscience - Jefferson Health. "It appears that ThGM cells are coming from a distinct lineage or origin, and therefore we've been able to define a set of criteria for identifying these cells."

The researchers also found that in a mouse model for MS there are increased numbers of ThGM cells in the nervous system, similar to findings in human disease. They also found that the ThGM cells induced endephalomyelitis, or inflammation of the brain and spinal cord, a sign of disease development in this model of MS, lending further evidence that ThGM cells contribute to autoimmunity.

The team is now working on further characterizing the ThGM cells in humans. "Our findings have already given us important clues on what genetic markers and chemical profile make this subset of T cells unique," explains Dr. Rostami. "This could allow us to develop therapies that selectively target this population of T cells, while leaving other T cells intact and avoiding widespread immunosuppression."

"This study was made possible by a talented group of scientists, especially Javad Rasouli, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab, and Bogoljub Ciric, associate professor of neurology here at Jefferson," says Dr. Rostami.