Earth

QUT researchers have used a combination of virtual reality (VR), aerial thermal-imaging and ground surveys to build a better statistical model for predicting the location of koalas and, ultimately, protecting their habitat.

In the study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, researchers from QUT and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Frontiers (ACEMS) used the mashup of high-tech 360-degree imagery and heat-seeking drone cameras along with traditional techniques of ground surveys to develop a model that could be used to identify areas most likely to be home to koalas, which are facing population decline.

Lead author Dr Catherine Leigh, who is also an Associate Investigator with ACEMS, said the advantage of the multi-pronged approach was that it greatly increased the accuracy of the statistical model.

"It's about building a model that tells us with confidence where koalas are and where they're not," Dr Leigh said.

"When you start building up a model with all of that data, you get a much better idea about where the koalas are likely to be.

"If you can predict where koalas are, and the types of habitats they are hanging around in, then you know not only where to go to keep monitoring them but also the areas you need to protect."

In the study, the researchers used ground survey information captured between 2102 and 2017 from Alexander Clarke Park in Loganholme, south-east Queensland, which is an area that has vegetation ranging from dense forest to grass fields and contains facilities including playgrounds and a dog park.

Dr Leigh said one of the challenges with ground survey observations was that they could show a statistical bias of higher koala populations close to paths and other areas easily accessible by observers.

"When you're out in the field as an experienced koala observer or a citizen scientist, you really are restricted where you can walk. And koalas are hard to see, even by trained observers," Dr Leigh said.

"They are slow moving and often hidden high in the canopy."

To counteract that, the researchers surveyed the area from the air using thermal cameras near sunrise, when the body heat of the koalas is detectable against the surrounding foliage.

The third part of the study involved sending researchers out to some of the 82 specific locations in the area where koalas were known to either be or not be, to take 360-degree images. Those images were then shown to a panel of koala experts wearing VR headsets, with the experts asked to state how likely the environment they were viewing in was 'good koala habitat'.

Dr Leigh said the advantage of using VR for the survey was it enabled them to bring the environment to the experts rather than having to take the experts to the field.

"They're called immersive experiences," Dr Leigh said.

"A lot of the research done on immersive experiences suggests that it helps to bring back the memories associated with when that expert has been in the field in the past, so they can be more cognizant of making the decision about the likelihood that a koala would be there."

The researchers found that the three-pronged system of VR-prompted expert information, thermal imagery and ground surveys proved to be 75 per cent more accurate at predicting koala locations than ground surveys alone.

"You put all three together and you get a much better model," Dr Leigh said.

Dr Leigh said the methods could be used by councils and town planning authorities to obtain critical information needed for koala protection.

An international team of scientists led by the University of Bath have made drug-like molecules inspired by a chemical found in a tropical flower, that they hope could in the future help to treat deadly pancreatic cancer.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most aggressive and deadly cancers

Around 10,000 patients in the UK per year die from this type of cancer

Patients have an average survival of less than 6 months

Pancreatic cancer is the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the EU, more than breast cancer

Researchers from the University of Bath have made three new molecules similar to Grandifloracin, a chemical found in the tropical plant Uvaria grandiflora, which grows in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.

Their study, which was done in collaboration with Professor Suresh Awale from the University of Toyama, Japan, shows that all three molecules kill pancreatic cancer cells in a petri dish. Two of these killed the cells more effectively than the original Grandifloracin molecule.

Since pancreatic cancer causes few symptoms, many patients don't realise they are affected until it has already spread to other organs. Pancreatic cancer is also very difficult to treat as the tumours have resistance to many anti-cancer drugs - so these molecules could become a valuable tool in combating the condition.

Whilst this research is more than five years away from trialling new drugs in humans, the researchers say these molecules could become a promising new class of drugs for treating pancreatic cancer.

The research is published in the journal ChemMedChem.

Dr Simon Lewis, Senior Lecturer in Chemistry from the University of Bath, said: "Pancreatic cancers are especially aggressive and fast-growing, so the tumours develop faster than the blood vessels can supply nutrients to them.

"This leads to a lack of nutrients, to an extent that would kill ordinary cells, but the pancreatic cancer cells can survive these 'austere' conditions and keep on growing.

"The molecules we have identified are so-called 'anti-austerity' agents that can remove the ability of the cancer cells to tolerate these starvation conditions, so they will die, whereas ordinary cells with a normal supply of nutrients remain unaffected."

Dr Lorenzo Caggiano, Senior Lecturer in the Medicinal Chemistry group at the University's Department of Pharmacy & Pharmacology, said: "Through evolution, nature has developed a huge variety of active compounds to help it survive and thrive under a wide range of environmental conditions.

"These so-called natural products are of great interest in the development of new drugs and as such approximately a quarter of all medicines are derived from plants.

"As part of our ongoing research into the development of new treatments for brain cancers based on compounds found in daffodils, the research published in collaboration with Dr Lewis describes a compound also found in flowering plants that is able to selectively kill pancreatic cancer cells in a new way.

"This exciting approach could potentially lead to a new drug to treat pancreatic cancers that is more effective yet less toxic than current treatments."

A new find from Patagonia sheds light on the evolution of large predatory dinosaurs. Features of the 8-m long specimen from the Middle Jurassic suggest that it records a phase of rapid diversification and evolutionary experimentation.

In life, it must have been an intimidating sight. The dimensions of the newly discovered dinosaur fossil suggest that this individual was up to 8 meters long, and its skull alone measured 80 centimeters from front to back. The specimen was uncovered by the Munich paleontologist Oliver Rauhut in Patagonia, and can be assigned to the tetanurans - the most prominent group of bipedal dinosaurs, which includes such iconic representatives as Allosaurus, Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor. This is also the group from which modern birds are derived. The new find is the most complete dinosaur skeleton yet discovered from the early phase of the Middle Jurassic, and is between 174 and 168 million years old. The specimen represents a previously unknown genus, and Rauhut and his Argentinian colleague Diego Pol have named it Asfaltoventor vialidadi. The genus name includes both Greek and Latin components (including the Latin term for hunter), while also referring to the nature of the deposits in which the fossil was found and the species name honours the road maintance of Chubut, who helped in the recovery of the specimen.

Almost the entire skull is preserved, together with the complete vertebral column including parts of the pelvis, all the bones of both anterior extremities and parts of the legs. "The fossil displays a very unusual combination of skeletal characters, which is difficult to reconcile with the currently accepted picture of the relationships between the three large groups that comprise the tetanurans - Megalosauria, Allosauria and Coelurosauria," says Rauhut, who is Professor of Palaeontology in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich and Senior Curator of the Bavarian State Collection for Paleontology and Geology. He and his co-author Diego Pol, who is based in the Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio in Trelew (Argentina), describe the find in a paper that appears in the online journal Scientific Reports. According to the authors, A. vialidadi exhibits a diverse set of skeletal traits, which combines characters that have so far been found to be specific for various other species of dinosaurs.

The unusual mixture of morphological features displayed by A. vialidadi prompted the authors to carry out a comparative analysis with other tetanurans. They noted that around the period to which the new find can be assigned, the geographical range of this group was rapidly expanding, while the different species developed very similar sets of skeletal features.

Rauhut links the explosive evolution of the group with an episode of mass extinction that had occurred in the late stage of the Lower Jurassic, about 180 million years ago. The two researchers therefore interpret the parallel development of similar external traits in different species as an example of evolutionary experimentation during the subsequent rapid expansion and diversification of the tetanurans. The prior extinction of potential competitors will have opened up new ecological niches for the groups that survived, and the tetanurans were apparently among those that benefited.

"This is a pattern that we also observe in many other groups of animals in the aftermath of mass extinctions. It holds, for example, for the expansion and diversification of both mammals and birds following the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous 66 million years ago," says Rauhut. It could also explain why it is so difficult to unravel the phylogenetic relationships close to the origin of many highly diversified animal groups.

Nearly a year and a half into its mission, Parker Solar Probe has returned gigabytes of data on the Sun and its atmosphere. Following the release of the very first science from the mission, five researchers presented additional new findings from Parker Solar Probe at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union on Dec. 11, 2019. Research from these teams hints at the processes behind both the Sun's continual outflow of material -- the solar wind -- and more infrequent solar storms that can disrupt technology and endanger astronauts, along with new insight into space dust that creates the Geminids meteor shower.

The young solar wind

The solar wind carries the Sun's magnetic field with it, shaping space weather throughout the solar system as it flows out from the Sun at around a million miles per hour. Some of Parker Solar Probe's primary science goals are to pinpoint the mechanisms that send the solar wind streaming out into space at such high speeds.

One clue lies in disturbances in the solar wind that could point to the processes that heat and accelerate the wind. These structures -- pockets of relatively dense material -- have been glimpsed in data from earlier missions spanning decades. They are several times the size of Earth's entire magnetic field, which stretches tens of thousands of miles into space -- meaning these structures can compress Earth's magnetic field on a global scale when they crash into it.

"When structures in the solar wind reach Earth, they can drive dynamics in Earth's magnetosphere, including particle precipitation from Earth's radiation belts," said Nicholeen Viall, a space scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who presented new findings on solar wind structures from Parker Solar Probe at the AGU meeting. Particle precipitation can cause a range of effects, like setting off the aurora and interfering with satellites.

Near the Sun, Parker Solar Probe made better-than-ever measurements of these solar wind structures, using both imagers to take pictures from afar and in situ instruments to measure the structures as they pass over the spacecraft. To get a more complete picture of these solar wind structures, Viall went one step further, combining observations from Parker, satellites near Earth, and NASA's STEREO-A spacecraft to examine these structures from multiple angles.

STEREO-A carries an instrument called a coronagraph, which uses a solid disk to block out the bright light of the Sun, letting the camera capture images of the relatively faint outer atmosphere, the corona. From its vantage point about 90 degrees away from Earth, STEREO-A could see the regions of the corona that Parker was flying through -- allowing Viall to combine the measurements in a novel way and get a better view of solar wind structures as they flowed out from the Sun. Alongside Parker Solar Probe's images, scientists now have a better view of magnetic disturbances in the solar wind.

Parker's instruments are also shedding new light on the invisible processes in the solar wind, revealing a surprisingly active system near the Sun.

"We think of the solar wind -- as we see it near Earth -- as very smooth, but Parker saw surprisingly slow wind, full of little bursts and jets of plasma," said Tim Horbury, a lead researcher on Parker Solar Probe's FIELDS instruments based at Imperial College London.

Horbury used data from Parker Solar Probe's FIELDS instruments -- which measure the scale and shape of electric and magnetic fields near the spacecraft -- to examine in detail one particularly odd event: magnetic "switchbacks," sudden clusters of events when the solar magnetic field bends back on itself, first described with Parker Solar Probe's initial results on Dec. 4, 2019.

The exact origin of the switchbacks isn't certain, but they may be signatures of the process that heats the Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, to millions of degrees, hundreds of times hotter than the visible surface below. The cause of this counterintuitive jump in temperature is a longstanding question in solar science -- referred to as the coronal heating mystery -- and is closely related to questions about how the solar wind is energized and accelerated.

"We think the switchbacks are probably related to individual energetic energy releases on the Sun -- what we call jets," said Horbury. "If these are jets, there must a very large population of small events happening on the Sun, so they would contribute a large fraction of the total energy of the solar wind."

A look inside solar storms

Along with the solar wind, the Sun also releases discrete clouds of material called coronal mass ejections, or CMEs. Denser and sometimes faster than the solar wind, CMEs can also trigger space weather effects on Earth, or cause problems for satellites in their path.

CMEs are notoriously hard to predict. Some of them are simply not visible from Earth or from STEREO-A -- the two positions where we have instruments capable of seeing CMEs from afar -- because they erupt from parts of the Sun out of view of both spacecraft. Even when they are spotted by instruments, it's not always possible to predict which CMEs will disturb Earth's magnetic field and trigger space weather effects, as the magnetic structure within the cloud of material plays a crucial role.

Our best shot at understanding the magnetic properties of any given CME relies on pinpointing the region on the Sun from which the CME exploded -- meaning that one type eruption called a stealth CME poses a unique challenge for space weather forecasters.

Stealth CMEs are visible in coronagraphs -- instruments that look only at the Sun's outer atmosphere -- but don't leave clear signatures of their eruption in images of the Sun's disk, making it difficult to ascertain from where, exactly, they lifted off.

But during Parker Solar Probe's first solar flyby in November 2018, the spacecraft was hit by one of these stealth CMEs.

"Flying close to the Sun, Parker Solar Probe has a unique chance to see young CMEs that haven't been processed from traveling tens of millions of miles," said Kelly Korreck, head of science operations for Parker's SWEAP instruments, based at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "This was the first time we were able to stick our instruments inside one of these coronal mass ejections that close to the Sun."

In particular, Korreck used data from Parker's FIELDS and SWEAP instruments to get a snapshot of the internal structure of the CME. SWEAP, the mission's solar wind instruments, measures characteristics like velocity, temperature, and electron and proton densities of the solar wind. These measurements not only provide one of the first looks inside a CME so close to the Sun, but they may help scientists learn to trace stealth CMEs back to their sources.

Another type of solar storm consists of extremely energetic particles moving near the speed of light. Though often related to CME outbursts, these particles are subject to their own acceleration processes -- and they move much faster than CMEs, reaching Earth and spacecraft in a matter of minutes. These particles can damage satellite electronics and endanger astronauts, but their speed makes them more difficult to avoid than many other types of space weather.

These bursts of particles often, but not always, accompany other solar events like flares and CMEs, but predicting just when they'll make an appearance is difficult. Before particles reach the near-light speeds that makes them hazardous to spacecraft, electronics and astronauts, they go through a multi-stage energization process -- but the first step in this process, near the Sun, hadn't been directly observed.

As Parker Solar Probe traveled away from the Sun in April 2019, after its second solar encounter, the spacecraft observed the largest-yet energetic particle event seen by the mission. Measurements by the energetic particle instrument suite, IS?IS, have filled in one missing link in the processes of particle energization.

"The regions in front of coronal mass ejections build up material, like snowplows in space, and it turns out these 'snowplows' also build up material from previously released solar flares," said Nathan Schwadron, a space scientist at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

Understanding how solar flares create populations of seed particles that feed energetic particle events will help scientists better predict when such events might happen, along with improving models of how they move through space.

Asteroid fingerprints

Parker Solar Probe's WISPR instruments are designed to capture detailed images of the faint corona and solar wind, but they also picked up another difficult-to-see structure: a 60,000-mile-wide dust trail following the orbit of the asteroid Phaethon, which created the Geminids meteor shower. In 2019, the Geminids meteor shower peaks on the night of Dec. 13-14.

This trail of dust grains peppers Earth's atmosphere when our planet intersects with Phaethon's orbit each December, burning up and producing the spectacular show we call the Geminids. Though scientists have long known that Phaethon is the parent of the Geminids, seeing the actual dust trail hasn't been possible until now. Extremely faint and very close to the Sun in the sky, it has never been picked up by any previous telescope, despite several attempts -- but WISPR is designed to see faint structures near the Sun. WISPR's first-ever direct view of the dust trail has given new information about its characteristics.

"We calculate a mass on the order of a billion tons for the entire trail, which is not as much as we'd expect for the Geminids, but much more than Phaethon produces near the Sun," said Karl Battams, a space scientist at the U.S. Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C. "This implies that WISPR is only seeing a portion of the Geminid stream - not the entire thing - but it's a portion that no one had ever seen or even knew was there, so that's very exciting!"

With three orbits under its belt, Parker Solar Probe will continue its exploration of the Sun over the course of 21 progressively-closer solar flybys. The next orbit change will occur during the Venus flyby on Dec. 26, bringing Parker to about 11.6 million miles from the Sun's surface for its next close approach to the Sun on Jan. 29, 2020. With direct measurements of this never-before-measured environment -- closer to the Sun than ever before -- we can expect to learn even more about these phenomena and uncover entirely new questions.

LAS VEGAS (December 11, 2019) -- Consumers seeking cheaper, faster access to antibiotics are apparently consuming antibiotics intended for treating fish rather than humans, according to research presented at the ASHP (American Society of Health-System Pharmacists) 54th Midyear Clinical Meeting and Exhibition. This consumption may lead to dangerous unintended consequences such as adverse side-effects, treatment failures, and antibiotic drug resistance, said co-author Brandon Bookstaver, Pharm.D., director of residency and fellowship training at the University of South Carolina College of Pharmacy.

The new research investigated the broad range of this potential misuse by conducting a comprehensive review of the online fish antibiotic market, along with all customer reviews and comments available on websites that sell fish antibiotics in the United States.

"While human consumption of fish antibiotics is likely low, any consumption by humans of antibiotics intended for animals is alarming," Bookstaver said. "Self-medication and the availability of antibiotics without healthcare oversight might contribute to increasing antimicrobial resistance and delayed appropriate treatment. We were particularly concerned that the high volume of positive feedback on the comments about human use might encourage others to attempt to use these drugs."

Unlike antibiotics prescribed for dogs and cats, fish antibiotics are currently available over the counter and do not require a prescription. Researchers identified nine different antibiotics for sale online at 24 different websites, ranging in prices from $8.99 for a bottle of 30 capsules of amoxicillin (250mg per capsule) to $119.99 for a bottle of 100 ciprofloxacin tablets (500mg per tablet).

While the number of product reviews associated with human consumption was low (2.4 percent or only 55 comments out of the 2,288 reviewed), the attention generated by those reviews, in terms of "likes" and "dislikes," exceeded other reviews by a ratio of 9-to-1. On average, reviews discussing human consumption of fish antibiotics received 9.2 likes compared to just 1.3 likes for those not mentioning human consumption. In addition, one vendor responded to a question online and asserted that the fish pills were suitable for human use.

Authors of the study also obtained and examined five antibiotics that were being marketed online for fish --amoxicillin, penicillin, cephalexin, metronidazole, and sulfamethoxazole-trimethoprim--and discovered that they carry the exact imprints, color, and shape of available products meant for human consumption. Study authors plan to verify the contents of the antibiotics as a next step in their research.

ASHP Director of Pharmacy Practice and Quality Michael Ganio, Pharm.D., M.S., BCPS, CPHIMS, FASHP, said pharmacists can play a critical role in helping patients access safe and appropriate medications and in educating people about the dangers of taking antibiotics not prescribed to them.

"What might seem like a less expensive, easier way to treat an assumed infection can ultimately have very serious negative consequences," said Ganio. "Unlike antibiotics for humans or other animals, these medications are completely unregulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Even if the pills look the same, it's impossible to know that medications purchased in this manner contain what the label says and are safe for humans. Antibiotics, like all medications, should be dispensed from a licensed pharmacy after a diagnosis and prescription from a medical professional."

The UK's first citizen science project focusing on solitary, ground-nesting bees has revealed that they nest in a far broader range of habitats than previously thought.

There are approximately 250 species of solitary bee in the UK, but far less is known about these important pollinators compared to honeybees or bumblebees.

Although some previous studies have examined their foraging activities, there has been little research into their nesting behaviour as their nests can be difficult to find. This is why academics from Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) called on the public to help.

Dr Stephanie Maher (now based at Trinity College Dublin) and Dr Thomas Ings of Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) led the solitary bee citizen science project and the results, which could help shape how land is managed to better protect ground-nesting bees, have been published in the journal Ecosphere.

The project asked the public to report active nesting sites of four different species that nest close together in aggregations: the tawny mining bee (Andrena fulva), the ashy mining bee (Andrena cineraria), the yellow legged furrow bee (Halictus rubicundus), and the ivy bee (Colletes hederae).

In total, almost 400 submissions were made to the site during 2017 and from the verifiable recordings it was found that the solitary bees studied were able to nest across a broad range of habits, although distinct preferences were found between species.

The recordings found that 82% of tawny mining bee nests were on flat ground and 68% were in at least partial shade. Meanwhile 74% of ivy bee nests were fully exposed to sunlight, and they were equally at home on flat or sloped ground.

Senior author of the study Dr Thomas Ings, Senior Lecturer in Zoology at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), said: "By enlisting the general public we have been able to increase awareness of solitary bees and at the same time collect valuable information on nest site characteristics.

"We have found that the species in our study have the capacity to tolerate a range of environmental conditions, although each species was more frequently associated with a particular set of site characteristics. For example, the tawny mining bee was associated with flat ground in shady sites, while the ivy bee was most commonly found nesting in unshaded sites.

"This information on nesting behaviour is highly valuable because it puts us in a better position to provide advice to land owners on how to manage their land sympathetically in order to protect these important, ground-nesting solitary bees.

"Understanding solitary bee nesting requirements and how to sympathetically manage land for them is especially important in light of the severe declines solitary bees and other pollinating insects have suffered in the UK over recent decades.

"While there is a lot of excellent work being done on increasing the availability of floral resources for solitary bees, we also need to ensure that suitable nesting resources are available in both urban and rural landscapes."

If you want to know how climate change and hypoxia -- the related loss of oxygen in the world's oceans -- affect fish species such as the economically important Baltic cod, all you have to do is ask the fish.

Those cod, at least, will tell you that hypoxia is making them smaller, scrawnier and less valuable.

"The cod themselves are telling us through their 'internal logbooks' that they're affected by hypoxia, which we know is driven by climate change and by nutrient loading," said Dr. Karin Limburg, a fisheries ecologist at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York. "Our recent findings suggest fish are in worse condition because of hypoxia."

Limburg is the joint author of a paper that appeared today (Wednesday, Dec. 11) in the journal Biology Letters, published by the Royal Society, that adds new depth to scientists' ability to decode the history of a fish's life by analyzing the chemical content of otoliths, or earstones, that form part of a fish's hearing and balance system. Made of calcium carbonate, otoliths grow as the fish grows, forming rings each year that can be read much the same way as a tree's rings.

Limburg was a contributor to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's recently released global ocean deoxygenation report. That report lays out the clear connection of hypoxia to the warming climate. As for the cod otoliths, Limburg puts it this way: "It's another tool that helps tell the story. It provides a clear link between hypoxia and the declining condition of Baltic Sea cod that we've been seeing for more than 20 years."

The new study details research done by Limburg and her co-author, Michele Casini of the Department of Aquatic Resources at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. They report that the presence of certain trace elements in otoliths points to hypoxia as the reason for the declining condition of Baltic cod, at least for the last 20 years.

Long-term monitoring shows that the frequency of slender cod with little economic value has been steadily increasing since the 1990s, and the fishes' overall body condition - which takes length and weight into consideration - has decreased by around 30 percent. From the early 1990s to 2018, the average weight of a 40-cm-long cod (about 16 inches) has dropped from 900 grams (31 ounces) to 600 grams (21 ounces).

The amount of the element magnesium in otoliths is seen as an indicator of the fishes' overall condition. The higher the magnesium level, the better the fish had fared in life. But Limburg recently discovered that another mineral with a similar-sounding name, manganese, explains why the cod were increasingly in poor condition.

In well-oxygenated ocean water, she said, manganese exists as a solid, taking the form of small particles. But when oxygen is depleted, manganese dissolves and can be absorbed by the fishes' bodies. The otoliths, analyzed through X-ray fluorescence and mass spectrometry analysis, pick up the manganese and tell the story of the fish's travels through hypoxic waters.

Limburg said the research indicates hypoxia has been a factor since 2000. This suggests that in earlier years, the poor condition of Baltic cod was caused by other factors, such as over-crowding or fishing.

"Magnesium reflects the fish's condition. Basically, it tells us if the fish was 'feeling' good or bad," she said. "The manganese tells us why it was feeling bad - that it had spent too much time in deoxygenated waters."

SAN FRANCISCO - Satellite data has given scientists clues about how, when and why Greenland's glaciers are shrinking - and shows a sharp increase in glacial retreat beginning about 2000, according to new research presented this week.

In a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, scientists released time-lapse satellite images dating back 34 years of about 200 glaciers on the island of Greenland. The images are the first to compare Greenland's glacier retreat - when a glacier shrinks back from the ocean, pulling inland - and the speed at which the glaciers are retreating.

"These glaciers are calving more ice into the ocean than they were in the past," said Michalea King, who presented the research at AGU. King is a graduate student in earth sciences at The Ohio State University. "We're finding this clear correlation where more retreat instigates greater discharge of ice."

To evaluate the glaciers, King analyzed images from the NASA-U.S. Geological Survey's Landsat missions, an ongoing project to monitor the Earth's surface from space. The satellites survey much of the Earth's surface; scientists at AGU also presented on changes to glaciers and ice fields in Alaska and Antarctica.

"One thing we've noticed is that retreat has been a pattern that we've seen across the ice sheets in Greenland," King said. "It's not just limited to one region."

That means the glaciers are not just shrinking in one part of the ice sheet covering Greenland - in the north or south, for example - but that most glaciers across the country have retreated.

The satellite imagery, which, for King's study, dates back to 1985, showed Greenland's glaciers have retreated about 3 miles (5 kilometers) between 1985 and 2018. That data also shows that in 2000, that retreat began accelerating. In 2000, she said, the rate of ice calving - the phenomenon by which chunks of ice break off the glacier and tumble into the ocean - began to increase. In recent years, the data shows that about 50 gigatons more ice per year calves into the ocean than what scientists observed prior to 2000.

That matters for the glacier's size: Prior to 2000, the ice that calved from the glacier was roughly equivalent to the amount of snow that accumulated on the ice sheet - essentially, the mass lost to calving was a wash, because it was replaced by new snowfall.

But after 2000, that equilibrium went out of whack: The glacier is losing ice faster than snow is falling to replace it.

"The ice sheet is out of balance," King said.

And while calving is just one way in which glaciers shrink - meltwater also affects how fast a glacier can flow - it is an important component for a glacier's health, King said.

She said the year 2000 is noteworthy for one reason: In that year, scientists saw glaciers across Greenland begin to retreat more rapidly.

"Their fronts had retreated further inland, which allowed the ice to flow faster, and that brought more ice into the ocean," she said.

King said the triggers for that retreat vary by region, but in southeast Greenland, the retreat was largely caused by warming ocean waters that melted the front of the glaciers.

The satellite images show that, overall, most of the glaciers across Greenland have lost mass, King said.

"There is a very clear relationship between the retreat and increasing ice mass losses from these glaciers during the 1985-through-present record."

Emphasis on particular groups hinders efforts to address the problem of declining physical activity in children, according to a study led at the University of Strathclyde.

A review of more than 50 published studies, covering a total of 22,000 children, found that children of all ages around the world are at risk from a decline in physical activity. It fell steadily from the age of four or five, in both boys and girls and in every part of the world covered by the study.

Daily activity fell by three to four minutes each year overall, although it remained higher at weekends and on holidays.

Previous Strathclyde-led research found that physical activity levels might start tailing off as early as the age of seven, rather than during adolescence as is widely believed. It studied children in the north-east of England but the new research, published in Obesity Reviews, suggests that the drop in physical activity is a global issue.

The study also involved researchers from University College London, the University of Glasgow and the Aspetar Orthopaedic and Sports Medicine Hospital in Doha, Qatar.

It comes as a World Health Organization survey finds that more than 80% of girls and boys aged between 11 and 17 globally did not meet current recommendations of at least one hour of physical activity per day.

Professor John Reilly, of Strathclyde's School of Psychological Sciences & Health, was a partner in the new Strathclyde-led study. He said: "Higher levels of what is defined as moderate to vigorous physical activity in children improve their bone health, brain development and learning, levels of body fatness, cardiovascular and metabolic health and sleep.

"However, despite these many important benefits, only a minority of children and adolescents meet recommended levels of physical activity.

"The view that physical activity is high in children and does not decline until adolescence - and even then chiefly among girls - continues to be widely held among policymakers and practitioners around the world.

"As a result, policies and practices aimed at promoting activity have focused on adolescent girls, who are seen as a group at high risk group of low and declining physical activity; our study indicates that, while the relative decline is greater among girls, there is no one high risk group. All children face a high risk and physical activity needs to be promoted to them - and their parents - before they even start school.

"While we found a lack of studies covering developing countries, our findings do appear to bear out the conclusions of previous research and suggest that this is a worldwide problem."

The research assessed studies of children and young people aged between two and 18, which measured activity with accelerometer devices. The individual studies covered Australia, New Zealand, the US, Mexico and numerous countries in Europe, including the UK.

Boston, MA -- Psoriasis is a skin disorder that affects at least 100 million individuals worldwide. Its economic impact is more than $10 billion annually in the U.S. alone. Involved skin becomes thickened, red, and covered with silvery scales, while changes to the nails and deforming inflammation of the joints may also occur in up to one-third of affected individuals. The underlying cause of psoriasis remains a mystery, and effective targeted therapies remain to be developed. Now, investigators from Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute have uncovered a novel pathway that may explain why skin thickens in psoriasis and suggests new strategies for developing therapies for the condition. The team's results are published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.

"Psoriasis places social and psychological stress on patients and is associated with risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease and more. While steroids and biologics can be prescribed, we don't have a cure because we haven't understood the cause," said co-senior author George Murphy, MD, director of the Program in Dermatopathology in the Department of Pathology at the Brigham. "Our initial finding that skin thickening in psoriasis is due to build-up of dysregulated stem cells and their progeny are exciting because it represents a new way of thinking about an old and significant skin disease."

To better understand the basis for the dysregulated skin stem cell behavior, the investigators focused on the epigenome, the methylated wrapping that covers each DNA strand and orchestrates how individual genes behave.

"Without understanding the mechanism underlying a disease, it's hard to find effective treatments," said co-senior author Christine Lian, MD, a dermatopathologist in the Department of Pathology at the Brigham. "The question we decided to pursue was: Is there an epigenetic abnormality in psoriasis that may explain why stem cells are misbehaving?"

Lian, Murphy and their colleagues found a defect in the epigenetic covering that resulted in the loss of a DNA methylation hydroxymethylation mark. Known as loss of 5-hmC, this defect was found in cells from patients with psoriasis but not other skin conditions that produce a similar skin thickening, such as callous-like areas from chronic irritation. The team replicated the defect in a mouse model of psoriasis and found that it preferentially affected genes that regulated the function of skin cells.

Lian and Murphy have previously shown that 5-hmC loss in the skin epigenome can be reprogrammed using agents as fundamental as ascorbic acid (vitamin C). They reasoned that therapeutic correction of the epigenomic defect in psoriasis might reverse the entire process. Based on experiments using skin stem cell cultures in the lab, the team presents promising preliminary data suggesting that 5-hmC levels can be restored to correct the deficiency seen in psoriasis.

The investigators note that while there is much interest in the role of vitamin C, additional research is needed to develop and test effective treatments since simply taking a vitamin supplement is likely to have little effect. The team has begun work on the next research steps, which will involve three-dimensional bioprinting of skin stem cells in the context of their supportive niches to test other epigenetic reprogramming agents.

"If successful, our epigenetic stem cell explanation for psoriasis hopefully could transform therapy, allowing for more personalized and targeted approaches directed at the very cells that accumulate to form the heartbreak of this all-too-often devastating skin condition," said Murphy.

LA JOLLA, CALIF. - December 11, 2019 - Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute have shown that worms live longer lives if they produce excess levels of a protein, p62 or SQSTM1, which recognizes toxic cell proteins that are tagged for destruction. The discovery, published in Nature Communications, could help uncover treatments for age-related conditions, such as Alzheimer's disease, which are often caused by accumulation of misfolded proteins.

"Research, including our own, has shown that lifespan can be extended by enhancing autophagy--the process cells use to degrade and recycle old, broken and damaged cell components," says Malene Hansen, Ph.D., a professor in the Development, Aging and Regeneration Program at Sanford Burnham Prebys and senior author of the study. "Prior to this work, we understood that autophagy as a process was linked to aging, but the impact of p62, a selective autophagy protein, on longevity was unknown."

Scientists used to think that cellular recycling worked the same way for all waste products. In more recent years, researchers are learning that autophagy can be highly selective--meaning the cell uses distinct "recycling trucks," such as the protein p62, to deliver different types of trash to cellular "recycling centers." For example, p62 is known to selectively deliver aggregated proteins and worn-out mitochondria (the powerplants of the cell) to recycling centers.

To better understand p62's role in cellular recycling and longevity, the scientists used short-lived, transparent roundworms called C. elegans for their studies. Previously, Hansen's team found that levels of p62 are increased after a short heat shock is administered to the worms. This proved to be beneficial to the animals and required for the longevity that is caused by mild heat stress.

These findings prompted the scientists to genetically engineer C. elegans to produce excess levels of the protein p62. Instead of their usual three-week lifespan, these worms lived for a month--equivalent to a 20 to 30% lifespan extension. The researchers were intrigued to find that by increasing the levels of p62, the "recycling truck," the "recycling centers" became more abundant and were able to recycle more "trash," indicating that p62 is a driver of the recycling process.

"Now that we have confirmed that selective autophagy by p62 is important for longevity, at least in C. elegans, we can move to our next step: identifying what harmful cellular 'trash' it is removing. With this knowledge, we hope to target specific cell components that are risk factors for longevity," says Caroline Kumsta, Ph.D., a research assistant professor in Hansen's lab and lead and co-corresponding author of the study.

Many age-related diseases, including Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease, are caused by accumulation of toxic, misfolded proteins. Scientists are hopeful that studying selective autophagy via proteins like p62 could lead to therapies that clear the proteins that are detrimental to living a long, healthy life. Finding possible therapeutic avenues to age-related diseases is increasingly important as the U.S. population ages: In about a decade, about 20 percent of Americans--about 71 million people--will be 65 and older and at higher risk for chronic diseases.

While the scientists see much potential in their findings--and are encouraged that the benefits of increasing p62 levels on longevity seem to be evolutionarily conserved as a recent study in fruit flies demonstrated--they urge caution for direct translations to humans: High levels of p62 have been shown to be associated with cancer in humans.

"Given the known link between p62 and cancer, it's even more important to map the selective autophagy process from start-to-finish," says Hansen. "Armed with this information, we may be able to enhance beneficial functions for p62 in selective autophagy and find therapeutics that promote healthy aging."

As technology advances in the things we use every day, it's generally accepted they also become safer. But according to one UBC engineer, that may not be true for a large portion of the population.

New research from UBC's Okanagan campus has developed a innovative model to map the impact of trauma on a pregnant woman and her uterus if she were involved in an accident--with the hopes of making everything from airbags to seatbelts safer for all.

"I became an engineer because I firmly believe we have an incredible ability to make the world a safer and better place," says Hadi Mohammadi, an assistant professor at the UBC Okanagan School of Engineering and lead author on the study. "But unfortunately a large portion of the world around us is designed and built excluding a group representing 50 per cent of the population--women."

Motor vehicles, explains Mohammadi, are a prime example. He says that things like seatbelts, airbags and even the vibrations of the suspension are designed with the male body in mind, largely ignoring the physiology differences between men and women or women who are pregnant.

"A pregnant woman's body is under very unique stresses that absolutely must be taken into account when designing safety equipment--especially in something she's going to be using every day, like a car or a bus," says Mohammadi. "Our intention was to create a model of how different mechanical traumas, like those you'd see in a car accident, impact a woman's uterus specifically."

It's an area that he says has very little research behind it.

"Medicine spends a lot of time seeking to keep fetuses healthy on the inside but we don't know much on the impact of exterior traumas to maternal and fetal health," he adds.

The model is the first of its kind to use CT-scan data--a tool to visualize the interior of the body in real-time--to map out and compare trauma on pregnant and non-pregnant abdomens. Mohammadi and his team were able to gauge the impact of different amounts of force and penetration into the abdominal area.

"We found that a pregnant women's abdomen responds similarly to a non-pregnant abdomen during events involving less force, but the pregnant abdomen responds more rigidly when faced with greater impact," he says. "This is an important factor in the risk of injury for both mother and fetus during a traumatic event like an airbag going off."

Mohammadi hopes his model can help future engineers rethink how they design safety equipment and sees this kind of research as just the tip of the iceberg.

"While our research looked specifically at pregnant women, the reality is that humans come in all different shapes, sizes and with different abilities," he says. "Thinking about the safety and other needs of everyone--no matter their height or weight--really needs to be part of engineering and design right from the beginning."

SPOKANE, Wash. - A new study conducted by researchers at Washington State University shows that individuals with chronic sleep-onset insomnia who pulled an all-nighter performed up to twice as bad on a reaction time task as healthy normal sleepers. Their findings were published today in the online journal Nature and Science of Sleep.

Poor daytime functioning is a frequent complaint among those suffering from insomnia, said lead author Devon Hansen, an assistant professor in the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine and a researcher in the WSU Sleep and Performance Research Center. However, previous studies have found that their daytime cognitive performance is not significantly degraded, seemingly suggesting that it is a perceived issue that does not reflect a real impairment. The WSU study of individuals with sleep-onset insomnia revealed that the impairment may in fact be real but hidden during the normal day--yet exposed after pulling an all-nighter, which impacted them much more than age-matched control subjects.

The finding caught the WSU research team by surprise.

"There has been a theory about what perpetuates insomnia that focuses on hyperarousal, an activation in their system that keeps those with insomnia from being able to wind down when they go to bed," Hansen said. "We thought that this hyperarousal would protect them to some extent and had hypothesized that their performance after a night of total sleep deprivation would be better than normal healthy sleepers. Instead, we found the exact opposite."

Hansen, who in a previous career worked as a therapist in a sleep clinic, said the study adds credibility to insomnia patients' experiences. She also said it serves as a warning to poor sleepers that they should try to maintain a regular sleep schedule and avoid pushing their limits by staying up all night.

The research team studied 14 volunteer participants. Half of the group consisted of individuals who had chronic sleep-onset insomnia, the inability to fall asleep within 30 minutes for at least three nights a week for more than three months. The other half were healthy normal sleepers who served as controls. The two groups of participants were matched in age, with all participants aged between 22 and 40 and an average age of 29 for both groups.

Participants spent a total of five days and four nights in the sleep laboratory. They were allowed to sleep normally during the first two nights. They were kept awake the next night and following day--totaling 38 hours of total sleep deprivation--followed by a night of recovery sleep.

During their time awake, participants completed a series of performance tasks every three hours. This included a widely used alertness test known as the psychomotor vigilance test (PVT), which measures participants' response times to visual stimuli that appear on a screen at random intervals. The researchers analyzed PVT data for lapses of attention (i.e., slow reaction times) and false starts (i.e., responses that occur before the stimulus appears), comparing the findings between the two groups both before and during sleep deprivation.

Before sleep deprivation, the insomnia group's performance on the PVT looked very similar to that of the control group. However, as soon as sleep deprivation started the researchers began to see a dramatic increase in lapses of attention and false starts in the insomnia group. At one point during the night, their performance was twice as bad as that of the healthy normal sleepers.

"Our study suggests that even with a few hours of sleep deprivation--which people routinely experience for work or family reasons--those with sleep-onset insomnia may be much more impaired than those who normally sleep well at night," Hansen said. "This may increase their risk of errors and accidents whenever time-sensitive performance is required, such as while driving or when focused on a safety-critical task."

Hansen cautioned that since their study looked specifically at individuals with sleep-onset insomnia, their findings may not hold up in other insomnia subtypes, such as sleep-maintenance insomnia--which is characterized by difficulty staying asleep--and terminal insomnia--which involves early-morning awakenings. She plans to repeat the study in those groups to find out.

New therapy shows 'dramatic' effect against worst leukaemias

A collaborative research effort by Australian and US scientists has led to the discovery of a promising new approach to treating some of the worst types of leukaemia, including an aggressive leukaemia that mostly affects babies.

MLL-rearranged leukaemia (MLL-r leukaemias) is a subtype of leukaemia that has a particular genetic structure known as MLL rearrangement. This occurs in about 80% of acute leukemia cases in infants (children under one year of age) and up to 10% of all leukemia cases, including acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Often resistant to chemotherapy and extremely difficult to treat, MLL-r leukaemia claims the lives of many of those affected, while those who survive are often left with serious long-term effects due to the highly intensive treatment they are given.

The new research, to be published this month in the international journal Cancer Cell, describes a new therapy developed for MLL-r leukaemia as having 'outstanding pharmaceutical properties.' When used to treat specially-bred mice that were growing MLL-r leukaemia derived from human patients, the therapy produced a 'dramatic response', curing many of the mice. The researchers are hopeful that the new therapy will prove successful against MLL-r leukaemia in humans, and anticipate the rapid translation of their research into clinical trials.

'New therapeutic approaches are desperately needed for MLL-r leukaemia,' said Professor Richard Lock, Head of the Blood Cancers Theme at Children's Cancer Institute, Australia. 'The combination of drugs currently used for treatment is often not effective and causes significant side effects. This is undesirable in anyone, but is particularly a problem in children, whose growing bodies are very susceptible to the damaging effects of toxic drugs.'

The newly developed agent, a small molecule inhibitor called VTP50469, is one of a new breed of targeted therapies, named for the fact that they are designed to specifically target molecules that are critical for the survival and growth of cancer cells. Such therapies offer significant advantages over conventional drug treatments, since as well as being more effective, they cause far fewer side effects. In the case of MLL-r leukaemia, the molecules being targeted are Menin and MLL fusion proteins, which interact in leukaemia cells to drive the growth of the cells.

'What is particularly exciting about this new agent is that it shows remarkable anti-leukaemia activity when used on its own,' said Professor Lock. 'It is highly unusual to see a single agent cause such a dramatic response, so we are extremely optimistic that it will prove effective in humans.'

By analysing almost daily water samples taken from the same river from 1940 until today, researchers at Lund University in Sweden have confirmed their hypothesis that the browning of lakes is primarily due to the increase in coniferous forests, as well as rainfall and sulphur deposits.

The study was carried out on the Lyckebyån River in southeast Sweden. However, Martin Škerlep, doctoral student at Lund University and the leader of the study, believes the results are relevant for why the water has turned brown in other running waters and lakes in northern Europe and North America.

To be able to apply the study in these areas, there must have been an increase in forest volumes in the surrounding catchments.

The researcher team has investigated the change in water colour over the past 79 years, since 1940 when the Karlskrona municipality started to archive data from the samples of the drinking water supply. Martin Škerlep says that the frequency of the testing (nearly daily) and the time period covered by the data series (from 1940 until today) is what makes the study unique.

"It is thanks to this unique data series that we can understand what actually causes the browning of running waters and lakes with greater certainty than in previous studies. The amount of data and the duration provides great reliability", says Martin Škerlep, who continues:

"We therefore know that the water colour did not change in response to increasing acidification, which peaked in the 1970s and 1980s. This means that the observed variation in water colour, with a notable browning in the last decades cannot be explained primarily by variation in acid deposition. "

In their work, the researchers have compared the data on water colour with long-term data on climate variables, sulphur deposition, and volumes of coniferous forest. The results show that a change in the landscape to an increase in coniferous forest is the primary cause of the browning of water, a result that supports their previous studies.

During the last 100 years, the forest industry has focused on spruce, a type of tree that grows relatively quickly and is financially profitable. In spruce forests, over the years, the organic soil layer becomes thick and rich in organic material. When it rains, carbon leaches out into the lakes and streams and colours the water brown. The most significant leaching occurs when it rains a lot in a short period following drought.

"In the past 40-50 years, the water in the Lyckebyån River has turned a lot browner", says Martin Škerlep.

To see how much coniferous forest there is in the area around the Lyckebyån River, researchers used data from the Swedish National Forest Inventory. In doing this, they were able to detect a 200 percent increase in the volume of coniferous forest around the river since 1928.

In addition to coniferous forest, the study shows that rainfall and sulphur deposition also affect the colour of the water.