Earth

Tropical Depression 21E never matured into a tropical storm and a NASA analysis of rainfall rates show the storm won't have that chance.

NASA has the unique capability of peering under the clouds in storms and measuring the rate in which rain is falling. Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core passed over Tropical Depression 21E (TD21E) from its orbit in space and measured rainfall rates throughout the storm.

TD21E formed on Saturday, Nov. 16 and maintained depression status over the weekend.

The GPM's core satellite passed over TD21E in the Arabian Sea, Northern Indian Ocean on Nov. 18 at 0046 UTC (Nov. 17 at 7:46 p.m. EST) and found a few areas of light rain falling at a rate of 0.4 inches (10 mm) per hour. There was one small area north of the center where heavy rain was falling at a rate of 1 inch (25 mm) per hour, but forecasters said that area "doesn't seem to be directly associated with the depression's circulation." Forecasters incorporate the rainfall data into their forecasts.

NOAA's National Hurricane Center or NHC noted at 4 a.m. EST (0900 UTC), the center of TD21E was located near latitude 12.2 north, longitude 105.0 west and is located about 470 miles (760 km) south of Manzanillo, Mexico.

The depression is moving toward the northwest near 7 mph (11 kph). A westward motion at a slower forward speed is expected for the next couple of days.

Maximum sustained winds are near 30 mph (45 kph) with higher gusts. The estimated minimum central pressure is 1007 millibars.

The depression is expected to become a remnant by early Tuesday and dissipate by Wednesday night or Thursday, Nov. 21.

With economies and populations surging, an industrial revolution is inevitable on the African continent. The question is, what's going to power it? With renewable energy cheaper and more efficient than ever, countries in Africa have the unique opportunity to harness abundant renewable sources like wind, solar and geothermal to leapfrog the dependence on fossil fuels that has poisoned the air and environment in Europe, the U.S., India and China.

But will they?

New research from Harvard University and the University of Leicester finds that if Africa chooses a future powered by fossil fuels, nearly 50,000 people could die prematurely each year from fossil fuel emissions by 2030, mostly in South Africa, Nigeria and Malawi.

The research is published in Environmental Science and Technology.

"Our work shows the substantial health benefit of shifting to clean energy sources in Africa, which we hope can help incentivize the transition towards renewable energy over fossil fuels," said Eloise Marais, a former graduate student of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) and senior author of the paper.

Marais is now an Associate Professor at the University of Leicester.

The researchers focused on air pollution from power plants and transportation, as many African countries are currently working to increase fossil-fuel power plants and vehicle infrastructure. South Africa, for example, is commissioning the largest dry-cooled coal-fired power plant in the world. Namibia, Ghana and Mozambique are all turning to offshore power plants -- known as powerships -- that run on the dirty residue from crude oil refining.

The researchers calculated emissions from all the current power plants on the continent as well as the projected emissions of all power plants proposed as of November 2017. They calculated vehicle emissions based on increases in population that they showed is strongly tied to vehicle usage. They then plugged all the data into the GEOS-Chem global transport model, the open source pollution model developed and housed at Harvard.

The researchers found that continent-wide, 13,000 people would die prematurely each year from exposure to vehicle emissions and 39,000 people would die from exposure to pollutants from power plants. Most of those deaths are in southern Africa, where most of the new power plants are being planned.

Interestingly, some countries without any planned power plants also show high rates of mortality. Pollution from power plants in South Africa and Botswana, for example, travels as far as northern Angola because of winds and air circulation.

"This research shows that if we can cut emissions in southern Africa, and South Africa specifically, it can have a far-reaching impact on health," said Marais.

"Africa has the opportunity to avoid the mistakes that much of the rest of the world has made in electricity generation and transportation," said Joel Schwartz, Professor of Environmental Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and co-author of the study. "The technology to avoid these mistakes already exists. Making these choices for clean energy will greatly benefit the health of Africans."

"Our work suggests that the countries of Africa can show the way toward cleaner energy, with benefits for both the earth's climate and the air that millions breathe," said Loretta Mickley, Senior Research Fellow at SEAS and co-author of the study.

MADISON - There's a long-standing belief in the freshwater fishing community that once anglers find it too hard to land a particular fish for their dinner plate, they either move on to fishing for different species or fish in new waters, giving depleted populations time to rebound.

But this "self-regulation" assumption, says University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Limnology graduate student Holly Embke, turns out to be wrong. Embke is lead author of a study published this week [Nov. 18, 2019] in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that shows when stocks of fish get so low that it becomes a greater challenge to catch them, many anglers step up to the challenge and continue catching fish. This poses a threat to the long-term health of sportfish populations in Wisconsin and in inland recreational fisheries around the world.

The study examined stocks of the popular game fish walleye in 179 lakes in Wisconsin and found that 40 percent of walleye populations are overharvested, says Embke. By assessing fish stocks with the currently accepted models that minimize angler impacts, she and her co-authors say, resource managers miss this "hidden overharvest."

Over the last few decades, walleye populations in Wisconsin have dramatically declined because of climate change. They are a cold-water species that thrive in cooler conditions, but as lakes in the upper Midwest warm, says co-author Steve Carpenter, director emeritus of the Center for Limnology, they offer less cold-water habitat for walleye.

Annual walleye production across the state's more-than 900 "walleye lakes" has declined by 35 percent over the last 30 years. On top of that, walleye stocks now take one and a half times longer to grow than they did in 1990.

However, despite climate-driven decline, walleye are as popular as ever among anglers and the annual percentage of walleye that they are permitted to harvest each year has stayed roughly the same, compounding the problem.

One way to think of it, Carpenter says, is in terms of a bank account. If you withdraw the same amount of money from your account each year, but start making smaller and smaller annual contributions, your savings shrink. Do this several years in a row, and those annual withdrawals begin to have an outsized impact on what little money is left in the bank.

Part of the reason harvest rules haven't changed, says Embke, is that the current practice of estimating the number of adult walleye in a lake doesn't reveal the full story of the health of the population.

In the late 1980s, after a U.S. District Court judge ruled that Ojibwe tribes had the right under federal treaty to hunt and fish in their former territories, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission worked together to set sustainable harvest limits on walleye. More than 450 tribal anglers spear walleye on roughly 175 lakes each spring, and more than 1 million recreational anglers fish nearly year-round on lakes across the state.

Using the best available science at the time, the agencies developed a management plan that estimated adult walleye populations and set regulations to ensure no more than 35 percent were harvested in any given year. The average exploitation rate for walleye stocks is closer to 15 percent, so the agencies assumed the regulations were sufficiently conservative to be sustainable.

These regulations "worked for a long time," says Carpenter, "and then they stopped working. Over the last couple of decades, there began to be walleye recruitment failures scattered around the state. And the rules didn't move with that. There was no change in the rules."

Embke and her colleagues set out to better understand the other factors that managers might consider when setting harvest rules. They sought to shift the focus from abundance to production, moving beyond an estimate of how many walleye were in a given lake to a clearer picture of how well those populations were able to withstand harvest and continue to reproduce and grow.

"We wanted to take a more nuanced approach and ask not only how many fish are in a lake but also consider how fast they're growing, how big they are, and how many are produced every year," she says.

To continue the banking metaphor, Embke adds: "Abundance tells you the money in the bank while production tells you the interest rate."

Using data that state and tribal researchers had already collected across Wisconsin, Embke and her colleagues calculated how walleye biomass had changed over a 28-year period in 179 lakes. Measuring biomass is akin to throwing all of the walleye in a lake on a scale and recording the overall weight. Production, though, is a reading of how much biomass grows each year, an indication of a population's ability to replenish its losses.

By comparing walleye production to the total fishery harvest in these study lakes, they found that overharvest is ten times higher than the 4 percent estimates generated when fisheries managers consider abundance alone.

What's more, Embke says, the study found great variation in walleye production from lake to lake. By considering production, fisheries managers may be better equipped to set limits for individual lakes. Some remain walleye strongholds and can handle current fishing pressures, while others lakes can't sustain the 35 percent harvest benchmark.

These results, the researchers write, "highlight the urgent need for improved governance, assessment, and regulation of recreational fisheries in the face of rapid environmental change."

"Nature has changed," says Carpenter. "The climate now is different from what it was in the 1980s and it's not going back. That means habitat is decreasing and, on average, walleye stocks can't take the harvest levels they have seen."

The good news, he says, is that the data fisheries managers already collect can be plugged in to Embke's method for estimating production and help chart a way forward. By better understanding the resilience of Wisconsin walleye populations and by acknowledging the role that anglers play in reducing stocks, the future of this iconic fishery just may have a fighting chance.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Indiana University researchers have identified a mechanism involving the body's ability to resist fungal infection. The work could help advance research on cancer therapies that use the body's own immune system to fight disease.

In a study published Nov. 18 in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, IU scientist Yan Yu and colleagues found that two immune receptors -- named Dectin-1 and TLR2 -- must work together to trigger an inflammatory response that resists fungal infection.

The study's leaders compared the use of two receptors to trigger immune response to the use of two identification codes, versus a single password, in online security -- a form of authentication popularly known as "dual login."

"It was previously known that Dectin-1 and TLR2 enhanced each other's function to achieve maximal immune response against fungal infection," said Yu, a professor in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Chemistry. "But nobody had been able to pinpoint the mechanism by which immune cells manage the receptors to regulate the anti-fungal inflammatory response."

In order to fight infections, immune cells -- also known as white blood cells -- must first identify outside pathogens, which triggers a "search and destroy" response throughout the body. As part of this process, immune cells reply upon specific combinations of immunoreceptors to accurately and effectively detect foreign bodies.

If this process fails, Yu said, people are left vulnerable to life-threating diseases. She added that identifying the specific receptors whose "passwords" work together to regulate proper immune responses may help lead to new treatments for these diseases, as well as improve existing cancer immunotherapies.

To understand specifically how Dectin-1 and TLR2 trigger an immune response, Yu's team created two microparticles -- disguised as fungi -- with different binding patterns on their surface that activate these receptors. They then observed how different patterns triggered different levels of immune response.

By comparing the different patterns against the response to their "faux fungus," Yu and colleagues could see that white blood cells mounted the strongest defense when the molecules that bind to Dectin-1 and TLR2 were placed 500 nanometers apart.

"Both these receptors are regarded as important for stimulating immunity in cancer treatment," Yu said. "This discovery suggests the cancer immunotherapy could be made more effective by developing drugs that target both receptors in a single compound."

Yu added that the discovery was made possible in part by the use of Janus-particles, a nanotechnology named after the two-faced god of Roman mythology, in which two receptors are placed on opposite sides of the same particle. The researchers found that these particles triggered a weaker immune response due to their separation compared to particles where the receptors were paired evenly across their surface. As a result, Yu and colleagues concluded that close proximity played an important role in triggering a "maximal" immune response.

"The unique properties of Janus particles let us 'decouple' the receptors without affecting the rest of the experiment, which was key," she said. "No one had revealed this mechanism prior to our work."

Next, Yu said her team plans to use the study's methods to understand how the immune system resists other nonfungal infections -- as well as ultimately work toward creating new nanomaterials to enhance cancer immunotherapy.

Other authors on the paper were Wenqian Li, a Ph.D. student in biochemistry working in Yu's lab at IU, and Jun Yan at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Indiana University researchers have identified a mechanism involving the body's ability to resist fungal infection. The work could help advance research on cancer therapies that use the body's own immune system to fight disease.

In a study published Nov. 18 in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, IU scientist Yan Yu and colleagues found that two immune receptors -- named Dectin-1 and TLR2 -- must work together to trigger an inflammatory response that resists fungal infection.

The study's leaders compared the use of two receptors to trigger immune response to the use of two identification codes, versus a single password, in online security -- a form of authentication popularly known as "dual login."

"It was previously known that Dectin-1 and TLR2 enhanced each other's function to achieve maximal immune response against fungal infection," said Yu, a professor in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Chemistry. "But nobody had been able to pinpoint the mechanism by which immune cells manage the receptors to regulate the anti-fungal inflammatory response."

In order to fight infections, immune cells -- also known as white blood cells -- must first identify outside pathogens, which triggers a "search and destroy" response throughout the body. As part of this process, immune cells reply upon specific combinations of immunoreceptors to accurately and effectively detect foreign bodies.

If this process fails, Yu said, people are left vulnerable to life-threating diseases. She added that identifying the specific receptors whose "passwords" work together to regulate proper immune responses may help lead to new treatments for these diseases, as well as improve existing cancer immunotherapies.

To understand specifically how Dectin-1 and TLR2 trigger an immune response, Yu's team created two microparticles -- disguised as fungi -- with different binding patterns on their surface that activate these receptors. They then observed how different patterns triggered different levels of immune response.

By comparing the different patterns against the response to their "faux fungus," Yu and colleagues could see that white blood cells mounted the strongest defense when the molecules that bind to Dectin-1 and TLR2 were placed 500 nanometers apart.

"Both these receptors are regarded as important for stimulating immunity in cancer treatment," Yu said. "This discovery suggests the cancer immunotherapy could be made more effective by developing drugs that target both receptors in a single compound."

Yu added that the discovery was made possible in part by the use of Janus-particles, a nanotechnology named after the two-faced god of Roman mythology, in which two receptors are placed on opposite sides of the same particle. The researchers found that these particles triggered a weaker immune response due to their separation compared to particles where the receptors were paired evenly across their surface. As a result, Yu and colleagues concluded that close proximity played an important role in triggering a "maximal" immune response.

"The unique properties of Janus particles let us 'decouple' the receptors without affecting the rest of the experiment, which was key," she said. "No one had revealed this mechanism prior to our work."

Next, Yu said her team plans to use the study's methods to understand how the immune system resists other nonfungal infections -- as well as ultimately work toward creating new nanomaterials to enhance cancer immunotherapy.

INFORMS Journal Management Science New Study Key Takeaways:

There is growing concern that digital platforms are contributing to the U.S. drug epidemic.

Over a period of more than 10 years after Craigslist's founding, there was a nearly 15% increase in drug abuse treatment admissions, 5.7% increase in drug abuse violations and 6% increase in drug overdose deaths.

The impact of online drug sales is higher in areas typically thought to be at a lower risk for drug abuse.

CATONSVILLE, MD, November 18, 2019 - New research in the INFORMS journal Management Science looks at the influence online platforms have on the rising illegal drug epidemic. This study shows drug abuse treatment admissions and overdose deaths have increased since the founding of Craigslist.

The paper, "Drug Abuse and the Internet: Evidence from Craigslist," written by Jiayi Liu and Anandhi Bharadwaj both of Emory University, looks at Craigslist rollout and drug abuse data from all counties in the United States from 1997 to 2008.

"From the national rollout of Craigslist, we find a 14.9% increase in drug abuse treatment admissions, a 5.7% increase in drug abuse violations and a 6% increase in drug overdose deaths after Craigslist got up and running," said Liu, a Ph.D. student in the Goizueta Business School.

The researchers point to a cloak of anonymity provided by online platforms such as Craigslist as the driving factor enabling new populations that were previously unaffected to enter the market.

Economic disadvantages such as unemployment, poverty and low education levels are thought to be associated with higher risk of drug abuse, but this study finds lower risk groups like Caucasians or Asians, women, the elderly and those more educated are more likely to use drugs after the entry of Craigslist.

"Online drug sales are likely to be more lucrative because the costs and risks of online transactions are lower than offline sales," said Bharadwaj, endowed chair in electronic commerce and professor of information systems and operations management at Goizueta Business School. "The entry of online platforms is likely to increase market participation by spurring both demand and supply of illicit drugs."

This study calls for additional law enforcement and healthcare resources to be proactively allocated in areas that were once unaffected by illicit drugs in anticipation of changes in drug abuse associated with online access.

"Meanwhile, providers of online services have a responsibility to anticipate and mitigate harms that their service might cause to users and society," continued Bharadwaj. "Many platforms like Google, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, Uber and others have come under greater scrutiny in recent years. Our work adds to the growing chorus for stricter regulations and monitoring of online platforms."

NASA analyzed the cloud top temperatures in Typhoon Kalmaegi using infrared light to determine the strength of the storm. Kalmaegi is known locally as Ramon in the Philippines where warnings are in effect.

Kalmaegi has triggered warnings in the Philippines. Philippines tropical cyclone wind signals include Signal #2 for the Luzon provinces of Cagayan (including Babuyan Islands), northern portion of Isabela (Sta Maria), San Pablo, Maconacon, Cabagan, Sto Tomas, Quezon, Delfin Albano, Tumauini and Divilacan, Apayao, Kalinga and Ilocos Norte. In addition, Signal #1 is in effect for the Luzon provinces of Batanes, Ilocos Sur, Abra, Mountain Province, Benguet, Ifugao, La Union, Northern Aurora (Dilasag), Casiguran and Dinalungan and the rest of Isabela.

One of the ways NASA researches tropical cyclones is using infrared data that provides temperature information. Cloud top temperatures identify where the strongest storms are located. The stronger the storms, the higher they extend into the troposphere, and the colder the cloud temperatures.

On Nov. 18 at 4:59 UTC (Nov. 17 at 11:59 p.m. EST) NASA's Aqua satellite analyzed the storm using the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument. The AIRS imagery showed the strongest storms circling the center of circulation, and over the northeastern side of Luzon, northern Philippines. In those areas, AIRS found coldest cloud top temperatures as cold as or colder 210 Kelvin minus 81 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 63.1 degrees Celsius). NASA research has shown that cloud top temperatures that cold indicate strong storms that have the capability to create heavy rain.

Tropical cyclones do not always have uniform strength, and some sides have stronger sides than others, so knowing where the strongest sides of the storms are located helps forecasters. NASA then provides data to tropical cyclone meteorologists so they can incorporate it in their forecasts.

At 10 a.m. EST (1500 UTC) on Nov. 19, the Joint Typhoon Warning Center or JTWC noted that the center of Kalmaegi was located near latitude 18.9 degrees north and longitude 123.0 degrees east. That puts the center about 282 nautical miles north-northeast of Manila, Philippines. Maximum sustained winds were near 75 knots (86 mph/139 kph).

Kalmaegi is turning into a westerly then southwesterly course, rounding the northern areas of Luzon. The storm will start to weaken as it moves southwest into the South China Sea.

Typhoons and hurricanes are the most powerful weather event on Earth. NASA's expertise in space and scientific exploration contributes to essential services provided to the American people by other federal agencies, such as hurricane weather forecasting.

The AIRS instrument is one of six instruments flying on board NASA's Aqua satellite which launched on May 4, 2002.

Decades after farmland was abandoned, plant biodiversity and productivity struggle to recover, according to new University of Minnesota research.

Published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, researchers examined 37 years of data tied to plant biodiversity (i.e., number of different species) and plant productivity (i.e., biomass or amount of plants) related to 21 grasslands and savannas in Minnesota. Most of these fields had been ploughed and abandoned for agricultural use between one and 91 years prior.

Researchers then compared the plots to nearby land that has not been significantly impacted by human activity.

The study found that:

local grassland plant diversity increased significantly over time, but incompletely recovered, and plant productivity did not significantly recover;

one year after abandonment, the fields had, on average, 38% of the plant diversity and 34% of the plant productivity for the land that was never ploughed;

91 years after abandonment, the fields had 73% of the plant diversity and 53% of the plant productivity.

"When taken at a global scale, fossil records indicate plant species are going extinct at rates hundreds of times faster than the natural extinction rate," said Forest Isbell, assistant professor in the College of Biological Sciences (CBS) and co-author on this study. "At this localized level, we're seeing how human activity can impact the loss of species."

Researchers suggest that the slow and incomplete recovery of species on abandoned farmland in Minnesota is likely happening in ecosystems around the world where land has been cleared for agriculture, logging or other human activities.

"The amount of land being used for agricultural purposes has slowly been decreasing, leaving some 11 million square miles of old fields and recovering forests across our planet," said Adam Clark, study co-author and CBS graduate who is currently a postdoctoral researcher with the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research. "In these spaces, active restoration efforts may often be needed to restore biodiversity and prevent the extinction of species."

Restoration tactics can include using prescribed burns, dispersing seeds, using haying to remove nutrients added through fertilization and reintroducing others in the food chain (e.g., herbivores, predators) pushed out of the area.

"This is an unprecedented opportunity for us -- humans as species -- to restore ecosystems and help mitigate the threat extinctions could have on our planet and our own well-being," said Isbell, an expert in biodiversity, as well as ecosystem functioning, stability and services.

For older adults, Fitbits and other activity trackers may be popular gifts, but they may not be used for very long.

While counterintuitive, engaging in competition with family and friends decreases the odds of long-term use among older adults, perhaps because they feel it's demotivating, according to a new Michigan State University study.

And wanting to lose weight, become more active and monitor health doesn't seem to influence length of use either. But technological savviness does.

"For older adults, motivation is about partnership and collaboration, such as walking together," said Anastasia Kononova, assistant professor of advertising, who was on the research team. "It's about being active together, not competing."

The researchers conducted a survey of adults age 65 and older to explore factors associated with long-term use - longer than six months - of wearable activity trackers. They looked at usage patterns, socioeconomic factors, health status and activity levels.

Specifically, the study, published in the journal Telemedicine and e-HEALTH, found older adults are likely to use trackers longer if they use a wider variety of functions to track their health and activity levels. Examples of such functions include tracking calories burned, distance, heart rate, mood, sleep time, steps, etc.

Other factors determining long-term use: being female; being well educated; wearing every day; exercising regularly; and not having chronic health conditions.

So, what can the industry learn from the study?

For starters, manufacturers should incorporate activities specific to an older population, such as swimming and gardening, into trackers, Kononova said. And, like younger users, physical appearance of trackers is important, so big and bulky doesn't work.

"Wearable activity trackers have the potential to improve older adults' health, yet many adopters don't use them on a long-term basis," said Lin Li, a doctoral candidate studying health and technology, who led the study. "So, we wanted to see how we could engage older adults in using trackers, while also helping researchers and the industry better understand this population - where trackers are beneficial but underused."

When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the Philippine Sea, water vapor data provided information about the intensity of Tropical Depression Kalmaegi.

NASA's Aqua satellite passed Kalmaegi on Nov. 15 at 0425 UTC (Nov. 14 at 11:25 p.m. EST) and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument gathered water vapor content and temperature information. The MODIS image showed highest concentrations of water vapor and coldest cloud top temperatures were north and west of the center. MODIS data also showed coldest cloud top temperatures were as cold as or colder than minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 56.6 degrees Celsius) in those storms. Storms with cloud top temperatures that cold have the capability to produce heavy rainfall.

Water vapor analysis of tropical cyclones tells forecasters how much development potential a storm has. Water vapor releases latent heat as it condenses into liquid. That liquid becomes the clouds and thunderstorms that make up a tropical cyclone. Temperature is important when trying to understand how strong storms can be. The higher the cloud tops, the colder and the stronger they are.

At 10 a.m. EDT (1500 UTC) on Nov. 15, Kalmaegi was located near latitude 15.8 degrees north and longitude 125.9 degrees east. Maximum sustained winds were near 30 knots (34.5 mph/55.5 kph). The depression was moving to the west.

Forecasters at the Joint Typhoon Warning Center expect the storm to strengthen into a tropical storm, make landfall in the northern Philippines and cross into the South China Sea by Nov. 19.

New Haven, Conn. -- A study by researchers at Yale has uncovered why belly fat surrounding organs increases as people age, a finding that could offer new treatment possibilities for improving metabolic health, thereby reducing the likelihood for diseases like diabetes and atherosclerosis that stem from inflammation.

Led by Dr. Vishwa Deep Dixit, the Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Comparative Medicine and of Immunobiology, the study was published Nov. 15 in Cell Metabolism.

Previous work found that as people age, their body's ability to generate energy by burning the belly fat is reduced. Consequently, fat that surrounds the internal organs increases in the elderly. Dixit's lab had found that the immune cells necessary to the fat-burning process, called macrophages, were still active but their overall numbers declined as belly fat increased with aging.

This latest study found that something else is happening as well. Adipose B cells in belly fat unexpectedly proliferated as animals aged, contributing to increased inflammation and metabolic decline. "These adipose B cells are a unique source of inflammation," Dixit said, "normally the B cells produce antibodies, and defend against infection. But with aging, the increased adipose B cells become dysfunctional, contributing to metabolic disease."

When they are working correctly, Dixit said, some B cells expand as needed to protect the body from infection, and then contract to baseline. But with aging, they don't contract in belly fat.

"This predisposes an animal to diabetes and metabolic dysfunction like inability to burn fat," he said. Dixit theorizes that this ongoing expansion may be due to increased human life expectancy - a pushing of the body's cells beyond their evolutionary limits. "Several mechanisms in the body are not selected for longevity," he said.

Researchers discovered that adipose B cells expand by receiving signals from nearby macrophages. Relatedly, they found that by reducing the macrophage signal and by removing adipose B cells, they could reverse the expansion process, and protect against age-induced decline in metabolic health.

This could lead to exciting possibilities for repurposing drugs to target these dysfunctional adipose B cells for improved health outcomes and to protect against metabolic disease, Dixit said. One drug, called cytokine IL-1B, reduces one of the small proteins driving this process and is currently used to protect against heart disease. "It's important to study whether reducing this cytokine in the elderly can lower B cell expansion in belly fat," Dixit said.

He added that there are also immunotherapy drugs that neutralize B cells that are used in certain cancers. These, too, could be tested for their effectiveness in reducing metabolic disease in elderly people, Dixit said.

Squids, octopuses and cuttlefish are undisputed masters of deception and camouflage. Their extraordinary ability to change color, texture and shape is unrivaled, even by modern technology.

Researchers in the lab of UC Santa Barbara professor Daniel Morse have long been interested in the optical properties of color-changing animals, and they are particularly intrigued by the opalescent inshore squid. Also known as the California market squid, these animals have evolved the ability to finely and continuously tune their color and sheen to a degree unrivaled in other creatures. This enables them to communicate, as well as hide in plain sight in the bright and often featureless upper ocean.

In previous work, the researchers uncovered that specialized proteins, called reflectins, control reflective pigment cells -- iridocytes -- which in turn contribute to changing the overall visibility and appearance of the creature. But still a mystery was how the reflectins actually worked.

"We wanted now to understand how this remarkable molecular machine works," said Morse, a Distinguished Emeritus Professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, and principal author of a paper that appears in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Understanding this mechanism, he said, would provide insight into the tunable control of emergent properties, which could open the door to the next generation of bio-inspired synthetic materials.

Light-reflecting skin

Like most cephalopods, opalescent inshore squid, practice their sorcery by way of what may be the most sophisticated skin found anywhere in nature. Tiny muscles manipulate the skin texture while pigments and iridescent cells affect its appearance. One group of cells controls their color by expanding and contracting cells in their skin that contain sacks of pigment.

Behind these pigment cells are a layer of iridescent cells -- those iridocytes -- that reflect light and contribute to the animals' color across the entire visible spectrum. The squids also have leucophores, which control the reflectance of white light. Together, these layers of pigment-containing and light-reflecting cells give the squids the ability to control the brightness, color and hue of their skin over a remarkably broad palette.

Unlike the color from pigments, the highly dynamic hues of the opalescent inshore squid result from changing the iridocyte's structure itself. Light bounces between nanometer-sized features about the same size as wavelengths in the visible part of the spectrum, producing colors. As these structures change their dimensions, the colors change. Reflectin proteins are behind these features' ability to shapeshift, and the researchers' task was to figure out how they do the job.

Thanks to a combination of genetic engineering and biophysical analyses, the scientists found the answer, and it turned out to be a mechanism far more elegant and powerful than previously imagined.

"The results were very surprising," said first author Robert Levenson, a postdoctoral researcher in Morse's lab. The group had expected to find one or two spots on the protein that controlled its activity, he said. "Instead, our evidence showed that the features of the reflectins that control its signal detection and the resulting assembly are spread across the entire protein chain."

An Osmotic Motor

Reflectin, which is contained in closely packed layers of membrane in iridocytes, looks a bit like a series of beads on a string, the researchers found. Normally, the links between the beads are strongly positively charged, so they repel each other, straightening out the proteins like uncooked spaghetti.

Morse and his team discovered that nerve signals to the reflective cells trigger the addition of phosphate groups to the links. These negatively charged phosphate groups neutralize the links' repulsion, allowing the proteins to fold up. The team was especially excited to discover that this folding exposed new, sticky surfaces on the bead-like portions of the reflectin, allowing them to clump together. Up to four phosphates can bind to each reflectin protein, providing the squid with a precisely tunable process: The more phosphates added, the more the proteins fold up, progressively exposing more of the emergent hydrophobic surfaces, and the larger the clumps grow.

As these clumps grow, the many, single, small proteins in solution become fewer, larger groups of multiple proteins. This changes the fluid pressure inside the membrane stacks, driving water out -- a type of "osmotic motor" that responds to the slightest changes in charge generated by the neurons, to which patches of thousands of leucophores and iridocytes are connected. The resulting dehydration reduces the thickness and spacing of the membrane stacks, which shifts the wavelength of reflected light progressively from red to yellow, then to green and finally blue. The more concentrated solution also has a higher refractive index, which increases the cells' brightness.

"We had no idea that the mechanism we would discover would turn out to be so remarkably complex yet contained and so elegantly integrated in one multifunctional molecule -- the block-copolymeric reflectin -- with opposing domains so delicately poised that they act like a metastable machine, continually sensing and responding to neuronal signaling by precisely adjusting the osmotic pressure of an intracellular nanostructure to precisely fine-tune the color and brightness of its reflected light," Morse said.

What's more, the researchers found, the whole process is reversible and cyclable, enabling the squid to continually fine-tune whatever optical properties its situation calls for.

New Design Principles

The researchers had successfully manipulated reflectin in previous experiments, but this study marks the first demonstration of the underlying mechanism. Now it could provide new ideas to scientists and engineers designing materials with tunable properties. "Our findings reveal a fundamental link between the properties of biomolecular materials produced in living systems and the highly engineered synthetic polymers that are now being developed at the frontiers of industry and technology," Morse said.

"Because reflectin works to control osmotic pressure, I can envision applications for novel means of energy storage and conversion, pharmaceutical and industrial applications involving viscosity and other liquid properties, and medical applications," he added.

Remarkably, some of the processes at work in these reflectin proteins are shared by the proteins that assemble pathologically in Alzheimer's disease and other degenerative conditions, Morse observed. He plans to investigate why this mechanism is reversible, cyclable, harmless and useful in the case of reflectin, but irreversible and pathological for other proteins. Perhaps the fine-structured differences in their sequences can explain the disparity, and even point to new paths for disease prevention and treatment.

A new genetic study carried out at the University of Helsinki and the University of Turku demonstrates that, at the end of the Iron Age, Finland was inhabited by separate and differing populations, all of them influencing the gene pool of modern Finns. The study is so far the most extensive investigation of the ancient DNA of people inhabiting the region of Finland.

In the study, genes were investigated from archaeological bone samples of more than one hundred individuals who lived between the 4th and 19th centuries AD. Most of the samples originated in the Iron Age and the Middle Ages. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is passed down by mothers to all of their offspring, was extracted from the individuals, thus uncovering the population history of women.

Based on the findings, the people who inhabited Finland in the Iron Age (approximately 300-1300 AD) and the Middle Ages (approximately 1200-1500 AD) shared mitochondrial lineages with today's Finns. However, significant differences were seen in the genome of individuals buried in different burial sites in the Iron Age in particular. mtDNA lineages typical of Stone Age hunter-gatherers were common among those buried in Luistari, Eura (southwest Finland), and Kirkkailanmaki, Hollola (southern Finland). In Kylalahti, Hiitola (Republic of Karelia, Russia) and Tuukkala, Mikkeli (eastern Finland), the most common findings were lineages characteristic of ancient European farmer populations. The fifth Iron Age burial site included in the study is located in Levanluhta, western Finland. Many of the individuals buried there represented mtDNA lineages associated with the modern Sami.

"All of the above originally independent lineages remain common in Finland to this day. This indicates that the studied Iron Age populations have had an impact on the gene pool of contemporary Finns," says doctoral student Sanni Oversti from the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland.

The researchers posit that the differences found in the Iron Age populations of western and eastern Finland are opposite to those found in today's Finns: the lineages associated with ancient farmers were more common in the east, while the lineages inherited from hunter-gatherers were more prevalent in the west. Farmer populations arriving in Finland not only from the west and south but also from the east provides a potential explanation for this.

Nearly half of Americans in their 50s and early 60s think they're likely to develop dementia as they grow older, but only 5% of them have actually talked with a doctor about what they could do to reduce their risk, a new study finds.

Meanwhile, a third or more say they're trying to stave off dementia by taking supplements or doing crossword puzzles - despite the lack of proof that such tactics work.

The new findings suggest a need for better counseling for middle-aged Americans about the steps they can take to keep their brains healthy as they age.

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies continue to work on potential dementia-preventing medications. But an over-estimation of future dementia risk by individuals may lead to costly over-use of such products, the researchers warn.

The new results appear in a research letter in the new edition of JAMA Neurology, and a presentation at the Gerontological Society of America's annual meeting.

Both are by members of a team from the University of Michigan's Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation who analyzed data from a nationally representative poll of 1,019 adults between the ages of 50 and 64.

Donovan Maust, M.D., M.S., a geriatric psychiatrist specializing in dementia-related care and lead author of the JAMA Neurology letter, notes that even among the oldest Americans, the risk of dementia is lower than one in three people over age 85.

Risk starts rising around age 65, and is higher among people of Latino or African-American heritage.

When people are in their 50s and early 60s, he says, they still have time to bring down their future dementia risk.

"There is growing evidence that adults in mid-life can take steps to lower their risk of dementia, including increasing physical activity and controlling health conditions like hypertension and diabetes," says Maust. "Unfortunately, our findings suggest that people may not be aware of this and are not asking their doctor."

Meanwhile, the new study shows, 32% of those polled said they were taking fish oil or omega-3 fatty acid supplements, and 39% said they took other supplements for brain health. More than half said they were doing crossword puzzles or other brain games in hopes of keeping their minds "sharp."

Other findings

The new data come from the National Poll on Healthy Aging, carried out by IHPI with support from AARP and Michigan Medicine, U-M's academic medical center. The new paper, and GSA presentation by poll co-director Erica Solway, Ph.D., M.S.W., delve deeper into the poll data than the report issued earlier this year.

The level of worry about dementia among some groups of middle-aged adults may not be in line with their risk compared to others, the study suggests. For example, studies suggest that people of Latino heritage are about 50% more likely to develop dementia than non-Latino whites, and African-Americans are about twice as likely as non-Latino whites.

However, in the poll, those of African-American or Latino backgrounds did not consider themselves more likely to develop dementia than white respondents.In fact, African-American respondents felt they were significantly less likely to develop dementia than other groups.

Similarly, middle-aged people with worse physical health because of conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease are more likely to develop dementia than those in good health. However, poll respondents who reported their physical health as just fair or poor did not judge their risk of dementia to be higher than their healthier peers.

Turning worry into prevention

Reducing the risk of developing dementia can be done in mid-life through things like increasing physical activity, smoking cessation, and managing chronic medical conditions such as diabetes or hypertension, says Maust.

Physicians and public health authorities should communicate to middle-aged adults that taking these steps are the most evidence-based strategies to help preserve brain function into old age, Maust says, as well as reducing the risk of everything from heart attacks and strokes to lung disease, cancer and loss of vision and mobility.

Even if drug developers succeed where past attempts have failed, and come up with medications that act specifically to prevent dementia, those drugs are likely to be costly. And the failure of several would-be preventive drugs mean it could be years before one hits the market.

But people in their 50s and 60s can take specific actions to improve their health now at much lower cost to themselves and society, plus saving the dollars they've been spending on supplements and brain games.

The western corn rootworm causes economic losses of over 2 billion US dollars in maize cultivation and is thus a serious agricultural pest. Originally from America, the western corn rootworm is currently invading Europe, including Switzerland.

A successful pest

In an earlier study, Christelle Robert and Matthias Erb from the Institute of plant sciences (IPS) at the University of Bern elucidated one of the strategies that underlies the success of the western corn rootworm. Maize plants store certain defense substances, so-called benzoxazinoids, in their roots. These substances are harmful to many pests. However, the western corn rootworm has developed a strategy to detoxify these substances. The larvae of the corn rootworm thus become resistant against the plant's own defense. Even worse - the larvae store the benzoxazinoids in their bodies and in turn, use them for self-defense against their own enemies, including parasitic roundworms (entomopathogenic nematodes). The fact that the western corn rootworm has found a defense strategy against nematodes is of particular importance, as the nematodes are used as biological control agents against this pest.

"Considerable successes have already been achieved in the field using nematodes; efficiency-increasing measures could further boost this approach", explains Matthias Erb, Professor for Biotic Interactions at the IPS. "Against this background, we asked ourselves the question: If pests such as the western corn rootworm can become immune against plant defense substances, could beneficial organisms such as entomopathogenic nematodes do the same?"

Breeding beneficial organisms for pest control

The researchers compared nematodes from areas in which the western corn rootworm is present with nematodes from areas where it is absent. "We found that nematodes from infested areas are resistant against benzoxazinoids, unlike nematodes from other areas", says Xi Zhang, who worked on the project as a PhD student. In the lab, the researchers were able to observe that nematodes which were exposed to the the western corn rootworm became resistant to plant defense substances within just a few generations. "The speed of this adaptation surprised us", says Zhang.

The results of the study, which was published in the journal PNAS, are particularly relevant for biological pest control. "Beneficial insects like nematodes, which are resistant against plant defense substances, can keep the insect pests that accumulate these substances from the plant at bay", explains study co-author Ricardo Machado. This trait can be acquired very quickly through targeted selection and is thus a promising breeding target. "We expect that many other beneficial organisms could be improved by focusing on their capacity to resist plant defense compounds", says Machado.

In the next stage, researchers are targeting the symbiotic bacteria of the nematodes to make them resistant against benzoxazinoids, and to test the improved biological control agents in the field. "This is a next step to bring our research closer to agricultural application", says Machado.

Plant defense compounds shape food chains

In the research project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the researchers relied on a combined approach of behavioral ecology, analytical chemistry and plant genetics. The findings illustrate the importance of plant defense compounds such as benzoxazinoids for the evolution and dynamics of food chains. "The arms race between plants and herbivores is often viewed as a motor of the chemical and biological diversity of these two groups", says study co-author Christelle Robert. "Our study indicates that plant defense compounds may influence the evolution of entire food chains."

As part of the interfaculty research cooperation "One Health" at the University of Bern (see box), the researchers have recently started to investigate how benzoxazinoids affect the health of animals and humans. "The integration of our findings into the central agricultural food chain is a fascinating expansion of our work with a lot of potential", says Matthias Erb.

The world's tropical forests store huge quantities of carbon in their biomass and thus constitute an important carbon sink. However, current estimates of the amount of carbon dioxide stored in tropical forests of the Amazon vary largely. Scientists at the UFZ have developed an approach that uses recent satellite data to provide much more precise estimates of the amount of biomass in tropical forests than in the past. This makes it possible to obtain a more exact picture of the consequences of droughts and forest fires for the Amazon.

Estimating forest biomass from satellite measurements is still a challenge, as there exists currently no direct measurement method. State-of-the-art satellites equipped with laser or radar instruments now open up a new range of options: they not only measure the height of the forests around the globe but also the entire structure of these forests. The forest modelling team led by Prof. Dr. Andreas Huth of the UFZ now combined the measurements from a laser satellite with the FORMIND forest model developed at the UFZ; this model uses climate and soil data to simulate the dynamics of forests and the growth of individual trees with a resolution of up to 20 metres. Over 700,000 such laser datasets were evaluated in this way for the Amazon rainforest. The result: important forest attributes, which are crucial in providing a picture of a forest area, can be estimated much more accurately in future. These forest attributes include the above-ground biomass and the rate of forest growth (i.e. gross primary production). "All in all, the uncertainty surrounding the estimates of the forest parameters decreases by between 20 and 43 percent. The estimate of above-ground biomass, for example, has become 25 percent more accurate," says Andreas Huth, one of the authors of the study. This makes it possible to obtain a significantly more precise assessment of the quantity of carbon stored in the forest. "With our approach, we are able to find out more about the carbon cycle - how much is stored in the tropical rainforest, released or resorbed again each year," adds Dr. Rico Fischer, also author of this study and involved in forest modelling at the UFZ.

The UFZ team will also use the new approach to refine their own studies, which only incorporated the forest height to date but not all the information on forest structure, in their biomass estimates. In 2018, they succeeded in simulating the biomass of all 410 billion trees in the Amazon region for the year 2005 by combining laser data from the ICESat satellite with FORMIND. According to one result provided by this method, a total of 76 billion tonnes of carbon is stored in the Amazon rainforest. "This also enabled us to identify which areas of the Amazon region are carbon sinks or sources of carbon," says Andreas Huth. Overall, the rainforest still constitutes a carbon sink by absorbing around 600 million tonnes per year. There are, however, also local carbon sources, such as when trees die due to drought or are destroyed by fire.

Combining high-resolution satellite data with the FORMIND model now opens up a range of new options for the forest modelling team at the UFZ. For example, the GEDI (Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation) mission launched by NASA has been using a new type of laser instrument at the International Space Station (ISS) to measure the global forest since 2018. This data will be available at the end of this year. This would enable UFZ researchers to make statements at six-monthly intervals on how land use or global warming - to name just two factors - has changed the quantity of biomass stored in the tropical forests and where the carbon sinks and sources are located. Up-to-date assessments of the consequences of forest fires, such as those in the Amazon region, are also feasible. "As soon as the NASA measurements are available, we will be able to analyse how much carbon dioxide was emitted by fires in the Amazon," says Rico Fischer.

Another vision held by UFZ researchers is to integrate the data provided by other satellites and to blend it with FORMIND. This would further reduce the uncertainties contained in the estimates. Researchers could also benefit from a new radar satellite mission proposed and planned by German scientists, the Tandem-L mission. One of the mission's objectives is to measure the structure of forests around the world every week by deploying two radar satellites. This would make it possible to quickly identify changes to the forest over the short term caused by deforestation, forest fires or droughts, for example, and thus to quantify much more precisely the consequences of land use and climate change. This, according to Rico Fischer and Andreas Huth, would be a further big step for ecological research.