Earth

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A new paper co-written by a University of Illinois expert in the use of financial information in capital markets examines the relationship between political corruption and firm value in the U.S., and what prevailing forces potentially constrain or exacerbate the effects of corruption.

While the U.S. traditionally ranks low on worldwide corruption indices, domestic political corruption still imposes substantial costs on U.S. shareholders - but the relationship between political corruption and firm value can be moderated by several firm- and government-level factors and monitoring mechanisms, the authors report.

Nerissa Brown, a professor of accountancy at the Gies College of Business, and her colleagues at other institutions found that low-profit firms in competitive environments are particularly vulnerable when operating in corrupt areas.

Using Department of Justice corruption convictions data from 1996-2013 and a sample of U.S. firms, Brown and her co-authors found that the consequences of political corruption are exacerbated for firms operating in competitive product markets and mitigated for firms that are subject to external monitoring by state governments or monitoring induced by disclosure transparency.

"We know that corruption has a negative effect on firm value. It's a deadweight tax on firm value," said Brown, who also is a PricewaterhouseCoopers Faculty Fellow. "One key factor that exacerbates this negative effect is when firms operate in highly competitive industries. In such industries, the profit margins or economic rents that a firm earns are much lower because competition drives those margins down. If low-profit firms face corruption on top of that, they already have a small piece of the profit pie - and that slice will surely be smaller if they have to grease the palms of rent-seeking public officials."

While prior studies have looked at how corruption influences firm performance, "a lot of that research has been done on a global, cross-country basis," Brown said.

"There are well-known corruption indices that rank countries from most corrupt to least corrupt, and several studies examine how gross domestic product, foreign direct investment, and other country-level measures of growth vary with corruption. The U.S. typically ranks as a low corruption country, so the interesting thing we're able to show given our data is the variation in corruption across the states within the U.S. That was a very difficult thing to capture in prior U.S.-based studies, because corruption by its very nature is unobservable and hidden until exposed."

The results should inform managers and policymakers of the tradeoffs imposed on firms operating in areas of the U.S. that rank higher on the corruption scale, Brown said.

"The data that we use isn't perfect, but we can observe within a given geographic district court boundary the number of public officials that have been federally convicted of crimes that are of a political nature," Brown said. "And so the interesting result we show in this paper is that, when you peer inside district court boundaries, there are huge variations in corruption rates across the U.S. There are even huge variations within the same state."

Further analysis in the paper suggests that corruption is particularly harmful to shareholder value when state governments are controlled by a single party, consistent with the notion that interparty competition deters corruption, Brown said.

"State governments with split party control serve as a monitoring mechanism in that one party is closely watching the other party," Brown said. "If there are corrupt officials in either party who might have some proclivity to extract cash from firms operating in the area, having another party to shine a light on their activities functions as a check. It seems to tamp down the level of corruption, which then reduces the negative firm value effects that we show."

If you're a start-up and you're thinking about where to locate, "then the corruption culture is something you ought to take into consideration," Brown said. "This is no different from a multinational corporation that should assess a country's corruption culture before entering the market."

"Which states or areas would you be more likely to flourish in without having to deal with corrupting influences or corrupt officials? Know that if you do choose to operate or locate in those areas, then there needs to be greater vigilance over the effectiveness of internal control and compliance procedures that are put in place."

Being transparent to outside investors and other external parties is also important for companies, Brown said.

"We find that the costs of corruption are lower for firms that voluntarily disclose more information. Investors, financial regulators and the business press are key monitors or watchdogs for corrupt activities, and transparency facilitates these monitoring mechanisms. As they say, 'Sunlight is the best disinfectant.'"

The culprit responsible for the decline of Mexico's once lucrative jumbo squid fishery has remained a mystery, until now. A new Stanford-led study published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science identifies shifting weather patterns and ocean conditions as among the reasons for the collapse, which spells trouble for the Gulf of California's marine ecosystems and fishery-dependent economies. It could also be a sign of things to come elsewhere.

"What is happening with the jumbo squid is indicative of larger changes impacting marine organisms and ecosystems across the northeast Pacific," said the study's lead author, Timothy Frawley, who was a Stanford graduate student when he conducted the research. "In many respects these squid, with their unique and adaptive survival strategies, function as sentinels of environmental change." William Gilly, professor of biology, was senior author of the study.

Warmer waters

Also known as the Humboldt squid, these large, predatory creatures are targets of the world's biggest invertebrate fishery, commercially fished in Peru, Chile and Baja California. In 2008 the Gulf of California jumbo squid fishery employed over 1,500 fishing vessels and was the fourth largest fishery in all of Mexico. By 2015, it had completely collapsed, and as of yet shows no sign of recovery.

To better understand the factors that drove the collapse and have inhibited recovery, the team compiled official fisheries records and reports, oceanographic data obtained from satellites and instruments deployed at sea, and biological measurements of over 1,000 individual squid. Comparing these data sources over time, the research team identified and described changes in ocean habitat that coincided with reductions in squid size, life span and fisheries productivity.

They found that long-standing currents and circulation patterns within the Gulf of California have shifted over the past decade. Previously, warm-water El Niño conditions that are inhospitable to the large squid were followed by cool-water La Niña phases, allowing the system to recover and recuperate. In recent years La Niña has been conspicuously absent, resulting in increasingly tropical waters across the region. As these waters warm, cooler, nutrient-rich waters ideal for both the jumbo squid and their prey have become scarce.

In response to new, warmer ocean conditions the squid limit their growth, shorten their life span and reproduce earlier. As a result, smaller, more difficult to catch and less profitable squid have become the norm, shuttering the entire squid fishing industry in the region.

"You can think of it as a sort of oceanographic drought," Frawley said. "Until the cool-water conditions we associate with elevated primary and secondary production return, jumbo squid in the Gulf of California are likely to remain small."

Other fisheries at risk

Though careful not to discount overfishing as a potential contributing factor in the collapse of the fishery, the researchers cite the persistence of the small-size squid in the years since fishing has ended as evidence of additional factors at play.

"These results show that our traditional understanding of the dynamics underlying fisheries, their management and sustainability are all at risk when environmental change is rapid and persistent," said Larry Crowder, study co-author and the Edward Ricketts Provostial Professor of Marine Ecology and Conservation at Stanford Hopkins Marine Station.

The change in squid populations marks a drastic and persistent shift in the larger ecosystem, a shift likely to have significant implications for coastal fishing communities across the region, according to the study's authors. In a related study, Frawley examines the squid fishery to understand the processes through which small-scale fishers perceive and respond to such changes.

"Small-scale fishers in Baja California and elsewhere are increasingly recognizing the value of diversifying what they catch as a means of remaining flexible and resilient," Frawley said. "For the fishers, as for the squid, being able to adapt in real-time appears essential in the face of increasing climatic and oceanographic variability."

NEWPORT, Ore. - Warming temperatures and changes in ocean circulation and salinity are driving the breakup of ice sheets in Antarctica, but a new study suggests that intense storms may help push the system over the edge.

A research team led by U.S. and Korean scientists deployed three moorings with hydrophones attached seaward of the Nansen Ice Shelf in Antarctica's Ross Sea in December of 2015, and were able to record hundreds of short-duration, broadband signals indicating the fracturing of the ice shelf.

The "icequakes" primarily took place between January and March of 2016, with the front of the ice sheet calving into two giant icebergs on April 7. The day the icebergs drifted away from the shelf coincided with the largest low-pressure storm system the region had recorded in the previous seven months, the researchers say.

Results of the study are being published this week in Frontiers in Earth Science.

"It appears that while the icebergs had broken free of the main ice sheet, they stayed nearby until the combination of high winds and a strong low-pressure storm combined to break them loose," noted Bob Dziak, a research oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and lead author on the study.

"The processes behind the unpinning and breakup of Antarctic ice shelves is not fully understood, and our study suggests that storms play an under-appreciated role in their breakup," Dziak said.

Next January, Dziak and researchers from Oregon State University and the Korea Polar Research Institute will return to Antarctica to replace the three hydrophones near Nansen, and deploy addition acoustic sensors near the massive Thwaites Glacier, called one of the most important - and dangerous - glaciers on the planet.

The huge glacier has developed a large cavity from rapid melting under the glacier because of climate change. It contained an estimated 14 billion tons of ice with most of it melting over the past 3-4 years. Since it is thought to "hold back" other glaciers, its collapse could have a significant impact on global sea level rise as well as the structure and environment of West Antarctica.

Dziak, who has a courtesy appointment in Oregon State's College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, said hydrophones provide a new source of data for scientists studying Antarctica.

"Even though the leading edge of the Nansen Ice Shelf broke free, the icebergs remained in place for several months, so it wasn't clear from the GPS sensors or satellite images that a large piece of the shelf had calved," Dziak noted. "But our undersea hydrophones recorded the sounds of the shelf breaking apart months earlier.

"We hope that deploying additional underwater sensors in Antarctica will give us similar warnings if the Thwaites ice shelf begins to calve."

In a first of its kind study, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute evaluated the language use of black mothers in comparison with white mothers with the same education levels to measure the amount and complexity of the words they use with their infants and young children. This study resulted in the new discovery that race played no role in the amount and quality of the words they used with their children or with the language skills their children later develop.

Researchers found that maternal education did play an important role in predicting the amount and quality of the mother's language use and the child's language development. This is significant because earlier studies have shown that children of parents with lower socioeconomic backgrounds and education levels have lower language skills when entering school, but those studies included parents with higher incomes who were primarily white and parents with lower incomes who were primarily black. As a result, educators and other child professionals were not able to distinguish between race, income or education as the cause of the language gap until now. These new findings were published in the journal Child Development on July 17, 2019.

"Over time, there were summaries of this early research that misrepresented the data. Many of these summaries suggested that black and African American mothers, especially those with lower-incomes, provided less and lower quality language to their children than white mothers," said Lynne Vernon-Feagans, Ph.D.

"Our findings represent a big shift from previous thinking that race-based differences in maternal language play a significant role in children's language outcomes," said Mary Bratsch-Hines, Ph.D.

Researchers Lynne Vernon-Feagans, Mary Bratsch-Hines and Elizabeth Reynolds of Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute teamed up with Michael Willoughby, Ph.D., of RTI International on the study to determine if and how much a mother's race or her education played a role in her child's language development.

Researchers were also able to determine that maternal education was very related to children's later language at school age regardless of maternal race, and that mothers' early language input quality and complexity were even more related to children's later language at school age.

These new discoveries will help improve parent, teacher and school system efforts by shaping their understanding of the importance of maternal education for both black and white children and allowing experts to focus available efforts and resources in better ways to improve child outcomes.

BOSTON - You may remember Tang - the sugar-sweetened orange-flavored drink mix - as the official beverage of the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first men on the moon fifty years ago this month. But, according to a new report published in Frontiers in Physiology, the first men and women who set foot on Mars might be better off choosing a nice merlot.

Researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) have demonstrated that resveratrol - a naturally occurring ingredient in grapes and blueberries - can preserve muscle function and mitigate muscle atrophy under conditions that mimic the gravity on Mars - which is about 40 percent as strong as that experienced on Earth. The team's findings suggest that supplementing future astronauts' diets with resveratrol could help maintain their musculoskeletal health even on a long-term mission to Mars.

"Resveratrol has been extensively studied for its health benefits, including its anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and anti-diabetic effects," said senior author Seward B. Rutkove, MD, Chief of the Division of Neuromuscular Disease in the Department of Neurology at BIDMC. "Resveratrol has also been shown to preserve bone and muscle loss, however there's a lack of research regarding its effects on the musculoskeletal system in partial gravity. We hypothesized that a moderate daily dose would help mitigate muscle deconditioning under conditions that replicate the partial gravity on Mars."

Muscle atrophy is an almost immediate consequence and one of the most serious side effects of spaceflight. Studies of crews over the last fifty years of manned spaceflight reveal that astronauts can lose up to 20 percent of their muscle mass in less than two weeks in microgravity. To prevent this muscle decomposition, astronauts living and working in aboard the International Space Station for extended missions exercise several hours each day. Yet, most return to Earth in a weakened state, requiring months of post-flight rehabilitation. The first humans landing on an alien world will ideally arrive in better shape. In addition to physical training, could a dietary supplement help preserve muscle mass during their mission to Mars?

To test that idea, the scientists used an innovative method to replicate Martian gravity in rats designed by corresponding author Marie Mortreux, PhD, a post-doctoral research fellow in Rutkove's lab. This method was based on a similar approach in mice, originally developed by Mary Bouxsein, PhD, Director of the Center for Advanced Orthopaedic Studies at BIDMC.

"In the past, mimicking lower gravity had been achieved by tail suspension," said Mortreux. "Although effective, this approach presents a variety of challenges, including impaired blood flow and spinal misalignment. To avoid these issues and to help keep the animals horizontal and presumably more comfortable, we incorporated a custom-fit suspension harness."

In this pilot study of two dozen male animals, half lived under normal gravity conditions as a control group, while half were exposed to Martian gravity, about 40 percent of that on Earth. Half of each of these groups received 150 milligrams resveratrol per kilogram of body weight per day, while half did not. As they hypothesized, the scientists found that after two weeks living in partial gravity, all animals experienced muscle atrophy. However, they also saw that animals that received resveratrol supplementation maintained both front and hind limb grip force - a metric that rapidly declines when animals are exposed to partial weight bearing conditions. Additionally, resveratrol supplementation led to a significant increase in muscle weight, myofiber (or muscle cell) size, and a protection of muscle composition.

"After five decades of manned low earth orbit missions, scientists have a relatively good understanding of the effects of microgravity on the human body, but the consequences of partial gravity remain far less well understood," said Mortreux. "This study emphasizes that natural compounds could be key to maintaining human health as we journey to the moon and to the red planet."

To follow up, the team would like to assess the benefits of resveratrol supplements in females as well as males, to see if the supplement may be of benefit for all space explorers.

Fifty years ago, in July 1969, the Apollo 11 lunar module landed on the Moon and humans left their first mark on the surface of another world. In this special issue of Science, a Review, Policy Forum, Feature from Science's news department and an Editorial by Science Editor-In-Chief, Jeremy Berg, celebrate the semicentennial anniversary of the landing, its scientific impact and explore the potential future of lunar exploration.

In the Review, Richard Carlson highlights the discoveries and contributions to planetary science that were made possible through the study of lunar rock samples returned to Earth by the Apollo and Luna missions. Because Earth is so geologically active, nearly all of the material on its surface has been recycled and reformed anew. As a result, what little evidence remains from the planet's earliest days is often difficult to discern from more recent geological events. Many of the Moon's features, however, have been preserved since the Solar System's formative years more than four billion years ago. Prior to the Apollo landings, it was widely thought that planets formed cold and as a result of the gentle accumulation of asteroid-sized debris. However, the samples retrieved from the Moon illustrated a dynamic and far more violent process, characterized by high energy impacts and global-scale melting of rocks and minerals. Lunar samples have also been used to develop a chronological record of cratering on the Moon's surface. This record forms the foundation for the age estimates of other planetary surfaces throughout the inner Solar System and the dynamic planetary interactions with the space environment. As analytical technologies and techniques continue to advance, Carlson suggests that the lunar samples brought to Earth a half-century ago will continue to provide new insights into the formation and geology of other worlds.

A Policy Forum by Chunlai Li and colleagues highlights some of the most recent lunar exploration missions. Earlier this year, the China Lunar Exploration Program's (CLEP) Chang'E-4 lander and Yutu-2 rover landed on the far side of the Moon. The authors discuss China's lunar exploration program and its goal of understanding the Moon through advances in space technology and international collaboration. Although still in its infancy, the CLEPs four lunar missions so far have built a foundation for subsequent lunar exploration. According to the authors, future missions are being developed to fly in the next decade and CLEP will develop its capabilities for both robotic and human exploration of the Moon's surface.

A team of researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) is now scrutinising a daring way of stabilising the ice sheet: Generating trillions of tons of additional snowfall by pumping ocean water onto the glaciers and distributing it with snow canons. This would mean unprecedented engineering efforts and a substantial environmental hazard in one of the world's last pristine regions - to prevent long-term sea level rise for some of the world's most densely populated areas along coastlines from the US to China.

"The fundamental trade-off is whether we as humanity want to sacrifice Antarctica to safe the currently inhabited coastal regions and the cultural heritage that we have built and are building on our shores. It is about global metropolises, from New York to Shanghai, which in the long term will be below sea level if nothing is done" explains Anders Levermann, physicist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Columbia University and one of the authors of the study. "The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is one of the tipping elements in our climate system. Ice loss is accelerating and might not stop until the West Antarctic ice sheet is practically gone."

Unprecedented measures to stabilise the ice sheet

Warm ocean currents have reached the Amundsen Sea Sector of West Antarctica -- a region comprising several glaciers that are prone to instability due to their topographic configuration. Underwater melting of these glaciers triggered their speed-up and retreat. This is already now responsible for the largest ice loss from the continent and provides an accelerating contribution to global sea level rise. In their study, the researchers employ computer simulations to project the dynamic ice loss into the future. They confirm earlier studies suggesting that even strong reduction of greenhouse gas emissions may not prevent the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet.

"So we investigated what could stop a potential collapse in our simulations and increased the snowfall in the destabilised region far beyond observations," says PIK co-author Johannes Feldmann. "In fact, we find that an awful lot of snow can indeed push the ice sheet back towards a stable regime and stop the instability. In practice, this could be realized by an enormous redisposition of water masses -- pumped out of the ocean and snowed onto the ice sheet at a rate of several hundred billion tons per year over a few decades."

A tremendous trade-off between hazards and hopes

"We are fully aware of the disruptive character such an intervention would have," adds Feldmann. Uplifting, desalinating and heating the ocean water as well as powering the snow canons would require an amount of electric power in the order of several ten thousand high-end wind turbines. "Putting up such a wind farm and the further infrastructure in the Amundsen Sea and the massive extraction of ocean water itself would essentially mean losing a unique natural reserve. Further, the harsh Antarctic climate makes the technical challenges difficult to anticipate and hard to handle while the potential hazardous impacts to the region are likely to be devastating." Thus the risks and costs of such an unprecedented endeavour must be weighted very carefully against its potential benefits. "Also, our study does not consider future man-made global warming. Hence this gigantic endeavour only makes sense if the Paris Climate Agreement is kept and carbon emissions are reduced fast and unequivocally."

"The apparent absurdity of the endeavour to let it snow in Antarctica to stop an ice instability reflects the breath-taking dimension of the sea-level problem," concludes Levermann. "Yet as scientists we feel it is our duty to inform society about each and every potential option to counter the problems ahead. As unbelievable as it might seem: In order to prevent an unprecedented risk, humankind might have to make an unprecedented effort, too."

Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center study coauthors Anne Marie Lennon, Simeon Springer, Marco Dal Molin, Christopher Wolfgang and Bert Vogelstein will participate in a press teleconference organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science at 11 a.m. Tuesday, July 16. To RSVP, send an email to scipak@aaas.org. An audio recording and transcript will be available on the MedPak webpage (eurekalert.org/journls/scitransmed/) at the end of the teleconference.

In a proof-of-concept study, an international scientific team led by Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center researchers has shown that a laboratory test using artificial intelligence tools has the potential to more accurately sort out which people with pancreatic cysts will go on to develop pancreatic cancers.

The test, dubbed CompCyst (for comprehensive cyst analysis), incorporates measures of molecular and clinical markers in cyst fluids, and appears to be on track to significantly improve on conventional clinical and imaging tests, the research team says.

Using information from more than 800 patients with pancreatic cysts who had cyst fluid analysis and cyst removal surgery at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and 15 other medical centers around the world, investigators say CompCyst more often than standard current methods correctly identified which patients needed and likely had a chance to benefit from surgery, and which were unlikely to benefit from surgery or needed further monitoring only. Specifically, they found that using the test would have spared from surgery more than half of patients who underwent cyst removal later deemed unnecessary because the cysts were unlikely to have caused cancer.

A description of the work is published in the July 17 issue of Science Translational Medicine.

"Our study demonstrates the potential role of CompCyst as a complement to existing clinical and imaging criteria when evaluating pancreatic cysts," says Anne Marie Lennon, M.B.B.Ch., Ph.D., professor of medicine and director of the Johns Hopkins multidisciplinary pancreatic cyst clinic. "It could provide a greater degree of confidence for physicians when they advise patients that they do not require follow-up and can be discharged from surveillance."

"Although we still need to prospectively validate this test, our results are exciting because they document a new and more objective way to manage the many patients with this disease," she adds. Plans are underway to begin a prospective validation study in the next year.

Pancreatic cysts are common. They are found in 4% of people in their 60s and 8% of people over age 70, according to other published research. That means some 800,000 people with a pancreatic cyst are identified each year in the U.S. alone. By contrast, only a small fraction of cysts progress to cancer.

"The dilemma facing patients and their physicians is the ability to distinguish precancerous cysts from cysts that will not progress to cancer," says Lennon.

"Currently available clinical and imaging tests often fail to distinguish precancerous cysts from cysts that have little or no potential to turn cancerous, which makes it difficult to determine which patients will not require follow-up and which patients will need long-term follow-up or immediate surgical resection," says study investigator Christopher Wolfgang, M.D., Ph.D., M.S., John L. Cameron Professor of Surgery, director of surgical oncology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Precision Medicine Center of Excellence for Pancreatic Cancer. "As a result, essentially all people diagnosed with a cyst are followed long-term. Surgeons are faced with making recommendations to patients based on the risks and benefits of surgery with limited information. We seldom miss a cancer, but it is at the expense of performing an operation that in hindsight may not have been necessary. This study directly addresses these fundamental problems in management of pancreatic cysts."

In the study, the precise nature of the cysts examined was confirmed through histopathological analysis of resected surgical specimens. The cysts were then classified into three groups: those with no potential to turn cancerous, for which patients would not require periodic monitoring; mucin-producing cysts that have a small risk of progressing to cancer, for which patients can receive periodic monitoring for progression to possible cancer; and cysts for which surgery is recommended because there is a high likelihood of progression to cancer.

The CompCyst test, developed by the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center-led investigators, was created with patient data including clinical impressions and symptoms, images from CT scans and molecular features such as DNA alterations within cyst fluid.

In the study, the researchers evaluated the molecular profiles, including DNA mutations and chromosome changes, of a large number (862) of pancreatic cysts. They then fed the molecular information, along with clinical and radiologic data, into a computer-based program that used artificial intelligence to classify patients into the three groups noted previously.

Based on histopathological analysis of the surgically resected cysts, the researchers found that surgery was not needed for 45% of the patients that underwent surgery for their cysts. This unnecessary surgery was performed because the clinicians could not determine if the cysts were dangerous. In these patients, if CompCyst had been used, the researchers estimated that 60% to 74% of the patients (depending on the cyst type) could have been spared these unnecessary surgeries.

The study had several limitations, the researchers note, including that pancreatic cyst fluid was obtained at the time of surgery, and that the cysts evaluated are more atypical than those seen in routine clinical practice.

"We think CompCyst has the capacity to substantially reduce unnecessary surgeries for pancreatic cysts. Over the next five years, we hope to use CompCyst in many more patients with cysts in an effort to guide surgical treatment -- to determine when surgery is needed and when it is not needed -- and evaluate how well the test performs," says Bert Vogelstein, M.D., Clayton Professor of Oncology, co-director of the Ludwig Center at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Scientists have discovered that a specific brain cell known as a 'projection neuron' has a central role to play in the brain changes seen in multiple sclerosis (MS). The research, published today in Nature, shows that projection neurons are damaged by the body's own immune cells, and that this damage could underpin the brain shrinkage and cognitive changes associated with MS. These new findings provide a platform for specific new MS therapies that target damaged brain cells to be developed.

Multiple sclerosis is a diease of the brain and the spinal cord that affects over two million people worldwide. The potential symptoms of MS are wide ranging and can include problems with vision, movement and cognitive abilities. Previous research has shown that a brain region called the cortex shrinks over time in MS patients, known as cortical atrophy. The processes driving this cortical shrinkage have, until now, been unclear.

In a new international study from the University of Cambridge, University of Heidelberg and University of California, San Francisco, researchers used post-mortem human brain samples from MS patients to study a wide range of cell types implicated in the disease, and compared their findings to brain samples donated from people that did not have MS.

"Using a new technique called single nuclei RNA sequencing, we were able to study the genetic make-up of individual brain cells to understand why some cells might be more susceptible to damage in MS than others," said Dr Lucas Schirmer, lead scientist on the project from the University of Heidelberg.

"Our results showed that a particular type of nerve cell called "projection neurons" were particularly vulnerable to damage in the brains of MS patients."

In healthy people, these projection neurons are involved in communicating information between different areas of the brain. It is therefore possible that the damage to these cells can affect cognitive abilities in MS patients. Moreover, the loss of this particular cell types helps explain why brains of MS patients shrink over time - the more cells that are damaged and lost, the less space the brain takes up.

The researchers also showed that immune cells in the brains of MS patients were targeting projection neurons and causing cell stress and damage.

"We found that antibody-producing immune cells are related to the damage of the important projection neurons in MS brains," said Professor David Rowitch from the University of Cambridge, the senior scientist coordinating the research. "This suggests that cell therapies targeting these immune cells could protect projection neurons and provide a novel treatment for progressive MS."

Dr Dmitry Velmeshev and Professor Arnold Kriegstein from the University of California, San Francisco worked together to develop the techniques used to analyse the genetic code within the individual brain cells.

"These new techniques have wide applicability in the understanding of human neurodevelopmental and neurological disorders and are providing new insight into not only MS, but also autism spectrum disorder," said Professor Arnold Kriegstein.

Dr Andrew Welchman, Head of Neuroscience at Wellcome, said: "This study uses state-of-the-art measurements of gene expression to provide a valuable new window onto the process by which inflammation in the brain causes MS to progress. This new insight should stimulate further development of treatments that could freeze the disease in its tracks. It is an exciting advance that attests to the importance of cutting-edge genetic tools in understanding diseases of the brain."

Dr Bruce Bebo, Executive Vice President for Research at the National MS Society (USA) said: "Research, such as Professor Rowitch's on projection neurons in MS brain tissue, contributes to our understanding of the underlying pathology in MS and is likely to lead to better, more targeted ways to stop the disease, protect the nervous system from further injury, and slow down progression."

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa.--Skin tests that can distinguish between cattle that are infected with tuberculosis (TB) and those that have been vaccinated against the disease have been created by an international team of scientists. The traditional TB tuberculin skin test shows a positive result for cows that have the disease as well as those that have been vaccinated against the disease. By distinguishing between these two groups, the new tests will facilitate the implementation of vaccination programs that could considerably reduce the transmission of this infectious bacterial disease from cattle to cattle and humans.

"TB kills more people globally than any other infectious disease. In fact, three people die every minute from the disease," said Vivek Kapur, professor of microbiology and infectious diseases and Huck Distinguished Chair in Global Health, Penn State. "What is less widely known is that cattle in many low- and middle-income countries are not only infected with and suffer horribly from tuberculosis, but also represent important reservoirs for transmission of the disease to humans through the consumption of unpasteurized milk or dairy products and co-habitation with infected animals."

The team created its tests--which are described in the July 17 issue of Science Advances--by targeting specific proteins, previously identified by scientists from Denmark and the United Kingdom, that are missing from, or not secreted by, the widely used vaccine strain, called BCG. The ability to express these proteins were lost when the bacterium was adapted for use as a vaccine more than a hundred years ago. By indicating the presence or absence of reactivity to these "missing" proteins, the new tests can distinguish between an animal that is infected with the natural form of the disease and one that has been vaccinated.

"Our diagnostic reagent is a simple cocktail of synthetic peptides representing antigens that are present in the naturally occurring TB bacteria but not recognized by the immune system following BCG vaccination," said Sreenidhi Srinivasan, graduate student in molecular, cellular and integrative biosciences at Penn State. "These antigens, when applied to the skin, cause an immune reaction in cows that have TB, whereas no reaction occurs in animals that have been vaccinated with BCG."

The publication also highlights a promising alternative test format based on a recombinant fusion protein that is comparable in performance to the peptide cocktail. This protein has been developed for the United Kingdom government to be compatible with its potential cattle vaccination program, although the peptide-based test potentially obviates regulatory hurdles in countries that place greater restrictions on the use of products from genetically modified organisms.

The team assessed the usefulness of its test in cattle in the United Kingdom, Ethiopia and India.

"It worked beautifully, exceeding the performance of the traditional test by clearly differentiating vaccinated from infected cattle," said Kapur.

Kapur noted that the BCG vaccine, which was developed in the early 1900s from the bacterium that causes disease in cattle and is the world's most widely used vaccine in humans, has remained largely unused in cattle due to the potential to complicate diagnosis. In fact, the European Union, the United States and many other countries prohibit its use in cattle mainly for this reason.

"While BCG rarely provides sterilizing immunity for either humans or cattle, it has been shown to be effective at preventing a substantial number of infections and protecting against the more severe forms of human TB," he said. "However, the inability to tell whether a cow has the disease or has simply been vaccinated has prevented governments from implementing cow vaccination programs, leaving both animals and humans vulnerable to infection."

Instead of vaccinating cattle, many countries have used a "test and slaughter" approach to control TB in these animals. The highly successful method effectively eliminated TB in the United States nearly 100 years ago and is still used in high-income countries around the world. Unfortunately, test-and-slaughter remains unfeasible in most low- and middle-income countries, where small and marginal cattle owners cannot afford to lose what often represents their primary source of income and nutrition. Additionally, in some countries, such as India, the slaughter of cattle is illegal due to the animal's cultural and spiritual importance.

Treating TB-infected cows with antibiotics is not feasible either. While humans who contract TB often can be treated--as long as they do not contract a strain that is resistant to antibiotics--treating cows with antibiotics is expensive and can remove the animals from their service of providing milk, sometimes for years.

"The novel diagnostic test we have developed has the potential to replace the current standard test that has been in use for close to a century now," said Srinivasan. "Apart from being economical and easy to manufacture and to standardize quality control, the new tests enable reliable differentiation between infected and vaccinated animals, which is one of the most important limitations of the current method. Access to such tests pave the way for implementation of vaccination as an intervention strategy in settings where test-and-cull strategies are not affordable for socioeconomic reasons."

The 18-year life expectancy gap between people with mental illness and the general population can only be bridged by protecting patients' physical and mental health, according to a new study.

As part of a Lancet Psychiatry Commission into mental illness, University of Queensland researchers found patients' physical health was often overlooked in pursuit of treating the mind.

UQ psychiatrist Associate Professor Dan Siskind said it was time to prioritise the physical health of such patients.

"One in five people across the world live with mental illness and people with mental illness can die up to 18 years earlier than the general population," Dr Siskind said.

"Contrary to popular belief, this is not because of suicide.
"It is from physical health issues associated with mental illness like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and lifestyle factors.

"This commission aimed to find out how great the life expectancy gap really is between those living with mental illness and the general population, discover the causative pathways for this gap, and look at practical strategies to narrow it."

Dr Siskind said conditions such as diabetes served as a stark example, with rates twice as high in those with mental illness compared to the general population.

"Getting people more physically active, improving nutrition and stopping smoking and substance abuse are all lifestyle factors that can be modified to improve health outcomes," he said.

"We also looked at issues caused by medications and how these can be managed to mitigate side-effects such as obesity."

The researchers hope the findings serve as a blueprint for doctors and healthcare professionals treating patients with mental illness.

"It can be hard for people with mental illness to engage with primary healthcare providers, although they may still see their psychiatrist," Dr Siskind said.

"We wanted to empower psychiatrists to be involved in the primary healthcare of their patients and engage the efforts of a multi-disciplined team, a team that includes not only psychologists and nurses but also nutritionists and exercise physiologists.

"A 'one-stop-shop', where patients can have their mental health and physical health needs met by a team of experts, can lead to improved health care outcomes."

Dr Siskind said this multi-disciplined approach would help patients take back control of their well-being, and overcome a debilitating lack of motivation.

"Motivation is often lost among people with mental illness.

"If we can remove barriers to treatment, then we can start to make improvements across a broad range of physical conditions.

"This is about making everyone realise patients are whole people; it's not just about eradicating mental health problems; we need to look after physical health too."

Firms in Japan are changing people's perceptions about common spiders, worms and insect larvae. These seemingly unwanted creatures have unique features that could be useful for many applications that benefit humans, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society.

Both small and large firms in Japan have warmed up to the idea of researching creepy-crawlies because these creatures are cost efficient and alleviate ethical concerns about using rats or other mammals for testing, freelance contributor Katsumori Matsuoka writes. Genome Pharmaceuticals Institute (GPI), for example, is using silkworms as animal models to study human disease, identifying a compound in soil bacteria that could be used to treat Staphylococcus aureus infections. The company is also using silkworms to screen for functional food ingredients, discovering that lactic acid bacteria can be added to food to boost immune systems.

Remarkably, nematodes can detect cancer in human urine, an ability being exploited by scientists at Hirotsu Bio Science for a cancer diagnostic kit. Still other firms are using silkworms' and spiders' natural abilities to produce silk for clothing, construction materials and biomonitoring. In 2021, Spiber will start production of spider silk at a new structured-protein fermentation facility in Thailand -- the world's largest of its kind. Two Japanese trading firms, Itochu and Marubeni, invested $10 million each in a venture called Musca, which seeks to use fly larvae to convert the excreta of livestock into fertilizer and animal feed. These surprising discoveries suggest that creepy-crawlies deserve more appreciation and less revulsion.

Renewable sources of energy such as wind or photovoltaic are intermittent. The production peaks do not necessarily follow the demand peaks. Storing green energy is therefore essential to moving away from fossil fuels. The energy produced by photovoltaic cells is stored during the day and by wind-power when the wind blows to be used later on when needed.

What do we have now?

The Li-ion technology is currently the best performing technology for energy storage based on batteries. Li-ion batteries are used in small electronics (smartphones, laptops) and are the best options for electric cars. Their drawback? Li-ion batteries can catch fire, for instance because of a manufacturing problem. This is due in part to the presence of liquid organic electrolytes in current batteries. These organic electrolytes are necessary to the battery but highly flammable.

The solution? Switching from a liquid flammable electrolyte to a solid (i.e., moving to &laquo all-solid-state » batteries). This is a very difficult step as lithium ions in solids are less mobile than in liquids. This lower mobility limits the battery performances in terms of charge and discharge rate.

The discovery made by UCLouvain

Scientists have been looking for materials that could enable these future all-solid-state batteries. Researchers from UCLouvain recently discovered such material. Its name? LiTi2(PS4)3 or LTPS. The researchers observed in LTPS the highest lithium diffusion coefficient (a direct measure of lithium mobility) ever measured in a solid. LTPS shows a diffusion coefficient much higher than known materials. The results are published in the prestigious scientific journal Chem from Cell Press.

The discovery? This lithium mobility comes directly from the unique crystal structure (i.e., the arrangement of atoms) of LTPS. The understanding of this mechanism opens new perspectives in the field of lithium ion conductors and, beyond LTPS, opens an avenue towards the search for new materials with similar diffusion mechanisms.

What's next? The researchers need for further study and improve the material to enable its future commercialization. This discovery is nevertheless an important step in the understanding of materials with extremely high lithium ion mobility which are ultimately needed for the developing the "all-solid-state" batteries of the future. These materials including LTPS might end up being used in many the technologies that we use in our daily lives from cars to smartphones.

Batteries power our lives: we rely on them to keep our cell phones and laptops buzzing and our hybrid and electric cars on the road. But ever-increasing adoption of the most commonly used lithium-ion batteries may actually lead to increased cost and potential shortages of lithium -- which is why sodium-ion batteries are being researched intensely as a possible replacement. They perform well, and sodium, an alkali metal closely related to lithium, is cheap and abundant.

The challenge? Sodium-ion batteries have shorter lifetimes than their lithium-based siblings.

Now, UC Santa Barbara computational materials scientist Chris Van de Walle and colleagues have uncovered a reason for this loss of capacity in sodium batteries: the unintended presence of hydrogen, which leads to degradation of the battery electrode. Van de Walle and co-authors Zhen Zhu and Hartwin Peelaers published their findings in the journal Chemistry of Materials.

"Hydrogen is commonly present during the fabrication of the cathode material, or it can be incorporated from the environment or from the electrolyte," said Zhu, who is now at Google. "Hydrogen is known to strongly affect the properties of electronic materials, so we were curious about its effect on NaMnO2 (sodium manganese dioxide), a common cathode material for sodium-ion batteries." To study this, the researchers used computational techniques that are capable of predicting the structural and chemical effects that arise from the presence of impurities.

Professor Peelaers, now at the University of Kansas, described the key findings: "We quickly realized that hydrogen can very easily penetrate the material, and that its presence enables the manganese atoms to break loose from the manganese-oxide backbone that holds the material together. This removal of manganese is irreversible and leads to a decrease in capacity and, ultimately, degradation of the battery."

The studies were performed in Van De Walle's Computational Materials Group at UC Santa Barbara.

"Earlier research had shown that loss of manganese could take place at the interface with the electrolyte or could be associated with a phase transition, but it did not really identify a trigger," Van de Walle said. "Our new results show that the loss of manganese can occur anywhere in the material, if hydrogen is present. Because hydrogen atoms are so small and reactive, hydrogen is a common contaminant in materials. Now that its detrimental impact has been flagged, measures can be taken during fabrication and encapsulation of the batteries to suppress incorporation of hydrogen, which should lead to better performance."

In fact, the researchers suspect that even the ubiquitous lithium-ion batteries may suffer from the ill effects of unintended hydrogen incorporation. Whether this causes fewer problems because fabrication methods are further advanced in this mature materials system, or because there is a fundamental reason for the lithium batteries to be more resistant to hydrogen is not clear at present, and will be an area of future research.

Salt marshes are important habitats for fish and birds and protect coasts under sea level rise against stronger wave attacks. However, salt marshes themselves are much more vulnerable to these global change threats than previously thought. Stronger waves due to sea level rise can not only reduce the marsh extent by erosion of the marsh edge, but these waves hamper plant (re-)establishment on neighboring tidal flats, thus making it much more difficult for the marsh to recover and grow again. An international research team, led by researches from the Netherland Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), reports these results in a paper published on Jul.16, 2019 at Limnology and Oceanography.

Sea level rise limits recovery of eroded marshes

Marsh loss often takes place when waves erode the seaward marsh edge. Sea level rise is expected to increase such erosion by allowing stronger waves on neighboring tidal flats due to raised water depth. While a healthy marsh can recover the lost land via plants recolonizing the bare tidal flats, waves enhanced by sea level rise can greatly slow down or even block such recovery by hampering seed establishment. "A few cm increase of wave height can double the time needed for vegetation recovery on the tidal flats", says Zhenchang Zhu, the leading author of this paper, who conducted this research at NIOZ, but is currently working at Guangdong University of technology, China. "This is problematic as sea level rise may speed up marsh erosion meanwhile limiting its recovery. In the long run, this can cause big loss in marsh extent and key ecosystems services humans rely on, such as coastal defense", Zhu continues.

Good neighbors make healthy marshes

How to improve marsh health and coastal safety under sea level rise? "The key is to manage their neighbors: the tidal flats", Zhu adds. Habitats at lower tidal elevations (e.g. tidal flats) do not make a direct contribution for flood defense, yet they affect the stability of ecosystems at higher tidal elevations (e.g. saltmarshes) that directly protect the coast against wave attacks. When harnessing saltmarshes as natural flood defense, it is important to maintain well elevated tidal flats for ensuring stable marshes and thus safer coasts. This may be achieved by e.g. supplying dredging materials to keep a sufficiently high elevation or by e.g. restoring shellfish reef ecosystems (e.g. oyster reefs and mussel beds) that limit wave formation on the tidal flat. Such measures are beneficial for quick vegetation recovery after marsh edge erosion to support healthy marshes. "Overall this research teaches us that with good management of our tidal flats, we can preserve wide wave-attenuating marshes, and hence continue to benefit from their value for flood defense", says Zhenchang Zhu.