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Children are more likely to control their immediate impulses when they and a peer rely on each other to get a reward than when they're left to their own willpower, new research indicates.

The findings appear in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The researchers say their experiments are the first to show that children are more willing to delay gratification for cooperative reasons than for individual goals.

For their study, researchers Rebecca Koomen, Sebastian Grueneisen, and Esther Herrmann, all affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, used a modified version of the "marshmallow test," a classic psychological experiment designed to examine young children's ability to delay gratification. In the classic experiment, preschool children were led into a room where a marshmallow or other treat was placed on a table. The children were told they could either eat the treat right away, or they could wait until the experimenter, who had to step out of the room, returned, in which case they'd receive a second treat. About a third of the children were able to wait for the second treat for up to 15 minutes.

In their new research, the researchers paired up more than 200 5- and 6-year-olds and had them play a brief balloon toss game to get comfortable in the testing environment. They then put the partners in separate rooms and placed a cookie in front of each of them. Some partners were assigned to a solo condition and only had to rely on their own self-control to earn a second cookie, much like the traditional experiment. Others were placed in a cooperative condition in which they received a second treat only if both they and their partner waited until the experimenter returned. Waiting in this condition was therefore risky and indeed less likely to result in a second cookie because children had to rely both on themselves and their partner to refrain from eating. The authors called this the interdependence condition. To identify any cultural differences in the responses, the researchers tested children at a laboratory in Germany and went to schools in Kenya to test children of the Kikuyu tribe.

Across both conditions, Kikuyu children were more likely to delay gratification compared to their German counterparts. But across the two cultures, significantly more children held off on eating the first cookie in the interdependence condition compared with the solo condition.

"The fact that we obtained these findings even though children could not see or communicate with each other attests to the strong motivational consequences that simply being in a cooperative context has for children from early on in development," Grueneisen said.

The research team suggest that children from a young age develop a sense of obligation towards their social partners.

"In this study, children may have been motivated to delay gratification because they felt they shouldn't let their partner down," Koomen said, "and that if they did, their partner would have had the right to hold them accountable."

The sibling relationship is the longest most people will enjoy in their lifetimes and is central to the everyday lives of children. A new Tel Aviv University and University of Haifa study finds that relationships between children and their siblings with intellectual disabilities are more positive than those between typically developing siblings.

The research examines the relationships of typically developing children with siblings with and without intellectual disabilities through artwork and questionnaires. It was conducted by Prof. Anat Zaidman-Zait of the Department of School Counseling and Special Education at TAU's Constantiner School of Education and Dr. Dafna Regev and Miri Yechezkiely of the University of Haifa's Graduate School of Creative Art Therapies. The study was recently published in Research in Developmental Disabilities.

"Having a child with a disability in a family places unique demands on all family members, including typically developing siblings," Prof. Zaidman-Zait explains. "Although challenges exist, they are often accompanied by both short- and long-term positive contributions.

"Through our research, we found that relationships among children with siblings with intellectual disabilities were even more supportive than those among typically developed siblings. Specifically, we found that children with siblings with intellectual disabilities scored higher on empathy, teaching and closeness and scored lower on conflict and rivalry than those with typically developing siblings."

Until now, research on how having a sibling with a developmental disability affects children's social-emotional and behavioral outcomes generated mixed findings. At times, the findings suggested that having a sibling with developmental disabilities led to greater variability in typically developing children's behavior and adjustment.

"But these studies did little to tap into the inner worlds of children, which really can only be accessed through self-expression in the form of art or self-reporting, independent of parental intervention, which is the route we took in our study," Prof. Zaidman-Zait says.

The scientists assessed some 60 children aged 8-11, half with typically developing siblings, half with intellectually disabled siblings, through drawings and a questionnaire about their relationships with their siblings. Mothers of both sets of siblings were also asked to answer a questionnaire about their children's sibling relationship quality.

"We drew on the basic assumption that artistic creation allows internal content to be expressed visually and that children's self-reports have special added value in studies measuring sibling relationship qualities, especially in areas where parents might have less insight," Prof. Zaidman-Zait says.

Both sets of typically developing children, with and without siblings with intellectual disabilities, were asked to draw themselves and their siblings. Licensed art therapists then used several set criteria to "score" the illustrations: the physical distance between the figures; the presence or absence of a parent in the illustration; the amount of detail invested in either the self-portrait or the sibling representation; and the amount of support given to a sibling in the picture. The children were then asked to complete the Sibling Relationship Questionnaire, which assessed the feelings of closeness, dominance, conflict and rivalry they felt for their siblings.

Reviewing the children's illustrations and questionnaires, as well as the questionnaires completed by the children's mothers, the researchers found that the children with siblings with intellectual disabilities scored significantly higher on empathy, teaching and closeness in their sibling relationship and scored lower on conflict and rivalry in the relationships than those with typically developing siblings.

"Our study makes a valuable contribution to the literature by using an art-based data gathering task to shed new light on the unique aspects of the relationships of children with siblings with intellectual disabilities that are not revealed in verbal reports," Prof. Zaidman-Zait concludes. "We can argue that having a family member with a disability makes the rest of the family, including typically developing children, more attentive to the needs of others."

The researchers hope their study, supported by The Shalem Foundation in Israel, will serve as a basis for further research into art-based tools that elicit and document the subjective experience of children.

Tropical Storm Claudia now has two factors against it: wind shear and dry air.  NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite provided forecasters with an image of the storm on January 14 as it continued to weaken and move further away from Western Australia.

Visible imagery from NASA satellites help forecasters understand if a storm is organizing or weakening. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite provided a visible image of Claudia that showed the storm continued to appear elongated. The shape of a tropical cyclone provides forecasters with an idea of its organization and strength. Usually, the more circular a storm appears, the stronger the rotation. When storms become less symmetrical, they tend to weaken. Suomi NPP's imagery showed Claudia continued to appear elongated from west to east.

In addition to the visible imagery, microwave and other satellite imagery shows diminishing thunderstorms northwest of the center of circulation and the strongest thunderstorms, located in the southern quadrant of Claudia, have weakened. The southern quadrant storms have weakened because of dry air moving into the system and sapping thunderstorm development. In addition, easterly wind shear continues to batter the storm.

At 7:46 a.m. EST (8:46 pm WST) on Monday, January 14, 2020 the Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology (ABM) noted that Tropical Cyclone Claudia continued to move far from Western Australia. At that time it was located near latitude 18.3 degrees south and longitude 109.32 east, about 404 miles (650 km) northwest of Exmouth. It was moving to the west-southwest at 11 miles (18 kilometers) per hour. Maximum sustained winds had dropped to 47 mph (75 kph).

Tropical Cyclone Claudia is expected to continue to track towards the west southwest and slowly weaken.

Tropical cyclones/hurricanes are the most powerful weather events on Earth. NASA's expertise in space and scientific exploration contributes to essential services provided to the American people by other federal agencies, such as hurricane weather forecasting.

It's been almost a quarter century since the first drug was approved for stroke. But what's even more striking is that only a single drug remains approved today.

In a publication appearing this month in the journal Translational Stroke Research, animal scientists, funded by the National Institutes of Health, present brain-imaging data for a new stroke treatment that supported full recovery in swine, modeled with the same pattern of neurodegeneration as seen in humans with severe stroke.

"It was eye opening and unexpected that you would see such a benefit after having had such a severe stroke," said Steven Stice, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar and D.W. Brooks Distinguished Professor in the University of Georgia's College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. "Perhaps the most formidable discovery was that one could recover and do so well after the exosome treatment."

Stice and his colleagues at UGA's Regenerative Bioscience Center report the first observational evidence during a midline shift--when the brain is being pushed to one side-- to suggest that a minimally invasive and non-operative exosome treatment can now influence the repair and damage that follow a severe stroke.

Exosomes are considered to be powerful mediators of long-distance cell-to-cell communication that can change the behavior of tumor and neighboring cells. The results of the study echo findings from other recent RBC studies using the same licensed exosome technology.

Many patients who suffer stroke exhibit a shift of the brain past its center line--the valley between the left and right part of the brain. Lesions or tumors will induce pressure or inflammation in the brain, causing what typically appears as a straight line to shift.

"Based on results of the exosome treatment in swine, it doesn't look like lesion volume or the effects of a midline shift matter nearly as much as one would think," said Franklin West, associate professor of animal and dairy science in the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. "This suggests that, even in some extremely severe cases caused by stroke, you're still going to recover just as well."

Trauma from an acute stroke can happen quickly and can cause irreversible damage almost immediately. "Time is brain," a phrase coined by stroke advocacy organizations in the late 1990s, captures the importance of acting on the first signs of stroke. In less than 60 seconds, warns the Stroke Awareness Foundation, an ischemic stroke kills 1.9 million brain cells.

Data from the team's research showed that non-treated brain cells near the site of the stroke injury quickly starved from lack of oxygen and died--triggering a lethal action of damage signals throughout the brain network and potentially compromising millions of healthy cells.

However, in brain areas treated with exosomes that were taken directly from cold storage and administered intravenously, these cells were able to penetrate the brain and interrupt the process of cell death.

"Basically, during a stroke, these really destructive free radicals are all over the place destroying things," said Stice, director of the RBC. "What the exosome technology does is communicate with jeopardized cells and work like an anti-inflammatory agent to interrupt and stop further damage."

According to the team's results, neuroimaging is an essential tool for evaluating brain tissue and managing stroke recovery.

In this observational study, the team analyzed brain images taken 24 hours after stroke. They then applied recovery scores, commonly used in human practice, based on swine gait, cadence, walking speed and stride length. By recording the relationship between brain measurements and functional outcomes, the new assessment scales can better help physicians predict how quickly a person will recover in real time.

"What I'm trying to do with this assessment data is come up with something that we can implement in the clinics right now--today--to help with predicting patient outcomes," said Samantha Spellicy, a neuroscience graduate student and first author on the publication.

Spellicy, who is currently training under Stice, began her first two years at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University and has plans to return to MCG after completing her Ph.D. She anticipates a return to stroke care and one day using the same outcome assessments presented in the study with human patients.

"When a patient arrives in emergency with a stroke, the available clinician would not be left crunching an arbitrary number based on some standardized scale assessment," Spellicy said. "Instead, the clinician could take more of a personalized approach based on the patient's midline shift measurement, and, say for instance, 'OK, in three months you're going to get better, but you're going to have issues with your gait. Let's talk to a specialist now to target that exact condition.'"

As for the future of the exosome treatment, Spellicy and the RBC team anticipate that the patented neural exosome technology, called AB126, will be filed for clinical trials by 2021.

NASA scientists using data from its NOAA/NASA Suomi NPP satellite, has traced the movement of the smoke coming off the Australian fires across the globe showing that it has circumnavigated the Earth. In an image created from data gathered by the Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) Nadir Mapper on Suomi NPP, a black circle shows the smoke which had been traced from its origins coming back to the eastern region of Australia after having traveled around the world. Suomi NPP carries carry five science instruments and is the first satellite mission to address the challenge of acquiring a wide range of land, ocean, and atmospheric measurements for Earth system science while simultaneously preparing to address operational requirements for weather forecasting. Suomi NPP also represents the gateway to the creation of a U.S. climate monitoring system, collecting both climate and operational weather data and continuing key data records that are critical for global change science.

NASA's satellite instruments are often the first to detect wildfires burning in remote regions, and the locations of new fires are sent directly to land managers worldwide within hours of the satellite overpass. Together, NASA instruments detect actively burning fires, track the transport of smoke from fires, provide information for fire management, and map the extent of changes to ecosystems, based on the extent and severity of burn scars. NASA has a fleet of Earth-observing instruments, many of which contribute to our understanding of fire in the Earth system. Satellites in orbit around the poles provide observations of the entire planet several times per day, whereas satellites in a geostationary orbit provide coarse-resolution imagery of fires, smoke and clouds every five to 15 minutes.

NASA satellites can show the movement of the smoke across the globe as evidenced above, but other instruments found onboard can give scientists, firefighters, health experts, local government, and others information about what is happening on the ground in real-time.

So, too, air quality during events such as devastating bushfires is another serious concern to address and NASA satellites are able to help in this area as well.

The OMPS (Ozone Mapper and Profiler Suite of instruments) Aerosol Index layer on Suomi NPP is able to indicate the presence of ultraviolet (UV)-absorbing particles in the air (aerosols) such as desert dust and, in this case, soot particles in the atmosphere; it is related to both the thickness of the aerosol layer located in the atmosphere and to the height of the layer. The Aerosol Index is a unitless range from =5.00, where 5.0 (dark red) indicates heavy concentrations of aerosols that could reduce visibility or impact human health. The Aerosol Index layer is useful for identifying and tracking the long-range transport of volcanic ash from volcanic eruptions, smoke from wildfires or biomass burning events and dust from desert dust storms, even tracking over clouds and areas of snow and ice.

Aerosols absorb and scatter incoming sunlight, which reduces visibility and increases the optical depth. Aerosols have an effect on human health, weather and the climate. Aerosols are produced from many events including pollution from factories, smoke from fires, dust from dust storms, sea salts, and volcanic ash and smog. Aerosols compromise human health when inhaled by people with asthma or other respiratory illnesses. Aerosols also have an affect on the weather and climate by cooling or warming the earth, helping or preventing clouds from forming. The image below shows a huge area directly above the bushfires that is spewing extreme amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere creating a health hazard not only for residents in the area, but also for those affected when wind patterns carry that smoke on jet streams.

NOAA meteorologists incorporate Suomi NPP data into their weather prediction models to produce forecasts and warnings that help emergency responders anticipate, monitor and react to many types of natural disasters, including the bushfires plaguing Australia currently. Suomi NPP serves as an important link between the current generation of Earth-observing satellites and the next generation of climate and weather satellites. It observes the Earth's surface twice every 24-hour day, once in daylight and once at night. In its orbit Suomi NPP flies 512 miles (824 kilometers) above the surface in a polar orbit, circling the planet about 14 times a day. The satellite sends its data once an orbit to the ground station in Svalbard, Norway and continuously to local direct broadcast users. The data collected by Suomi NPP can help save lives.

?NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Worldview application provides the capability to interactively browse over 700 global, full-resolution satellite imagery layers and then download the underlying data. Many of the available imagery layers are updated within three hours of observation, essentially showing the entire Earth as it looks "right now." This satellite image was collected on Actively burning fires, detected by thermal bands, are shown as red points. Image Courtesy: NASA Worldview, Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS).

In 1906, Francis Galton was at a country fair where attendees had the opportunity to guess the weight of a dead ox. Galton took the guesses of 787 fair-goers and found that the average guess was only one pound off of the correct weight -- even when individual guesses were off base.

This concept, known as "the wisdoms of crowds" or "collective intelligence," has been applied to many situations over the past century, from people estimating the number of jellybeans in a jar to predicting the winners of major sporting events -- often with high rates of success. Whatever the problem, the average answer of the crowd seems to be an accurate solution.

But does this also apply to knowledge about systems, such as ecosystems, health care, or cities? Do we always need in-depth scientific inquiries to describe and manage them -- or could we leverage crowds?

This question has fascinated Antonie J. Jetter, associate professor of Engineering and Technology Management for many years. Now, there's an answer. A recent study, which was co-authored by Jetter and published in Nature Sustainability, shows that diverse crowds of local natural resource stakeholders can collectively produce complex environmental models very similar to those of trained experts.

For this study, about 250 anglers, water guards and board members of German fishing clubs were asked to draw connections showing how ecological relationships influence the pike stock from the perspective of the anglers and how factors like nutrients and fishing pressures help determine the number of pike in a freshwater lake ecosystem. The individuals' drawings -- or their so-called mental models -- were then mathematically combined into a collective model representing their averaged understanding of the ecosystem and compared with the best scientific knowledge on the same subject.

The result is astonishing. If you combine the ideas from many individual anglers by averaging their mental models, the final outcomes correspond more or less exactly to the scientific knowledge of pike ecology -- local knowledge of stakeholders produces results that are in no way inferior to lengthy and expensive scientific studies.

"The result gets better the more anglers are involved in the collective solution," Jetter explained, "but it is not a simple vote count."

The study found that it is important that the opinions of different types of anglers -- recreational anglers, fisheries managers or board members of fishing associations -- are preserved and taken into account separately. The knowledge base of only a single group of anglers may have group-specific biases that can accumulate to a possibly wrong solution.

"I am excited about the possibilities for other complex systems," Jetter said. "We now understand how we can investigate problems like improving schools or increasing ridership in public transportation -- we ask people who frequently interact with these systems and merge their system descriptions. This has huge potential for making cities smarter."

The most exciting and rewarding aspect of this study, however, is how it came together. The study was lead by Payam Aminpour, who is presently a Ph.D. student at Michigan State University. "It is truly a story of interdisciplinarity, collaboration, persistence, and serendipity that stretches over years and continents," Jetter said.

For PSU, it started when Jetter met an ecologist, Steven Gray, at a conference. They collaborated on two grants under Dr. Jetter's leadership and frequently discussed how to obtain system descriptions to scale. In 2016, it finally clicked: connecting ideas from two earlier papers, including one by Jetter, they proposed leveraging the wisdom of crowds and drafted initial ideas for how to make it work. However, they still needed a data set -- and an expert in quantitative analysis.

Data came in the form of an almost forgotten 2010 study by Gray's collaborator, fishery scientist Robert Arlinghaus at the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology in Germany. And the expert analyst and scientific lead of the study turned out to be Ph.D. student Payam Aminpour, a civil engineer by training, who had joined Gray's team at the Department of Community Sustainability at MSU and closely collaborated with Jetter on PSU-led grants that made the collaboration possible. Additional contributors were Joshua Introne and Alison Singer, former MSU affiliated scholars.

"About a hundred years after the introduction of the wisdom of crowds phenomenon by Francis Galton, we expand this theory and show empirically that averaging judgments from large crowds can also work for the cognitively more demanding task of describing a complex system," Jetter said. "Maybe this will make our cities smarter, one day. If it does, it is a testament to interdisciplinary research."

Why are Irish Setters so red? Geneticists at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine now have an answer for why some dogs have more intense coat colors than others.

While their wolf ancestors are muted in color, domestic dogs have been bred into a variety of hues from white and golden through brown to black. Similarly to other mammals, canine coat color comes from two pigments: yellow (pheomelanin) and black (eumelanin). These pigments are controlled through pigment-switching genes MC1R (melanocortin 1 receptor) and agouti signaling protein (ASIP). For example, solid yellow or red dogs have a mutation in MC1R so they only make pheomelanin.

"Much is known about canine coat colors but one thing that was unclear is why dogs with the same variants in the MC1R gene have different shades of red," said Danika Bannasch, professor in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and senior author on a paper describing the work published Jan. 9 in the journal Genes.

Graduate student Kalie Weich, Bannasch and colleagues carried out a genome-wide association study with samples from Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retrievers. "Tollers" as a breed vary in color from bright golden red to a dark coppery color.

Copy number variant influences color gene

The researchers found a region of DNA on the dog chromosome 15 that can have multiple copies related to coat color. This copy number variant doesn't encode a gene itself, but it does influence the gene KITLG, which is related to hair color (a single change near the KITLG region in humans is associated with blonde hair).

When they looked across a range of breeds, dogs with a higher number of copies of this region had more intense coat colors.

"The interesting thing is that variation in the domestic dog is to darker pigment," Bannasch said. Wolves have just a single copy on each chromosome 15.

Copy number appears to affect color intensity through the distribution of pigment along the hair. Animals with a low copy number have hair that is light at the root and darkens towards the tip, while animals with a high number of copies have pigment evenly distributed all the way along the hair.

There is still more to learn about dog coat color. For example, copy number does not seem to correlate with coat color in Golden Retrievers and Labrador Retrievers, so there must be other genetic elements involved.

Sophia Antipolis, 14 January 2020: Feeling excessively tired, devoid of energy, demoralised, and irritable? You may have burnout, a syndrome associated with a potentially deadly heart rhythm disturbance. That's the conclusion of a large study published today in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).1

"Vital exhaustion, commonly referred to as burnout syndrome, is typically caused by prolonged and profound stress at work or home," said study author Dr. Parveen K. Garg of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "It differs from depression, which is characterised by low mood, guilt, and poor self-esteem. The results of our study further establish the harm that can be caused in people who suffer from exhaustion that goes unchecked."

Atrial fibrillation is the most common form of heart arrhythmia. It is estimated that 17 million people in Europe and 10 million people in the US will have this condition by next year, increasing their risk for heart attack, stroke, and death. Yet, what causes atrial fibrillation is not fully understood.

Psychological distress has been suggested as a risk factor for atrial fibrillation, but previous studies showed mixed results. In addition, until now, the specific association between vital exhaustion and atrial fibrillation had not been evaluated.

The researchers in this study surveyed more than 11,000 individuals for the presence of vital exhaustion, anger, antidepressant use, and poor social support. They then followed them over a period of nearly 25 years for the development of atrial fibrillation.

Participants with the highest levels of vital exhaustion were at a 20% higher risk of developing atrial fibrillation over the course of follow-up compared to those with little to no evidence of vital exhaustion.

While further study is needed to better understand the observed relationship, Dr. Garg noted that two mechanisms are likely at play. "Vital exhaustion is associated with increased inflammation and heightened activation of the body's physiologic stress response," he said. "When these two things are chronically triggered that can have serious and damaging effects on the heart tissue, which could then eventually lead to the development of this arrhythmia."

No connections were found between anger, antidepressant use, or poor social support and development of atrial fibrillation. "The findings for anger and social support are consistent with prior research but two previous studies did find a significant association between antidepressant use and an increased risk of atrial fibrillation. Clearly, more work still needs to be done," said Dr. Garg.

Further research is also needed to identify concrete actions for doctors to help patients with exhaustion, said Dr. Garg.

He concluded: "It is already known that exhaustion increases one's risk for cardiovascular disease, including heart attack and stroke. We now report that it may also increase one's risk for developing atrial fibrillation, a potentially serious cardiac arrhythmia. The importance of avoiding exhaustion through careful attention to - and management of - personal stress levels as a way to help preserve overall cardiovascular health cannot be overstated."

Many owners of rescue dogs imported into the UK believe they arrive through the European Union (EU) Pet Travel Scheme, which has less stringent requirements than the EU Balai Directive, which should be applied for these animals, find the results of a large survey, published in Vet Record.

The EU Pet Travel Scheme is intended only for pets, although it is thought that many of the 300,000 dogs imported under it, don't fall into this category.

The scheme is relatively simple and cheap, but only requires the dog to be microchipped, vaccinated for rabies, and treated by a vet for a tapeworm Echinococcus multilocularis, which can be fatal if passed on to people.

The Balai Directive is for commercially traded dogs,which includes those where ownership changes, as in rescue dogs brought over by charities.

This requires the animal to come from registered or approved premises, be microchipped, vaccinated against rabies, given a health check by a qualified vet 48 hours before despatch and certified with an Intra Trade Animal Health Certificate (ITAHC).

In recent years, the number of dogs imported legally and illegally into the UK has risen, and often involves dogs rescued from southern or eastern Europe.

To try and find out why people in the UK import rescue dogs, and how, the researchers uploaded a survey for 3 weeks in 2017, targeting Facebook groups for dog rescuers bringing animals in from abroad.

Some 3,080 responses were received, most of which were from women (93%). Around two thirds of respondents already had one other dog (67%).

Eighty one different breeds from 44 countries were imported, with a third (34%) imported from Romania alone, followed by Cyprus (22%) and Spain (19%).

Most owners thought their dogs had been put up for adoption after being found on the street (61%). The rest had been rescued from animal cruelty, given to a shelter by their previous owners, or born in a dog shelter. A few (1%) had been rescued from the dog meat trade.

Owners said that most of the dogs (89%; 2,726) had been imported through the EU Pet Travel Scheme; only 1% (37) indicated the Balai Directive, despite one in five respondents saying they had looked at UK government website information on the correct procedures. A further 8% of respondents didn't know which method had been used.

Most (92%) respondents said they had adopted a rescue dog through an organisation, 40% of which were based abroad.

The most common method of finding a rescue dog was through social media, with the most common reason given for adoption, coming across a particular dog they wanted (59%).

But concerns about greater likelihood of suffering for a dog based abroad (39%) and the risk of the dog being put down (38%) were also cited.

Strict requirements to adopt from UK rescue organisations were also highlighted as barriers to adopting from the UK, which suggests that a review of organisational adoption processes may be required, say the researchers.

Some 15% (79 out of 533) of the dogs tested for Leishmania parasitic infection, which can cause leishmaniasis in people, tested positive. But infections such as tapeworm and other worms, were also picked up.

The researchers emphasise that their research relied on information supplied by the owners, and wasn't objectively confirmed, so may not have been entirely accurate.

Nevertheless, they point out: "These results indicate a lack of understanding (or application) of the laws relating to the importation of rescue dogs from abroad."

Clear guidelines on animal travel laws and stricter checks on imported rescue dogs are needed, "to ensure protection against the importation of exotic diseases that pose a risk to animal and human health in the UK," they conclude.

BVA President Daniella Dos Santos said: "This important study demonstrates the pressing need for stricter pet travel laws and more stringent enforcement to safeguard the health and welfare of both animals and the wider public in the UK.

"Vets are concerned about cases of new or rare diseases they are seeing in practice, such as leishmaniasis, ehrlichiosis, and heartworm. These are associated with rescuing so-called 'Trojan dogs' with unknown health histories from abroad.

"Our advice to anyone thinking of rescuing a dog is to consider adopting a dog from a UK rehoming charity or welfare organisation instead or financially supporting organisations abroad to rescue and rehabilitate stray animals locally."

SPOKANE, Wash. - Treatment for breast cancer commonly includes radiation therapy, which offers good chances of success but comes with a serious long-term side effect: toxicity due to radiation that reaches the heart, causing DNA damage in healthy heart cells. Over time, this can lead to heart disease and eventually heart failure.

A new study conducted by researchers in the Washington State University College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences suggests that a preventive solution may lie in the biological clock, the built-in time-keeping mechanism that keeps us on a 24-hour cycle of rest and activity and regulates a wide variety of processes in our bodies.

Published in the FASEB Journal, their study used a rodent model to determine whether the biological clock is involved in heart toxicity from radiation therapy and could be used as part of a strategy to reduce this toxicity. Their findings showed that after receiving a dose of radiation to the heart, mice with disrupted biological clocks had significantly worse heart function than control mice.

In addition, the researchers demonstrated that a protein known as Bmal1--which drives 24-hour rhythms in the expression of many genes--plays an important role in protecting the heart from radiation-related damage.

"Our findings suggest that Bmal1 serves as a biomarker for the susceptibility to radiation-induced DNA damage to the heart," said Shobhan Gaddameedhi, an assistant professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences and the study's senior author.

Though more research is needed, the researchers are hopeful that their discovery could someday be used to improve treatment outcomes for breast cancer patients. Panshak Dakup--the study's first author and a PhD in pharmaceutical sciences student--said their finding holds promise for personalized medicine. "For example, in breast cancer patients who have a long history of working night shifts, the expression of biological clock proteins such as Bmal1 may be compromised, and it could be that radiation therapy is not the best option for them."

Gaddameedhi added that it could also be used to optimize the timing of radiation therapy so it is provided when a patient's Bmal1 level offers the greatest level of protection from heart damage. That timing may vary depending on a person's chronotype--whether they are early birds or night owls--as well as on other factors that influence the status of the master biological clock, such as shiftwork or frequent travel across time zones.

Dakup conducted the experiments for the study as part of a predoctoral fellowship supported by the American Heart Association. Additional major support for the study came from the National Institutes of Health.

In the study's main experiment, Dakup looked at the heart function of two groups of mice with disrupted clocks, as compared to that of control mice. One group had a genetic mutation that eliminated Per1 and Per2--two genes that control the body's master biological clock. The second group were wild-type mice that were put on a simulated rotating shift schedule in which light-dark cycles were reversed weekly, throwing off their clocks. The control group consisted of wild-type mice with healthy biological clocks that were on a simulated day shift schedule. All mice received radiation treatment to the chest that included all of the heart.

Collaborating with assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences and cardiovascular biology expert Zhaokang Cheng, Dakup used ultrasound echocardiography technology to compare heart function among the three groups, both prior to and up to six weeks after radiation treatment. In clock-disrupted mice, the heart's ability to pump blood out and into circulation was compromised due to a loss of elasticity in the heart ventricle. Those mice also had more heart scar tissue than control mice.

Additional analyses focused on determining a potential relationship with the biological clock protein Bmal1. The researchers showed that Bmal1 levels across 24 hours were significantly lower in clock-disrupted mice versus control mice and peaked at a later time. They also found that higher levels of Bmal1 were associated with lower DNA damage levels, and vice versa.

Finally, the researchers found that Bmal1 interacts with the BRCA1, BRCA2, and ATM genes, three DNA damage response genes they said are important in fighting against radiation-induced DNA damage and cell death.

"When Bmal1 binds to these genes, it is potentially trying to elevate or activate their function against the collateral damage caused by radiation therapy," Gaddameedhi said.

The researchers' next step is to test their hypothesis in a cancer model. This will help them pin down the exact mechanism by which the biological clock protects the heart from radiation damage. They could then use this knowledge to develop new treatment strategies to minimize heart damage while maximizing the ability to kill tumor cells. Any such strategies would first need to be tested in clinical trials before they could be adopted.

Boulder, Colo., USA: Rare metallic elements found in clumps on the deep-ocean floor mysteriously remain uncovered despite the shifting sands and sediment many leagues under the sea. Scientists now think they know why, and it could have important implications for mining these metals while preserving the strange fauna at the bottom of the ocean.

The growth of these deep-sea nodules -- metallic lumps of manganese, iron, and other metals found in all the major ocean basins -- is one of the slowest known geological processes. These ringed concretions, which are potential sources of rare-earth and other critical elements, grow on average just 10 to 20 millimeters every million years. Yet in one of earth science's most enduring mysteries, they somehow manage to avoid being buried by sediment despite their locations in areas where clay accumulates at least 100 times faster than the nodules grow.

Understanding how these agglomerations of metals remain on the open sea floor could help geoscientists provide advice on accessing them for industrial use. A new study published this month in Geology will help scientists understand this process better.

"It is important that any mining of these resources is done in a way that preserves the fragile deep-sea environments in which they are found," said lead author Adriana Dutkiewicz, an ARC Future Fellow in the School of Geosciences at The University of Sydney.

Rare-earth and other critical elements are essential for the development of technologies needed for low-carbon economies. They will play an increasingly important role for next-generation solar cells, efficient wind turbines, and rechargeable batteries that will power the renewables revolution.

Solving the Enigma

From scouring bottom currents to burrowing animals, researchers have proposed a number of mechanisms to account for this enigma. But solving it depends on a better understanding of where the nodules are situated and the environmental conditions that prevail there. Now a global study published in Geology uses predictive machine learning to investigate which factors control the location of polymetallic nodules. The results offer new insights to inform deep-sea mineral exploration as well as its regulation.

"The International Seabed Authority is currently preparing new environmental regulations to govern deep-sea mining," Dr. Dutkiewicz said. "Our analysis represents a global, data-driven synthesis to impartially inform these policies and deep-ocean environmental management."

Dr. Dutkiewicz and co-authors Dr. Alexander Judge and Professor Dietmar Müller combined open-access data for thousands of polymetallic nodules with global datasets of key environmental parameters to create a machine-learning model that ranks the factors controlling nodule location. The resulting map predicts where polymetallic nodules are most likely to occur.

The authors were surprised to find that globally the nodules occur in regions where the bottom current speeds are far too slow to remove sediment. Instead, the nodules are associated with seafloor fauna.

"Organisms such as star fish, octopods and molluscs seem to keep the nodules at the seafloor surface by foraging, burrowing and ingesting sediment on and around them," Dr. Dutkiewicz said. "Although these organisms occur in relatively low concentrations on the abyssal seafloor, they are still abundant enough to locally affect sediment accumulation."

This insight is supported by direct seafloor observations of nodule fields by independent studies. "Our conclusion is that deep-sea ecosystems and nodules are inextricably connected," Dr. Dutkiewicz said.

The study results also suggest that the regions where nodules are most likely to occur are more extensive than what has previously been assumed and include vast areas that are yet to be explored--findings with important industrial as well as conservation implications.

"Our map highlights regions that may be important economically," Dr. Dutkiewicz said, "but at the same time draws attention to areas of the seafloor that may be hotspots for diverse deep-sea organisms that we know little about."

Because the techniques used by the researchers can be modified to investigate other seafloor features, this approach -- as well as the conclusion that there is an apparent "symbiosis" between deep-sea fauna and the nodules -- could also have implications for future biodiversity research.

"Vast regions of the deep sea are unexplored," Dr. Dutkiewicz said, "so the consequences of nodule mining for deep-sea ecosystems need to be carefully evaluated."

Like a long-distance food delivery app with no apparent highway, fungi that associate with shallow-rooted shrubs in the tundra are accessing deep stores of nitrogen being released by thawing permafrost. The findings by Northern Arizona University researchers, announced this week in New Phytologist, could change scientists' understanding of who accesses nutrients from permafrost, and how.

"This just doesn't fit the paradigm of how we think these plants and their mycorrhizal partners work together," said lead author Rebecca Hewitt from the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss) at NAU. "Previously, we thought only plants with extended root systems could access nutrients near the permafrost thaw front. But we saw that all these plants were using deep nitrogen, whether they had deep root systems or not, suggesting that mycorrhizal partners may provide access to the deep, cold permafrost table."

As researchers race to better understand the carbon cycle and how a warming Arctic will affect the amount of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere, this discovery offers clues about where nitrogen and carbon released from thawing permafrost will go. If the burgeoning plant community in the tundra can access nitrogen as it's released from thawing permafrost, then this fungal connection to the thaw front may be helping to offset carbon losses, since more nitrogen means more plant biomass to pull down carbon from the atmosphere.

In order to see which organisms were gobbling the nitrogen from the permafrost, Hewitt and her team, including senior author and Ecoss professor Michelle Mack, added an isotopic tracer, Nitrogen-15, to soil at the "thaw front," or where permafrost meets unfrozen "active layer" soil, with long needles. This nitrogen isotope is heavier than the more common Nitrogen-14, and, like food coloring dropped in a flower vase, allows researchers to watch exactly where it goes. The team waited 24 hours and then harvested the plants and sampled fungi from shrub root tips and deep active layer soils. When they sequenced fungal DNA and RNA, they could see which fungi had helped plants take up the heavy nitrogen from the permafrost table. Both shallow-rooted ericoid mycorrhizal shrubs ectomycorrhizal-aided shrubs had received nitrogen infusions from their fungal partners.

Zooming out, this study could have implications for researchers and computer models that predict where nitrogen and carbon go at both regional and global levels. Hewitt said that, to date, models that account for nitrogen release from permafrost don't treat it as much of a factor at an ecosystem scale. But if all plants can tap this source, that could change.

"The fact that deep nitrogen can be sucked up and retained in plant biomass, or possibly in fungal biomass, means there's less nitrogen to be swept away into rivers or as nitrous oxide," Hewitt said.

For Hewitt, the next step is learning more about whether these root-associated fungi are keeping some nitrogen to themselves, and why.

"How much of this nitrogen is being locked up in fungi? We need to learn this to understand how much of that nitrogen pool is available to fertilize plants in the future."

This spring, Hewitt and Mack also are coordinating the launch of the Arctic Underground Network, an international research network for the synthesis of root and rhizosphere processes in cold soil ecosystems. The first meeting will take place in March during Arctic Science Summit Week in Akureyri, Iceland, with support from the International Arctic Science Committee.

A new analysis shows the world's oceans were the warmest in 2019 than any other time in recorded human history, especially between the surface and a depth of 2,000 meters. The study, conducted by an international team of 14 scientists from 11 institutes across the world, also concludes that the past ten years have been the warmest on record for global ocean temperatures, with the past five years holding the highest record.

The authors published their results on Jan. 13 in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, with a call to action for humans to reverse climate change. In the face of such disastrous effects as the 17.9 million acres Australian bushfire, which has resulted in 24 deaths and thousands of homes destroyed so far, the researchers report that global ocean temperature is not only increasing, but it's speeding up.

According to the study, the 2019 ocean temperature is about 0.075 degrees Celsius above the 1981-2010 average. To reach this temperature, the ocean would have taken in 228,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (228 Sextillion) Joules of heat.

"That's a lot of zeros indeed. To make it easier to understand, I did a calculation. The Hiroshima atom-bomb exploded with an energy of about 63,000,000,000,000 Joules. The amount of heat we have put in the world's oceans in the past 25 years equals to 3.6 billion Hiroshima atom-bomb explosions." said Lijing Cheng, lead paper author and associate professor with the International Center for Climate and Environmental Sciences at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Cheng is also affiliated with CAS's Center for Ocean Mega-Science. "This measured ocean warming is irrefutable and is further proof of global warming. There are no reasonable alternatives aside from the human emissions of heat trapping gases to explain this heating."

The researchers used a relatively new method of analysis from the IAP to account for potentially sparse data and time discrepancies in instruments that were previously used to measure ocean warmth specially from the ocean surface to 2,000 meters deep. The newly available data allowed the researchers to examine warmth trends dating back to the 1950s. This study also includes ocean temperature changes recorded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the United States. The two independent data sets indicate that the past five years have been the warmest on record for global ocean temperatures.

The researchers also compared the 1987 to 2019 data recording period to the 1955 to 1986 period. They found that over the past six decades, the more recent warming was ~450% that of the earlier warming, reflecting a major increase in the rate of global climate change.

"It is critical to understand how fast things are changing," said John Abraham, co-author and professor of mechanical engineering at the University of St. Thomas in the United States. "The key to answering this question is in the oceans -- that's where the vast majority of heat ends up. If you want to understand global warming, you have to measure ocean warming."

2019 broke the previous records set in prior years for global warming, and the effects are already appearing in the form of more extreme weather, rising sea levels and harm to ocean animals.

"Global warming is real, and it's getting worse," Abraham said. "And this is just the tip of the iceberg for what is to come. Fortunately, we can do something about it: We can use energy more wisely and we can diversify our energy sources. We have the power to reduce this problem."

According to the researchers, humans can work to reverse their effect on the climate, but the ocean will take longer to respond than atmospheric and land environments. Since 1970, more than 90% of global warming heat went into the ocean, while less than 4% of the heat warmed the atmosphere and land where humans live.

"Even with that small fraction affecting the atmosphere and land, the global heating has led to an increase in catastrophic fires in the Amazon, California and Australia in 2019, and we're seeing that continue into 2020," Cheng said. "The global ocean warming has caused marine heat waves in Tasman Sea and other regions."

One such marine heat wave in the North Pacific, dubbed "the blob," was first detected in 2013 and continued through 2015.

"The blob is documented to have caused major loss of marine life, from phytoplankton to zooplankton to fish -- including a 100 million cod -- to marine animals, such as whales," said Kevin Trenberth, co-author and distinguished senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the United States. "These manifestations of global warming have major consequences."

Trenberth also noted that a hot spot in the Gulf of Mexico in 2017 spawned Hurricane Harvey, which led to 82 deaths and caused about $108 billion in damages according to the Rice Kinder Institute for Urban Research. The following year, a hotspot in the Atlantic Ocean near the Carolinas led to Hurricane Florence. According to Moody's Analytics, an economic research organization, the storm caused 53 deaths and between $38 and $50 billion in economic damage.

"The price we pay is the reduction of ocean-dissolved oxygen, the harmed marine lives, strengthening storms and reduced fisheries and ocean-related economies," Cheng said. "However, the more we reduce greenhouse gasses, the less the ocean will warm. Reduce, reuse and recycle and transferring to a clean energy society are still the major way forward."

Next, the researchers are examining how warming impacts oceans beyond temperature. They plan to study how water temperatures affect the water's buoyancy, which directly affects the distribution of nutrients and heat.

PITTSBURGH, Jan. 13, 2020 - Coaching Boys Into Men, a program that seeks to prevent dating violence and sexual assault, reduces abusive behaviors among middle school male athletes toward their female peers, according to clinical trial results published today in JAMA Pediatrics.

The trial, led by Elizabeth Miller, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at UPMC Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, examined the short- and long-term effectiveness of the program.

"Given the prevalence of sexual violence and relationship abuse, as well as precursors like sexual harassment and homophobic teasing, we wanted to test whether the program could help middle school youth and have a similar impact as it has among high school students," said Miller, who also is professor of pediatrics, public health and clinical and translational science at the University of Pittsburgh.

Coaching Boys Into Men trains coaches to speak frankly with their male athletes about stopping violence against women and girls. In 2018 alone, this innovative program, developed by national nonprofit Futures Without Violence and disseminated locally with support of Southwest PA Says No More (a United Way and FISA Foundation initiative), has involved 283 coaches with 1,832 athletes on 63 teams in 31 schools and three community programs in southwestern Pennsylvania.

"This groundbreaking evidence shows we can effectively reach youth at their most impressionable ages, while they are in middle school," said Esta Soler, president of Futures Without Violence. "This affirms the years of work we have done primarily with high school and college student-athletes and provides new opportunities for helping even more youth build positive, healthy relationship skills."

The Miller-led study, conducted between spring 2015 and fall 2017, included 973 male athletes in 41 middle schools, half of which were randomly selected to participate in the program. Participants receiving the intervention reported increases in positive bystander behaviors -- such as intervening when a peer is being disrespectful toward others -- by more than 50% by the end of the sports season, compared to participants in the control group.

This effect persisted through the year of follow-up. Male athletes at schools that implemented the program as intended were more than twice as likely to report positive bystander behaviors a year after its conclusion than male athletes at schools that did not participate in the program. Improvements also emerged in athletes' recognition of what constitutes abusive behaviors as well as their attitudes related to gender equity. Additionally, among those who had ever dated (about two thirds of the group), athletes in schools implementing the program had 76% lower odds of abuse against a dating partner one year after the program conclusion compared to athletes in non-participating schools. The results were even more pronounced when accounting for implementing the program as intended (i.e., with fidelity).

"Demonstrating that this evidence-based program can work well with younger adolescents strengthens our efforts to prevent sexual and dating violence," said Miller, also medical director of Community and Population Health at UPMC Children's. "We now have the research to show that introducing this program earlier in adolescence is doable, and that the impact appears to be big. This means we can expect positive results if we scale up the Coaching Boys Into Men program to reach many more youth across our region and hopefully move the needle on this epidemic of violence."

This study follows research by Miller and her colleagues published last month in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine finding that teen boys with more equitable gender attitudes -- those who felt boys and girls deserve equal opportunities and respect -- had lower odds of reporting violent behavior.

A database of 10,000 bird species shows how measurements of wings, beaks and tails can predict a species' role in an ecosystem.

Given that many bird species perform important ecological functions, such as pollinating plants, spreading seeds, or controlling pests, the database may help scientists to understand and predict how the loss of species will affect ecosystem health.

A global team of researchers, led by Imperial College London and University College London, visited museums around the world to find specimens of nearly 10,000 species, covering more than 99 percent of all known bird species. Their results, and the database, are published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

The link between body form of each animal species and aspects of their lifestyle, including diet, has previously been proposed, but this is the first time it has been confirmed at such a large scale and with such precise detail.

The senior author of the study, Dr Joseph Tobias, from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial, said: "To compile measurements for all bird species has been a massive undertaking. That's particularly the case considering the hundreds of explorers and biologists over the last 150 years who collected and curated the 70,000 museum specimens on which this work is based."

Predictions of a species' contribution to an ecosystem are often made using estimates of their evolutionary relationships with other species - relying on the fact that closely related species tend to be more similar in function than distantly related species.

However, the new database shows that body measurements offer a far better prediction overall, as some very distantly related species have evolved similar bodies to equip them for similar lifestyles or dietary preferences.

For example, the family of auks, which includes puffins and guillemots, have very similar body shape to penguins, despite evolving in opposite hemispheres. Both have beaks, bodies and wings adapted to swimming and catching fish underwater.

The concept - called convergent evolution - is far from new, but the new dataset provides the clearest picture yet of its widespread influence across an entire class of animals at a global scale.

The team looked at nine body measurements including the dimensions of beaks, tails, wings and legs as well as body mass, and compared these to a bird's diet and foraging behaviour - for example whether it primarily catches invertebrates in the air, on the ground, or under water.

Some associations are obvious, such as longer wings in species that spend much of their time flying, or longer legs in ground-dwelling species. However, the team found that the combination of all body measurements was highly predictive of even subtle differences in lifestyle, and ecosystem function, across all species.

The study's first author, Dr Alex Pigot of UCL's Department of Genetics, Evolution & Environment, said: "Our results suggest that evolution is a predictable process. If we were to 're-run the tape of life', then evolution likely would once again lead to very similar-looking organisms to the ones we see today.

"Being able to quantify each animal's vital role in the functioning of the biosphere is really important in understanding impacts of the current extinction and climate crisis."

Dr Tobias said: "The link we show between body form and function has some potentially important applications, and paves the way for the use of similar data to investigate the role of biodiversity in ecosystems.

"For example, further studies can use our database to predict the effects of climate and land-use change on ecosystem function, and to set appropriate targets for wildlife conservation."