Earth

ITHACA, N.Y. -Metal copper from agricultural runoff and marine paint leaching from boat hulls poses an emerging threat to soft coral sea fans in the waters around Puerto Rico.

In a Cornell-led study, published in the journal Ecological Applications, scientists report evidence of metal pollution creating danger for the soft coral sea fans.

"We know warming oceans pose an existential threat to coral reefs around the world," said ecologist Allison Tracy, who conducted this work with Drew Harvell, professor of marine biology. "Action to alleviate the impact of warming oceans is a priority, but understanding the role of pollutants in coral disease and mortality gives us more options for solutions."

While plastics and microplastics are a well-known threat to the world's oceans, the effect of metal contamination is poorly understood, according to the researchers. Increased copper pollution can be a result of agricultural runoff and marine paint leaching from boat hulls.

Over a one-year period, the researchers tracked 175 individual sea fan colonies with varying levels of copper concentrations found in the sediment at 15 coral reef sites around Puerto Rico. They found that reefs with higher copper concentrations in the sediment suffered a reduction in recovery from multifocal purple spots disease - a disease that can plague the sea fans.

In the laboratory, Tracy found that sea fans initially launched an immune response to a damaging infection at low levels of copper and temperature stress. But when copper concentrations were boosted, sea fans' immune response failed, which suggests that copper stressed the sea fans and eliminated their immune potential, she said.

"The patterns we saw in immune markers are important because they show a mechanism through which copper and warming oceans can impair the corals' health," Tracy said.

This research supplied novel data on the role of environmental stressors in coral disease and may provide a toolkit for combatting coral disease on a local scale.

"We can't manage the climate damage to coral reefs until we better understand how pollution and disease magnify the impacts of heat stress," Harvell said. "Although healthy corals in thriving ecosystems also experience low levels of disease, the concern is that changing ocean conditions and increased pollution have led to increased disease outbreaks. As a result, corals may be losing the battle with their pathogens as ocean stressors tip the balance in favor of disease."

Beijing, November 19, 2019: Cardiovascular Innovations and Applications (CVIA), in its role as the official journal of the Great Wall International Cardiology Conference (GW-ICC), has published selected abstracts from the 30th GW-ICC. The abstracts are now online at https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cscript/cvia/2019/00000004/a00101s1

Editor-in-Chief of CVIA Dr. C. Richard Conti, past president of the American College of Cardiology, is delighted to be publishing the abstracts to support GW-ICC in its aims of leading the development of cardiovascular medicine in China, by introducing and promoting new concepts and technologies and strengthening and promoting cooperation amongst Chinese and international cardiology experts.

Topics covered by the abstracts include basic and translational medicine, clinical research on cardiovascular diseases, cardiovascular-disciplinary research and cardiovascular prevention & rehabilitation.

The 30th Great Wall International Congress of Cardiology (GW-ICC) was held from October 10th to 13th at the China National Convention Center (CNCC), Beijing, China. GW-ICC 2019 covered thirteen subject disciplines with more than 1,900 cardiology experts chairing forty-six forums of over four hundred lectures. Over two hundred and sixty international cardiology experts from more than thirty-five countries shared the latest international developments with congress delegates. International associations and organizations, including the World Heart Federation (WHF), the American College of Cardiology (ACC), the American Heart Association (AHA), and the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) hosted joint forums with GW-ICC to support discussion and exchange of expertise.

CVIA is available on the IngentaConnect platform http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/cscript/cvia and at http://cvia-journal.org/. Submissions may be made using Scholar One manuscripts at https:/mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/cvia-journal. There are no author submission or article processing fees.

Twitter: @CVIA_Journal

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cvia.journal/

Conference website: http://www.gw-icc2017.org/en/1/index.jsp

We live in a society plagued by burnout.

Our hyper-connectivity, sustained through the pulse of WiFi, leaves little room for quiet. This constant stimulation can cause stress, which is a risk factor for a host of diseases, including diabetes, depression and heart disease.

While meditation is touted to relieve the anxiety of the day-to-day struggle, many novices find it difficult to quiet their restless minds. Ultimately, many meditators quit their practice before they have a chance to reap its potential rewards.

To combat this mental unrest, Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) brain stimulation researchers Bashar W. Badran, Ph.D. and E. Baron Short, M.D., both of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, have been exploring mindfulness meditation, but with a twist.

This twist is known as E-meditation, in which mindfulness techniques are coupled with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). In tDCS, a low electrical current is sent through the skin to specific areas of the brain. For E-Meditation, tDCS is targeted toward those regions of the brain that are involved in meditation.

Badran and Short recently partnered with the Center for Mindful Learning to investigate the effects of a five-day E-meditation retreat, in which 31 study participants were guided through the use of a meditation-enhancing device (Zendo, Bodhi Neurotech, Inc., Charleston, SC) that allowed them to self-administer tCDS up to twice a day during their meditation practice. The findings were reported at the 2019 Joint Meeting of Neuromodulation, held in Napa, California in October.

While direct current stimulation to the brain might seem counterintuitive in those seeking peace and relaxation, preliminary evidence from the MUSC researchers suggest that tDCS could be an effective method for reining in a wandering mind.

In a January 2017 letter to the editor of the journal Brain Stimulation, Short, Badran and colleagues reported increased feelings of calm as well as increases in scores on some facets of a mindfulness measure, including a significant increase in "acting with awareness," after tDCS use.

These findings led the researchers to launch a start-up to develop a neurostimulation device that could be used to enhance meditation.

But would it be feasible to ask meditators to use the device to self-administer brain stimulation? That was the question the researchers were trying to answer with the study at the E-meditation retreat.

"So the question was, can people self-administer brain stimulation to augment their meditation practice outside of the laboratory?" said Badran.

Each day of the retreat, participants were scored on their self-perceived benefits, as well as any difficulties with using the device. The results were promising. Attendees were able to apply the device easily by their second use. Side effects from the device were few and mild, such as tingling at the site of application. Future studies will be needed to assess the longer-term benefits and side effects of using the device to enhance meditation.

E-meditation is still relatively new to the scene, but if the success seen at the retreat is borne out by longer-term studies with more participants, the team hopes one day to see E-meditation become a household practice.

Badran thinks it could enhance the practice of both experienced and inexperienced meditators.

"We wanted to make a tool for both novice and pros that could accelerate their practice," said Badran. "I hope this is the way people will be meditating for the next 50 years."

Okinawan cuisine is known for its many delicacies - from squid ink soup to rafute pork belly. But one of the most famous delicacies served in restaurants across Okinawa is a type of seaweed, which is renowned for its pleasing texture and taste. Instead of leaves, this seaweed has bundles of little green bubbles that burst in the mouth, releasing the salty-sweet flavor of the ocean.

The unique shape of this bubbly algae gives it the name "umi-budo" or "sea grapes". Umi-budo is a staple crop in Okinawa which is cultivated for market by the fishery industry. Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) recently unveiled key information about gene expression in sea grapes, which could help shed light on the evolution of sea grape morphology and help Okinawan farmers improve cultivation of umi-budo.

"Sea grapes are composed of two main structures - the fronds and stolons, which are similar to plant leaves and stems. The shape of umi-budo is very interesting because the whole seaweed, which can grow fronds of up to 30cm in length, is composed of just one single cell with multiple nuclei," said Dr Asuka Arimoto, first author of the study and a postdoctoral scholar previously working in the OIST Marine Genomics Unit, which is led by Professor Noriyuki Satoh. "Our research showed that despite being one cell with no physical barriers, there were differences in gene expression between the fronds and stolons, which was very unexpected." The team believes that investigation into these differences can illuminate the function and development of the fronds and stolons.

The study, which was recently published in the journal Development, Growth and Differentiation on November 11th, 2019, used sea grapes cultivated at Onna Village Fisheries Cooperative, located only a few kilometers from the OIST campus. The scientists extracted and sequenced mRNA - a molecule which carries information from expressed genes into the jelly-like liquid of the cytoplasm, where it is used to code for proteins. The team then calculated the levels of gene expression in the two different structures. Earlier this year, the OIST Marine Genomics Unit decoded the sea grape genome and estimated the presence of 9,311 protein-coding genes in the genome. In this latest research, the scientists found that out of the 9,311 genes, 1,027 genes were more highly expressed in the fronds, whereas 1,129 genes were more highly expressed in the stolons.

Exploring the similarities between sea grapes and land plants

One major advantage of this study was the ability to utilize past research from the OIST Marine Genomics Unit, which had not only previously decoded the genome of sea grapes but had also compared the sea grape genes with other land plants.

"Having genomic information to base our gene expression analysis on was incredibly useful, as it allowed us to more easily identify which genes were more highly expressed, and to characterize genes by their function," said Arimoto.

The team found that genes involved in metabolic functions such as respiration and photosynthesis were more highly expressed in the fronds, whereas genes related to DNA replication and protein synthesis were more highly expressed in the stolons. These results showed that sea grape fronds have a similar function to the leaves of land plants.

The researchers also delved further into a group of genes that regulate plant hormone pathways, which was shown in the previous study to be expanded in sea grapes compared to land plants. The results showed that a larger variety of plant hormone genes were expressed in the fronds, compared to the stolons.

"The plant hormone pathways help control the development of sea grapes and keep conditions within the seaweed stable," said Arimoto. "What is extraordinary is that despite land plants and green seaweed diverging a billion years ago, we have found that they have independently evolved similar mechanisms for regulation and development." Arimoto therefore thinks that exploring the biology of unconventional unicellular organisms, such as sea grapes, could also help scientists uncover the common principles of development and evolution among various plant and algal species.

Helping Okinawan farmers cultivate umi-budo

As well as shedding light on algae and land plant evolution, Arimoto believes that this information could lead to better methods of increasing frond growth, allowing Okinawan farmers to cultivate a more productive crop. "The fronds are the edible part of sea grapes, but it can be difficult for Okinawan farmers to cultivate sea grapes with fronds that have many bubbles without advanced scientific techniques," said Arimoto.

The Marine Genomics Unit also hopes that in the future, their science can help Okinawan farmers to cultivate umi-budo with greater tolerance to drought, high temperature or more extreme salinity. One of the plant hormone pathways - known as the abscisic acid (ABA) signaling pathway - plays a role in allowing the seaweed to cope with environmental stress. Further research into this pathway could help farmers in Okinawa and other regions to deal with the rapidly changing climate.

To study the swiftness of biology - the protein chemistry behind every life function - scientists need to see molecules changing and interacting in unimaginably rapid time increments - trillionths of a second or shorter.

Imaging equipment with that kind of speed was finally tested last year at the European X-ray Free-Electron Laser, or EuXFEL. Now, a team of physicists from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has completed the facility's first molecular movie, or "mapping," of the ultrafast movement of proteins.

With this capability, scientists can watch how proteins do their jobs properly - or how their shape-changing goes awry, causing disease.

"Creating maps of a protein's physical functioning opens the door to answering much bigger biological questions," said Marius Schmidt, a UWM professor of physics who designed the experiment. "You could say that the EuXFEL can now be looked on as a tool that helps to save lives."

Their findings mark a new age of protein research that enables enzymes involved in disease to be observed in real time for meaningful durations in unprecedented clarity. The paper is published online today in the journal Nature Methods.

The EuXFEL produces intense X-rays in extremely short pulses at a megahertz rate - a million pulses a second. The rays are aimed at crystals containing proteins, in a method called X-ray crystallography. When a crystal is hit by the X-ray pulse, it diffracts the beam, scattering in a certain pattern that reveals where the atoms are and producing a "snapshot."

The rapid-fire X-ray pulses produce 2D snapshots of each pattern from hundreds of thousands of angles where the beam lands on the crystal. Those are mathematically reconstructed into moving 3D images that show changes in the arrangement of atoms over time.

The European XFEL, which opened last year, has taken this atom-mapping to a new level. Extremely powerful bursts contain X-ray pulses at a quadrillionth of a second, in "bursts" that occur at 100 millisecond intervals.

Schmidt's experiment began with a flash of blue, visible light that induced a chemical reaction inside the protein crystal, followed immediately by a burst of intense X-rays in megahertz pulses that produce the "snapshots."

It's an experiment he first staged in 2014 at the U.S. Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. There, he and his students were able to document atomic changes in their protein samples for the first time at an XFEL.

Subsequently, in 2016, they were able to map the rearrangement of atoms in the range of time proteins take to change their shapes - quadrillionths of a second (femtoseconds) up to 3 trillionths of a second (picoseconds). In a picosecond, which is a trillionth of a second, light travels the length of the period at the end of this sentence.

Previous time-resolved crystallography on their photoreactive protein had already been completed using other X-ray sources capable of imaging time scales larger than 100 picoseconds, leaving a gap of uncharted time between 3 and 100 picoseconds that the scientists were able to fill using the EuXFEL.

The exceptional brightness of the laser and the megahertz X-ray pulse rate allowed them to gather data much quicker and with greater resolution and over longer time frames.

Schmidt describes EuXFEL as "a machine of superlatives." The largest XFEL in the world, it is 3 kilometers long, spanning the distance between the German federal states of Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein. Superconductive technology is used to accelerate high-energy electrons, which generates the X-rays.

Schmidt, a biophysicist who has participated in more than 30 XFEL imaging projects to date, offered a taste of the medical potential of enhanced crystallography with the XFEL: Using this method, he has witnessed how multiple proteins work together, how enzymes responsible for antibiotic resistance disable a drug and how proteins change their shape in order to absorb light and enable sight.

Doctoral student Suraj Pandey, who came to UWM from his native Nepal, is first author on the paper. He now has experience with technology that few people in the world can claim, at least for now. He said he was not sure what to expect going into the experiment.

Pandey's role was to analyze the data and calculate the maps of structural change. Of the millions of X-ray pulses that XFELs deliver, the majority don't hit a target at all. In fact, only 1% to 2% diffract off a protein crystal, while the remaining pulses produce "noise" that must be removed from the data.

The team had other worries too, he said. It took months for Pandey to grow the protein required to produce the experiment's crystals, but during their transport to Germany, the 5 grams of frozen protein was detained in customs for several days, during which some of it melted.

After the first day of imaging, he processed the data and could identify for the first time a strong signal in the resulting map. "This was a breakthrough," he said. "But the signal did not correspond to the change predicted from previous experiments. I thought the experiment had failed."

Instead, he and EuXFEL operators learned their first lesson: Optical pulses that initiate the reaction have to be exactly synchronized with the megahertz X-ray pulses. Otherwise, the protein reaction unfolds in unknown time allotments. And they had to be sure that the sample was only excited once, which turned out to be quite tricky with megahertz pulse rates.

The ultimate success of the experiment gave Pandey tremendous satisfaction.

"It's a one-of-a-kind technology," he said of the EuXFEL. "We pioneered the usage of European XFEL in seeing the movies of how proteins function. I'm just flying."

A discovery from a team of physicists and other researchers is breaking new ground in the study of ferroelectricity, a characteristic of certain dielectric materials that are used in high-technology applications. The findings appear today in the journal Nature Materials.

Led in physics theory by Sokrates Pantelides, University Distinguished Professor of Physics and Engineering at Vanderbilt, and in experiments by Nina Balke and Peter Maksymovych of the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the team reports an undiscovered property known as a quadruple potential well, which plays a role in the mechanism known as ferroelectric switching - a process specific to ferroelectric materials which describes spontaneous reversible polarization through the application of an electric field, similar to the way atoms in magnets flip poles through the application of an external magnetic field.

Until now, physicists recognize only two wells as destinations for travelling atoms, which result in a binary record. But the quadruple potential well increases the number of options in ferroelectric switching, yielding additional possibilities which could lead to increasingly complex operations and applications in data storage and electronics.

"A ferromagnetic needle, as in a compass, lines up with a magnetic field," explained Pantelides. "A ferroelectric needle would have one positively charged end, one negatively charged end and align with an electric field instead of a magnetic one. When electric fields cause the atomic-scale poles in a ferroelectric to switch, the process presents a basis for making, notably, electronic memory devices."

The team, comprised of members of Pantelides' group at Vanderbilt and several experimentalists at ORNL and other institutions, performed a combination of calculations, simulations and experiments to verify the existence of the quadruple well, made possible by the complex layered structure of the material: ferroelectric copper indium thiophosphate (CuInP2S6), or CIPS. Sabine Neumayer at ORNL and John Brehm, Lei Tao and Andrew O'Hara at Vanderbilt were key participating postdoctoral scholars.

The findings are novel in that they find new potential for CIPS and similarly complex layered materials, and redefine the currently understood variables for atom displacements in ferroelectric materials - the physical process at the atomic level behind the switching process.

"This achievement is a powerful example of how integration of theory and experiment can lead to a major discovery. We worked together with our experimentalist collaborators at ORNL, who are experts in quantifying local piezoelectric material properties using scanning probe microscopy, and designed quantum calculations to probe how ferroelectricity works in CIPS," said Pantelides, who has been a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at ORNL for the last 25 years. "The calculations led us to a prediction of an unexpected feature with important consequences, and our friends designed just the right experiments to verify the predictions. Theory and experiment worked hand in hand from there."

Uppsala researchers have developed a new method for investigating dynamic processes in large genetic libraries. By using this method to study cell cycle regulation, they help paint a clearer picture of the elusive control mechanism. The study is published in the journal Nature Methods.

Modern gene technology makes it possible to quickly and inexpensively introduce thousands of different DNA modifications in human cells or bacteria to create genetic libraries. The CRISPR/Cas9 system, a.k.a. 'the gene snipper', can be modified and used to alter the expression of thousands of different proteins. By labelling each modification with a genetic barcode, it is possible to keep track of which cell carries which change.

At the same time, recent developments in optics and image analysis have made it possible to investigate the chemical processes inside the cell with exceedingly high precision. In principle, it is possible to 'film' basic biological processes such as protein expression or cell division at the molecular level inside a living cell.

Now imagine it were possible to combine these advanced optical methods with large-scale genetic engineering. Let us say we are interested in a particular biological process. We could, in theory, identify all the genes involved in this process by observing the biology in a genetic library. Studies that have so far taken several years could be conducted in a single experiment - in theory.

The challenges that have previously prevented scientists from putting theory into practice have primarily been technical. How do you keep track of thousands of different cells so that you can first examine their biology and then read the genetic barcode?

A group of Uppsala researchers rose to the challenge, and now presents the DuMPLING method (Dynamic u-fluidic Microscopy-based Phenotyping of a Library before IN situ Genotyping). This method enables the examination of an entire library of living cells in a single microfluidic chip.

"The method is exceptionally potent and allows us to link genetic information to complex cell behaviour at an entirely new level," says Johan Elf, Professor of Physical Biology, who leads the study.

Among other things, Elf and his team study the bacterial cell cycle. In all cells, including human cells, it is vital that all DNA is copied exactly once before each cell division. If this is not the case, the cell is at risk of losing genetic material or accumulating DNA with equally devastating consequences. Although cell cycle regulation has been studied for decades, it is still unclear how cells achieve the strict control that is required.

"We can develop models that can reproduce the mechanism, but since we don't know all the players yet, it's hard to test if the models are biologically relevant. With this new method, it will be possible to identify the unknown components," says Daniel Camsund, researcher in molecular cell biology at Uppsala University.

The researchers created a genetic library where they decreased the expression of various known cell cycle regulators as well as some unknown genes and then used the DuMPLING method to study how the cell cycle was affected by these modifications. The next step is the game-changer. When all cell cycle data is collected, the nutrient solution in the chip is replaced with a solution that preserves the cells and fixes them in their positions. The genetic barcode can now be read using microscopy and colour-coded pieces of DNA.

"It's fascinating to see how the colour code develops, but fortunately, we're not decoding it manually. We have software that makes the identification," says Jimmy Larsson, researcher in molecular cell biology at Uppsala University

The results are encouraging. From the data, the researchers can identify most of the known regulatory elements, which means that the method works. Since the DuMPLING produces time-resolved data, it is also possible to tell how the cell cycle is affected by the various modifications. In the next phase, the team plans to expand the library to include all genes in the bacterial genome. Hopefully, this will take research one step closer to a complete description of the cell cycle control mechanism.

There is more to foam than meets the eye. Literally. A study by Princeton scientists has shown that a type of foam long studied by scientists is able to block particular wavelengths of light, a coveted property for next-generation information technology that uses light instead of electricity.

The researchers, integrating expertise from materials science, chemistry and physics, conducted exhaustive computational simulations of a structure known as a Weaire-Phelan foam. They found that this foam would allow some frequencies of light to pass through while completely reflecting others. This selective blocking, known as a photonic band gap, is similar to the behavior of a semiconductor, the bedrock material behind all modern electronics because of its ability to control the flow of electrons at extremely small scales.

"This has the property we want: an omnidirectional mirror for a certain range of frequencies," said Salvatore Torquato, professor of chemistry and the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials. Torquato, the Lewis Bernard Professor of Natural Sciences, published the results Nov. 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with coauthors Michael Klatt, a postdoctoral researcher, and physicist Paul Steinhardt, who is Princeton's Albert Einstein Professor in Science.

While numerous examples of photonic band gaps have been shown previously in various types of crystals, the researchers believe that their new finding is the first example in a foam, similar to the froth of soap bubbles or a draft beer. Unlike the disordered foam of beer however, the Weaire-Phelan foam is a precisely structured arrangement with deep roots in mathematics and physics.

The origins of the Weaire-Phelan foam date to 1887 when the Scottish physicist Lord Kelvin proposed a structure for the "ether," the mysterious substance that was then thought to comprise a background structure to all space. Although the concept of the ether was already falling out of favor at the time, Kelvin's proposed foam went on to intrigue mathematicians for a century because it appeared to be the most efficient way to fill space with interlocking geometrical shapes that have the least possible surface area.

In 1993, physicists Denis Weaire and Robert Phelan found an alternative arrangement that requires slightly less surface area. Since then, interest in the Weaire-Phelan structure was mainly in the mathematics, physics and artistic communities. The structure was used as the outer wall of the "Beijing Water Cube" created for the 2008 Olympics. The new finding now makes the structure of interest to materials scientists and technologists.

"You start out with a classical, beautiful problem in geometry, in mathematics, and now suddenly you have this material that opens up a photonic band gap," Torquato said.

Torquato, Klatt and Steinhardt became interested in the Weaire-Phelan foam as a tangent of another project in which they were investigating "hyperuniform" disordered materials as an innovative way to control light. Although not their original focus, the three realized that this precisely structured foam had intriguing properties.

"Little by little, it became apparent that there was something interesting here," Torquato said. "And eventually we said, 'Ok, let's put the main project to the side for a while to pursue this.'"

"Always look out for what's at the wayside of research," Klatt added.

Weaire, who was not involved in this new finding, said that the Princeton discovery is part of a broadening interest in the material since he and Phelan discovered it. He said the possible new use in optics likely stems from the material being very isotropic, or not having strongly directional properties.

"The fact that it displays a photonic band gap is very interesting because it turns out to have so many special properties," said Andrew Kraynik, an expert in foams who earned his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Princeton in 1977 and has studied the Weaire-Phelan foam extensively but was not involved in the Princeton study. Another Princeton connection, said Kraynik, is that a key tool in discovering and analyzing the Weaire-Phelan foam is a software tool called Surface Evolver, which optimizes shapes according to their surface properties and was written by Ken Brakke, who earned his Ph.D. in math at Princeton in 1975.

To show that the Weaire-Phelan foam exhibited the light-controlling properties they were seeking, Klatt developed a meticulous set of calculations that he executed on the supercomputing facilities of the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering.

"The programs he had to run are really computationally intensive," Torquato said.

The work opens numerous possibilities for further invention, said the researchers, who dubbed the new area of work as "phoamtonics" (a mashup of "foam" and "photonics"). Because foams occur naturally and are relatively easy to make, one possible goal would be to coax raw materials to self-organize into the precise arrangement of the Weaire-Phelan foam, Torquato said.

With further development, the foam could transport and manipulate light used in telecommunications. Currently much of the data traversing the internet is carried by glass fibers. However, at its destination, the light is converted back to electricity. Photonic band gap materials could guide the light much more precisely than conventional fiber optic cables and might serve as optical transistors that perform computations using light.

"Who knows?" said Torquato. "Once you have this as a result, then it provides experimental challenges for the future."

Knowledge and awareness of antibiotic resistance and related issues is generally high among European healthcare workers, according to the first European survey to examine attitudes and behaviours in relation to antibiotic resistance in this group. However, the study also illustrates important knowledge gaps.

The study, published today, can serve as an important resource and baseline for EU/EEA countries when developing approaches and interventions to tackle antibiotic resistance, says the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC), which commissioned the study.

"I thank my fellow EU health workers for taking part in this survey. They are key actors in fighting the antimicrobial resistance. While it shows that the overall knowledge about antimicrobial resistance is good, it also highlights the need to make more efforts to put it into practice. In particular, in terms of moderating prescriptions and improving infection prevention in order to better protect citizens and treat patients notably through training and guidance." said Vytenis Andriukaitis, European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety. "As a medical doctor, I know that we have a great responsibility to stand in the forefront of the fight against antimicrobial resistance and we should spare no effort in our work to continuously improve our knowledge and practices."

"Healthcare professionals play a fundamental role in tackling antibiotic resistance. We need to make sure that their knowledge about the prevention and emergence of this threat is up-to-date so they can act accordingly and inform their patients correctly", highlights ECDC Director Andrea Ammon. "With our study results, we now have a wealth of data about key issues concerning healthcare workers and antibiotic resistance, across all EU/EEA countries, all healthcare professions and healthcare settings. These can be used when developing locally adapted interventions to ensure prudent use of antibiotics, focused on changing behaviour and practice among healthcare workers."

Healthcare workers from all EU/EEA countries participated in the online study, Survey of healthcare workers' knowledge, attitudes and behaviours about antibiotics, antibiotic use and antibiotic resistance, EU/EEA, 2019, which included 43 questions. The objective was to gain a better understanding of healthcare workers' capabilities, opportunities and motivations around prudent antibiotic use in order to support future policy, education and communication interventions.

To test knowledge about antibiotic resistance related to human health, the 18,365 survey participants were asked seven true/false knowledge questions. Across the EU/EEA, only 58% of the respondents were able to answer all seven questions correctly. There was considerable variation in scores, depending on country and profession.

Nonetheless, the survey results also showed that healthcare workers have, in general, a good knowledge and awareness of several key concepts regarding antibiotics and antibiotic resistance, with 97% of respondents correctly identifying that antibiotics are not effective against colds and flu. This is significantly higher than among the general public, of whom only just over half know that antibiotics are ineffective against colds .

However, among healthcare workers with direct patient or public involvement, 25% reported that they do not have easy access to guidance on infection management, and 33% do not have easy access to materials for advice on prudent antibiotic use and antibiotic resistance. This suggests that more investment is needed in producing and disseminating locally adapted guidance, resources and toolkits aimed at healthcare workers.

75% of the health burden of antibiotic resistance in the EU/EEA is due to healthcare-associated infections, and over 50% of healthcare-associated infections are estimated to be preventable. Although the misuse or overuse of antibiotics, particularly in human health, is a multifactorial issue, a lack of understanding, clarity and knowledge about prudent antibiotic use and spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is a key driver of antibiotic resistance.

Key results from the ECDC survey:

Perceived knowledge about antibiotic use and antibiotic resistance was high amongst healthcare workers, with more than 89% of these respondents acknowledging the connection between prescribing, dispensing and administering of antibiotics and the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistance.

To test knowledge of antibiotics, antibiotic use and antibiotic resistance, healthcare workers were asked seven true or false knowledge questions. Across the EU/EEA, only 58% of respondents were able to answer all seven knowledge questions correctly, with an average score of 6.35/7. This score varied significantly across countries (range 40-73%) and professions (range 29-68%).

The questions 'Antibiotics are effective against viruses', 'Antibiotics are effective against cold and flu', 'Taking antibiotics has associated side effects or risks such as diarrhoea, colitis, allergies', had the highest proportion of respondents providing the correct answer (98%, 97% and 97%, respectively).

The question with the lowest proportion of respondents providing the correct answer (75%) was 'Every person treated with antibiotics is at increased risk of antibiotic-resistant infection'.

The majority (89%) of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that excessive use of antibiotics in livestock and food production contributes to antibiotic resistance in bacteria from humans.

Nurses and nursing associates were the professions most aware of the WHO's 'Five moments for hand hygiene' (73%), and the most likely to perform hand hygiene even if using gloves when dealing with patients or biological material (96% and 92%, respectively).

43% of prescribers stated that they had prescribed antibiotics at least once in the previous week even when they would have preferred not to, because of the fear of patient deterioration or of complications.

Of those respondents with direct patient or public involvement, 75% reported that they have easy access to guidelines on managing infections, with 68% reporting easy access to materials for giving advice on prudent antibiotic use and informing about antibiotic resistance. 72% agreed or strongly agreed that they had good opportunities to provide advice on prudent antibiotic use and antibiotic resistance

Most respondents (89%) agreed or strongly agreed there was a connection between their prescribing, dispensing or administering of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance, but only 58% agreed or strongly agreed they had a key role to play in helping control antibiotic resistance.

The proportion of respondents who strongly agreed or agreed that they have a key role in controlling antibiotic resistance was higher for those working in primary health care settings (65%) than those working in hospitals (56%) and other settings, such as pharmacies and long-term care facilities (55%).

Electrocatalytic reaction, like other heterogenous catalytic reaction, commonly consists of multiple elementary reaction steps. For example, alkaline hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) involves: H2O + e- ?Had + OH- (Volmer step) and H2O + Had + e- ? H2 + OH- (Heyrovsky step) or Had + Had ? H2 (Tafel step). Compared with acidic HER, the Volmer step in alkaline electrolyte requires appropriate water molecule adsorption energy and extra energy to dissociate water molecule, leading to much slower kinetics. Designing the multiple active sites on catalyst surface for targeting each elementary step and investigating their influence on electrocatalytic performance would provide new insights into the electrocatalytic process and advance the design of efficient electrocatalysts, although it is still challenging and has not received much attention yet.

Recently, Professors Jin-Song Hu and Li-Jun Wan from Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences and their collaborators designed the nanocrystals with tunable Ni/NiO heterosurfaces to target Volmer and Heyrovsky/Tafel steps in the alkaline hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and discovered that such bicomponent active sites on the surface should be balanced for promoting HER performance.

The DFT calculations were firstly performed and predicted that NiO can accelerate the dissociation of water (Volmer step) while metallic Ni can promote the formation of H2 from adsorbed hydrogen Had (Heyrovsky/Tafel step). A series of well-dispersed Ni/NiO nanocrystals model catalysts were subsequently synthesized by preparing Ni nanocrystals, followed by natural oxidation. The surface Ni/NiO ratios of these nanocrystals could be regulated by controlling the nanocrystal size since the natural oxidation of Ni nanocrystal is dependent on its size. The existence of Ni/NiO heterogeneous interface was evidenced by means of spherical aberration electron microscopy, low-energy electron energy loss spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy. The X-ray photoelectron spectroscopic analyses gave the surface Ni/NiO ratios from 0% to 59.5% as the nanocrystal size increased from 0.7 nm to 6.1 nm. The systematic electrochemical tests showed that the activity of alkaline HER was in a volcanic-shape relationship with the Ni/NiO ratio for these nanocrystals. The nanocrystal with an average size of 3.8 nm and a surface Ni/NiO ratio of 23.7% delivered the best HER activity in terms of a low overpotential of only 90 mV at 10 mA cm-2 and a small Tafel slope of 41 mV dec-1. Such performance is superior to other Ni-based analogues. The turnover frequency (TOF) calculations corroborated the fastest reaction at this Ni/NiO ratio. In contrast, when the Ni/NiO ratio on the surface of the nanocrystals decreased or increased, the alkaline HER performance decreased accordingly.

Moreover, in order to exclude the influence from nanocrystal size, the authors further post-oxidized the same catalysts to modulate the surface Ni/NiO ratios. Electrochemical tests drew the similar conclusions that when the surface Ni/NiO ratio was about 20%, the catalyst presented the best alkaline HER performance.

This work suggest that integrating multiple component active sites with suitable composition ratio is effective for balancing elementary reaction steps and thus promoting the alkaline HER. The findings might guide the exploration of efficient electrocatalysts for HER and other heterogenous catalytic reactions.

A multidisciplinary group of scientists from the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain (IGME) and the Universities of Granada, Cologne, and Lisbon has demonstrated that the traditional careo underground aquifer recharge system used in Sierra Nevada is the oldest in Europe. This finding is the outcome of various research techniques conducted by experts from different fields including archaeology, sedimentology, geophysics, and hydrogeology.

The results of this study have been published in the prestigious Journal of Hydrology, in a paper entitled "The oldest managed aquifer recharge system in Europe: New insights from the Espino recharge channel (Sierra Nevada, Southern Spain)".

The "sowing and harvesting" of water is the managed process by which human beings intentionally channel water to seep via the subsoil (sowing) so that it can be collected (harvested) at some point in the future. For centuries, this practice of recharging mountain aquifers has been conducted in several regions of our planet, although the most-documented cases are found in the high-Andean regions of Peru and Ecuador.

In Sierra Nevada, water is sown and harvested by means of the so-called acequias (irrigation channels) de careo. These acequias, dug out of the ground, are used by mountain stock farmers and acequieros (the individuals with expert skills in water catchment and allocation) to channel the meltwater so that it seeps down through the high part of the valleys. Once the water has percolated through the subsoil, it trickles down the mountain slopes to, eventually, feed the rivers and springs. This increases their flow during the dry season, when it is most needed.

The archaeological and historical research conducted on this project has shown that there were acequias de careo operating in Sierra Nevada as early as the 11th Century. However, the innovative dating techniques used in the study went a stage further, calculating how long the grains of quartz sediment that were dragged here by the early acequias have remained buried. These calculations show that the practices of sowing and harvesting water on Sierra Nevada date back about 1,300 years. That means this system was first implemented during the transition period between the end of the Visigoth period and the beginning of the period associated with al-Andalus.

The study centred on the River Bérchules basin (Granada), which is the easternmost tributary of the River Guadalfeo in the Alpujarra. The IGME, in collaboration with the Junta de Andalucía and in accordance with its policy of scientific dissemination, has also published an informative booklet entitled Careos: Siembra y cosecha del agua en la cuenca del río Bérchules (Sierra Nevada, Granada) ("Careos, Sowing and Harvesting Water in the River Bérchules basin (Sierra Nevada, Granada").

A free download of this publication in e-book format is available here (in Spanish): http://www.igme.es/Publicaciones/publiFree/PG_Careos/Careos%20flip/index.html
or in PDF format at http://www.igme.es/Publicaciones/publiFree/PG_Careos/Careos.pdf.

This booklet describes how the careo water management technique works. Five fascinating routes through the massif are also suggested, in which water, acequias, Sierra Nevada, and its people are the main protagonists

Both the survival rate and the incidence of neuroblastoma have increased in the last decennia, as was shown by a study from the Princess Máxima Center. The improved chance of survival and the increase in the number of patients has been greatest in the high risk group; children older than 18 months with a stage 4 neuroblastoma.

In the early nineties, 6 percent of the children with high risk neuroblastoma survived five years after diagnosis. Nowadays, 43 percent survives. 'The prognosis for the high risk has improved most significantly', says Michelle Tas. Together with her colleague Ardine Reedijk, she performed the study and wrote the article that was published in the scientific journal European Journal of Cancer. The study shows that the introduction of a high dose of chemotherapy followed by autologous stem cell transplantation and immunotherapy were responsible for the increased survival rate.

For this study, the research team used data from the Dutch Cancer Registry (NKR) which are collected nationwide since 1990. Besides the improved prognosis the researchers found that more children were diagnosed with neuroblastoma in the last decennia. In 1990-1994, twenty patients were diagnosed per year. In 2010-2014 this increased to 26. 'The increase is most prominent in the same high risk group of children above 18 months with a stage 4 neuroblastoma', says Max van Noesel, MD, PhD.

The increased incidence remains unexplained, so far. Conceivable influences, such as modern diagnostic tools and improved registration of tumors, were incorporated in the analysis. However, none of them explained the increase. 'That is very frustrating', says Tas, 'It seems possible that the Western lifestyle or environmental factors contributed to the increased incidence, these have changed with time. However, we don't have an indication which factors play a role.'

'Fortunately, the outcome is positive in the end - more children survive this disease', stated Van Noesel, 'that is the result of many (inter)national investments of oncologists and researchers in researching new treatment methods and adjusting the treatment strategies.'

Whether you are a company or a reporter trying to boost your visibility online, what is ok to do and what is considered "unfairly gaming the system?''

Is it ok to use keywords that you know people are searching for, but not ok for "bots'' to direct traffic to your site? Will you be punished, suspended or banned from Google, Facebook and Instagram because how you strategize with the algorithm is deemed illegitimate?

Researchers at Rutgers University say more consistent standards are needed for advertisers, journalists, influencers and marketers seeking to boost their visibility on platforms such as Google, Facebook and Instagram.

In a study, published in the journal Social Media & Society, researchers found that platforms' boundary lines between legitimate and improper ways to boost visibility are vague, inconsistent and largely reflective of the companies' material interests.

"Though the line between acceptable and unacceptable user behavior will necessarily be fraught, continually shifting, and arbitrary to some degree, it must nevertheless be drawn," said lead author Caitlin Petre, an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick's School of Communication and Information.

The problem, according to the researchers, is that too often platform companies draw these lines unilaterally and arbitrarily, potentially harming well-intentioned content creators in the process.

In the study, researchers analyzed platform user guidelines and media coverage of three case studies in which Google, Facebook and Instagram accused a group of users of illegitimately "gaming the algorithm" and punished them by limiting their visibility, suspending, or banning them.

"Even though platform-drawn lines between 'gaming the system' and acting strategically are blurry, there is a public discourse where those who engage in behavior deemed to be gaming are not just 'mistaken' about what the rules are, but that they are cheaters, offenders and acting criminally," Petre said.

More troubling is that the rules, guidelines, and punishments that have emerged seem to reflect digital intermediaries' powerful structural position and commercial interests, rather than a coherent understanding of manipulation, deception, and authenticity.

Social media platform companies are portrayed as neutral umpires acting in good faith, even though their decisions are driven by what is best for their business - a dynamic the researchers termed "platform paternalism."

"The decisions about how algorithmic manipulation is formulated and enforced should be democratized to grant influence to a wider array of content makers--perhaps especially for those whose very livelihoods depend on algorithmic visibility," Petre said.

Essential genes are often expressed with high variability during the development of cells. Scientists call this phenomenon "biological noise" and suspect that it is also decisive for the fate of cells, i.e. the developmental pathway a cell takes. Max Planck researcher Dominic Grün now presents a method based on single-cell data to quantify this variability in gene expression. The advantage of the so-called VarID method is that the noise of gene expression can be measured across groups of very similar or related cell states. Thus, the Freiburg researcher hopes to gain a better understanding of the extent to which noise regulates development or is even necessary for the differentiation of cells.

Cells are the building blocks of life. To gain more insight into the different cell types and their molecular processes, scientists use a technology called single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq). This involves measuring the number of mRNA molecules generated by active genes in the individual cells. Depending on type and stage of development, cells activate different genes, which are initially translated into RNA molecules that form the basis for the synthesis of proteins.

The identity of the cell

Just like a kind of fingerprint, the number of different mRNA molecules per gene in a particular cell informs about the cell's identity and the relationship between the cells. In recent years, scRNA-seq not only confirmed already known cell types but also led to the identification of formerly unknown and rare cell types. Moreover, the technology also allows further insights into the cell. The measurements can be used to analyze the spatial arrangement of individual cells in the tissue and to identify developmental trajectories and transitional states on these trajectories.

"Many diseases, such as cancer, arise because cells do not fully develop from the stem cell to maturity. Instead, they remain in a precursor stage and proliferate uncontrolled. We want to understand what happens in the cell when development is perturbed in such a way. Therefore, we came up with unique algorithms for processing and analysis of single-cell data," says Max Planck research group leader Dominic Grün.

Gene expression is noise

Essential genes - such as transcription factors that mediate which genes should be switched on or off - are often only weakly expressed in cell differentiation, sometimes with high variability in cells of the same type. Researchers refer to this as "biological noise". Accordingly, differences in the expression of such genes are difficult to detect in the data.

"Moreover, currently available analysis methods are almost exclusively focused on quantifying and interpreting gene expression levels within an individual cell. But the biological implications of gene expression noise during cell differentiation and cell state transitions have not been explored in depths," says Grün.

VarID quantifies the dynamics of gene expression variability

The new VarID method by Dominic Grün addresses this gap by quantifying the noise of gene expression across groups of very similar or related cell states. With this approach, it is possible to explore the dynamics of gene expression noise during the differentiation of stem cells into mature cell types and to investigate the extent to which noise regulates development or is even necessary for cellular differentiation.

The core of the VarID method is an algorithm developed by Dominic Grün that quantifies the dynamics of gene expression variability from single-cell RNA-sequencing data. Thus, VarID delineates neighborhoods with differential gene expression variability, also in complex mixtures of different cell types or cell states. In particular, this approach reveals the activity of weak and noisy transcription factors involved in cell state transitions.

Gene noise shapes cell fate

By using the VarID method, the author was able to track the activity of essential transcription factors during the development of blood cells in mice. "The data shows that important transcription factors known to be expressed in mature blood cells in the mouse bone marrow are lowly expressed - but highly variable - in blood stem cells. We assume that the fluctuating activity of these gene networks - in other words, the noise of these genes - could trigger the differentiation," says Dominic Grün.

The Max Planck researcher Dominic Grün is convinced that gene expression noise is a crucial part of how cells make decisions about their future. "The VarID method opens the door to shed light on the role of gene expression noise during stem cell differentiation. Since we are now able to read in the noise of stem cell differentiation, we hope to discover how this process is controlled to better understand how noise regulates cell fate decisions."

Scientists have been looking at pollution affecting the air, land and water around the Athabaska Oil Sands for some time. After looking at contaminants in snow taken from up-to 25 km away from the oil sands, a McGill-led scientific team now suggests that oil sand pollution is also affecting the weather patterns in the surrounding regions.

"The beauty of frozen precipitation such as snow is that it's like a snapshot of atmospheric processes. The snow absorbs the hard metal particles and embeds it and this allows us to see things that we might not be able to see otherwise," says Professor Parisa Ariya, from McGill's Departments of Chemistry and Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. She led the team that recently published their research in Environmental Pollution.

More specifically, the researchers looked at the presence of nanosized particles of metal contaminants in order to gain insight into the larger weather patterns. They discovered:

That the presence of nanosized particles of metal contaminants (such as chromium, nickel, copper) is much higher (100 times more) than in snow taken from the middle of a Canadian city (Montreal), indicating that air pollution is much greater close to the oil sands

That the structure of the contaminants in the nanoparticles and microparticles allows a process called ice nucleation - which is at the heart of cloud formation - to take place more rapidly and efficiently and at higher temperatures than when there is simply mineral dust in the air. This means that they can alter cloud formation processes as well as precipitation frequency and intensity, which control extreme weather events, such as floods and droughts at the two extremes.

These results are of concern since both the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have identified nanoparticle pollution as a major challenge in climate change. Further research is being done in Professor Ariya's lab to explore the effects of other major industrial pollutants.