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DALLAS, Dec. 9, 2019 -- Geriatric conditions such as frailty and cognitive impairments may inadvertently worsen when older patients are treated in cardiac intensive care units - even as they receive excellent care for their heart attack, heart failure, valvular heart disease or pulmonary embolism, according to a new scientific statement from the American Heart Association, published today in the Association's premier journal Circulation.

In addition to their cardiovascular conditions, many older patients often have additional health conditions, take multiple medications for these conditions, may be frail or have cognitive impairment. Caring for older adults in the cardiac intensive care unit is markedly different than caring for younger patients, according to the statement, which provides an overview of how geriatric conditions may influence acute cardiovascular care.

"Treating the whole patient - considering their entire health profile, rather than focusing only on their acute cardiovascular event - is essential for achieving the best possible outcomes among geriatric patients with acute cardiovascular disease," said Abdulla A. Damluji, M.D., M.P.H., chair of the writing group for the statement, assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, and interventional cardiologist at the Inova Heart and Vascular Institute, Falls Church, Virginia.

While in a cardiac intensive care unit, older patients often experience factors that are emotionally and physically disorienting - such as bright lights, excessive noise, new medications, urinary catheters, dietary shifts, sleep disruptions and toileting challenges. "For vulnerable older adults who may already be experiencing cognitive decline, the environment in the cardiac intensive care unit may deplete already limited coping skills and could lead to delirium," said Damluji.

Delirium is a state of an acute disturbance in awareness and attention. It commonly occurs during critical illness, and it contributes to a higher risk of dying in the hospital. "Reducing the level of sedation used in older patients may help mitigate delirium, however, more research needs to be done to fully understand how best to treat this condition in the context of acute cardiovascular illness," said Damluji.

Extended bedrest, often necessary in an intensive care unit, is detrimental to patients of all ages. For older, critically ill patients, who are often frail when admitted to the cardiac intensive care unit, bedrest can significantly worsen their frailty. Further deterioration in muscle strength and bone density often occurs with prolonged immobility, which can also lead to poor medication tolerance, an increased risk of falling, weakened heart function and pressure ulcers (bed sores).

Early mobilization - getting the patient out of bed as soon as appropriate, may be helpful for some patients to address frailty. Encouraging appropriate physical movement may result in less weakness, an improved ability to walk and less time in the cardiac intensive care unit, among other benefits.

Another issue faced by older adults admitted to the cardiac intensive care unit is that they take an average of 12 different prescription medications, raising the risk of adverse side effects, drug-to-drug and drug-to-disease interactions. Patients may benefit by having some of their medications discontinued or deprescribed, if appropriate.

"In recent years, there has been a strong emphasis by the American Heart Association and other organizations to integrate geriatric syndromes into cardiovascular care for older patients, although implementation is slow. Strategies to achieve a wholistic care approach for each patient remains an important goal to improve care of older patients in the cardiac intensive care unit," said Damluji.

Most clinical trials on how to treat acute cardiovascular conditions were performed on younger populations, however, their findings may not be accurate for older patients. Yet, most people over age 85 years have a cardiovascular disease and are likely to be admitted to a cardiac intensive care unit for treatment of an acute event, according to the statement.

In a joint research study from Sweden, scientists from Chalmers University of Technology and Stockholm University have developed a new material for capturing carbon dioxide. The new material offers many benefits - it is sustainable, has a high capture rate, and has low operating costs. The research has been published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a technology that attracts a lot of attention and debate. Large investments and initiatives are underway from politicians and industry alike, to capture carbon dioxide emissions and tackle climate change. So far, the materials and processes involved have been associated with significant negative side effects and high costs. But now, new research from Chalmers University of Technology and Stockholm University in Sweden has demonstrated the possibility of a sustainable, low-cost alternative with excellent, selective carbon dioxide-capturing properties.

The new material is a bio-based hybrid foam, infused with a high amount of CO2-adsorbing 'zeolites' - microporous aluminosilicates. This material has been shown to have very promising properties. The porous, open structure of the material gives it a great ability to adsorb the carbon dioxide.

"In the new material, we took zeolites, which have excellent capabilities for capturing carbon dioxide, and combined them with gelatine and cellulose, which has strong mechanical properties. Together, this makes a durable, lightweight, stable material with a high reusability. Our research has shown that the cellulose does not interfere with the zeolites' ability to adsorb carbon dioxide. The cellulose and zeolites together therefore create an environmentally friendly, affordable material," says Walter Rosas Arbelaez, PhD student at Chalmers' Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering and one of the researchers behind the study.

The researchers' work has yielded important knowledge and points the way for further development of sustainable carbon capture technology. Currently, the leading CCS technology uses 'amines', suspended in a solution. This method has several problems - amines are inherently environmentally unfriendly, larger and heavier volumes are required, and the solution causes corrosion in pipes and tanks. Additionally, a lot of energy is required to separate the captured carbon dioxide from the amine solution for reuse. The material now presented avoids all of these problems. In future applications, filters of various kinds could be easily manufactured.

"This research fits well with the ongoing developments within CCS and CCU (Carbon Capture and Utilisation) technology, as a sustainable alternative with great potential. In addition to bio-based materials being more environmentally friendly, the material is a solid - once the carbon dioxide has been captured, it is therefore easier and more efficient to separate it than from the liquid amine solutions," says Professor Anders Palmqvist, research leader for the study at Chalmers.

Zeolites have been proposed for carbon capture for a long time, but so far, the obstacle has been that ordinary, larger zeolite particles are difficult to work with when they are processed and implemented in different applications. This has prevented them from being optimally used. But the way the zeolite particles have been prepared this time - as smaller particles in a suspension - means they can be readily incorporated in and supported by the highly porous cellulose foam. Overcoming this obstacle has been a vital breakthrough of the current study.

"What surprised us most was that it was possible to fill the foam with such a high proportion of zeolites. When we reached 90% by weight, we realized that we had achieved something exceptional. We see our results as a very interesting piece of the puzzle in the search for a solution to the complex challenge of being able to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere quickly enough to meet climate goals," says Walter Rosas Arbelaez.

BEER-SHEVA, ISRAEL...December 9, 2019 - Taking a cue from the self-cleaning properties of the lotus leaf, researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have shed new light on microscopic forces and mechanisms that can be optimized to remove dust from solar panels to maintain efficiency and light absorption. The new technique removed 98% of dust particles.

In a new study published in ACS Langmuir, the researchers confirmed that modifying the surface properties of solar panels may greatly reduce the amount of dust remaining on the surface, and significantly increase the potential of solar energy harvesting applications in the desert.

Dust adhesion on solar panels is a major challenge to energy harvesting through photovoltaic cells and solar thermal collectors. New solutions are necessary to maintain maximum collection efficiency in high dust density areas such as the Negev desert in Israel.

"In nature, we observe that the lotus leaf remains dust and pathogen free due to its nanotextured surface, and a thin wax, hydrophobic coating that repels water," says Tabea Heckenthaler, a master's student from Düsseldorf Germany at the BGU Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research, Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research. "In the desert, dust accumulates on the surface of solar cells and it's labor-intensive to clean them constantly, so we're trying to mimic this behavior on a solar cell."

The researchers explored the effect of modifying a silicon substrate (Si), a semiconductor used in photovoltaic cells, to mimic the self-cleaning properties of the lotus leaf, as water rolls down the leaves and removes contamination.

It is known that superhydrophobicity reduces the friction between water droplets and the surface, thus allowing water drops to slide clean particles from surfaces. However, the forces that attach and detach particles from surfaces during the self-cleaning mechanism and the effect of nanotextures on these forces are not fully understood.

To shed light on these forces and the effect of nanotexture on them, the researchers prepared four silicon-based samples relevant to solar panels: (1) smooth hydrophillic (2) nanotextured hydrophilic surfaces and (3) smooth hydrophobic (4) nanotextured hydrophobic surfaces. This was achieved by wet-chemically etching the surface to create nanowires on the surface, and additionally applying a hydrophobic coating.

Particle removal increased from 41% on hydrophilic smooth Si wafers to 98% on superhydrophobic Si-based nanotextured surfaces. The researchers confirmed these results by measuring the adhesion of a micron-sized particle to the flat and nanotextured substrate using an atomic force microscope. They found that the adhesion in water is reduced by a factor of 30.

"We determined that the reason for the increased particle removal is not low friction between the droplets and the superhydrophobic surfaces," Heckenthaler says. "Rather, it is the increase in the forces that can detach particles from the surfaces. The experimental methods we used and the criterion for particle removal we derived can be implemented to engineer self-cleaning surfaces exhibiting different chemistries and/or textures."

Eye-opening research by neurosurgeons from Barrow Neurological Institute and Montreal Neurological Institute has produced the foremost investigation of the origin and evolution of perhaps the most famous concept devised in neurobiology--the homunculus of neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield. The paper, along with a perspective piece, was published in the August issue of World Neurosurgery. The research was conducted by Drs. Mark Preul and Gurpreet Gandhoke at Barrow and Richard Leblanc at Montreal.

This exciting research is the culmination of years of assessing Penfield's archives at the Osler Library of McGill University, as well as finding and preserving at McGill the only known copy from which the beginnings of the homunculus may be traced--Edwin Boldrey's 1936 McGill master's degree thesis supervised by Penfield. Boldrey, one of Penfield's neurosurgery trainees, wrote the analysis of the largest and most intricately studied collection of intraoperative stimulations and mappings during human brain surgery ever performed up to that time.

Boldrey's thesis provides an incredible record of electrical brain stimulations of over 100 patients studied from 1928 to 1936 during open brain surgery, and includes later additional cases. Each stimulation point was assigned to one of 28 brain maps, each representing a specific function. These included movement and sensation of the tongue, mouth, jaw, face, and throat; swallowing; vocalizing; and sensation and movements of fingers, hand, arm, shoulder, trunk, leg, and foot. Vision and audition were also represented, as were autonomic functions and head and eye movements. Each stimulation point was placed on the appropriate composite map according to its distance from the sylvian and rolandic fissures, thereby creating a cluster diagram of individual data points. In this way, probabilistic maps with widely outlying points were created, a reflection of the individual variations that one sees in grouped data obtained from biological systems.

The iconic homunculus was devised by Penfield as a teaching tool to aid memory, and was drawn by Hortense Cantlie, a medical illustrator at McGill. She rendered the complex idea simply for its first appearance in 1937 as an acrobat hanging from a trapeze by his knees, with his head tilted up to look at the audience. The areas devoted to the opposable thumbs, necessary for grasping tools, and to the tongue and lips, necessary for speech, are disproportionally large, reflecting their relative importance with respect to human experience.

Preul and Leblanc state, "Penfield's homunculus is a symbol of the extraordinary efforts that were expended in the exploration of the conscious human brain, which was achieved with the most rudimentary technology, and captured the imagination of succeeding generations of neurobiologists. One of Penfield's greatest contributions may be that he sought to explain the mysteries of the brain to everyone, as proclaimed by his own notes and letters, and he realized that there was no better way to understand cerebral functional organization than by a humanoid mnemonic, 'the sort of thing that people in general understand,' as he wrote in his letters. Boldrey's thesis is one of the most remarkable publications in the history of neuroscience and provides a fascinating window into the origin of the extraordinarily influential and endearing concept of Wilder Penfield's homunculus."

PORTLAND, OR - Most people diagnosed with the most common type of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma can safely skip radiation treatment after a clear PET scan, according to new clinical trial results released today at the 61st American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting.

The results are expected to change the standard of cancer care for early stage, or limited, diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), a fast-spreading cancer that is the most common subtype of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in the United States, with more than 20,000 people diagnosed each year. Findings from the study, run by the SWOG Cancer Research Network, a cancer clinical trials network funded by the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, were presented at a special session today in Orlando, Florida at the ASH Annual Meeting, the world's largest conference devoted to blood diseases and blood cancers like lymphoma.

Daniel Persky, MD, an associate professor at the University of Arizona Cancer Center and the lead investigator of the SWOG study, said the research results are good news for patients.

"Radiation treatment, like all cancer treatments, has side effects," Persky said. "It can be painful and cause rashes or burns, as well as fatigue. It can also increase patients' risk of developing other cancers. If we can spare people the pain - and time and cost - of radiation and give a simpler course of treatment, it's a win."

For more than 20 years, SWOG researchers have pioneered treatment for people with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. In 1998, SWOG researcher Thomas P. Miller, MD, published findings in The New England Journal of Medicine that showed the addition of radiation therapy to the standard chemotherapy regimen of cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, vincristine, and prednisone (CHOP) is superior to eight cycles of a CHOP chemotherapy combination alone for people with limited stage, aggressive non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. This work changed how doctors treat patients. Since then, SWOG and other researchers have successfully added the monoclonal antibody rituximab to the treatment regimen (R-CHOP), but the general concept of a chemotherapy and radiation combination treatment for limited stage DLBCL has not changed - until now.

Persky and colleagues wanted to see if the use of a positron emission tomography (PET) scan could positively impact care for people with DLBCL in the early stages, the time in cancer development when treatment is most effective. PET scans use glucose labeled with a radioactive tracer, which collects in fast-growing tissues, like cancers, that consume sugar at high rates.

Persky and his team enrolled 132 eligible patients with stage I and II DLBCL for the trial, making it the largest U.S. study of this cancer subtype since the original SWOG study in 1998. There was no age limit for enrollment, so patients skewed older, with a median age of 62. Everyone received standard R-CHOP therapy, then got a PET scan after their third cycle of treatment. Scans were reviewed by the same group of radiologists in real time.

Patients with a negative PET scan got one additional cycle of R-CHOP to complete their treatment, for a total of four rounds of chemotherapy. Patients with a positive scan underwent involved-field radiation therapy (IFRT) to their affected lymph nodes, and a booster treatment in areas where the scans showed fast-growing cancer cells. Three to six weeks later, these patients received treatment with ibritumomab tiuxetan, a radio-immunotherapy drug approved for a different lymphoma type, which couples a rituximab-like monoclonal antibody to a radioactive particle. Twelve weeks after treatment completion, every patient had a final PET scan.

Patients were then followed for an average of about five years after treatment. During this follow-up period, 11 patients died, but only two died from lymphoma. Five patients saw their cancer return. Of those five, three had received the experimental treatment of only four rounds of R-CHOP. One patient had a positive PET scan but declined radiation. The other went off treatment altogether after one round of chemotherapy.

For survivors of both treatment groups, outcomes were excellent. Results showed that 91 percent of people who received no radiation were alive five years after treatment, and 89 percent were cancer-free. For patients who did receive radiation, 93 percent were alive five years after treatment, and 86 percent were cancer-free.

With 89 percent of patients in remission after just four rounds of chemotherapy, Persky believes PET-directed therapy will be the new standard of care for limited DLBCL, particularly when coupled with German results presented at last year's ASH annual meeting. They showed that a subgroup of younger patients respond well to four, rather than six, cycles of R-CHOP along with two cycles of rituximab monotherapy.

"In both studies, we find that many patients can forgo radiation and get less chemo - and still get excellent results," Persky said. "This means people can heal from treatment sooner, and that care costs can go down. I think doctors and patients can agree: The less cancer treatment, the better."

Funding for S1001came from the National Institutes of Health through the National Cancer Institute under grants CA180888, CA180819, CA180820, and CA180821 and in part by Spectrum Pharmaceuticals.

Scientists say coral reefs on a tiny island in the South Pacific have shown incredible resilience and recovery from a recent but very severe disturbance: a volcanic eruption that created a new island.

Hunga Tonga - Hunga Ha'apai was (until October this year) the newest island on Earth. It was a result of a massive 2015 volcanic eruption in the middle of the South Pacific that, over a period of two weeks, created a new island more than 200 metres high.

Lead author Patrick Smallhorn-West is a PhD candidate at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University (Coral CoE at JCU) and a National Geographic Explorer. He and a team of scientists surveyed the effects of the eruption on the coral reefs around the island.

"Coral reefs are increasingly compromised by multiple stressors, even in the most remote locations," Mr Smallhorn-West said.

"While severe disturbances, such as volcanic eruptions, can annihilate entire reef ecosystems, they can also provide unique opportunities to examine ecosystem resilience and recovery."

"We wanted to see what happens to a coral reef when it experiences the worst of the worst. Not much is as bad as a massive volcanic eruption, short of things such as nuclear testing at places like Bikini Atoll. This event allowed us to document not only how reefs were affected by a massive disturbance, but also how they recovered."

Co-author Dr Tom Bridge, also from Coral CoE at JCU and the Queensland Museum, says the reefs were surveyed not only to examine the effects of the eruption, but also to understand how new reefs began forming on the new habitat.

The team also included researchers from the NASA Goddard Space Institute who helped piece together the environmental conditions that were present at the time of the eruption.

Dr Jim Garvin, chief scientist from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre, explained that large ash clouds from the eruption collapsed into a ground-hugging flow that released massive sediment plumes into the ocean. This was confirmed by scans of rock samples collected from the island and by satellite imagery. The latter showed high sea temperatures around the eruption.

"Some parts of the reef were totally annihilated by the blast," Dr Bridge said. "They were completely destroyed with huge chunks of reef turned over--you could still see dead coral species in-situ but covered in black sediment, and often upside down."

"However, one section of the island--shielded by a pre-existing island and prevailing weather conditions--still supported diverse coral reefs."

"Here we found high cover and diversity of corals, including many large mature coral colonies. This was a well-established reef system that had clearly persisted through the eruption largely unaffected."

The small area that survived appears to have provided a source of larvae to repopulate reefs around the rest of the island.

"This is evidenced by the large number of juvenile corals that covered the substrate at many locations," Mr Smallhorn-West said.

"Some of the uplifted land had also made brand new habitat for reef formation, and there was very high recruitment of specific fast-growing species in these areas--all very young and beginning to lay the foundations of a new reef.

"Fish showed a similar pattern, with all the large fish persisting at the one site, and plenty of juveniles now living in the areas that were either annihilated or uplifted by the blast."

The study suggests that the remote location and lack of additional stressors, such as human activity, have likely contributed to the resilience of these reefs.

"In the absence of chronic man-made stressors such as poor water quality and overfishing, coral reefs can be resilient to one of the largest physical disturbances on Earth," Mr Smallhorn-West said.

Dr Bridge said natural disasters like these were once the largest catastrophes on Earth, and showed that reefs can recover from severe acute disturbances. However, the key to recovery was the persistence of adult corals and fish in the small area unaffected by the blast.

"Reefs are facing disturbance events at unprecedented spatial scales; for example, the bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef in 2016 affected huge areas with few refuges available. Therefore, recovery of the hardest hit areas will take decades if it occurs at all," Dr Bridge said.

"Small and protected populations can be crucial for recovery from severe disturbances in marine as well as terrestrial ecosystems--but recovery is likely to decline as the frequency and severity of man-made disturbances continues to increase."

For patients with high-risk myeloid cancers undergoing a donor stem cell transplant, adding the targeted drug venetoclax to a reduced-intensity drug regimen prior to transplant is safe and does not impair the ability of the donor cells to take root in recipients' bodies, a study led by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute researchers suggests. The study will be presented today at the 61st American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting.

The findings provide support for the use of venetoclax prior to transplant as a way to increase the chances of transplant success in this group of patients, said Jacqueline S. Garcia, MD, physician in the Adult Leukemia Program at Dana-Farber and first author of the study.

While a donor stem cell transplant can cure myeloid malignancies such as acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), patients whose tumor cells carry certain genetic mutations or chromosomal abnormalities have a high risk of relapsing after transplant. A variety of approaches to lowering the chance of relapse are under study. One involves using venetoclax, which prompts cancer cell death by blocking the BCL-2 protein, as part of the conditioning regimen patients receive in preparation for a donor stem cell transplant.

The new study focused on patients who underwent reduced-intensity conditioning regimens, which use lower, less toxic doses of chemotherapy and radiation therapy. While such regimens kill fewer cancer cells than traditional "myeloablative" treatments, they are milder on the body and are used in patients over age 60.

"In previous research, we have shown that adding venetoclax to leukemia drugs produces a very large increase in anti-leukemia activity," Garcia remarked. "We hypothesized that venetoclax would promote the anti-leukemic effect of conditioning chemotherapy and therefore reduce the risk of relapse without producing undue toxicity."

The study involved nine patients with high-risk AML or MDS who were recommended for a donor stem cell transplant. In a phase I clinical trial, they received venetoclax along with the chemotherapy drugs fludarabine and busulfex as a conditioning regimen and then underwent a donor stem cell transplant.

"We found that venetoclax can be safely added to standard reduced-intensity conditioning without impeding the ability of donor neutrophils [a type of white blood cell] to engraft," Garcia stated.

Because patients are just six months removed from transplant, it is too early to know if the new regimen reduced the chance of relapse, Garcia noted, but the fact that the donor cells have engrafted - evidenced by patients' blood counts - is an encouraging sign. There has not been a signal of toxicity in excess of what is expected with standard reduced-intensity conditioning, including rates of graft-versus-host disease. To further minimize the potential for relapse, the trial is under an amendment to allow trial participants to receive post transplant maintenance therapy of low dose venetoclax and the chemotherapy drug azacytidine.

SAN DIEGO, December 6, 2019 -- The release of more than 50 floating sensors, called Mobile Earthquake Recording in Marine Areas by Independent Divers (MERMAIDs), is increasing the number of seismic stations around the planet. Scientists will use the floating array to clarify the picture of the massive mantel plume in the lower mantel lying below the South Pacific Ocean. This effort will also establish one of the most comprehensive overviews of seismic activity across the globe.

Frederik Simons, at Princeton University, will discuss this international effort during the marine seismoacoustics session of the 178th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. The presentation will be given Friday, Dec. 6 at 9:30 a.m. in Empress Room of the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego.

"We are hunting for the deep source of mantel plumes, which bring to the surface hot volcanic material from great depth," said Simons. "What happens inside [the Earth] is all part of the plate-tectonic cycle [that gives] us energy. I see it as both as an opportunity and as a threat."

The floating array offers an advantage over traditional land-based seismic stations. The floating sensors gather data spanning many angles of Earth's interior, producing a massive CAT scanlike reading of seismic activity for the planet.

According to Simons, this effort offers insight into the buoyancy, viscosity, density and temperature of the deep mantel plume as deep as 700 kilometers below Earth's surface. This depth produces a potential barrier for material flowing from the lower into the upper mantel. The relayed information provides the scientific community precise measurements of the propagation speeds of seismic waves traveling through the plume.

The sensors, released in the Pacific Ocean, have a life span of five years. Each device was designed to drift passively, as well as sink to a depth of 3,000 meters. The sensors, which can relay information to scientists in near real time through a satellite link, consists of a hydrophone to capture seismic information, a GPS to annotate location accurately and a unit to digitize and process wavelet detection of the seismic activity underwater.

The array forms the backbone of the South Pacific Plume Imaging and Modeling program, an international effort managed by scientists from China, France, Japan and the United States.

Simons' presentation 5aAO4, "EarthScope-Oceans: An Array of Floating MERMAID Instruments for Earthquake Seismology," will be at 9:30 a.m. PT, Friday, Dec. 6, in the Empress room of the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego.

SAN DIEGO, December 6, 2019 -- Stormquakes are a recently discovered phenomenon characterized by seismic activity originating at the ocean floor due to powerful storms.

Catherine de Groot-Hedlin, a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, was part of the group that first observed stormquakes. She will discuss their properties and meteorological significance during a session at the 178th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, which will take place Dec. 2-6, at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego.

The talk, "Stormquakes: Tracing the path of ocean storms through the solid earth," will be presented at 9:10 a.m. PT (U.S.) on Friday, Dec. 6, as part of the session on marine seismoacoustics.

Heavy storms, like hurricanes or nor'easters, can create seismic waves as large as magnitude 3.5 quakes. These tremors caused by the effects of storms on the seafloor are what de Groot-Hedlin and her collaborators call stormquakes. An equivalent earthquake would be large enough to generate noticeable indoor shaking.

The track of the storm and the depth of the ocean at its location are key factors in determining whether a stormquake occurs.

"Most hurricanes we studied were strong as they passed north along Georgia to New Jersey but weakened into category 1 or even tropical storms by the time they hit offshore New England," said de Groot-Hedlin. "Despite this, stormquakes were only detectable off the coast of the New England region and Georges Bank, when the storms were weaker."

On the other hand, the storm's intensity does not play a critical role, though it must be strong enough to be able to transfer a certain amount of energy into the ocean. This energy transfer leads to strong pressure zones at the interaction between ocean waves and ocean banks.

"Stormquakes differ from seismic ambient noise in that their sources can be well located near the ocean banks as effective point seismic sources. Seismic noise is random, by contrast," she said.

The exact mechanisms that lead to the creation of stormquakes remain unknown.

"We're still in early stages of stormquake research," de Groot-Hedlin said.

In a new paper, researchers at North Carolina State University lift the veil on the "conductor" plant root stem cell gene that helps orchestrate and coordinate stem cell division of different root stem cell types, ensuring the harmonic communication necessary for plant growth and maintenance.

Ross Sozzani, an NC State associate professor of plant and microbial biology and corresponding author of the paper, says that the conductor behind this communication - which is critical to key aspects of plant development, including plant cell division, proliferation and differentiation - is a gene called TCX2, which is present in all the different plant root stem cells.

Like an orchestra with its various component instruments working together to create beautiful music, plant root stem cells work within various networks to perform various functions. TCX2 ensures that these local networks communicate with each other, similar to an orchestra conductor making sure that horns, for example, don't drown out the violins.

The interdisciplinary research included molecular biology experiments in Arabadopsis thaliana, or mustard weed, as well as mathematical modeling and machine learning approaches to narrow down some 3,000 candidate genes and learn about the causal relationships between different root stem cell networks.

"We saw that TCX2 was able to target different stem cell genes in different stem cell networks and regulate their functional timing," Sozzani said.

To validate the network prediction and mathematical modeling, the researchers took an experimental approach. They both overexpressed and knocked out the TCX2 gene and found that the timing of plant root stem cell division suffered. Sozzani and Natalie Clark, the paper's first author and a former NC State biomathematics graduate student, likened this to the principle behind the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears - the porridge was acceptable only when its temperature was "just right."

Sozzani said that future work will use these findings and 3D bioprinting to learn more about building better plants.

"We can physically change the position or number of these root stem cells and see how those changes help or harm this harmonic system," she said. "If you wanted to help a plant become more drought tolerant, for example, how do you build more vascular tissue which is important for that function? 3D bioprinting allows us to test this by positioning stem cells in desired spatial arrangements."

The researchers from Peter the Great St.Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU) and Institute of Problems of Mechanical Engineering of the Russian Academy of Sciences studied the distribution of hydrogen in metals in the process of standard testing for hydrogen cracking. They found that there is a surface effect that does not let hydrogen enter the metal. This can result in errors in industrial quality control of material, and to fundamental errors in terms of scientific research of hydrogen embrittlement. The finding was published in International Journal of Continuum Mechanics and Thermodynamics. This research was supported by the Russian Science Foundation grant.

Hydrogen influences the properties of various materials greatly which is important for almost all industrial technologies. It can enter the molten metal and remain in it after solidification. During the usage of metal parts, hydrogen saturation occurs due to corrosion, friction or plastic deformation. Water is the most common source of hydrogen. The properties of metals are drastically affected in the presence of any additives. They become brittle, crack, lose durability. Only one hydrogen atom per hundreds of thousands of metal atoms is enough while other impurities can cause some harm in much higher concentrations. A small concentration of hydrogen is difficult to fix, which makes problems with the direct measurement of its content in metals, especially its distribution within micron-thick metal layers. Indirect measurements are usually used, in particular, the time of saturation with hydrogen is normalized.

Construction materials are tested before use under hydrogen saturation conditions. The most common ones are the electrochemical saturation of metal samples in an electrolyte solution and saturation in a neutral salt solution while passing hydrogen sulfide. It is usually considered that these methods provide universal saturation of the samples similar to natural conditions.

Scientists have figured out whether this is true. The studies were carried out on a highly sensitive industrial mass spectrometric hydrogen analyzer. It was possible to measure the distribution of hydrogen concentrations in steel samples of a standard form made of stainless, pipe, bridge and weather-resistant steel. The surface effect was detected. It based on the fact that an abnormally high concentration of hydrogen arises in the thin layer of metal at the surface of the sample, which is hundreds of times higher than the internal hydrogen concentration. This surface layer of metal, with a thickness of about 50 microns, creates a kind of a "shield" that prevents the entering of hydrogen into the metal. A theoretical model was also developed in terms of the mathematical description of this phenomenon.

"This is a new look at the industrial testing of the hydrogen resistance of metals, applied in many standardized methods of quality control. It turns out that it is not equivalent to the actual hydrogen saturation that occurs during metal part exploitation. This causes errors in evaluating of metals properties. It is important to understand that modern high-strength alloys are highly sensitive to the influence of hydrogen, so additional testing and the development of new methods of industrial testing are required", says Vladimir Polyansky, professor of SPbPU. "We plan to study how much the surface effect we discovered is manifested in real constructions subject under thermomechanical loads, and what is the relationship between model hydrogen saturation and the brittleness of metals that occurs during real industrial exploitation".

CAMDEN - Formerly incarcerated individuals with barriers to re-entry and service needs following their release are subsequently more likely to experience poor physical and mental health, according to an eye-opening new Rutgers University-Camden study.

Daniel Semenza and Nathan Link, assistant professors of criminal justice at Rutgers-Camden, analyzed data on recently incarcerated men from the Serious and Violent Offender Re-entry Initiative (SVORI) to examine how multiple barriers to reintegration related to employment, housing, childcare, and service needs accumulate to influence physical and mental health three, nine, and 15 months after release.

"It's a prison re-entry study that examines outcomes other than recidivism," says Link. "In general, re-entry work has been far too narrowly focused on recidivism."

The study, published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, shows that greater reintegration barriers decrease self-rated health for formerly incarcerated individuals at all three intervals, and increases their symptoms of depression at three and nine months after release.

Semenza and Link explain that those released from prison face a wide variety of challenges when coming home and reintegrating back into daily life. These challenges can range from difficulties in finding a job, finding housing, securing affordable childcare, or getting necessary medical services.

They note that individuals struggle to find jobs because employers may not be willing to hire those who have been incarcerated.

"This is especially true when people must indicate prior incarceration on a job application," says Semenza.

They further explain that, if the individual leaving prison does not have a home to return to with their family, he or she might struggle to find a place to rent, especially if they do not have the financial means to put any money down, such as the first and last month's rent plus a security deposit.

The researchers add that people leaving prison often need a range of services, such as childcare, job training, additional education, drug or alcohol treatment, medical treatment, or help accessing public assistance.

"All of these challenges can pile up and make it extremely difficult to start a new life, and our study finds that there may be health consequences to these accumulated barriers as well," says Semenza.

In light of these common challenges, respondents in the study were given a list of 30 needs and asked if they needed that service or item. The researchers then counted the number of barriers that a person says they are experiencing at each time point in the study after release from prison.

"Indicating a need represents a potential barrier to reintegration and each contributes to the accumulation of challenges that we discuss in the article," says Semenza.

The Rutgers-Camden researchers posit that this accumulation - the whole - is greater than the sum of its parts. Drawing on important literature related to "stress processes and health" to make their case, they explain that the months after being released from prison are not only crucial for long-term success, but represent times of significant stress that can be further exacerbated by problems in satisfying their variety of needs. They posit that greater acute and prolonged stress can create a kind of "wear and tear" on the body, and those with accumulated barriers to reintegration are likely experiencing higher levels of stress than those with fewer barriers.

"We think of these barriers as placing a heavier and heavier burden on those leaving prison as they accumulate, which can impact both physical and mental health over time," says Semenza.

The Rutgers-Camden study shows that both lower self-rated physical health and increased symptoms of depression can actually lead back to an increase in reintegration barriers, evidence of a "negative feedback loop" where more barriers to reintegration worsen health, and in turn, poorer health increases these barriers.

"For instance, if a person has difficulty getting a job, it could lead to symptoms of depression, which can in turn make it more difficult to apply for jobs or to attend job training meetings," says Semenza.

The Rutgers-Camden researchers suggest that comprehensive reintegration services addressing multiple needs related to all aspects of employment, housing, childcare, and public assistance, among other issues, can improve not only recidivism rates but also population health outcomes more broadly.

"While programs surely need to focus on the big barriers like housing and employment, other needs shouldn't be ignored," says Link. "We believe that a greater policy and research focus on the months right after coming home can really have an impact on the lives of those who have served their time in prison moving forward."

Pulling back the lens, adds Link, their study goes beyond most research on prisoner re-entry that focuses almost exclusively on recidivism as outcomes by questioning whether a person reoffended or not and what was associated with these outcomes. He posits that these are important questions, but in order for the American justice system to be reformed, re-entry needs to be thought of more broadly and include the re-entry goal of improving life outcomes.

"As researchers, analyzing both mental and physical health - as important outcomes per se - with the goal of figuring out how to improve them is one such way to do this," says Link.

UT Health San Antonio researchers, working with collaborators at the University of Florida, have discovered a safe and potent next generation of drugs to fight multiple types of leukemia and lymphoma in adults and children. The journal Nature Medicine reported the findings Dec. 2.

"This is a new class of drugs called PROTACs that target an essential survival protein in cancer cells called BCL-XL," said research co-author Robert Hromas, M.D., FACP, professor of medicine and dean of the university's Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long School of Medicine. "The previous drugs that have targeted BCL-XL decrease platelets dangerously, with a high risk of bleeding. Our drug markedly reduces that risk, and thus would be potentially far more useful in cancer patients."

The PROTAC reported here would treat T-cell malignancies such as T-cell acute leukemia and T-cell lymphoma, Dr. Hromas, a noted hematologist and oncologist, said.

T cells are produced by a gland in the upper chest called the thymus. These cells are very important participants in the body's immune response. When they turn cancerous, they rely on BCL-XL for survival.

Dr. Hromas is joined on the paper by several co-authors from the Greehey Children's Cancer Research Institute at UT Health San Antonio.

"PROTAC drugs degrade the BCL-XL protein rather than merely inhibiting it," said Peter Houghton, Ph.D., professor of molecular medicine and director of the Greehey Institute. "Potentially this class of drug can be developed against certain childhood cancers that have been untreatable."

Johns Hopkins engineers have created a new lens-free ultra-miniaturized endoscope, the size of a few human hairs in width, that is less bulky and can produce higher quality images.

Their findings were published today in Science Advances.

"Usually, you have sacrifice either size or image quality. We've been able to achieve both with our microendoscope," says Mark Foster, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at The Johns Hopkins University and the study's corresponding author.

Intended for examining neurons firing off in the brains of animals such as mice and rats, an ideal microendoscope should be small to minimize brain tissue damage yet powerful enough to produce a clear image.

Currently, standard microendoscopes are about half a millimeter to a few millimeters in diameter, and require larger, more invasive lenses for better imaging. While lensless microendoscopes exist, the optical fiber within that scans an area pixel by pixel frequently bends and loses imaging ability when moved.

In their new study, Foster and colleagues created a lens-free ultra-miniaturized microendoscope that, compared to a conventional lens-based microendoscope, increases the amount researchers can see and improves image quality.

The researchers achieved this by using a coded aperture, or a flat grid that randomly blocks light creating a projection in a known pattern akin to randomly poking a piece of aluminum foil and letting light through all of the small holes. This creates a messy image, but one that provides a bounty of information about where the light originates, and that information can be computationally reconstructed into a clearer image. In their experiments, Foster's team looked at beads in different patterns on a slide.

"For thousands of years, the goal has been to make an image as clear as possible. Now, thanks to computational reconstruction, we can purposefully capture something that looks awful and counterintuitively end up with a clearer final image," says Foster.

Additionally, Foster and team's microendoscope doesn't require movement to focus on objects at different depths; they use computational refocusing to determine where the light originated from in 3 dimensions. This allows the endoscope to be much smaller than a traditional one that requires moving the endoscope around to focus.

Looking forward, the research team will test their microendoscope with fluorescent labeling procedures in which active brain neurons would be tagged and illuminated, to determine how accurately the endoscope can image neural activity.

New research by scientists at Harvard Medical School has found that nerves in the guts of mice do not merely sense the presence of Salmonella but actively protect against infection by this dangerous bacterium by deploying two lines of defense.

The study, which will be published Dec. 5 in Cell, casts in a new light the classic view of the nervous system as a mere watchdog that spots danger and alerts the body to its presence. The results show that by directly interfering with Salmonella's ability to infect the intestines, the nervous system is both a detector of danger and a defender against it.

"Our results show the nervous system is not just a simple sensor-and-alert system," said neuro-immunologist Isaac Chiu, the study's lead investigator and assistant professor of immunology in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School. "We have found that nerve cells in the gut go above and beyond. They regulate gut immunity, maintain gut homeostasis and provide active protection against infection."

Specifically, the experiments reveal that pain-sensing neurons embedded in the small intestine and beneath cells called Peyer's patches are activated by the presence of Salmonella, a foodborne bacterium responsible for a quarter of all bacterial diarrheal disease worldwide.

Once activated, the nerves use two defensive tactics to prevent the bug from infecting the intestine and spreading throughout the rest of the body. First, they regulate the cellular gates that allow microorganisms and various substances to go in and out of the small intestine. Second, they boost the number of protective gut microbes called SFB (segmented filamentous bacteria), which are part of the microbiome in the small intestine.

Bacteria get on our nerves

Under normal conditions, Peyer's patches--clusters of lymphatic and immune tissue found exclusively on the wall of the small intestine--scan the environment, sample substances and determine what can go into the intestine. To perform this function, Peyer's patches are studded with microfold cells, or M cells, which are cellular channels that open and close to regulate influx of substances and microorganisms into the intestine. M cells are the major entry points that Salmonella and other dangerous bacteria exploit to invade the small intestine. To do so, the Salmonella bacterium injects into the gut transcription factors that stimulate intestinal cells to become M cells. Next, Salmonella latches onto sugars sitting atop the M cells--the cellular gates--and uses its tentacles to prop the gates open. The bacterium then wiggles its way into the intestine.

To understand the role of pain-sensing gut neurons in infection protection, researchers compared how mice with and without them responded to Salmonella. One group of mice had intact gut neurons, another group had these neurons genetically disabled or deleted, and yet another cohort had them chemically disabled.

Experiments showed that in the presence of Salmonella, gut neurons fire back by releasing a neurochemical called CGRP, which slows down M cell differentiation, thereby reducing the number of entry points that Salmonella can use. Additionally, the experiments show, gut neurons launch another form of defense. By releasing CGRP, they boost the presence of SFB microbes--microorganisms that, among performing other beneficial functions, also guard against Salmonella invasion. Precisely how they do so remains unclear, but Chiu and colleagues say one plausible mechanism may be that SFB uses its tiny little hooks to attach itself to the intestinal wall and form a repellent coating that shields against the disease-causing bacteria.

Both defense mechanisms functioned reliably in mice with intact gut neurons. Not so, however, in animals that lacked these gut neurons. Indeed, intestinal biopsies from mice with inactivated neurons showed their Peyer's patches more densely infiltrated by Salmonella at a greater rate than animals with intact neurons. The neuron-deficient animals also had fewer protective SFB microbes in their guts. Not surprisingly, these mice got sick from Salmonella at a greater rate and had more widespread disease than mice with intact nerve fibers.

"It is becoming increasingly clear that the nervous system interacts directly with infectious organisms in various ways to affect immunity," Chiu said. "Bacteria literally do get on our nerves."

The findings are in line with past research by Chiu's group showing a powerful three-way interplay between infection and the nervous and the immune systems. But in contrast to the new findings, the previous work showed that the nervous system can, at times, be exploited by infectious organisms to their advantage. For example, Chiu's previous research found that nerves in the lungs can alter immune response in serious lung infections with the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, commonly known as staph. In another study, Chiu's team discovered that the bacterium that can cause flesh-eating disease hijacks nerves as a way to dampen immune defenses and weaken the body's defenses.

A diverse repertoire

The new findings add to a growing body of knowledge showing that the nervous system has a repertoire far broader than signaling to and from the brain.

"Our findings illustrate an important cross talk between the nervous system and the immune system," said study first author Nicole Lai, research fellow in immunology in the Chiu lab. "It is clearly a bidirectional highway with both systems sending messages and influencing each other to regulate protective responses during infection."

Indeed, the gut contains so many nerves that it has often been called the second brain. As an alert system designed to warn the body of looming threats, the nervous system acts ultrafast. Thus, the new findings, the researchers said, suggest that evolution has taken advantage of this feature for added protection.

"If you think about it, the nervous system's involvement in immunity is an evolutionarily smart way to protect the gut from infection by repurposing an existing feature," Chiu said.

The researchers say their findings could also help explain previous observations showing that the use of opioids--which silence pain-sensing nerve fibers--and other nerve-modulating drugs can make people more prone to infections.

"If you dial down nerve signaling in an effort to reduce pain, you may be inadvertently also dampening their protective abilities," Chiu said. "Our observations support that idea."

The interaction between gut neurons and gatekeeping M cells represents an area ripe for future research, the team said, because M cells--the molecular gates of the small intestine--are also exploited by other organisms that cause serious human disease, including the bacteria E. coli, Shigella and Yersinia, as well as prions, self-propagating clumps of misfolded protein that can cause rare but universally fatal neurodegenerative conditions.

The results also point to a possible therapeutic pathway that involves modulating nerve signaling either for boosting gut immunity or intestinal inflammation.

"The idea would be that if we could somehow stimulate these protective gut neurons or mimic their activity with a drug, we could activate the immune response and increase the body's ability to fend off infection," Chiu said.