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COLUMBUS, Ohio - Researchers have long known that childhood trauma is linked to poorer health for women at midlife. A new study shows one important reason why.

The national study of more than 3,000 women is the first to find that those who experienced childhood trauma were more likely than others to have their first child both earlier in life and outside of marriage - and that those factors were associated with poorer health later in life.

The findings have implications for public programs to prevent teen pregnancy, said Kristi Williams, lead author of the study and professor of sociology at The Ohio State University.

These results suggest that early trauma - such as the death of a parent, physical abuse or emotional neglect - may affect young people's decision-making in ways that they can't entirely control.

"It's easy to tell teens that they shouldn't have kids before marriage, but the message won't be effective if they haven't developed the capacity to do that because of trauma they experienced in childhood," Williams said.

"It may be necessary to do different kinds of interventions and do them when children are younger."

Williams conducted the study with Brian Karl Finch of the University of Southern California. Their results were published today (Sept. 17, 2019) in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

Early childhood trauma is "shockingly" common in the United States, the researchers said in the study. One national study conducted between 1995 and 1997 found that only 36 percent of respondents reported having no such adverse childhood experiences.

Other research has shown that childhood trauma is strongly associated with multiple health risks, including cancer, diabetes, stroke and early death, Williams said. Much of this work has focused on how early adversity may have biological and neurological effects that would lead to worse health throughout life.

"But there hasn't been any attention given to how childhood adversity may affect social and developmental processes in adolescence and young adulthood - factors that we know are also strong predictors of later health," she said.

One of those factors in women is the timing and context of first birth.

Data for this new study came from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which includes a representative sample of people who were aged 14 to 22 in 1979. The NLSY is run by Ohio State's Center for Human Resource Research.

Participants were interviewed every year through 1994 and once every two years since. The final sample for this study included 3,278 women.

Each participant reported whether she experienced one or more of six adverse childhood experiences before age 18: emotional neglect, physical abuse, alcoholism in the home, mental illness in the home, death of a biological parent and parental absence.

The researchers examined data on how old each participant was when she first gave birth and whether she was married, cohabiting or neither at the time.

Finally, participants rated their health at or near age 40.

Findings showed that each additional childhood trauma experienced by the participants was associated with earlier age at first birth and a greater probability for a first birth during adolescence or young adulthood compared to later (age 25 to 39).

In addition, each additional trauma was associated with a 24 percent increase in the probability of being unmarried and not cohabiting at first birth compared to the likelihood that they were married when their first child was born.

The researchers then conducted statistical tests that showed early and non-marital births were a key reason why children who experienced trauma were more likely to report poorer health at midlife.

"It is the idea of 'chains of risk' - one thing leads to another," Williams said.

"Childhood trauma leads to social and biological risks that lead to early and nonmarital birth which can lead to health problems later in life."

The findings also cast doubt on the notion that childbearing decisions are the result only of the culture in which children grow up, she said.

Some policymakers have claimed that some people don't value marriage enough, and if they were just encouraged not to have kids until after they're married, they would be better off, Williams said.

"You can promote this 'success sequence' - go to college, get a job, get married and have a child - exactly in that order. But the reason some people don't do that isn't just cultural, it is structural," Williams said.

"When people experience traumas early in life, it makes it less likely that they will be able to make those positive choices."

The first signs of Huntington's, an inherited disease that slowly deteriorates bodies and minds, don't typically surface until middle age. But new findings suggest that something in the brain might be amiss long before symptoms arise, and earlier than has ever been observed. Using a new technology, Rockefeller scientists were able to trace the causes of the disease back to early developmental stages when the brain has only just begun to form.

Developed in the lab of Ali Brivanlou, the Robert and Harriet Heilbrunn Professor, the system uses neuroloids--tiny, three-dimensional tissue cultures that serve as models for whole organs. The researchers create these cell clumps from human embryonic stem cells and manipulate them in the lab to study how developmental diseases arise.

Previous work in the Brivanlou lab found evidence that the disease arises in young neurons; but this latest study takes the developmental timeframe back even further, to the step in the brain's development when cellular uniformity gives way to the emergence of particular structures, a process called neurulation. When the researchers introduced into neuroloids a mutation known to cause Huntington's, it consistently caused dramatic effects with abnormally shaped tissue structures. "Something's collapsed," Brivanlou says.

The researchers have started using the technology to screen for drugs that prevent these abnormalities, an approach they hope will provide a powerful alternative to similar work being done in animal models.

"This technology really opens a door toward identifying that mechanisms that govern brain development, understanding how they go awry in disease, and testing drugs that set these mechanisms back on the right course," says Brivanlou.

Plants can grow whole new organs with the help of pluripotent stem cells throughout their entire lives. When necessary, these stem cells can develop into any type of cell within an organism. The biologist Prof. Dr. Thomas Laux and his plant genetics research group at the University of Freiburg, who are studying how the balance between stem cells and specialized cells is regulated in plants, have determined that the concentration of so-called Argonaute proteins, such as AGO1 and ZLL/AGO10, plays a central role in this process. The team recently published their findings in the scientific journal Plant Communications. First author is Dr. Fei Du.

Using the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, or mouse-ear cress, the scientists have researched how the concentration of Argonaute proteins affects the ratio of stem cells to differentiated cells, such as flower or leaf cells. The Argonaute proteins AGO1 and ZLL/AGO10 are key factors in RNA interference, a process in which the transfer of genetic information is inhibited. Because AGO1 destroys messenger RNA, which are vital for the maintenance of stem cells, this promotes cell differentiation - in other words, their development into specialized cell types. Laux's research group has discovered that the exact opposite occurs when there is a high concentration of AGO1. In this case, the protein protects the messenger RNA from degrading and prevents the cells from differentiating, promoting the maintenance of stem cells.

As a result, the scientists have demonstrated that the balance between stem cells and differentiated cells depends on the exact concentration of Argonaute proteins - and that the activity of these proteins is completely reversed when their concentration exceeds a certain level. This means that scientists could use these proteins in biotechnology to cultivate stem cells or to develop organs - for example, a small number of cultivated stem cells could be used to reproduce plants that are able to better adapt to changes in the environment.

MIAMI--A new study found that the larvae of haddock, a commercially important type of cod, have a magnetic compass to find their way at sea. The findings showed that haddock larvae orient toward the northwest using Earth's magnetic field.

A team of scientists led by the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and the Institute of Marine Research in Norway used a unique combination of experiments conducted in a magnetoreception test facility, or MagLab, and in a Norwegian fjord, a natural environment of Atlantic haddock larvae, to track their movements.

In the experiment, haddock larvae were first observed in a transparent behavioral chamber, known as a Drifting in situ Chamber and developed by UM Professor Claire Paris, to orient while drifting with the current under the environmental conditions that they would encounter at sea. The larvae were also tested in the MagLab, where the magnetic field to which they were exposed was then rotated such that the North-South and East-West were shifted by 90 degrees for each of the larvae.

They found that the larvae oriented to the magnetic northwest in the in situ chamber, and, although deprived of all other environmental cues, oriented towards the exact same magnetic direction in the MagLab.

"These results tell us that Atlantic haddock possess incredible orientation abilities from the earliest phase of their life, and that they have a sensitive magnetic compass," said Alessandro Cresci, a Ph.D. student at the UM Rosenstiel School and first author of the paper. "The dispersal of haddock larvae could be much less passive than we have assumed in the past."

"These microscopic haddock larvae were born in the hatchery and had never experienced life at sea, which suggests that magnetic orientation is in their DNA," said Claire Paris, professor of ocean sciences at the UM Rosenstiel and senior author of the study. "The next step to understand the consequences of their magnetic guidance will be to measure their swimming speed."

This discovery is an important step in better understanding the early-life stages of this commercially valuable fish, said the authors.

Even the best dermatologists can't diagnose skin cancer by eye, relying on magnifying glasses to examine suspicious blemishes and scalpels to cut tissue for analysis. Now, using shortwave rays used in cellphones and airport security scanners, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have developed a technique that detects skin lesions and determines whether they are cancerous or benign - a technology that could ultimately be incorporated into a handheld device that could rapidly diagnose skin cancer without a scalpel in sight.

The work, led by Negar Tavassolian, director of the Stevens Bio-Electromagnetics Laboratory, and postdoctoral fellow Amir Mirbeik-Sabzevari, not only has the ability to reduce the number of unnecessary biopsies by 50 percent but also has the potential to disrupt a $5.3 billion diagnostic market for the most common cancer in the United States, with 9,500 Americans diagnosed with skin cancer each day.

"This could be transformative," said first author Mirbeik-Sabzevari, whose work appears in the September 2019 issue of IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. "No other technology has these capabilities."

The team's technology uses millimeter-wave radiation -- the same shortwave rays used in cellphones and airport security scanners. Millimeter-wave rays penetrate certain materials and bounce off others, which is how airport security knows if you leave your keys in your pocket as you walk through a scanner. Just as metal reflects more energy than your body, so cancerous tumors reflect more calibrated energy than healthy skin, making it possible to identify diseased tissue by looking for reflectivity hotspots.

The latest tests were conducted on biopsies collected by surgeons from Hackensack University Medical Center. Tavassolian and Mirbeik-Sabzevari custom built antennae to generate high-resolution images of this biopsied tissue, and found they could map the tiny tumors as accurately as lab-based testing. Cancerous cells reflected around 40 percent more calibrated energy than healthy tissue, showing that millimeter-wave reflectivity is a reliable marker for cancerous tissue.

"We've shown proof-of-concept that this technology can be used for rapidly detecting skin cancer," said Tavassolian. "That's a major step forward toward our ultimate goal of developing a handheld device, which would be safe to use directly on the skin for an almost instant diagnostic reading of specific kinds of skin cancer -- including lethal melanomas -- based on their individual reflectivity signatures."

While the technology underpinning the device is innovative, it's also inexpensive. Since it involves the same basic circuitry within a cellphone, manufacturing costs would be low.

"In fact, it should be possible to keep manufacturing costs below $1,000, even at low production volumes," said Tavassolian "That's about the same as the magnifying tools already used by dermatologists, and an order of magnitude cheaper than laser-based imaging tools, which also tend to be slower, bulkier and less accurate than millimeter-wave scanners."

Since millimeter-wave rays penetrate the skin, the scanners can generate real-time 3D images of tumors that could guide surgeons and eliminate the need for multiple trial-and-error biopsies to fully remove cancerous tissue. The devices could also be configured to interpret images automatically, and deliver basic diagnostic information -- such as a warning to get checked out by a doctor -- without needing a trained operator. "We could place these devices in pharmacies, so people can get checked out and go to a doctor for a follow-up if necessary," said Tavassolian. "People won't need to wait weeks to get results, and that will save lives."

Mirbeik-Sabzevari, who began working on the technology five years ago as a graduate student in Tavassolian's lab, is confident that this invention will prove a hit. As a postdoctoral fellow at Stevens and the 2019 inaugural recipient of the Paul Kaplan Award for Distinguished Doctoral Research, Mirbeik-Sabzevari plans to launch a startup to commercialize the scanners. He was the entrepreneurial lead on a customer discovery grant on this technology from the National Science Foundation.

Devices smaller than the width of a human hair are key to technologies for drug delivery, semiconductors, and fuel production. But current methods for fabricating these micro- and nanostructures can be expensive and wasteful.

Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have fabricated a novel glass and synthetic diamond foundation that can be used to create miniscule micro- and nanostructures. This new substrate is low cost and leaves minimal waste, the researchers say, in a study published in Diamond and Related Materials.

"We've spent the last couple of decades throwing away plastics," said Stoffel Janssens, the first author of the study, and a member of OIST's Mathematics, Mechanics, and Materials Unit. "With sustainable materials like diamond and glass, we're minimizing negative environmental impacts."

Building a Nanostructure

Current processes in place for micro- and nanodevice fabrication can be costly and inefficient. Synthetic diamond, which has the same chemical structure as natural diamond, is resilient, low-cost and sustainable, and glass is versatile and electrically insulating; technologies that combine the two are promising.

The researchers made their foundation using glass etching, a process that relies on acid to reduce a glass slab to a thickness of 50 micrometers (about the length of a typical cell in the human body). Janssens and his collaborators, Professor Eliot Fried, David Vázquez-Cortés, Alessandro Giussani, and James Kwiecinski, used a laser to drill cavities, approximately 40 micrometers in diameter and depth, into one side of the glass slab.

Next, the scientists grew a 175-nanometer thick nanocrystalline diamond film on the other side of the glass and transformed the drilled cavities into small channels sealed with suspended diamond. Combining diamond and glass creates a transparent structure in which scientists can grow and visualize living cells.

"During this fabrication process, the glass can easily become rough and opaque," said Janssens. "There are so many small things that can go wrong; we made many adjustments to optimize our process."

Moving forward, Janssens hopes to create porous diamond films tailored to deliver specific drugs. The researchers have filed a patent for the new foundation and are exploring its commercial potential.

"This type of research can only be done through the combined efforts of researchers with different backgrounds," said Fried. "The interdisciplinarity of OIST and its collaborative environment made our work possible."

Researchers at the University of Liverpool, University College London (UCL), NSG Group (Pilkington) and Diamond Light Source have made an important design discovery that could dramatically improve the performance of a key material used to coat touch screens and other devices.

Tin doped indium oxide -ITO - is the leading material used in the coating applied to the glass or clear plastic of touch screens, solar cells and light emitting diodes because it conducts electricity and allows light through.

ITO accounts for 60 per cent of the multibillion dollar transparent conducting oxide market and 60 per cent of global indium use. However, the search for materials that can replace ITO has increased significantly in recent years, as supplies of indium decrease and its price significantly increases.

Now, researchers have made an important design discovery that could see films and coatings which don't rely so heavily on this rare element.

In a paper published in Materials Horizons, scientists used a combination of experimental and theoretical approaches to explain how replacing tin with the transition metal molybdenum creates a vastly superior material - IMO - that has twice the conductivity of ITO. It can deliver better performance than ITO with only half the thickness and half the amount of indium.

PhD student Jack Swallow, from the University of Liverpool's Department of Physics and the Stephenson Institute for Renewable Energy, said: "This is an exciting new development in the field of transparent conductors and has the potential of extending the life of the world's indium supplies, which are in increasingly short supply."

Professor David Scanlon of UCL said: "Our work illustrates the power of combining chemistry and physics experimental approaches with computational materials design."

The researchers now intend to apply their new understanding to find alternative novel dopants to improve other transparent conductors.

This includes tin dioxide which contains only earth abundant elements and so is cheap enough for large area uses such as solar cells and energy efficient windows.

Liverpool Professor, Tim Veal, a co-author on the paper said: "Although IMO was first made several years ago, the reason why it is so much better than ITO wasn't understood.

"Our research finding represents a breakthrough and opens the way for industry to reduce its use of indium in displays and touch screens and provides a route for commercial development of better, cheaper transparent conductors for renewable energy applications."

How do humans affect forest fires? And what can we learn from forest fires in the past for the future of forestry? An international team of researchers led by Elisabeth Dietze, formerly at the German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ in Potsdam and now at the Alfred Wegener Institute - Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, now provides new answers to these questions. The research team has shown for a region in north-eastern Poland that forest fires increasingly occurred there after the end of the 18th century with the change to organised forestry. Among other things, the conversion of forests into pine monocultures played a role. The increased number of fires subsequently made it necessary to manage and maintain the forests differently. The researchers report on this in the journal PLOS ONE.

Every natural landscape has its own pattern of how fires behave there. This pattern is also known as the "fire regime". Fire regimes are directly linked to the landscape, its vegetation and climate. Humans can change these regimes by managing a landscape. However, little is yet known about how they influenced fire regimes before the beginning of active forest fire fighting. Among the past 250 years, the human contribution to the global increase in fires during the mid- 19th century is particularly unclear, as the data available for this period is not comprehensive.

In the study published now, the researchers examined the extent to which forest management influenced the fire regime in a temperate forest landscape around Lake Czechowskie in the Bory Tucholskie (English: Tuchola Forest). Bory Tucholskie located in north-eastern Poland is one of the largest forest areas of Central Europe. The researchers combined evidence from various sources, such as pieces of charcoal and molecules formed during biomass combustion, so-called molecular fire markers. The investigated material originated from drilling cores of lake sediments. The researchers applied a new statistical approach to the classification of fires to their samples. They compared their measurements with independent climate and vegetation reconstructions and historical records.

Adaptation needs in the context of climate change

The team found two striking changes in the fire regime in the 19th and 20th centuries, both of which were driven by man. Accordingly, the amount of biomass burned unintentionally increased during the mid-19th century. At that time, the flammable, fast-growing pine monocultures necessary for industrialisation were planted. "After devastating fires in 1863, fire became an important factor in forest management," explains Elisabeth Dietze.

At the end of the 19th century, state forestry reacted with an active fire prevention strategy. Various measures, such as a denser network of paths, were used to prevent fires. These measures had been very effective over the 20th century and the number of fires had decreased. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, more pine trees were planted again in the 1990s. The forested area had increased. "In the course of climate change with its temperature rise and more frequent dry summers a new adjustment of forestry is necessary. Fires should be suppressed more effectively in the future and the forest should be restructured - towards more diverse and less flammable tree and shrub species. This is our most important result for forestry," says Elisabeth Dietze.?

With the new findings, models for predicting fires can be better calibrated. "We can reconstruct fire types more comprehensively than before," says Elisabeth Dietze. "Even low-intensity fires, such as typical ground fires in contrast to crown fires, can be detected with molecular fire markers, which was not possible with charcoal alone."

The study is a cooperation between scientists from the Netherlands and Canada and partners in 'ICLEA - Virtual Institute for Integrated Climate and Landscape Development Analysis'. As partners the GFZ, the Ernst Moritz Arndt University Greifswald, the Brandenburg Technical University Cottbus together with the Polish Academy of Sciences bundle their research capacities and expertise to investigate the climate and landscape development of the historical cultural landscape between North East Germany and North West Poland.

Researchers from the Tulane University School of Medicine have discovered that some cancer cells survive chemotherapy by eating their neighboring tumor cells. The study, which will be published September 17 in the Journal of Cell Biology, suggests that this act of cannibalism provides these cancer cells with the energy they need to stay alive and initiate tumor relapse after the course of treatment is completed.

Chemotherapy drugs such as doxorubicin kill cancer cells by damaging their DNA, but cells that survive initial treatment can soon give rise to relapsed tumors. This is a particular problem in breast cancers that retain a normal copy of a gene called TP53. Instead of dying in response to chemotherapy-induced DNA damage, these cancer cells generally just stop proliferating and enter a dormant but metabolically active state known as senescence. In addition to surviving chemotherapy, these senescent cancer cells produce large amounts of inflammatory molecules and other factors that can promote the tumor’s regrowth. Chemotherapy-treated breast cancer patients with normal TP53 genes are therefore prone to relapse and have poor survival rates.

“Understanding the properties of these senescent cancer cells that allow their survival after chemotherapy treatment is extremely important,” says Crystal A. Tonnessen-Murray, a postdoctoral research fellow in James G. Jackson’s laboratory at the Tulane University School of Medicine.

In the new study, Tonnessen-Murray and colleagues discovered that, after exposure to doxorubicin or other chemotherapy drugs, breast cancer cells that become senescent frequently engulf neighboring cancer cells. The researchers observed this surprising behavior not only in cancer cells grown in the lab, but also in tumors growing in mice. Lung and bone cancer cells are also capable of engulfing their neighbors after becoming senescent, the researchers discovered.

Tonnessen-Murray and colleagues found that senescent cancer cells activate a group of genes that are normally active in white blood cells that engulf invading microbes or cellular debris. After “eating” their neighbors, senescent cancer cells digested them by delivering them to lysosomes, acidic cellular structures that are also highly active in senescent cells.

Importantly, the researchers determined that this process helps senescent cancer cells stay alive. Senescent cancer cells that engulfed a neighboring cell survived in culture for longer than senescent cancer cells that didn’t. The researchers suspect that consuming their neighbors may provide senescent cancer cells with the energy and materials they need to survive and produce the factors that drive tumor relapse.

“Inhibiting this process may provide new therapeutic opportunities, because we know that it is the breast cancer patients with tumors that undergo TP53-mediated senescence in response to chemotherapy that have  poor response and poor survival rates,” Jackson says.

As cities grow in size, crime grows even faster. But while certain types of crime -- car theft and robbery, for example -- exponentially outpace the population, other crime categories buck the trend. Rape, for example, grows only linearly, at roughly the same pace as a city's population.

Why it is that only some crimes supercharge from city size is explained in a new paper published this week in Physical Review E. According to the paper, the same underlying mechanism that boosts urban innovation and startup businesses can also explain why certain types of crimes thrive in a larger population.

"The variation among scaling relationships for crime has troubled researchers for a long time," says lead author Vicky Chuqiao Yang (Santa Fe Institute, Northwestern University). "This work says the variations are not a bug, but a feature."

According to Yang and her coauthors Andrew Papachristos and Daniel Abrams (both of Northwestern University), certain crimes are "social" in nature and require a team effort. Going by data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System, an average of ~1.6 offenders were arrested or reported for robbery, and ~1.5 for motor vehicle theft--relatively high numbers considering that only a small subset of offenders wind up getting arrested or listed in crime reports. By contrast, reporting data for rape, a crime often committed by a lone individual, hovered closer to one.

The more people involved in a crime, the more they seem to benefit from the population power of the city. Because the incidence of social crimes grows superlinearly with city population, the researchers hypothesized that social crimes thrived on making the right connections-- in this case, the ability to find collaborators who are willing and able to rob and steal.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers created a mathematical model that predicted the volume of crime as a function of social interactions. Because a higher population increases the number of unique contacts an individual criminal can choose from, that offender has a better chance of finding the right team of collaborators. Predictably, the incidence of social crimes then rises with a city's population disproportionally while solitary crimes stay roughly linear.

Though the current paper focuses on explaining crime data, the researchers stress that their model also applies to other socioeconomic quantities like innovation and productivity. Previous work in the "science of cities" has shown that innovation scales superlinearly with city size, and that social interactions might be fueling that growth. The new model builds on that understanding, as social interactions increase the probability of finding the right collaborators--either for starting a business or boosting a car.

"Bigger cities are a double-edged sword," Yang remarks. "What leads to more innovation and wealth in bigger cities also makes them more dangerous at the same time."

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 16, 2019 - Despite declining crime rates, tensions between police and the public remain an ongoing issue. High-profile incidents of police violence have led to distrust of the police, particularly among residents in high-crime and low-income areas. While some policymakers promote the use of community-oriented policing (COP) to enhance public trust and police legitimacy, little is known about its actual effectiveness. In a recent study, MIT Sloan Prof. David Rand, in collaboration with Kyle Peyton of Yale University and Prof. Michael Sierra-Arévalo of the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, provide the strongest evidence to date in support of the use of COP.

The study, which combined a randomized field experiment with longitudinal survey measurements, found that a single positive, nonenforcement contact with a uniformed patrol officer substantially improved the public's attitudes towards the police.

"We currently have a crisis of legitimacy, where many residents don't trust police officers, making it harder for them to effectively fight crime. COP's goal is to facilitate positive nonenforcement interactions between police and the public--through things like community meetings and door-to-door visits--to help residents feel safe and build trust. However, no one knows if it actually works and is worth the investment," says Rand.

To measure the effectiveness of COP, the researchers conducted a first-of-its-kind field experiment on the decades-old policing strategy. "We looked at whether positive, nonenforcement contact at the heart of community policing actually causes people to view the police differently," explains Peyton.

First, they mailed out a baseline survey to thousands of residents in New Haven, CT about their attitudes toward parts of the city's government, including the police. They were asked about issues such as:

Legitimacy - Do they feel the police make fair and impartial decisions?

Performance - Do they have confidence in the police to do their job well?

Cooperation - Would they be willing to assist the police in a search for a suspect?

Compliance - Would they be willing to do what a police officer tells them to do?

Half of those who completed the baseline survey were then randomly selected to receive an unannounced visit from a police officer. After knocking on the door, the officers introduced themselves and explained they were making a community policing visit in a nonenforcement capacity and provided their work cell phone number via a personalized business card.

The researchers sent follow-up surveys to residents three days and 21 days after the community policing visits, analyzing differences between those who received COP visits and those who did not.

"The findings were striking," says Rand. "There was some skepticism about whether a single COP visit would make a difference, and even concern that such visits could backfire if the residents responded with hostility or distrust. But it turned out to have a big positive impact. The people who received the community policing visits had a much better view of police afterward."

This was true of all of the different kinds of attitudes towards the police that were measured in the study. The effect was also still evident three weeks after the visit.

Importantly, the study found that the positive effects were particularly large for specific demographics. Rand explains,

"Among black respondents who had COP visits, the intervention had nearly twice as large of an effect as among white respondents. Further, the visits had the strongest effects among individuals who held the most negative views toward police prior to the COP visit."

The study also highlighted how the COP visit led to an increase in support for funding for additional police officers and a small decrease in support for body-worn cameras.

"Our research provides evidence in support of the power of COP to improve relationships between the police and residents," says Rand. "These broad effects of positive contact are especially important in light of the documented tensions between the police and the public, particularly within minority communities where longstanding distrust of the police can hinder effective policing."

Sierra-Arévalo agrees but also provides a caution. "Respectful, positive interactions like those we tested can be a powerful tool to increase trust and should be encouraged in U.S. police departments. That said, community policing isn't going to end police brutality or address a continuing lack of police accountability; these are serious problems that demand concerted attention and their own solutions."

A Phase III, NRG Oncology clinical trial that compared radiosurgery (SRS) or stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) to the conventional radiotherapy (cEBRT) for patients with spinal metastases indicated that there was no statistically significant difference between the treatments for pain response, adverse events, FACT-G, BPI, and EQ-5D scores. These results were presented during the plenary session of the American Society of Radiation Oncology's (ASTRO) Annual Meeting in September 2019. The abstract was one of four abstracts chosen from over 3,000 submitted abstracts for the plenary session.

NRG-RTOG 0631 was designed to compare two treatment options for patients with spinal metastases in one to three spinal sites. The experimental treatment arm was radiosurgery / stereotactic body radiotherapy (SRS/SBRT) at 16 or 18 Gy in one fraction to the involved spinal segment. This was compared to cEBRT given at 8 Gy in one fraction to the involved spine and additional one spinal segment above and below. The primary endpoint of this trial was to determine pain response of the treated region at 3 months after the treatment. Researchers also recorded changes in adverse events and FACT-G, BPI, and EQ-5D scores.

Pain control was evaluated on the Numerical Rating Pain Scale at the treated spinal segment. Complete response was defined as pain score 0 with no increase of pain medication, and partial response was defined as a greater than or equal to 3 point improvement. Scores were reviewed at 3 months post-treatment. There were 339 eligible patients on the trial; 209 of those patients received SRS/SBRT treatment and 130 patients received cEBRT. Baseline mean pain score at the index spine site was 6.06 with a standard deviation of 2.61 for the SRS/SBRT treatment arm and 5.88 with a standard deviation of 2.41 in the cEBRT treatment arm. At 3-months, the pain score at the index site was changed -3.00 with a standard deviation of 3.34 for the SRS/SBRT treatment arm, and -3.83 with a standard deviation of 2.97 for the cEBRT treatment arm. Results yielded no difference between SRS/SBRT and cEBRT treatments at 3 months for pain response (40.3% vs. 57.9%).

"Radiosurgery/SBRT failed to improve the pain response, at 1, 3 and 6 months. A single EBRT fraction of 8 Gy should therefore remain the standard of care for patients with localized spine metastases," stated Samuel Ryu, MD, of the Stony Brook University Medical Center and lead author of NRG-RTOG 0631.

Technological advances are allowing commercial fishing fleets to double their fishing power every 35 years and put even more pressure on dwindling fish stocks, new research has found.

Researchers from the Sea Around Us initiative at the University of British Columbia analyzed more than 50 studies related to the increase in vessels' catching power and found that the introduction of mechanisms such as GPS, fishfinders, echo-sounders or acoustic cameras, has led to an average two per cent yearly increase in boats' capacity to capture fish.

"This means that if a fleet has 10 boats today, one generation later, the same 10 boats have the fishing power of 20 vessels. The next generation, they have the power of 40 boats, and so on," said Deng Palomares, the Sea Around Us project manager and lead author of the study, which was published today in Ecology and Society.

An increase in fishing power is known as 'technological creep' and it's usually ignored by fisheries managers who are in charge of regulating how many days and hours and technique each vessel under their oversight is supposed to fish in a given period.

"This 'technological creep' is also ignored by most fisheries scientists in charge of proposing policies," said Daniel Pauly, the Sea Around Us principal investigator. "They tend to conduct short-term studies that only take into account nominal effort, which is, for example, the number of boats that fish using longlines in one year, employing 'x' number of people. However, they are disregarding the effective effort those vessels are deploying thanks to the technology that allows them to either maintain their catches or catch more fish."

In their paper, Palomares and Pauly propose a new equation that allows fisheries managers and scientists to easily estimate technological creep precisely and determine a fleet's effective effort.

"This is important because if you don't understand that the increase in power is happening, then you don't understand that you can deplete a stock," Pauly said. "We already know that marine fisheries catches have been declining by 1.2 million tonnes per year since 1996 so, by prompting boats to fish deeper and farther into the high seas, these new technologies are only helping the industry compensate for the diminishing abundance of fish populations."

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Eating your tomato sauce with meatballs piled on top could have a surprising downside, new research suggests.

Some of the anti-cancer benefits of tomatoes, specifically those from a compound called lycopene, could disappear when they're eaten with iron-rich foods, according to a new study from The Ohio State University.

Researchers analyzed the blood and digestive fluid of a small group of medical students after they consumed either a tomato extract-based shake with iron or one without iron. Lycopene levels in digestive fluid and in the blood were significantly lower when the study subjects drank the liquid meal mixed with an iron supplement, meaning there was less for the body to use in potentially beneficial ways.

"When people had iron with their meal, we saw almost a twofold drop in lycopene uptake over time," said the study's lead author, Rachel Kopec, an assistant professor of human nutrition at Ohio State.

"This could have potential implications every time a person is consuming something rich in lycopene and iron - say a Bolognese sauce, or an iron-fortified cereal with a side of tomato juice. You're probably only getting half as much lycopene from this as you would without the iron."

Iron is essential in the diet, performing such critical functions as allowing our bodies to produce energy and get rid of waste. But it's also a nutrient that is known to monkey with other cellular-level processes.

"We know that if you mix iron with certain compounds it will destroy them, but we didn't know if it would impair potentially beneficial carotenoids, like lycopene, found in fruits and vegetables," Kopec said.

Carotenoids are plant pigments with antioxidant properties responsible for many bright red, yellow and orange pigments found in the produce aisle. These include lycopene, which is found in abundance in tomatoes and also colors watermelon and pink grapefruit. Scientists have identified several potential anti-cancer benefits of lycopene, including in prostate, lung and skin cancers.

The small study, which included seven French medical students who had repeated blood draws and digestive samples taken from tubes placed in their stomachs and small intestines, took this research out of the test tube and into the human body, allowing for a better examination of human metabolism in action, Kopec said.

It's unclear precisely what is happening that is changing the uptake of lycopene, but it could be that the meal with iron oxidizes the lycopene, creating different products of metabolism than those followed in the study.

"It's also possible that iron interrupts the nice emulsified mix of tomato and fats that is critical for cells to absorb the lycopene. It could turn it into a substance like separated salad dressing - oil on top and vinegar on the bottom - that won't ever mix properly," Kopec said.

Researchers continue to work to better understand lycopene's role in fighting cancer, and the importance of its interplay with other compounds and nutrients.

"Nutrition can play an important role in disease prevention, but it's important for us to gather the details about precisely how what we eat is contributing to our health so that we can give people reliable, science-based recommendations," Kopec said.

NASA's Aqua satellite provided forecasters at the National Hurricane Center with infrared data and cloud top temperature information on Hurricane Kiko. Wind shear was affecting the storm and had closed the eye.

On Monday, September 16, 2019, microwave data and satellite imagery continue to indicate that the core of Kiko is being disrupted. Wind shear from the northeast is preventing Kiko from having a closed eyewall circulation. That means that the storm is subject to outside winds and can weaken.

NASA researches tropical cyclones. One of the ways NASA does that is with infrared data that provides temperature information. Cloud top temperatures provide information to forecasters about where the strongest storms are located within a tropical cyclone. Tropical cyclones do not always have uniform strength, and some sides have stronger sides than others. The stronger the storms, the higher they extend into the troposphere, and they have the colder cloud temperatures.

NASA's Aqua satellite analyzed the storm on Sept. 8 at 11.59 p.m. EDT (Sept. 9 at 0359 UTC) using the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument. The AIRS instrument is one of six instruments flying on board NASA's Aqua satellite, launched on May 4, 2002.

The AIRS infrared data no longer showed an eye in Kiko, indicating that the wind shear from the northeast had filled the center with clouds.

In general, wind shear is a measure of how the speed and direction of winds change with altitude. Tropical cyclones are like rotating cylinders of winds. Each level needs to be stacked on top each other vertically in order for the storm to maintain strength or intensify. Wind shear occurs when winds at different levels of the atmosphere push against the rotating cylinder of winds, weakening the rotation by pushing it apart at different levels.

AIRS found coldest cloud top temperatures as cold as or colder than minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 degrees Celsius) around Kiko's center and in a large bands east and west of center. NASA research has shown that cloud top temperatures that cold indicate strong storms that have the capability to create heavy rain.

At 11 a.m. EDT (1500 UTC), the center of Hurricane Kiko was located near latitude 17.3 degrees north and longitude 123.7 degrees west. That put the center about 975 miles (1,570 km) west-southwest of the southern tip of Baja Calfiornia, Mexico. Kiko is moving toward the west near 5 mph (7 kph), and this motion is expected to continue through tonight.

Maximum sustained winds have decreased to near 105 mph (165 kph) with higher gusts. Kiko is a small tropical cyclone. Hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 15 miles (30 km) from the center and tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 60 miles (95 km). The estimated minimum central pressure is 971 millibars.

NHC forecasters expect a west-southwestward motion on Sept. 17 followed by a turn back to the west on Wednesday. Gradual weakening is expected during the next couple of days.