Earth

The South Interior area of the state of Western Australia is under warnings for heavy rainfall and gusty winds as the remnants of Tropical Storm Blake move on a southeasterly path through the state. Imagery from NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite provided an image of the storm's clouds.

The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard Suomi NPP provided a visible image of Blake's remnants that showed the storm stretched from the South Interior to Goldfields, Southeast Coastal and Eucla localities. The strongest storms appeared in the northwestern corner of the South Interior

At 9 a.m. EST (10 p.m. AWST Australia local time) on Jan. 9, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology noted that "Ex-Tropical Cyclone Blake was located approximately 155 miles (250 km) southeast of Newman, or 130 miles (210 km) northeast of Wiluna, moving slowly southeast through the South Interior."

ABM cautioned that Blake's remnants could bring damaging winds between averaging 31 to 37 mph (50 to 60 kph). Strongest winds are most likely near the system center. In addition to the winds, heavy rainfall may cause flooding. Expected daily rainfall totals of 3 to 6 inches (75 mm to 150 mm) with higher isolated amounts. ABM Flood Warnings are updated at http://www.bom.gov.au/wa/warnings/.

Tropical cyclones are the most powerful weather event 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.

BALTIMORE, MD -- Diarrheal diseases are a leading cause of death for young children, accounting for nine percent of all deaths worldwide in children under five years of age, with most occurring in children under two years of age. Now, researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) found that even milder cases of diarrheal diseases can lead to death in young children.

This research, the latest report from the Global Enteric Multicenter Study (GEMS), published in Lancet Global Health, "provides a strong rationale for vigorously acting to prevent or to treat all cases of diarrheal illness, regardless of severity," according to Myron M. Levine, MD, DTPH, the Simon and Bessie Grollman Distinguished Professor and Associate Dean for Global Health, Vaccinology and Infectious Diseases. Dr. Levine, who served as the overall coordinating investigator for GEMS research, led a large international consortium of investigators from North America, Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Australia.

"Our international team of investigators showed that for the individual child moderate-to-severe diarrheal illness posed a significantly greater risk of death than less-severe diarrhea. However, in the overall pediatric populations in which our team worked, more total deaths derive from less-severe cases of diarrhea because they are more than three times more common than moderate-to-severe cases," said Dr. Levine.

Since many of the deaths occurred more than 14 to 21 days after the children were enrolled in the study, Dr. Levine suggests that where resources and logistics make it feasible active follow-up visits and interventions for all cases of diarrhea could help reduce fatalities.

GEMS, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is the largest, most comprehensive study of childhood diarrheal diseases ever conducted in developing country settings. The study, under the direction of Karen Kotloff, MD, Professor of Pediatrics at UMSOM and the Principal Investigator for Clinical and Epidemiological Research in GEMS, enrolled 22,568 children under five years of age in developing country settings including The Gambia, Kenya, Mali, Mozambique, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. Dr. Kotloff, previously reported that children who were stunted at baseline (a sign of malnutrition) were significantly more likely to die during the two to three months following their GEMS diarrheal illness. The additional adverse nutritional consequences (stunting) that followed GEMS diarrhea cases may further increase the risk of severe or fatal outcomes.

Dr. Kotloff noted that the Lancet Global Health report showed that the risk of death from diarrheal illness was greater among young children in the four GEMS sites in sub-Saharan Africa than in the three sites in South Asia. She further noted that at the one site in Asia (Pakistan) where the risk of death following diarrhea was higher than at the other two Asian sites (India and Bangladesh), the Pakistani children were significantly more malnourished at baseline, providing further proof that malnutrition unfavorably affects the outcome of diarrheal illness.

Leading Cause of Death in Young Children

Globally, diarrheal diseases are the second leading cause of death among children under five years after the newborn period, despite the existence of effective treatments such as oral rehydration solutions (ORS) and zinc supplements and preventions such as rotavirus vaccines. This amounts to more than half a million deaths each year globally. Although many different bacteria, viruses and protozoal pathogens cause diarrheal disease, this recent report from GEMS shows that a relatively small number of pathogens were associated with a significantly increased risk of death, including three different categories of diarrhea-causing Escherichia coli, Shigella, Aeromonas, and two protozoans (Cryptosporidium and Entameba histolytica). Among these pathogens, Shigella can cause both dysenteric (gross blood in diarrheal stools) and non-dysenteric clinical forms of moderate-to-severe diarrhea. Whereas dysentery is an indication for treatment with anti-Shigella antibiotics, non-dysenteric diarrhea is not typically treated with antibiotics. Thus, it was of particular interest to observe that Shigella not only significantly increased the risk of death in children with non-dysenteric moderate-to-severe diarrhea, but it was also quite common when detected by highly sensitive molecular diagnostic techniques.

"CVD's GEMS research provides important data showing the need to better prevent and treat diarrheal illness. Over the past decade we've seen a decline in child mortality linked to diarrheal illness, but certainly more needs to be done," said Kathleen Neuzil, MD, MPH, the Myron M. Levine Professor in Vaccinology, Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics and Director of the Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health (CVD).

The research is designed to help set a path for better prevention and treatment of diarrheal illness in children. "This research underscores our commitment to take on the most challenging illnesses for the world's vulnerable populations," said Dean E. Albert Reece, MD, PhD, MBA. "Our Global Enteric Multicenter Study research continues to serve as a key guide for policy makers as they move toward preventing child mortality and designing the best interventions for children suffering from diarrheal illness," added Dean Reece, who is also Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, UM Baltimore, and the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor, University of Maryland School of Medicine.

A new method could enable researchers to fabricate more efficient and longer lasting perovskite solar cells, LEDs and photodetectors. By growing thin perovskite films on substrates with different compositions, engineers at the University of California San Diego have invented a way of fabricating perovskite single crystals with precisely deformed, or strained, structures.

The work was published Jan. 8 in Nature.

Engineering a small amount of strain in perovskites is of great interest because it provides a way to make significant changes in the material's properties, such as how it conducts electricity, absorbs and transmits light, or how stable it is.

"You can use strain engineering as a knob to tune existing functions or even install new functions in a material," said Sheng Xu, a professor of nanoengineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and the senior author of the study.

There are techniques that use heat to introduce strain in perovskite crystals, but that strain is typically short lived or uncontrollable in terms of its magnitude, which makes these strain-engineered perovskites impractical to use. Existing strain engineering techniques are also incompatible with device fabrication processes.

Xu and his team tackled these problems by carefully growing deformed perovskite single crystals. Their technique permanently embeds strain into the material's structure and allows them to tailor the amount of strain--the more deformed the crystal lattice, the higher the strain.

The type of perovskite investigated in this study is alpha-formamidinium lead iodide, which has been used to create the highest efficiency perovskite solar cells to date. The researchers grew crystals of the material on a series of perovskite substrates with varying compositions and lattice sizes--a process called heteroepitaxial growth. As the material crystallized, it adopted the lattice size of its substrate, which essentially forced the alpha-formamidinium lead iodide crystals to grow differently than they normally do.

"Thus, the lattices in the material are deformed and strained to different degrees, depending on the lattice mismatch between material and substrate," explained Yimu Chen, a nanoengineering Ph.D. student in Xu's lab and co-first author of the study.

"Because we are introducing strain at the atomic level, we can precisely design the strain and control it," said Yusheng Lei, who is also a nanoengineering Ph.D. student in Xu's lab and the other co-first author of the study.

The researchers grew perovskite crystals with five different levels of strain ranging from 0 to -2.4%. They found that -1.2% strain produced samples with the best charge-carrier mobility.

The team also reported another interesting discovery: growing alpha-formamidinium lead iodide crystals with strain stabilized its photoactive alpha phase. "In its strain-free form, alpha-formamidinium lead iodide undergoes a phase transition from a photoactive phase to a non-photoactive phase, which is bad for photovoltaic applications," Chen said. "With our growth method, we can lock the material's crystal structure with that of the substrate to prevent this phase transition and enhance its phase stability."

In future studies, the researchers will explore what new properties and functionalities they can strain engineer into perovskites using their method. They will also work on scaling up their process to grow large, single-crystalline thin films for industrial applications.

Have you ever played with a baby and felt a sense of connection, even though they couldn't yet talk to you? New research suggests that you might quite literally be "on the same wavelength," experiencing similar brain activity in the same brain regions.

A team of Princeton researchers has conducted the first study of how baby and adult brains interact during natural play, and they found measurable similarities in their neural activity. In other words, baby and adult brain activity rose and fell together as they shared toys and eye contact. The research was conducted at the Princeton Baby Lab, where University researchers study how babies learn to see, talk and understand the world.

"Previous research has shown that adults' brains sync up when they watch movies and listen to stories, but little is known about how this 'neural synchrony' develops in the first years of life," said Elise Piazza, an associate research scholar in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI) and the first author on a paper published Dec. 17, 2019, in Psychological Science.

Piazza and her co-authors -- Liat Hasenfratz, an associate research scholar in PNI; Uri Hasson, a professor of psychology and neuroscience; and Casey Lew-Williams, an associate professor of psychology -- posited that neural synchrony has important implications for social development and language learning.

Studying real-life, face-to-face communication between babies and adults is quite difficult. Most past studies of neural coupling, many of which were conducted in Hasson's lab, involved scanning adults' brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in separate sessions, while the adults lay down and watched movies or listened to stories.

But to study real-time communication, the researchers needed to create a child-friendly method of recording brain activity simultaneously from baby and adult brains. With funding from the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Transformative Technology Grant, the researchers developed a new dual-brain neuroimaging system that uses functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which is highly safe and records oxygenation in the blood as a proxy for neural activity. The setup allowed the researchers to record the neural coordination between babies and an adult while they played with toys, sang songs and read a book.

The same adult interacted with all 42 infants and toddlers who participated in the study. Of those, 21 had to be excluded because they "squirmed excessively," and three others flat-out refused to wear the cap, leaving 18 children, ranging in age from 9 months to 15 months.

The experiment had two portions. In one, the adult experimenter spent five minutes interacting directly with a child -- playing with toys, singing nursery rhymes or reading Goodnight Moon -- while the child sat on their parent's lap. In the other, the experimenter turned to the side and told a story to another adult while the child played quietly with their parent.

The caps collected data from 57 channels of the brain known to be involved in prediction, language processing and understanding other people's perspectives.

When they looked at the data, the researchers found that during the face-to-face sessions, the babies' brains were synchronized with the adult's brain in several areas known to be involved in high-level understanding of the world -- perhaps helping the children decode the overall meaning of a story or analyze the motives of the adult reading to them.

When the adult and infant were turned away from each other and engaging with other people, the coupling between them disappeared.

That fit with researchers' expectations, but the data also had surprises in store. For example, the strongest coupling occurred in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in learning, planning and executive functioning and was previously thought to be quite underdeveloped during infancy.

"We were also surprised to find that the infant brain was often 'leading' the adult brain by a few seconds, suggesting that babies do not just passively receive input but may guide adults toward the next thing they're going to focus on: which toy to pick up, which words to say," said Lew-Williams, who is a co-director of the Princeton Baby Lab.

"While communicating, the adult and child seem to form a feedback loop," Piazza added. "That is, the adult's brain seemed to predict when the infants would smile, the infants' brains anticipated when the adult would use more 'baby talk,' and both brains tracked joint eye contact and joint attention to toys. So, when a baby and adult play together, their brains influence each other in dynamic ways."

This two-brain approach to neuroscience could open doors to understanding how coupling with caregivers breaks down in atypical development -- such as in children diagnosed with autism -- as well as how educators can optimize their teaching approaches to accommodate children's diverse brains.

The researchers are continuing to investigate how this neural coupling relates to preschoolers' early language learning.

Scientists from Trinity College Dublin have discovered that two very different species of bacteria have evolved distinct, powerful antibiotic arsenals for use in the war against their bacterial neighbours [Thursday 9th January, 2020]. By blueprinting precisely how the antibiotics function against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), the scientists have provided new options for drug designers seeking to hold back the global threat that antimicrobial resistance poses humanity.

Failure to develop effective antibiotics that counter resistance to current drugs will have disastrous consequences. It is estimated that by mid-century, just 30 years from now, antimicrobial resistance will result in a global death rate of up to 10 million per year. By 2030, the World Bank puts the cost of resistance at US$3.4 trillion in global gross domestic product. The need for new and effective therapeutics is immediate and immense.

There's more than one way to skin a cat. So the proverb goes, suggesting the same end can be achieved in different ways. And in the research, just published in leading international journal, Nature Communications, the Trinity scientists outline a fascinating example of this happening in nature. In this case, natural selection has delivered two very different answers to the same problem - ultimately enabling successful competition in bacterial warfare.

The hope is that the basic research into the workings of an enzyme involved in bacterial coat synthesis reported in this article will contribute to the development of these urgently needed medicines.

Professor Martin Caffrey, Fellow Emeritus in Trinity's School of Biochemistry and Immunology, is the senior author of the research article. He said:

"Specifically, we have discovered how evolution has led two completely different types of bacteria to figure out a way of making two very different antibiotics with which to fend off bacterial neighbours in precisely the same way. This is an exquisite example of molecular convergent evolution."

"While the two antibiotics are chemically distinct - one is a cyclic depsipeptide (globomycin), and the other a macrocyclic lactone (myxovirescin) - remarkably they achieve the very same end of shutting down the production of key components of the cell envelope in other bacteria. This weapon thereby kills or weakens the other bacteria."

How does this help drug designers?

While it is important from a purely scientific perspective to understand how nature crafts and moulds at the molecular level, as illustrated in this work, the scientists findings have the added benefit of providing drug designers chemical blueprints - or pharmacaphores, which explain how a molecular structure lends itself to a specific action, such as an antibiotic effect - which are known to work for bacteria in the real world.

These blueprints can now be used to guide pharmaceutical chemists when they design new, more effective drugs that are urgently needed in light of the accelerating global threat of antimicrobial resistance.

Professor Caffrey added:

"Scientists have recently devoted a lot of effort to tackling open, 'undruggable' targets - many of which lack the defined binding pockets where drugs can interact specifically to achieve the desired outcome. The bacterial cell wall target that takes centre stage in our work likewise has an open binding surface but in its case nature has figured out at least two ways of targeting it with very high affinity using the natural antibiotics, globomycin and myxovirescin. And they do so in ways that are, at once, similar and distinct."

PHILADELPHIA - Cancer patients may one day be able to get their entire course of radiation therapy in less than a second rather than coming in for treatment over the course of several weeks, and researchers in the Abramson Cancer Center of the University of Pennsylvania have taken the first steps toward making it a reality. In a new report published today in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology, and Physics, researchers detail how they used proton radiation to generate the dosage needed to theoretically give a cancer patient their entire course of radiotherapy in one rapid treatment. It's known as FLASH radiotherapy, and it's an experimental paradigm that could represent a sea change for the world of oncology in the future. In this study, researchers also found FLASH demonstrated the same effect on tumors as traditional photon radiation while sparing healthy tissue due to the shorter exposure time.

"This is the first time anyone has published findings that demonstrate the feasibility of using protons - rather than electrons - to generate FLASH doses, with an accelerator currently used for clinical treatments," said the study's co-senior author James M. Metz, MD, director of the Roberts Proton Therapy Center and chair of Radiation Oncology. The co-senior authors on the study are Constantinos Koumenis, PhD, the Richard H. Chamberlain Professor of Research Oncology, and Keith A. Cengel, MD, PhD, an associate professor of Radiation Oncology, both in Penn's Perelman School of Medicine.

Metz noted that other research teams have generated similar doses using electrons, which do not penetrate deep enough into the body to be clinically useful as a cancer treatment for internal tumors. Other groups have tried the approach with conventional photons, but currently available treatment devices do not have the ability to generate the necessary dosage. This study shows, that with technical modifications, the currently available accelerators for protons can achieve FLASH doses with the biologic effects today.

The key for the Penn team was the ability to generate the dose with protons, and even in that setting, researchers had to specially develop the tools needed to effectively and accurately measure radiation doses, since the standard detectors were quickly saturated due to the high levels of radiation. The Roberts Proton Therapy Center includes a dedicated research room to run experiments like these, allowing investigators to use photon and proton radiation side-by-side just feet from the clinic. It's one of the few facilities in the world with those unique features, and Metz said this infrastructure is what made Penn's FLASH experiments possible.

"We've been able to develop specialized systems in the research room to generate FLASH doses, demonstrate that we can control the proton beam, and perform a large number of experiments to help us understand the implications of FLASH radiation that we simply could not have done with a more traditional research setup," Metz said.

Researchers said they are already beginning to optimize how they would use this down the road for clinical trials, including taking the necessary steps to translate the ability from the research room to a clinical space, as well as designing a delivery system for FLASH in humans.

The famous, but bizarre, 'rubber hand illusion' could help people who suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder overcome their condition without the often unbearable stress of exposure therapy, suggests new research.

Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) affects as many as one in 50 people worldwide. One of the most common types of the condition, affecting almost a half of OCD patients, is characterised by severe contamination fears - even from touching something as commonplace as a door knob - leading to excessive washing behaviour. The condition can have a serious impact on people's lives, their mental health, their relationships and their ability to hold down jobs.

OCD is treated using a combination of medication such as Prozac and a form of cognitive behavioural therapy ('talking therapy') termed 'exposure and response prevention'. This exposure therapy often involves instructing OCD patients to touch contaminated surfaces, such as a toilet, but to refrain from then washing their hands; however, this experience can be so stressful that many patients cannot take part.

"OCD can be an extremely debilitating condition for many people, but the treatments are not always straightforward," explained Baland Jalal, a neuroscientist based in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. "In fact, exposure therapy can be very stressful and so is not always effective or even feasible for many patients."

To overcome this challenge, a team of researchers from the UK and USA tested whether, rather than asking patients to contaminate their own hands, it might be possible to help them overcome their fears by contaminating a fake hand instead - a procedure they call 'multisensory stimulation therapy'.

The technique builds on a famous trick known as the 'rubber hand illusion'. In this illusion, an individual places both hands in front of them on a table, either side of a partition such that they cannot see their right hand. Instead, to the left of the partition they see a fake right hand. The illusionist - in this case, the experimenter - strokes both the fake hand and hidden right hand using a paintbrush. After several minutes of stroking the individual often reports 'feeling' touch arising from the fake hand as though it was their own.

In the majority of cases, the rubber hand illusion only works if both hands are stroked in synchrony; if they are stroked asynchronously, the illusion is diminished or disappears entirely. However, in a number of psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia and body dysmorphic disorder, the illusion appears to work in both cases, suggesting that the body image held in the minds of these patients is more malleable than in healthy individuals.

In a previous study, carried out by Jalal and neuroscientist VS Ramachandran using healthy volunteers, once the illusion had begun to work, the researchers contaminated the dummy hand with fake faeces. The participants reported disgust sensations as if it were their own hand that had been contaminated.

In a new study published today in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Jalal and Ramachandran teamed up with researchers at Harvard University - Richard J McNally, Director of Clinical Training in Department Psychology and Jason A Elias and Sriramya Potluri in the Department Psychiatry.

The team recruited 29 OCD patients from the McLean Hospital Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Institute, an intensive residential treatment programme affiliated with Harvard Medical School. Sixteen of these patients had their hidden and dummy hands stroked at the same time, while the remaining 13 patients (the control group) had their hands stroked out of synch.

After 5 minutes of stroking, the participant was asked to rate how much the rubber hand felt like their own. The experimenter then used a tissue to smear the fake faeces on the rubber hand while simultaneously dabbing a damp paper towel on the participant's real right hand (to create the sensation of having the contaminant smeared on their real hand). The participant was then asked to rate their disgust, anxiety and handwashing urge levels, and the experimenter rated the participant's facial expression of disgust.

The researchers found that patients in both the experimental and control groups felt an equally strong rubber hand illusion. In other words, even when their real and fake hands were being stroked asynchronously, they had still begun to sense the fake hand as their own. Unsurprisingly, therefore, patients in both groups initially reported similar levels of contamination.

The experimenter then removed the clean paper towel and the tissue that had been used to contaminate the rubber hand, leaving fake faeces on the rubber hand. The experimenter continued to stroke the rubber hand and the participant's real hand for an additional 5 minutes, after which the participant again provided contamination ratings and the experimenter rated their facial expression.

Now, the patients in the experimental condition were more disgusted: 65% of participants in the experimental condition had a disgust facial expression compared to 35% in the control. This supports previous studies that show that the rubber hand illusion becomes stronger the longer the hand is stroked.

Next, the experimenter stopped the stroking and placed the fake faeces on the patient's real, right hand and asked the participant once again to provide contamination ratings. Now the differences were much more pronounced in the experimental condition. While those in the control group had average disgust, anxiety and washing urge levels at nearly 7, the experimental group had levels of nearly 9 - that is, an overall 23% difference in contamination ratings.

"Over time, stroking the real and fake hands in synchrony appears to create a stronger and stronger and stronger illusion to the extent that it eventually felt very much like their own hand," said Jalal. "This meant that after ten minutes, the reaction to contamination was more extreme. Although this was the point our experiment ended, research has shown that continued exposure leads to a decline in contamination feelings - which is the basis of traditional exposure therapy."

Jalal says it can be safely assumed that the fake hand contamination procedure would lead to similar fall in levels of disgust and contamination ratings, possibly after 30 minutes.

Jalal says the rubber hand illusion may offer a way of treating OCD patients without the high stress levels that exposure therapy can cause. "If you can provide an indirect treatment that is reasonably realistic, where you contaminate a rubber hand instead of a real hand, this might provide a bridge that will allow more people to tolerate exposure therapy or even to replace exposure therapy altogether."

Jalal has previously worked on other indirect treatments for treating patients with OCD, including a smartphone app. He says that unlike other indirect treatments, this new approach creates a compelling illusion that a part of the patient's body is being exposed to contamination and so could be even more immersive. It also has additional benefits: "Whereas traditional exposure therapy can be stressful, the rubber hand illusion often makes people laugh at first, helping put them at ease. It is also straightforward and cheap compared to virtual reality, and so can easily reach patients in distress no matter where they are, such as poorly resourced and emergency settings."

Jalal says the next step is to do randomised clinical trials and compare this technique to existing treatments. Ramachandran agrees, adding: "These results are compelling but not conclusive. We need larger samples and to iron out some methodological wrinkles."

Other applications of multisensory stimulation therapy might include therapy for people afraid of needles. Exposure therapy would mean repeated needle injections into a real arm and could result in punctured veins. Using a fake hand could provide a clever and convenient alternative.

Sometimes it helps to check the facts. You may be surprised what you find.

Over the last decade, several high-profile scientific studies have reported that tropical fish living in coral reefs are adversely affected by ocean acidification caused by climate change - that is, they behave oddly and are attracted to predators as levels of carbon dioxide dissolved from air pollution increase.

But now new research suggests that isn't the case.

In fact, in the most exhaustive study yet of the impacts of ocean acidification on the behaviour of coral reef fish, headed up in Australia and co-authored by two Université de Montréal researchers, it turns out fish behaviour is not affected at all.

"The past decade has seen many high-profile studies that have found alarming effects of ocean acidification on coral reef fish behaviour," with some reporting that "fish become attracted to the smell of predators in acidified waters," said lead author Timothy Clark, an associate professor at Deakin University's School of Life and Environmental Sciences in Geelong, a seaside city near Melbourne, Australia.

But when they tried to re-do those earlier studies with many of the same species, and by crunching the data in a new analysis, Clark and his team of Canadian and Scandinavian scientists - including UdeM biologists Sandra Binning and Dominique Roche - arrived at very different results.

It turns out the original results couldn't be replicated.

"We expected previous results would be easy to repeat because of how clear and strong they appeared in the initial papers. Instead, we found consistently normal behaviours in fish that we acclimated to (predicted) end-of-(21st)-century levels of CO2," said Clark.

But "by using rigorous methods, measuring multiple behaviours in multiple species, and making our data and analysis code openly available, we have comprehensively and transparently shown that ... ocean acidification has negligible direct impacts on the behaviour of fish on coral reefs," said Clark.

"Specifically, elevated CO2 does not meaningfully alter activity levels or behavioural lateralisation (left-right turning preference), nor does it alter the response of fish to the chemical cues released by predators."

The new study is bound to make a big impact in the marine biology world, the scientists believe. Not only does it contradict earlier studies, it shows that science doesn't always produce results to buttress things everyone agrees on, like climate change.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

"Some people may be surprised by these findings, but that's how science operates: it's a normal and healthy process to question published results. Sometimes they hold up, and sometimes they don't. Ultimately, it's the accumulation of evidence that matters and brings us closer to the truth," said Binning, an assistant professor at UdeM.

"It's not because some researchers have found one thing that we should take it at face value. As scientists, we should always be critical of what we read and what we see. That's how science advances."

"We're not saying that climate change is not a problem - far from it," added Roche, her husband, a research associate at UdeM. "Our point is that replication studies are very important, just as are ocean acidification and global warming generally."

Clark agreed.

"The negative effects of CO2 emissions are well established, with global warming already having devastating effects on coral reef ecosystems around the world. Among other things, more frequent storms and coral bleaching during heatwaves is causing severe habitat loss for fish," he said.

"So, despite our new results, coral reefs and their fish communities remain in grave danger because of increasing atmospheric CO2."

Now, instead of concentrating on how fish behaviour is affected by ocean acidification, scientists would do better to focus their attention "on others aspects of climate change that are more in need of research," such as infectious disease risk, habitat destruction, and decreased oxygen levels in water, said Binning, holder of a Canada Research Chair on Eco-Evolution and Host-Parasite Interactions.

"With so little time left to combat climate change, it's vitally important that research dollars are used in the best way possible to better help us understand and target systems and organisms at the greatest risk," added Roche.

Over the last 20 years, three families have been unknowingly linked to one another by an unknown illness. Researchers at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and other organizations have now identified the cause of the illness, a new disease called CRIA syndrome. The results of their work were published in the journal Nature.

Discovering a new disease

NHGRI scientific director Daniel Kastner, M.D., Ph.D., a pioneer in the field of auto-inflammatory diseases, and his team, had never seen a condition like this one. Symptoms include fevers, swollen lymph nodes, severe abdominal pain, gastrointestinal problems, headaches and, in some cases, abnormally enlarged spleen and liver.

The disorder has characteristics typical of an auto-inflammatory disease, where the immune system appears to be activated without any apparent trigger. Although the condition is not life-threatening, patients have persistent fever and swollen lymph nodes from childhood to old age, as well as other symptoms that can lead to lifelong pain and disability.

When confronted by patients' symptoms, who were first seen at the NIH Clinical Center, researchers looked for infections and cancer as the cause. After those were ruled out, they sought answers in the genome, a person's complete set of DNA. Kastner and his team sequenced gene regions across the genome and discovered only one gene - RIPK1 - to be consistently different in all patients.

Researchers identified a specific type of variation in the patients: a single DNA letter at a specific location incorrectly changed. This change can alter the amino acid added to the encoded protein. These are called "missense" mutations.

Remarkably, each of the three families had its own unique missense mutation affecting the very same DNA letter in the RIPK1 gene. Each affected person had one mutant and one normal copy of the gene, while the unaffected family members had two normal copies of the gene.

The researchers also looked at 554 people with sporadic unexplained fever, swollen glands and other symptoms or diseases, and then at over a quarter million people from public sequence databases to see if they encountered the same RIPK1 mutations. When they did not find such mutations elsewhere, it was clear that they were onto something new.

"It was as if lightning had struck three times in the same place," said Kastner, who led the NHGRI team. "This discovery underscores the tremendous power of combining astute clinical observation, state-of-the-art DNA sequencing, and the sharing of sequence data in large publicly-accessible databases. We live in a very special time."

Cause and effect

The RIPK1 gene encodes for the RIPK1 protein, which is involved in the body's response to inflammation and programmed cell death. To make sure that RIPK1 action does not initiate inflammation and cell death in all cells, another protein "cuts" the RIPK1 protein at a specific location in the protein sequence. The research team noticed that all the mutations in CRIA patients occur at the location where RIPK1 usually gets cut, resulting in an uncuttable, seemingly indestructible RIPK1 protein.

This suggests that cutting RIPK1, thereby disarming it, is crucial to controlling cell death and inflammation. Recognizing this cause-effect relationship, Kastner's team named the resulting disease cleavage-resistant RIPK1-induced autoinflammatory (CRIA) syndrome.

Although the researchers made the connection between CRIA syndrome and RIPK1 mutations, they still needed to understand the molecular mechanisms involved in the disease. To do this, Kastner and his team collaborated with Najoua Laloui, Ph.D., and John Silke, Ph.D., at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Australia, who made specialized mouse models with similar RIPK1 mutations as seen in CRIA patients.

The Australian team discovered that mouse embryos with two mutant copies of RIPK1 (and no normal copy) died in the uterus due to excessive cell death signals, which further confirmed the importance of cutting RIPK1 to limit its function in normal cells. However, mice bearing one mutant copy of RIPK1 and one normal copy, as is the case for CRIA patients, were mostly normal but had heightened responses to a variety of inflammatory stimuli, which the researchers think may suggest a possible mechanism for how the human disease occurs.

Finding answers

Kastner and his team worked to find a treatment for CRIA syndrome. Seven patients with the condition were given therapies that are known to reduce inflammation. While drugs such as etanercept and anakinra, which are routinely used to treat autoinflammatory and chronic diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, had little effect on the patients, one biological drug did.

Tocilizumab, a drug that suppresses the immune system, reduced the severity and frequency of CRIA syndrome symptoms in five out of seven patients in some cases with life-changing effects.

Hirotsugu Oda, M.D., Ph.D., a post-doctoral researcher in Kastner's laboratory and co-first author of the paper, said: "As a physician-scientist, the most thrilling experience to me was to hear the mother of a CRIA patient say that her son was a completely different, healthy child after the tocilizumab treatment. Through the genetic diagnosis, we were able to contribute to the treatment of a few patients. This is, after all, the ultimate goal."

Surprised by this serendipitous result, researchers are now trying to understand the detailed molecular mechanism that enables tocilizumab to treat CRIA. Specific inhibitors of RIPK1, which are under development, may also hold promise in both CRIA and other seemingly intractable inflammatory conditions.

A physically active lifestyle and a diet rich in vegetables and fruits have a central role in promoting health by preventing non-communicable diseases. A recent study carried out at the Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland examined the associations between diverse subgroups of leisure-time physical activity and fruit and vegetable consumption from childhood to middle age.

Persistent physical activity during leisure time from childhood to adulthood was associated with higher and more frequent fruit and vegetable consumption when compared to persistent low activity or inactivity. In addition, especially those men who decreased their activity level showed higher fruit and vegetable consumption than their less active peers until young adulthood, but no longer in middle age. Thus, decreasing leisure-time physical activity may be an indicator for an additional health risk, due to simultaneous detrimental changes in diet. In contrast, those who increased their activity level from childhood to adulthood seemed to increase their consumption of fruits and vegetables. This development was especially clear among females.

"In health care guidance, it would be important to acknowledge that these two health behaviors may facilitate each other," says Irinja Lounassalo, doctoral student at the University of Jyväskylä. "For example, when aiming to increase a person's activity level, improving the quality of diet simultaneously might come rather naturally. This could be a way to promote more holistic well-being."

While the inactive, low-active and decreasingly active participants generally showed the lowest levels of fruit and vegetable consumption in adulthood when compared to the persistently or increasingly active participants, a slight increasing trend in fruit and vegetable consumption was observed in the less active subgroups during the most recent measurements.

"These results are in line with the National FINRISK Study, which shows how the trend in fruit and vegetable consumption in Finland has been rising during the 21st century," says Lounassalo. "Nonetheless, not many manage to reach the recommended 500 grams of fruits and vegetables a day, but the course is promising."

Teenage years was the time period when a decreasing tendency in fruit and vegetable consumption was observed across nearly all the leisure-time physical activity subgroups.

"To achieve favorable changes in these behaviors, cross-government and multisectoral approaches that facilitate the integration of physical activity and higher fruit and vegetable consumption in multiple daily settings are needed," says Lounassalo. "Especially putting effort into adopting or maintaining a physically active lifestyle along with healthy dietary habits, starting from adolescence, would be important for health later in life."

Men and women from a South Asian background are more likely to develop a physical disability and struggle with day-to-day physical activities throughout adulthood compared with their White British counterparts, new research published in the Journal of Gerontology: Medical Sciences reports.

Examining data from 40,000 men and women from White British, South Asian (people originating from the Indian subcontinent) and African Caribbean backgrounds, researchers from the University of Surrey investigated whether different ethnic groups in the UK are more likely to have an increased risk of developing a physical disability and have problems with physical functioning than their White counterparts.

Physical functioning was determined by the extent to which a participant's ability to climb stairs and take part in moderate activities was limited by their health. A person was deemed to have a physical disability if they reported difficulties in mobility, manual dexterity and physical coordination or balance.

Researchers found that those from a South Asian background, at every stage of adulthood, were more likely to experience poor physical functioning and had an increased risk of developing a physical disability than their White counterparts. This ethnic difference was most pronounced in women, with older South Asian women (over the age of 60) being four times more likely to report having a physical disability compared with older White British women of the same age. The increased risk among South Asians could not be attributed to socioeconomic status or existing major health conditions such as diabetes, which is particularly prevalent among UK South Asian people.

Researchers also found that African Caribbean women had elevated odds of poor physical functioning compared with White British women from middle age onwards, for example, in the older group, with 75% of African Caribbean women reporting poor physical functioning compared with 57% of White British women. The research indicated that socioeconomic status and chronic conditions, in particular obesity and hypertension, may help explain some but not all of the increased risks reported by African Caribbean females.

In contrast, African Caribbean men, in some stages of adulthood, showed trends towards lower odds of developing a physical disability or reporting poor physical functioning compared with White British men.

Lead author Dr Emily Williams, Reader in Chronic Disease and Health Inequalities at the University of Surrey, said:

"It is concerning that people from South Asian backgrounds, particularly women, report much higher levels of physical disability throughout adulthood, compared with White British people. The fact that this is not explained by the standard risk factors for disability means more work is needed to understand this excess risk in order for us to address these health inequalities.

"There is a clear need for action in early adulthood when there may be more opportunity to effectively intervene, preventing physical decline in high-risk groups and reducing further impact on other health and employment outcomes.

"In particular, these findings highlight the service implications of addressing women's health needs, demonstrating the importance of taking into account important characteristics such as ethnicity and age in the planning and delivery of women's health care services."

Most people associate the idea of creatures trapped in amber with insects or spiders, which are preserved lifelike in fossil tree resin. An international research team of palaeontologists and biologists from the Universities of Göttingen and Helsinki, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York has now discovered the oldest slime mould identified to date. The fossil is about 100 million years old and is exquisitely preserved in amber from Myanmar. The results have been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Slime moulds, also called myxomycetes, belong to a group known as 'Amoebozoa'. These are microscopic organisms that live most of the time as single mobile cells hidden in the soil or in rotting wood, where they eat bacteria. However, they can join together to form complex, beautiful and delicate fruiting bodies, which serve to make and spread spores.

Since fossil slime moulds are extremely rare, studying their evolutionary history has been very difficult. So far, there have only been two confirmed reports of fossils of fruiting bodies and these are just 35 to 40 million years old. The discovery of fossil myxomycetes is very unlikely because their fruiting bodies are extremely short-lived. The researchers are therefore astounded by the chain of events that must have led to the preservation of this newly identified fossil. "The fragile fruiting bodies were most likely torn from the tree bark by a lizard, which was also caught in the sticky tree resin, and finally embedded in it together with the reptile," says Professor Jouko Rikkinen from the University of Helsinki. The lizard detached the fruiting bodies at a relatively early stage when the spores had not yet been released, which now reveals valuable information about the evolutionary history of these fascinating organisms.

The researchers were surprised by the discovery that the slime mould can easily be assigned to a genus still living today. "The fossil provides unique insights into the longevity of the ecological adaptations of myxomycetes," explains palaeontologist Professor Alexander Schmidt from the University of Göttingen, lead author of the study.

"We interpret this as evidence of strong environmental selection. It seems that slime moulds that spread very small spores using the wind had an advantage," says Rikkinen. The ability of slime moulds to develop long-lasting resting stages in their life cycle, which can last for years, probably also contributes to the remarkable similarity of the fossil to its closest present-day relatives.

When you see someone being unfair, disloyal or uncaring toward others, do you feel a sense of moral outrage in the form of a twisting stomach, pounding heart or flushing face? And is it possible that your body's response depends on your political affiliation?

Researchers with the University of Southern California Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI) set out to examine how and where emotions associated with violations of moral concerns are experienced in the body, and whether political orientation plays a role.

"Our study finds that liberals and conservatives feel moral violations in different areas of their bodies, interpret them as distinct complex feelings and make different moral and political judgements," said Morteza Dehghani, assistant professor of psychology and computer science at the BCI and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. "This was particularly true for perceptions of feelings of loyalty and purity."

The research was published today in Psychological Science.

Liberals and conservatives: Wired differently?

Prior research has shown liberals and conservatives rely on different moral foundations and react differently to violations of morals. The authors say their study is the first to indicate that political orientation influences where and how violations of specific moral concerns -- including care, fairness, purity, loyalty and authority -- are felt in the body. For example, liberals feel violations of purity in their crotch area, chest and slightly in their heads while conservatives feel these violations almost exclusively -- and very strongly -- in their heads.

The results are part of a growing body of research on psychological and physiological differences between liberals and conservatives and adds to the growing scientific body of work on how morality is linked to emotions.

"These findings suggest that at least some of these differences can be attributed to the basic emotional processes, which seem to function somewhat differently according to political affiliation. In addition, our results highlight a considerable amount of overlap in Republicans' and Democrats' emotional responses to moral transgressions," said Mohammad Atari, the first author of the paper and a third-year PhD student at USC Dornsife.

"Activated" by moral outrage

It's widely accepted that the sensing of physiological feedback from the body and its visceral organs is essential for emotional experience, but psychologists have only recently identified the distribution of emotion-related body sensations -- or "feeling space" -- by distinct maps.

Some emotions are associated with more activity in certain body parts, like a quickening heartbeat, while other body regions might be "deactivated" in the same emotional experience. Fear, for example, is represented by activity in the chest and head area, while sadness may accompany slight activations in the chest and deactivations in lower limbs.

The researchers wanted to take this emotional mapping to another level by examining the body's sensations of moral emotions in reaction to moral violations. They also wanted to study whether identification as conservative or liberal could predict where people experienced these emotions.

Mapping responses to moral violations

Study participants rated their political affiliation with the Republican or the Democratic party and ranked their conservatism on a scale ranging from 1 (very liberal) to 7 (very conservative). Researchers then used these to assign a political orientation score. Higher scores indicated someone was more conservative.

Researchers used a detailed questionnaire to assess the degree to which participants deemed different considerations as relevant when making moral judgments and their agreement with statements about morality. Participants were scored on their moral concerns of care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity.

Participants were randomly assigned to read scenarios involving moral violations, such as someone avoiding sitting next to an obese person on a bus. They were asked to rank on a scale of 1 to 5 how morally wrong it was and the strength of their emotional response to the behavior. Next, they were asked to draw key aspects of their experience on two highly detailed silhouettes of the body, demonstrating areas where feelings were stronger or faster and areas of their body where feelings were weaker or slower.

Researchers used the drawings to compute individual-level body sensation maps. The results showed that different moral violations are felt relatively similarly across the five moral concerns. However, scientists observed some important differences when they compared how feelings were experienced among liberals and conservatives.

The authors replicated their results in a second, nationally stratified sample, and found those results were fully consistent with the main study.

Is it all in your head?

Many feelings associated with moral violations consistently showed up in the same areas of the body. Across moral violations, the head and face area were highly activated and were paired with varying levels of activation in the chest.

"The consistent activation observed in the head area suggests that people subjectively associate moral violations with high-level cognitive processing 'in their head,'" Dehghani said. "This didn't surprise us, as moral violation scenarios require a high level of cognitive and emotional processing, as well as an evaluation of standards of right and wrong."

A team headed by Professor Frank Stienkemeier at Freiburg's Institute of Physics and Dr. Marcel Mudrich, professor at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, has observed the ultrafast reaction of nanodroplets of helium after excitation with extreme ultraviolet radiation (XUV) using a free-electron laser in real time. The researchers have published their findings in the latest issue of Nature Communications.

Lasers generating high-intensity and ultra-short XUV and X-ray pulses give researchers new options for investigating the fundamental properties of matter in great detail. In many such experiments, material samples in the nanometer range are of particular interest. Some scientists use helium droplets no larger than a few nanometers as a means of transporting and studying embedded molecules and molecular nanostructures. Helium droplets are ideally suited for this purpose because they possess extraordinary properties. At an extremely low temperature of only 0.37 degrees above absolute zero, they move frictionlessly and are thus considered superfluids. Moreover, helium droplets usually are inert to the embedded molecules' chemical processes and are completely transparent to infrared and visible light.

The team led by Stienkemeier and Mudrich wanted to find out how one of these superfluid droplets itself reacts when hit directly by an intense XUV laser pulse. The researchers used the world's first and only seeded free-electron laser FERMI in Trieste, Italy, which delivers high-intensity XUV pulses at a wavelength set by the team. Supported by model calculations, the researchers identified three elementary reaction steps: A very fast localization of electrons, the population of metastable states, and the formation of a bubble that eventually bursts at the surface of the droplets and ejects a single excited helium atom.

"For the first time, we have managed to directly follow these processes in superfluid helium, which take place in an extremely short time," says Mudrich. "The results help to understand how nanoparticles interact with energetic radiation and then decay," Stienkemeier adds. "This is essential information for the work aiming at directly imaging individual nanoparticles," he explains, "as it is being carried out at new intense radiation sources such as the European X-ray laser XFEL in Hamburg."

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Jan. 8, 2020) -- New research shows that the microorganisms in our gut could help protect brain cells from damage caused by inflammation after a stroke.

The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience by researchers from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, University of Kentucky's College of Medicine and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center reveals that supplementing the body's short chain fatty acids could improve stroke recovery.

Short chain fatty acids, which are produced by the community of bacteria that live in the gut - known collectively as the microbiome - are a key component of gut health. Although it is known that the microbiome can also influence brain health and the central nervous system, its role in stroke recovery has not yet been explored.

"There is a growing amount of evidence that inflammation can be influenced by the microbiome, and now we are learning how it affects neuroinflammation after brain injury," says Ann Stowe, UK associate professor in the Department of Neurology and co-author of the study.

Researchers added short chain fatty acids to the drinking water of mice, and those that drank the fatty acid water experienced a better stroke recovery. The fatty acid-supplemented mice had reduced motor impairment as well as increased spine growth on the dendrites of nerve cells, which are crucial for memory structure. They also expressed more genes related to microglia, the brain's immune cells. This relationship indicates short chain fatty acids may serve as messengers in the gut-brain connection by influencing how the brain responds to injury.

The results could be promising news for stroke patients. Currently, there are only two FDA-approved treatments for acute stroke and no effective therapeutics to promote long-term repair in the brain after stroke damage.

A short chain fatty acid dietary supplement may be a safe and practical additional therapy for stroke rehabilitation, Stowe says.

"If we can confirm that a dietary supplement could be beneficial to inflammation and recovery after stroke, it could positively impact so many lives. We have nearly 800,000 people a year in the U.S. who are affected by stroke," said Stowe.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that stroke is also the number one cause of adult disability and the fifth leading cause of death in the U.S.

Stowe says the research collaboration with Dr. Arthur Liesz' group in Munich is ongoing and next steps are to focus on additional behavioral tests as well as examining some of the specific immune cell populations that are affected by short chain fatty acids.