Earth

In the published study the group, led by researchers from EMBL and the DKFZ, present their new methods that permit them to characterise complex organs. The team focused their research on the bone marrow of mice, as it harbours blood stem cells that are responsible for life-long blood production. Because of the ability to influence stem cells and to sustain blood production, there is a growing interest in exploiting the bone marrow environment as a target for novel leukaemia treatments.

"So far, very little was known about how different cells are spatially organised within the bone marrow and how they interact with each other," explains Chiara Baccin, a post-doc in the Steinmetz Group at EMBL Heidelberg. The newly used methods permitted the team to uncover the cellular composition, the three-dimensional organisation and how the cells interact with each other. In the process the researchers have identified previously unknown cell types, so called "niche cells", that are of great importance for the regulation of blood stem cells.

In order to understand which cells can be found in the bone marrow, where they are localised and how they might impact on stem cells, the researchers combined single-cell and spatial transcriptomics with novel computational methods. By analysing the RNA content of individual bone marrow cells, the team identified 32 different cell types, including extremely rare and previously unknown cell types. "We believe that these rare 'niche cells' establish unique environments in the bone marrow that are required for stem cell function and production of new blood and immune cells," explains Simon Haas, group leader at the DKFZ and HI-STEM.

Using novel computational methods, the researchers were not only able to determine the organisation of the different cell types in the bone marrow in 3D, but could also predict how cells interact with each other. "It's the first evidence that spatial interactions in a tissue can be deduced computationally on the basis of genomic data," explains Lars Velten, staff scientist in the Steinmetz Group.

"Our dataset is publicly accessible to any laboratory in the world and it could be instrumental in refining in vivo studies," says Lars Steinmetz, group leader at EMBL Heidelberg. The data, which is now already used by different teams all over the world, is accessible in a 3D-atlas via a user-friendly web app. All gathered information is available for free and will in the future facilitate the refinement of genetic studies.

The developed method can be used in different tissues for the study of their 3D organisation. "Our approach is widely applicable and can be used to study the complex pathology of human diseases. We are actually currently in the process of using these approaches on haematological diseases, such as leukaemia," highlights Andreas Trumpp, managing director of HI-STEM and division head at DKFZ.

A new study led by Simon Fraser University's Dean of Science, Prof. Paul Kench, has discovered new evidence of sea-level variability in the central Indian Ocean.

The study, which provides new details about sea levels in the past, concludes that sea levels in the central Indian Ocean have risen by close to a meter in the last two centuries.

Prof. Kench says, "We know that certain types of fossil corals act as important recorders of past sea levels. By measuring the ages and the depths of these fossil corals, we are identifying that there have been periods several hundred years ago that the sea level has been much lower than we thought in parts of the Indian Ocean."

He says understanding where sea levels have been historically, and what happens as they rise, will provide greater insights into how coral reefs systems and islands may be able to respond to the changes in sea levels in the future.

Underscoring the serious threat posed to coastal cities and communities in the region, the ongoing study, which began in 2017, further suggests that if such acceleration continues over the next century, sea levels in the Indian Ocean will have risen to their highest level ever in recorded history.

The research paper authored by Kench and others, and entitled, "Climate-forced sea-level lowstands in the Indian Ocean during the last two millennia" was published this week in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Lithium-ion batteries are notorious for developing internal electrical shorts that can ignite a battery's liquid electrolytes, leading to explosions and fires. Engineers at the University of Illinois have developed a solid polymer-based electrolyte that can self-heal after damage - and the material can also be recycled without the use of harsh chemicals or high temperatures.

The new study, which could help manufacturers produce recyclable, self-healing commercial batteries, is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

As lithium-ion batteries go through multiple cycles of charge and discharge, they develop tiny, branchlike structures of solid lithium called dendrites, the researchers said. These structures reduce battery life, cause hotspots and electrical shorts, and sometimes grow large enough to puncture the internal parts of the battery, causing explosive chemical reactions between the electrodes and electrolyte liquids.

There has been a push by chemists and engineers to replace the liquid electrolytes in lithium-ion batteries with solid materials such as ceramics or polymers, the researchers said. However, many of these materials are rigid and brittle resulting in poor electrolyte-to-electrode contact and reduced conductivity.

"Solid ion-conducting polymers are one option for developing nonliquid electrolytes," said Brian Jing, a materials science and engineering graduate student and study co-author. "But the high-temperature conditions inside a battery can melt most polymers, again resulting in dendrites and failure."

Past studies have produced solid electrolytes by using a network of polymer strands that are cross-linked to form a rubbery lithium conductor. This method delays the growth of dendrites; however, these materials are complex and cannot be recovered or healed after damage, Jing said.

To address this issue, the researchers developed a network polymer electrolyte in which the cross-link point can undergo exchange reactions and swap polymer strands. In contrast to linear polymers, these networks actually get stiffer upon heating, which can potentially minimize the dendrite problem, the researchers said. Additionally, they can be easily broken down and resolidified into a networked structure after damage, making them recyclable, and they restore conductivity after being damaged because they are self-healing.

"This new network polymer also shows the remarkable property that both conductivity and stiffness increase with heating, which is not seen in conventional polymer electrolytes," Jing said.

"Most polymers require strong acids and high temperatures to break down," said materials science and engineering professor and lead author Christopher Evans. "Our material dissolves in water at room temperature, making it a very energy-efficient and environmentally friendly process."

The team probed the conductivity of the new material and found its potential as an effective battery electrolyte to be promising, the researchers said, but acknowledge that more work is required before it could be used in batteries that are comparable to what is in use today.

"I think this work presents an interesting platform for others to test," Evans said. "We used a very specific chemistry and a very specific dynamic bond in our polymer, but we think this platform can be reconfigured to be used with many other chemistries to tweak the conductivity and mechanical properties."

New Rochelle, NY, December 23, 2019--A new prospective study based on data from the Women's Health Initiative found a potential inverse association between dietary magnesium and fatal coronary heart disease in postmenopausal women. The study, which also showed a trend between magnesium and sudden cardiac death in this population, is published in Journal of Women's Health, a peer-reviewed publication from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. Click here to read the full-text article on the Journal of Women's Health website through January 23, 2020.

Charles Eaton, MD, Alpert Medical School of Brown University, and a large team of researchers from various institutions, coauthored the article entitled "Association of Dietary Magnesium Intake with Fatal Coronary Heart Disease and Sudden Cardiac Death: Findings from the Women's Health Initiative." The researchers examined magnesium intake at baseline for more than 153,000 postmenopausal women and identified the development of fatal coronary heart disease and sudden cardiac death over the subsequent 10.5 years of follow-up. The data revealed that higher magnesium intake was associated with statistically significant risk reduction in fatal coronary heart disease and a reduction in risk of sudden cardiac death.

Susan G. Kornstein, MD, Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Women's Health and Executive Director of the Virginia Commonwealth University Institute for Women's Health, Richmond, VA, states: "If the findings of this study are confirmed, future research should test whether high-risk women would benefit from magnesium supplementation to reduce their risk of fatal coronary heart disease."

Dense, hazy fog episodes characterized by relatively high humidity, low visibility and extremely high PM2.5 have been a headache to many megacities including those in Mainland China. Among pollutants that are less than 2.5 microns in diameter (PM2.5), airborne sulfate is one of the most common components of hazy air pollution formed atmospherically via the oxidation of sulphur dioxide (SO2).

While the reactant-product link between sulphur dioxide and airborne sulfate formation is common knowledge, the complex oxidants and mechanisms that enable this transformation are not. In particular, the role of nitrogen oxides in sulfate production is unclear. Managing sulfate pollution has dogged researchers and governments alike as it is not produced directly from pollution sources, unlike nitrogen oxides which are clearly emitted from vehicle exhaust, and the combustion of fossil fuels like coal, diesel and natural gas. This is the first study systematically examining the multiple roles of nitrogen oxides in affecting oxidants that enable this set of chemical reactions.

In collaboration with the California Institute of Technology, a research team led by Prof. YU Jianzhen, Professor at HKUST's Department of Chemistry and Division of Environment and Sustainability, identified three formation mechanism regimes, corresponding to the three distinct roles that nitrogen oxides play in sulfate production depending on the chemical surroundings. Under low NOx conditions, NOx catalyze the cycling of hydroxyl radicals, an effective oxidant of SO2, and thus promote formation of sulfate. Under extremely high NOx common in haze-fog conditions, NOx act as dominant oxidants of SO2 and thus also promote formation of sulfate. But in an environment with medium-high level of NOx, nitrogen dioxide (a member of the NOx family) would actually serve as a sink for hydroxyl radicals which supresses the oxidation of sulphur dioxide and thus inhibits sulfate formation.

These findings indicate that in order to reduce sulfate levels in highly polluted haze-fog conditions, co-control of SO2 and NOx emissions is necessary. However, since NOx would inhibit sulfate formation when its emissions are intermediately high, suppressing NOx in such environment would thus bring up sulfate levels in the air.

"Since sulfate is formed atmospherically and cannot be controlled directly, we must target its precursor components (such as sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides). Effective reduction of sulfate content in the air relies on knowledge of the quantitative relationship it has with its precursors. This work lays the conceptual framework to delineate the relationship between sulfate and one set of its controllable precursors, nitrogen oxides (NOx) - the low and extremely high concentration of NOx could both fuel up the production of sulfate. The policymakers should pay attention to when they try to control the emission of NOx," explained Prof. Yu.

As sulfate is one of the major components which leads to haze formation and acid rain, this study laid the groundwork for formulating more effective measures of targeting this major pollutant involved in aforementioned events - which do not just block the views or make aquatic environments more acidic, but also compromise human health. With greater understanding and better control, this will lead to improved air quality and better protection of public health and ecological systems as a whole.

The team's findings were recently published in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience.

New research from University of Alberta neuroscientists shows that the brains of adolescents struggling with mental-health issues may be wired differently from those of their healthy peers.

This collaborative research, led by Anthony Singhal, professor and chair in the Department of Psychology, involved adolescents between the ages of 14 and 17 who had a history of mental-health problems, including depression, anxiety, and ADHD. This group of teens received magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans designed to examine the white matter of their brains and were compared to scans from a second set of adolescents in the same age range who did not have a history of mental-health issues.

The results of the study show clear differences in connective neural pathways, as a function of cognitive control, between the healthy adolescents and those struggling with mental-health issues.

"We saw pathways that were less structurally efficient in the patients compared to the healthy controls," explained Singhal, who is also a member of UAlberta's Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute (NHMI). "Moreover, those observations correlated with attentional control test scores. In other words, less neural efficiency in key pathways was associated with an overall reduced tendency to focus attention."

The study is one of the first to show these results with adolescents, mapping onto previous studies conducted with adult participants.

"We can't paint with broad strokes that we are talking about differences between people's brains," explained Singhal. "It's just not that simple. But we do have to start somewhere, and this is a great jumping-off point."

Researchers at the University of Toronto have discovered how a brief disruption to a molecular pathway in the guts of mice before they are born can compromise adult immunity to a common and often deadly intestinal virus.

The researchers found that in utero inhibition of molecular signalling in the 'lymphotoxin pathway,' long known as important in the development of the immune system, prevented a robust antibody response in adult mice to rotavirus -- which in humans causes an estimated 215,000 deaths annually, mostly in the developing world.

That early disruption limits the ability of the immune system to later trigger and generate production of Immunoglobulin A (IgA) antibodies, the researchers showed. It also interferes with the nature and function of cells in the gut that support the antibody response, called mesenteric lymph node stromal cells.

"It was surprising that these non-immune stromal cells were so important to the immune response," says Jennifer Gommerman, a professor of Immunology at U of T and principal investigator on the study. "It turns out that stromal cells affect the ability of immune B cells to produce IgA that neutralizes rotavirus. We're just beginning to understand the influence these stromal cells can have."

The journal Science Immunology published the study today.

Gommerman says the findings highlight the growing importance of research on the environment in which immune cells function. "We typically think of a lymph node as just a bag of lymphocytes, but there is also this supporting structure that clearly has an active role in shaping immunity."

The study's first author, postdoctoral fellow Conglei Li, identified a broad subset of stromal cells that affect the immune response to rotavirus. But the key players are likely a subset of that subset, Gommerman says. New technology known as single-cell RNA sequencing should soon enable researchers to identify many more of those cells, she adds.

That work could in turn lead to a better understanding of the genetic and environmental factors that may undermine immunity to rotavirus in the developing world, where rotavirus vaccines are much less effective than in high-resource settings.

Gommerman says that while several dysfunctions in the immune system likely contribute to reduced immunity to rotavirus in low-income countries, the current study offers a hint that prevention may be possible.

"The thinking would be that if you're pregnant in a resource-depleted area, you may take a dietary supplement at a specific point to ensure proper development of tissues that support immunity, and which enable a vaccine to be more effective," she says.

That kind of intervention is likely a long way off, says Gommerman, and replicating her results in human pregnancy presents obvious ethical problems. A more immediate next step for her lab is a collaborative study on IgA immune responses to other pathogens such as norovirus, another highly contagious disease.

A focus on single pathogens is useful in studies of IgA, says Gommerman, because so many factors can influence IgA response. "If you simplify the system of study, you get more predictable kinetics and can ask more discrete questions," she says. "We've made a contribution with that approach, on a question that has been percolating in several labs for years. That feels good."

Bottom Line: Estimating how common diabetes (both diagnosed and undiagnosed) was among U.S. adults by racial and ethnic groups was the objective of this observational study. A group of 7,575 adults 20 and older who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys between 2011-2016 were included. Among them, 2,266 people had diagnosed diabetes, and 377 had undiagnosed diabetes. The age-sex-adjusted proportion of adults with diabetes (diagnosed and undiagnosed) was 12.1% non-Hispanic white, 20.4% non-Hispanic black, 22.1% Hispanic, and 19.1% non-Hispanic Asian. The results also show that among selected Hispanic and non-Hispanic Asian subpopulations, there were noteworthy differences in how common diabetes was. The age-sex-adjusted proportion of adults with undiagnosed diabetes was 3.9% non-Hispanic white, 5.2% non-Hispanic black, 7.5% Hispanic, and 7.5% non-Hispanic Asian. Limitations of the study include diagnosed diabetes was self-reported, and there was a small sample of adults in some subgroups used for estimates.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

Authors: Yiling J. Cheng, M.D., Ph.D., Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, and coauthors.

(doi:10.1001/jama.2019.19365)

Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.

Haplotypes are a set of genetic variations that, located side by side on the same chromosome, are transmitted in a single group to the next generation. Their examination makes it possible to understand the heritability of certain complex traits, such as the risk of developing a disease. However, to carry out this analysis, genome analysis of family members (parents and their child) is usually necessary, a tedious and expensive process. To overcome this problem, researchers from the Universities of Geneva (UNIGE) and Lausanne (UNIL) and the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics have developed SHAPEIT4, a powerful computer algorithm that allows the haplotypes of hundreds of thousands of unrelated individuals to be identified very quickly. Results are as detailed as when family analysis is per­formed, a process that cannot be conducted on such a large scale. Their tool is now available online under an open source license, freely available to the entire research community. Details can be discovered in Nature Communications.

Nowadays, the analysis of genetic data is becoming increasingly important, particularly in the field of personalized medicine. The number of human genomes sequenced each year is growing exponentially and the largest databases account for more than one million individuals. This wealth of data is extremely valuable for better understanding the genetic destiny of humanity, whether to determine the genetic weight in a particular disease or to better understand the history of human migration. To be meaningful, however, these big data must be processed electronically. "However, the processing power of computers remains relatively stable, unlike the ultra-fast growth of genomic Big Data", says Olivier Delaneau, SNSF professor in the Department of Computational Biology at UNIL Faculty of Biology and Medicine and at SIB, which led this work. "Our algorithm thus aims to optimize the processing of genetic data in order to absorb this amount of information and make it usable by scientists, despite the gap between its quantity and the comparatively limited power of computers."

Better understand the role of haplotypes

Genotyping makes it possible to know an individual's alleles, i.e. the genetic variations received from his or her parents. However, without knowing the parental genome, we do not know which alleles are simultaneously transmitted to children, and in which combinations. "This information - haplotypes - is crucial if we really want to understand the genetic basis of human variation, explains Emmanouil Dermitzakis, a professor at the Department of Genetic Medicine and Development at UNIGE Faculty of Medicine and SIB, who co-supervised this work. This is true for both population genetics or in the perspective of precision medicine."

To determine the genetic risk of disease, for example, scientists assess whether a genetic variation is more or less present in individuals who have developed the disease in order to determine the role of this variation in the disease being studied. "By knowing the haplotypes, we conduct the same type of analysis, says Emmanouil Dermitzakis. However, we are moving from a single variant to a combination of many variants, which allows us to determine which allelic combinations on the same chromosome have the greatest impact on disease risk. It is much more accurate!"

The method developed by the researchers makes it possible to process an extremely large number of genomes, about 500,000 to 1,000,000 individuals, and to determine their haplotypes without knowing their ancestry or progeny, while using standard computing power. The SHAPEIT4 tool has been successfully tested on the 500,000 individual genomes present in the UK Biobank, a scientific database developed in the United Kingdom. "We have here a typical example of what Big Data is, says Olivier Delaneau. Such a large amount of data makes it possible to build very high-precision statistical models, as long as they can be interpreted without drowning in them."

An open source license for transparency

The researchers have decided to make their tool accessible to all under an open source MIT license: the entire code is available and can be modified at will, according to the needs of researchers. This decision was made mainly for the sake of transparency and reproducibility, as well as to stimulate researchers from all over the world. "But we only give access to the analysis tool, under no circumstances to a corpus of data", Olivier Delaneau explains. "It is then up to each individual to use it on the data he or she has."

This tool is much more efficient than older tools, as well as faster and cheaper. It also makes it possible to limit the digital environmental impact. The very powerful computers used to process Big Data are indeed very energy-intensive; reducing their use also helps to minimize their negative impact.

In image processing, computer graphics and photography, high dynamic range or HDR images are a set of techniques that allow a better dynamic range of luminance between lighter and darker areas in an image than can be achieved by standard digital imaging techniques or other photographic methods.

HDR photography allows obtaining images that are more similar to those seen by the human eye. By adjusting the iris and other methods, the human eye adjusts constantly to adapt to a wider range of luminance present in the environment. The brain continuously interprets this information so we can see in a wide range of lighting conditions. This wider dynamic range allows HDR images to represent more accurately the extensive range of intensity levels found in real scenes, which go from direct sunlight to faint starlight.

Conventional methods for obtaining HDR images are based on two erroneous assumptions
An article published in October in the advanced online edition of Journal on Imaging Sciences of the SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics), shows that conventional methods for obtaining HDR images are based on wrong assumptions, and proposes a method that, based on correct assumptions, boosts the knowledge of this technology. It is described in a study by Raquel Gil Rodríguez, Javier Vázquez-Corral and Marcelo Bertalmío, members of the Image Processing for Enhanced Cinematography (IP4EC) research group at the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) at UPF.

As the authors say, "HDR image generation is based on a couple of wrong assumptions. First, that colour channels are independent and, secondly, that camera response function (CRF) remains constant while changing the exposure". One of the main contributions of this paper is to show that these assumptions, which are correct for film photography, in general, do not hold for digital cameras.

As a result of these false assumptions, results of multi-exposure HDR methods are less accurate, and when tone-mapped they often present problems like hue shifts and colour artefacts.

Another contribution by this paper is to propose a method to stabilize the CRF while coupling all colour channels, which can be applied to both static and dynamic scenes, which yields artefact-free results that are more accurate than those obtained with other technologies.

In August 2017, a marine accident occurred in the Pearl River Estuary where a cargo vessel accidentally released about 1,000 tonnes of palm stearin into the sea. Over 200 tonnes of palm stearin reached the southwest coasts of Hong Kong. The general public and green groups expressed concerns that such palm oil pollution could adversely affect the marine life and marine ecosystem, yet there was a lack of scientific information on the toxicity of the palm stearin toward marine organisms in the scientific literature, making it impossible to accurately evaluate its ecological risk.

Subsequently, Professor Kenneth Leung Mei Yee from School of Biological Sciences and the Swire Institute of Marine Science, The University of Hong Kong (HKU) and his research team launched a comprehensive 18-month investigation on the degradation, bioaccumulation, and toxicity of the palm stearin through bother field- and laboratory-based investigations. The study sites included Hung Shing Yeh Beach, Deep Water Bay, Repulse Bay, Chung Hom Kok, Outer Tai Tam and Inner Tai Tam. The results of the study were published in the international journal Environmental Science & Technology.

The results of the field-based study showed that the palm stearin could dissolve in seawater and sediment under elevated temperature, and marine organisms could be contaminated by the oil. In early August 2017, samples of the tissues of marine gastropod species, seawater and sediment were found to have high level of fatty acids, especially C16:0 fatty acid which is dominant in the palm stearin.

After the incident, the Hong Kong SAR Government and local citizens made concerted efforts in removing the palm stearin from the impacted shores. Such important actions effectively stopped their further contamination and helped to minimise negative impacts brought by the palm stearin.

In November 2017 (i.e. four months after the incident), the concentration of fatty acids in both seawater and sediment samples returned to the natural levels. Nonetheless, the concentration of fatty acids remained high in the marine gastropods; this might be due to a natural cause that the animals intensified their uptake of food to store more energy for winter.

The results of the laboratory experiment suggested that the rates of disintegration and degradation of the palm stearin were very slow. After deploying the palm stearin in seawater for a year under laboratory conditions, only about 10% of the palm stearin could be disintegrated and degraded.

After studying the toxicity of palm stearin on 10 different marine species, the research team also revealed that the palm stearin posed notable adverse effects on pelagic planktons and zooplanktons. It could prohibit the growth of microalgae (e.g. diatoms) and cause mortality to pelagic copepods, rotifers and brine shrimps. Benthic copepod and marine medaka fish were more tolerant to the palm stearin. Although the fish could eat the palm stearin, their growth was inhibited. Reproduction of the benthic copepod was greatly reduced after exposure to the palm stearin.

Combining the above findings, the research team conducted a scientific ecological risk assessment. The results indicated that the ecological risk was very high right after the accidental spill in August 2017 (risk quotient (RQ) at all sites >> 1). Fortunately, the ecological risk was substantially reduced after 4 months of the incident (RQ

The results of this study highlighted the importance of the immediate action for removal of the palm stearin from the shores, because these could minimise their long-term impact to the marine environment. As there is an ever-increasing trend of marine trade, the number and frequency of marine accidents are expected to rise. This study, therefore, provides useful scientific information to authorities around the world for them to make informed decision in risk assessment and management of similar crises in future.

People can hardly imagine a city without night-time street lighting. But how do nocturnal animals such as bats respond to the illuminated urban landscape? In a recent study, scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW), together with German and international colleagues, equipped common noctule bats (Nyctalus noctula) with mini GPS transmitters and recorded their trajectories in the sky above Berlin. They show that common noctules avoid brightly lit, built-up areas. The metropolitan area of Berlin is therefore mostly unsuitable as a habitat for bats. Dark corridors such as city forests, parks or watercourses, on the other hand, are of great importance for commuting and foraging. The results are published in the journal Landscape Ecology.

The international research team led by experts from the Leibniz-IZW investigated how common noctule bats react to various features of the urban landscape in the larger Berlin metropolitan area, in particular to artificial light at night. They were particularly interested in whether bats use illuminated areas for commuting and foraging or whether they switched to dark habitats.

"We noticed that some bats searched for food in areas with artificial light, especially along watercourses. Overall, however, they prefer the dark areas of the city," says Christian Voigt, head of the Department of Evolutionary Ecology at Leibniz-IZW and first author of the paper. However, bats only hunt at street lights when water bodies or areas with high vegetation cover are nearby. Voigt and his colleagues suspect that many insects are present at these sites when insects are lured by the street lamps at rivers, channels and lakes: "Particularly near water bodies, swarms of insects can be found buzzing around lanterns after they have developed from larval stages into adult insects. Of course, this also attracts some bats who like to take advantage of this rich food supply". In contrast, common noctule bats avoid artificial light when they commute between different feeding areas and their daytime roosts. For commuting, they prefer dark corridors such as forests, unlit city parks or waterways. Some even fly out of the city into the countryside and return before dusk.

For their investigations, the scientists equipped 20 common noctules with miniature GPS transmitters. The researchers began recording the GPS positions of the animals half an hour before sunset and repeated this every 30 seconds throughout the night. Using the flight speed and turning angles between successive GPS positions, they differentiated between commuting and foraging flights. When the bats commute between areas, they fly very fast and almost straight with only small turning angles. If they hunt for food, they fly slower and with much stronger curves and turns. This allowed the scientists to evaluate which areas the bats used for commuting and which for foraging.

"Our investigations show that large parts of Berlin are unsuitable for bats such as the common noctule due to light pollution and a high degree of impervious surfaces. Their preferred habitats are often isolated between heavily built-up areas and areas illuminated at night. Dark corridors such as forests and woods, unlit landscape parks and watercourses are of great importance as they allow animals to reach isolated feeding areas and roosts. However, increasing urbanisation and the associated light pollution are increasingly fragmenting urban habitats for bats," Voigt emphasises.

The study provides important insights into how bats cope in urban habitats and in particular with artificial light. As bats are relevant in planning processes due to their high protection status, the results can contribute to effective management recommendations for the conservation of urban biodiversity. "Protective measures should include approaches that take artificial light into account. The goal should be to preserve and strengthen a network of dark habitats for bats and other nocturnal species in cities," recommends Voigt.

Visualization

Three visualizations illustrate the research results. They are based on an astrophoto (a photograph from outer space) of Berlin at night, on which the brightly lit as well as the dark areas of the city can be recognized. In two other images, this astrophoto is overlaid with the research results: In the first case, the coloured areas (blue) show the areas of the city that the bats prefer to hunt. In the second case, the coloured areas (red) show the preferred areas of the city that the bats prefer for commuting between day and night quarters. In both cases, the preferences are for parks and waterways (Tiergarten, Spree, Landwehrkanal, Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal), while the brightest parts of the city (Alexanderplatz, Potsdamer Platz, Breitscheidplatz, Tegel Airport) are avoided.

For the first time, scientists have been able to observe people developing Type 2 diabetes - and confirmed that fat over-spills from the liver into the pancreas, triggering the chronic condition.

The research, led by Professor Roy Taylor at Newcastle University, UK, is published in the academic journal, Cell Metabolism.

The study involved a group of people from Tyneside who previously had Type 2 diabetes but had lost weight and successfully reversed the condition as part of the DiRECT trial, which was funded by Diabetes UK and led by Professors Roy Taylor and Mike Lean (Glasgow University).

The majority remained non-diabetic for the rest of the two year study, however, a small group went on to re-gain the weight and re-developed Type 2 diabetes.

Professor Roy Taylor, from the Newcastle University Institute of Translational and Clinical Research, explained what the advanced scanning techniques and blood monitoring revealed.

He said: "We saw that when a person accumulates too much fat, which should be stored under the skin, then it has to go elsewhere in the body. The amount that can be stored under the skin varies from person to person, indicating a 'personal fat threshold' above which fat can cause mischief.

"When fat cannot be safely stored under the skin, it is then stored inside the liver, and over-spills to the rest of the body including the pancreas. This 'clogs up' the pancreas, switching off the genes which direct how insulin should effectively be produced, and this causes Type 2 diabetes."

This research by Professor Taylor confirms his Twin Cycle Hypothesis - that Type 2 diabetes is caused by excess fat actually within both the liver and pancreas, and especially that this process is reversible.

Body of research

This latest paper builds on previous Newcastle studies supported by Diabetes UK showing exactly why Type 2 diabetes can be reversed back to normal glucose control. Those studies led to the large DiRECT trial which showed that Primary Care staff can achieve remission of Type 2 diabetes by using a low calorie diet with support to maintain the weight loss.

A quarter of participants achieved a staggering 15 kg or more weight loss, and of these, almost nine out of 10 people put their Type 2 diabetes into remission. After two years, more than one third of the group had been free of diabetes and off all diabetes medication for at least two years.

In 2020, this approach to management of short duration Type 2 diabetes is to be piloted in the NHS in up to 5,000 people across England, and a similar programme is being rolled out in Scotland.

Professor Taylor adds: "This means we can now see Type 2 diabetes as a simple condition where the individual has accumulated more fat than they can cope with.

"Importantly this means that through diet and persistence, patients are able to lose the fat and potentially reverse their diabetes. The sooner this is done after diagnosis, the more likely it is that remission can be achieved."

The team are continuing work to establish what may affect an individual's personal threshold and are supporting the roll out of the NHS Initiatives in both England and Scotland. 'Life Without Diabetes - The definitive guide to understanding and reversing your Type 2 diabetes' by Professor Roy Taylor will be published by Short Books on 26th December 2019.

A mother's obesity in pregnancy can affect her child's development years down the road, according to researchers who found impaired motor skills in preschoolers and lower IQ in middle childhood for boys whose mothers were severely overweight while expecting them. A team of nutrition and environmental health researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Columbia University found that the differences are comparable to the impact of lead exposure in early childhood.

The team studied 368 mothers and their children, all from similar economic circumstances and neighborhoods, during pregnancy and when the children were 3 and 7 years of age. At age 3, the researchers measured the children's motor skills and found that maternal obesity during pregnancy was strongly associated with lower motor skills in boys. At age 7, they again measured the children and found that the boys whose mothers were overweight or obese in pregnancy had scores 5 or more points lower on full-scale IQ tests, compared with boys whose mothers had been at a normal weight.

No effect was found in the girls.

"What's striking is, even using different age-appropriate developmental assessments, we found these associations in both early and middle childhood, meaning these effects persist over time," said Elizabeth Widen, assistant professor of nutritional sciences at UT Austin. "These findings aren't meant to shame or scare anyone. We are just beginning to understand some of these interactions between mothers' weight and the health of their babies."

It isn't clear why obesity in pregnancy would affect a child later, though previous research has found links between a mother's diet and cognitive development, such as higher IQ scores in kids whose mothers have more of certain fatty acids found in fish. Widen said that dietary and behavioral differences may be driving factors, or fetal development may be affected by some of the things that tend to happen in the bodies of people with too much extra weight, such as inflammation, metabolic stress, hormonal disruptions and high amounts of insulin and glucose.

The researchers controlled for several factors in their analysis, including race and ethnicity, marital status, the mother's education and IQ, as well as whether the children were born prematurely or exposed to environmental irritants such as air pollution. What the pregnant mothers ate or whether they breastfed were not included in the analysis.

The team also examined and accounted for the nurturing environment in a child's home in early childhood, looking at how parents interacted with their children and whether the child was provided with books and toys. A nurturing home environment was found to lessen the negative effects of obesity.

"The effect on IQ was smaller in nurturing home environments, but it was still there," Widen said.

This is not the first study to find that boys appear to be more vulnerable in utero. A 2018 study found lower performance IQ in boys, but not girls, whose mothers were exposed to lead, and a 2019 study suggested boys whose moms had fluoride in pregnancy scored lower on an IQ assessment.

Because childhood IQ is a predictor of education level, socioeconomic status and professional success later in life, the researchers said there is potential for effects to last into adulthood.

Widen advised women who are obese or overweight when they become pregnant to eat a well-balanced diet that is rich in fruits and vegetables, take a prenatal vitamin, stay active and make sure to get enough fatty acids such as the kind found in fish oil. Giving children a nurturing home environment also matters, as does seeing a doctor regularly, including during pregnancy to discuss weight gain.

"Work with your doctor and talk about what is appropriate for your circumstances," Widen said.

ITHACA, N.Y. - Prior organic farming practices and plantings can have lasting outcomes for future soil health, weeds and crop yields, according to new Cornell University research.

The study recently published in the journal Agriculture Systems also breaks down how specific components of soil health - such as the abundance and activity of soil animals and soil stability - affect crop productivity.

"With growing interest from farmers in being able to harness and exploit soil health, this research really helps us to get to the point of being more and more prescriptive about it," said Kyle Wickings, associate professor of entomology and co-author of the study.

Also, the study reinforced the understanding that soil animals, such as mites and other tiny critters living in soil, play critical roles in soil health and crop productivity.

Soil animals are known to break down crop litter while indirectly affecting microbial communities in the soil. The researchers' new findings suggest that measurements of soil invertebrates can inform assessments of soil health.

"When I think about crop management, nutrient amendments are not going to be the limiting factor [in crop productivity] for farmers in the U.S.," said Ashley Jernigan, a graduate student in Wickings' lab and the paper's first author. "Really, we need to be optimizing these biotic processes in our soil and focusing more on biotic measurements."

The study is important because unsustainable farming practices are depleting soils of biological activity and nutrients, leading to widespread concern about farmers' ability to grow enough food to keep up with global population growth.

In 2005, researchers started the Cornell Organic Grain Cropping Systems Experiment at a Cornell research farm in Aurora, New York. The experiment compared four cropping systems that varied in fertilizer inputs, tillage practices and weed control. Then in June 2017, the entire site - including the alleyways between plots - was plowed and seeded with sorghum sudangrass, to understand the long-term effects of previous management practices. By September that year, the researchers were gathering data on such things as soil invertebrate abundance, community structure, and weed and sorghum sudangrass biomass.

"The study highlights changes in weed populations, soil chemical, physical and biological properties, and crop productivity after 12 years of different types of organic crop and soil management practices," said Matthew Ryan, associate professor of soil and crop sciences, principal investigator of the cropping system experiment, and the paper's corresponding author.

Overall, they found that past nutrient inputs, how much soils had been disturbed, weed management and the preceding crop all produced lasting effects. For example, plots that had been managed with a reduced tillage system generally had better overall soil health, especially when looking at microbial activity. And plots under an enhanced weed management system had less impressive soil health, but better weed control.

"If weeds are adequately suppressed, reducing tillage in organic cropping systems can regenerate soil health and increase crop production," Ryan said.

They also looked at the alleyways between plots, where the soil health was very good due to a lack of soil disturbance. That led to a very high diversity of soil invertebrates.

Jernigan developed and ran statistical models to examine relationships driving future crop productivity across all the cropping systems. While strong science informs farmers about proper nutrient levels needed for crops, modeling results revealed that crop production is limited by factors such as microbial activity and soil aggregate stability (the ability of soil particles to stay clumped together for retaining air and water). And the model showed that soil invertebrates play important roles possibly by grazing on microbes, thereby stimulating microbial activity in soils.