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RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- What if a single musical note could mean the difference between life and death?

A new sensor based on a 3,000 year old African musical instrument can be used to identify substances, including a poisonous chemical sometimes mistakenly added to medicines. The mbira sensor, which can be constructed from off-the-shelf or discarded materials, could offer pharmacists and consumers in the developing world inexpensive protection from counterfeit and adulterated drugs.

The World Health Organization estimates that 10 percent of all medicines in low- and middle- income countries are counterfeit. Existing technologies to identify counterfeit drugs are both expensive and require expert technicians, neither of which are readily available in much of the developing world.

The device, built by an engineer at the University of California, Riverside, and described in a paper published today in ACS Omega, can accurately measure the density of any liquid. Comparing the density of a suspicious liquid medicine to the density of the known product can reveal whether or not the two medicines have the same ingredients.

The research was inspired by the observation that frequencies of sound created by a musical instrument are determined by the instrument's physical properties. For example, the pitch of a guitar string is a function of the length and tension of the string.

"Could we add a sample to a musical instrument, measure the resulting change in the instrument's notes, and use this change to determine information about the sample and its properties?" asked William Grover, an assistant professor of bioengineering in UCR's Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering.

To find out, Grover and his team modified a mbira, or kalimba, a musical instrument originating in Africa made of graduated metal prongs attached to a soundboard. The prongs play different musical notes when plucked with the finger. By replacing the metal prongs with a length of bent metal tubing and injecting it with a liquid, Grover compared the frequency of the musical notes made by the filled and empty tube to measure the liquid's density. Empty, the tube played a G sharp note; when filled with water, it played an F sharp.

With scrap wood and tubing he found in his garage, Grover built a new device from scratch. Experiments determined the optimal mbira sensor tube had thin walls and a length no shorter than 50 millimeters. His students used the device to measure the density of everything from local river water to buffalo milk in India, but they soon settled on detecting dangerous medicines as the ideal first application for their sensor.

One adulterant sometimes found in counterfeit cold medicines is diethylene glycol, a poison that looks, tastes, and smells like glycerol, a syrup that carries the active ingredients in many cold and flu medicines. Since 1985, a fatal mass poisoning caused by medicine containing diethylene glycol has occurred somewhere in the world on average every two years, with a combined death toll in the hundreds. An inexpensive sensor usable by both experts and consumers would save lives.

The researchers first confirmed their mbira sensor could tell the difference between harmless glycerol and deadly diethylene glycol. After filling the sensor with each substance, recording its musical notes using a smartphone, and uploading the recordings to an analysis website they created (mbira.groverlab.org), they found that glycerol and diethylene glycol make notes whose frequencies differ by 10 hertz.

This is too small a difference to notice by ear, but it's easily detectible by the website's software. It shows that someone using the mbira sensor and a smartphone could easily distinguish these two substances.

The researchers then tested six different batches of a popular cold and flu medicine purchased from various pharmacies in the Riverside area. All of the samples made the same musical note when loaded into the sensor. This suggests the medicine samples were identical and authentic, and that any sample of the drug making a different musical note must be chemically different from the authentic drug and may be counterfeit or adulterated.

The sensor could help drug companies or compounding pharmacists in the developing world verify bottles of glycerol that might have been mislabeled, unintentionally or not, by the manufacturer or distributor. It can also help consumers detect counterfeit drugs by comparing the density of a suspect sample to a known good sample of the same drug.

Measuring density as a musical note also presents the surprising possibility to write the frequency using musical notation easily interpreted by anyone who can read music, with little to no scientific training. For this reason, the authors included musical notation versions of the density measurements in the paper.

Philadelphia, September 12, 2018 - A new report published in European Psychiatry identified a significant association between childhood adversity and impaired social cognitive functioning among adults diagnosed with major psychiatric disorders. Through a comprehensive review of all research conducted to date, the investigators established that a traumatic early social environment frequently leads to social cognitive problems and greater illness severity for individuals with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, major depressive disorder, or post-traumatic stress disorder.

"Early childhood neglect, abuse, and/or trauma puts patients at greater risk for developing cognitive impairments that will later affect social perception and interaction, a core aspect of disability in major psychiatric disorders," explained lead investigator, Gary Donohoe, MPsychSc, DClinPsych, PhD, Centre for Neuroimaging and Cognitive Genomics, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland.

Deficits in social cognitive function are a hallmark feature of major psychiatric disorders resulting in impaired social and occupational functioning, specifically with regard to emotion recognition and regulation, theory of mind (the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others), attributional style, and social perception. Traumatic childhood experiences -- such as emotional and physical abuse and neglect, early loss of caregivers, and insecure attachment styles -- are frequently reported in as high as 85 percent of patients with various psychiatric disorders.

These findings are relevant to gain a better understanding the mechanisms between a traumatic early social environment and subsequent social cognitive problems and increased illness severity for a range of major psychiatric disorders in adulthood. The first three years of life are a very sensitive period for the development of attachment relationships, and exposure to traumatic events during this time has irreversible effects on subsequent cognitive, social, and emotional development. The link between childhood adversity and insecure attachment is supported by a number of previous studies. Once a dysfunctional attachment pattern is formed in childhood, it tends to persist later in life and can cause misperceptions of others' intentions and beliefs. Heightened threat vigilance can distract abuse victims from processing peripheral cognitive and social information, and the lack of stable, positive role models can interfere with their ability to recognize and respond to emotional cues.

The investigators hope that the study will guide future public health efforts to develop clinical interventions that reduce the consequences of childhood adversity. "With a better understanding of the connections between early trauma and later deficits, mental health clinicians may be able to develop strategic interventions that ameliorate patients' disabilities and improve their quality of life. The fact that these deficits are not generally improved by antipsychotic medication makes social cognition an important treatment target and the development of a causal working model of the deficits of crucial importance," noted Prof. Donohoe.

The study, funded by the European Research Council and Science Foundation Ireland, involved a systematic review of the published literature to provide a comprehensive picture of current research. This included the assessment of more than 2,650 published papers on the topic that were identified using the PubMed and PsycINFO databases. Of these, 25 research articles were found to meet the study's strict criteria and were included in the review. The investigators recommend additional research to model the relationship between early adversity and genetic risk that contributes to social cognitive development. Understanding the mechanisms by which neurocognitive and biological factors come into play is also an important subject for future study.

Anyone who has ever tried to find a way through a crowded pedestrian zone has - literally - run into the problem: While some people choose to weave their way through the gaps, others stick to the straight and narrow, and collisions are only a matter of time. Something very similar can happen during active protein transport in cells when molecular motors with different modes of locomotion share the same multilane highway (i.e. protein filament). Theoretical analyses carried out by LMU physicists led by Professor Erwin Frey, and now published in the journal Physical Review X, show how this comes to pass. The authors describe a newly developed model, which captures the collective behavior of two different types of motors and provides insight into the complex phenomena that can result.

Biological cells are traversed by networks of fibrous protein polymers, which together make up the cytoskeleton. These structures serve as highways for the intracellular transport of protein cargoes, which are attached to molecular motor proteins that walk along the filaments, stepping from one subunit to the next. This process is vital for cell function. However, different motor proteins move along in different ways. Some follow helical trajectories, and winding their way around the cylindrical filament. Others advance in a straight line. "The collective motions of a combination of such motors had not been modelled up to now," says Emanuel Reithmann, a doctoral student in Frey's group and joint first author of the paper together with Patrick Wilke.

Frey's team has now closed this gap by developing a theoretical model for the behavior of two types of particles that differ in their modes of motion. The filament itself is modelled as a two-dimensional cylindrical lattice on which particles hop from one node to the next. One particle species follows a straight course, i.e. remains in the same lane throughout, while the other switches lanes in a biased manner, and effectively traces out a spiral on the filament. Simulations based on the model revealed that, under these conditions, the two particle species indeed hinder one another stronger than previously thought. As a result of their differing trajectories, the precise distribution of the particles within the lattice has a critical effect on subsequent developments. As the two motor species have fixed modes of movement, the range of positions open to each is intrinsically restricted, and is further diminished by the disposition of the others at any instant. Hence a given position may be accessed from more directions than are open to the particle that currently occupies it. "Therefore, it is possible for a single particle to block the motions of several others, even though the lattice may be relatively sparsely occupied," says Frey. "This effect gives rise to a cascade of surprising phenomena, including the emergence of patterned distributions of particles that had not been observed in previous models."

Typhoon Mangkhut had already strengthened into a Super Typhoon when NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite grabbed a visible image of the storm in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean on Sept. 11. It is forecast to intensify even more.

Fortunately, Mangkhut has moved away from the Marianas Islands and is moving over open ocean so there are no watches or warnings in effect.

On Sept. 11 at 12:12 a.m. EDT (0412 UTC) the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured visible image of Super Typhoon Mangkhut. The image showed a clear eye surrounded by bands of powerful thunderstorms.

At 5 a.m. EDT (7 p.m. CHST/0900 UTC) on Sept. 11, the eye of Super Typhoon Mangkhut was located near latitude 14.0 degrees north and longitude 139.1 degrees east. That's about 380 miles west of Guam. Mangkhut is moving west at 17 mph. This westward motion is expected to continue tonight, followed by a turn to the west-northwest on Wednesday and Thursday, bringing Mangkhut near northern Luzon Friday evening.

The National Weather Service in Tiyan, Guam noted that "Maximum sustained winds have increased to 155 mph, making Mangkhut a Category 4 super typhoon. Mangkhut is expected to intensify into a Category 5 super typhoon Wednesday and Thursday."

Typhoon force winds extend up to 65 miles from the center. Tropical storm force winds extend up to 205 miles northeast of the center and up to 165 miles to the southwest.

NASA's Aqua satellite provided an infrared look at Tropical Depression Paul and found its center pushed away from strongest storms.

At 5:50 a.m. EDT (0950 UTC) on Sept. 11, from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite revealed a small area of strongest storms in Paul. Those storms, pushed west of the center of circulation, had cloud tops with temperatures near minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 56.6 degrees Celsius). NASA research has found that cloud top temperatures that cold have the capability to generate heavy rainfall.

NOAA's National Hurricane Center (NHC) said "The center of Paul remains to the east of a small area of deep convection."

At 8 a.m. EDT (1500 UTC), the center of Tropical Depression Paul was located near latitude 22.3 North, longitude 124.1 West. Paul is far from land areas so there are no warnings or watches in effect. It is centered about 905 miles (1,460 km) west of the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico.

The depression is moving toward the west-northwest near 12 mph (19 kph).  A gradual turn toward the west and a decrease in forward speed is anticipated over the next few days.

Maximum sustained winds remain near 35 mph (55 kph) with higher gusts. Slow weakening is anticipated as Paul moves into a stable, drier air mass and over cooler sea surface temperatures. Paul is expected to weaken into a remnant low on Wednesday, Sept. 12.

For updated forecasts, visit: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov

NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the Luzon Strait and captured a visible image of the latest tropical storm to form in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean, Tropical Storm 27W. 27W is expected to be renamed Tropical Storm Barijat.

The Luzon Strait is a body of water located between Taiwan and the Philippines. It is south of Taiwan and north of Luzon, Philippines. Luzon is the largest and most populous island in the Philippines and the northernmost island.

At 1:10 a.m. EDT (0510 UTC) on Sept.10 the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite provided a visible image of Tropical Storm 27W. Satellite imagery shows a small, slowly consolidating system with flaring central convection (developing thunderstorms) and shallow bands of thunderstorms loosely wrapping into an obscured low level circulation.

At 11 a.m. EDT (1500 UTC) on Sept. 10, 27W was located near latitude 21.3 degrees north and longitude 120.4 degrees east. That's about 225 nautical miles south of Taipei, Taiwan. Maximum sustained winds were near 40 mph (35 knots/62 kph). 27W is moving toward the west-southwest near 7 mph (6 knots/11 kph).

Tropical Storm 27W is forecast to continue tracking west-southwestward over the next three day and slowly intensify. The Joint Typhoon Warning Center noted that the storm is only expected to peak at 52 mph (45 knots/83 kph) sometime on Sept. 12. Tropical Storm 27W is expected to make landfall on Sept. 13 over the Luichow Peninsula, China and cross it where it will emerge into the Gulf of Tonkin and make a final landfall late on Sept. 13 or early Sept. 14 north of Hanoi, Vietnam.

Mentally reframing pain as a pleasant experience is an effective regulation strategy that acts independently of the opioid system, finds new human research published in JNeurosci. The study supports clinical use of mental imagery techniques, such as imagining a new context or consequence of a painful event, in conjunction with pain-relieving drugs.

Chantal Berna, Siri Leknes and colleagues tested two approaches toward modulating pain perception. For a mental imagery task, healthy men and women were instructed to imagine individually calibrated heat pain applied to their forearm as a pleasant experience, for example by thinking about warming up by a fire after coming in from the cold. A relative relief task used visual cues to manipulate participants' expectations about the forthcoming heat pain. Although both tasks made the pain experience more pleasant, only the effects of the relative relief task were blocked by naloxone -- the life-saving drug used to treat opioid overdose. Mental imagery was unaffected by naloxone, indicating that this approach works through opioid-independent mechanisms.

PITTSBURGH--The transfer of gene cassettes across generations of strawberry plants has been shown to drive changes in sex chromosomes, according to a team led by a researcher from the University of Pittsburgh Department of Biological Sciences.

Distinguished Professor of Evolutionary Ecology Tia-Lynn Ashman, along with researchers from Oregon State University's Department of Integrative Biology and Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, published the paper, "Repeated translocation of a gene cassette drives sex chromosome turnover in strawberries," in the September edition of PLOS Biology.

The study is supported through a National Science Foundation award granted to Pitt's Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.

Researchers determined that Wild North American octoploid strawberries feature separate sexes with homomorphic, female heterogametic (ZW) inheritance, whose origins trace back to three different chromosomes from three different taxonomic groups. The researchers were able to identify sex-determining region sequences that formed an SDR cassette in female plants that were never found in males. Further study of the SDR cassette showed "a history of repeated translocation."

The discovery is the first known to show that "plant sex regions can 'jump'" and indicates that "the phenomenon may be adaptive by gathering and locking new genes into linkage with sex," according to the paper.

"Although we know something about what determines whether an individual will be female or male -- or the more varied mating types found in plants -- their evolution is still poorly understood," said Samuel Scheiner, program director at the National Science Foundation. "This study shows that process to be much more complex than we might have guessed. These results can help create new varieties of crop plants and perhaps tell us something about how the great diversity of plants came to be."

Ashman said the work adds a novel phenotype to the broad set of evidence -- including antibiotic resistance and human traits -- supporting the theory of scientist Barbara McClintock, who received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1983 for the discovery of mobile genetic elements.

"We're trying to understand more broadly the mechanisms that determine why sex chromosomes are different across species. Here we have the first clear evidence that gene movements underlie the turnover leading to different chromosomes determining sex," said Ashman.

Washington-- While most interaction with digital content is still constrained to keyboards and 2-D touch panels, augmented and virtually reality (AR/VR) technologies promise ever more freedom from these limitations.

AR/VR devices can have their own drawbacks, such as a tendency to induce visual motion sickness or other visual disturbances with prolonged usage due to their stereoscopy or auto-stereoscopy based designs. One promising solution is to adapt holography or light field technology into the devices instead. This, however, requires additional optics that would increase the size, weight, and cost of these devices -- challenges that have so far prevented these devices from achieving commercial success.

Now, a group of researchers in Japan and Belgium has begun to explore a combination of holography and light field technologies as a way to reduce the size and cost of more people-friendly AR/VR devices. They will present their work during The Optical Society's (OSA) Frontiers in Optics meeting, 16-20 September, in Washington, D.C. One of the themes of the meeting is virtual reality and augmented vision, with both a visionary speaker and a series of invited talks on those subjects.

"Objects we see around us scatter light in different directions at different intensities in a way defined by the object's characteristic features--including size, thickness, distance, color, texture," said researcher Boaz Jessie Jackin of the National Institute of Information and Communication Technology in Japan. "The modulated [scattered] light is then received by the human eye and its characteristic features are reconstructed within the human brain."

Devices capable of generating the same modulated light--without the physical object present--are known as true 3-D displays, which includes holography and light-field displays. "Faithfully reproducing all of the object's features, the so-called 'modulation,' is very expensive," said Jackin. "The required modulation is first numerically computed and then converted into light signals by a liquid crystal device (LCD). These light signals are then picked up by other optical components like lenses, mirrors, beam combiners and so on."

The additional optical components, which are usually made of glass, play an important role because they determine the final performance and size of the display device.

This is where holographic optical elements can make a big difference. "A holographic optical element is a thin sheet of photosensitive material--think photographic film--that can replicate the functions of one or more additional optical components," said Jackin. "They aren't bulky or heavy, and can be adapted into smaller form factors. Fabricating them emerged as a new challenge for us here, but we've developed a solution."

Recording, or fabricating, a hologram that can replicate the function of a glass-made optical component requires that particular optical component to be physically present during the recording process. This recording is an analogue process that relies on lasers and recording film; no digital signals or information are used.

"Recording multiple optical components requires that all of them be present in the recording process, which makes it complex and, in most cases, impossible to do," said Jackin.

The group decided to print/record the hologram digitally, calling the solution a "digitally designed holographic optical element" (DDHOE). They use a holographic recording process that requires none of the optical components to be physically present during the recording, yet all the optical components' functions can be recorded.

"The idea is to digitally compute the hologram of all the optical functions [to be recorded and] reconstruct them together optically using a LCD and laser," said Jackin. "This reconstructed optical signal resembles the light that is otherwise modulated by all of those optical components together. The reconstructed light is then used to record the final holographic optical element. Since the reconstructed light had all optical functions, the recorded hologram on the photosensitive film will be able to modulate a light with all of those functions. So all of the additional optics needed can be replaced by a single holographic film."

In terms of applications, the researchers have already put DDHOE to the test on a head-up light field 3-D display. The system is see-through, so it's suitable for augmented reality applications.

"Our system uses a commercially available 2-D projector to display a set of multi-view images onto a micro-lens array sheet--which is usually glass or plastic," said Jackin. "The sheet receives the light from the projector and modulates it to reconstruct the 3-D images in space, so a viewer looking through the micro-lens array perceives the image in 3-D."

One big difficulty their approach overcomes is that light from a 2-D projector diverges and must be made collimated into a parallel beam before it hits the micro-lens array in order to accurately reconstruct the 3-D images in space.

"As displays get larger, the collimating lens should also increase in size. This leads to a bulky and heavy lens, the system consuming long optical path length and also the fabrication of the collimating lens gets costly," said Jackin. "It's the main bottleneck preventing such a system from achieving any commercial success."

Jackin and colleagues' approach completely avoids the requirement of collimation optics by incorporating its function on the lens array itself. The micro-lens array is a fabricated DDHOE, which includes the collimating functions.

The researchers went on to create a head-up, see-through 3-D display, which could soon offer an alternative to the current models that use the bulky collimation optics.

[Background]

Land plants dominate terrestrial flora, and our foodstuff heavily depends on them. How land plants evolved from aquatic algae has been a problem attracting much scientific attention. In 2011, Dr. Nishiyama, one of the present authors published an article in collaboration with other researchers comparing Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, the moss Physcomitrella patens, a spikemoss species (Selaginella moellendorffii) and the thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana). The comparison revealed that, after the separation of the ancestor of land plants from Chlamydomonas, a number of genes were acquired before the diversification of land plants. However, Chlamydomonas and land plants are distantly related with a divergence time of a billion years, so the genome sequences of green algae, closer to land plants, was of clear interest. In 2014, Dr. Hori and others lead by Prof. Ohta at Tokyo Institute of Technology published the genome sequence of Klebsormidium nitens, a filamentous green alga closer to land plants than Chlamydomonas; they showed that Klebsormidium nitens has genes important for living on land equivalent to those of land plants.

Three groups of green algae are evolutionarily closer to land plants than Klebsormidiophyceae, that is, Charophyceae, Coleochaetophyceae and Zygnematophyceae (Figures 1 and 2). Among them, the Charophyceae form the most complex bodyplan with reproductive organs, antheridia and oogonia. In fact, Pringsheim, in the 1860s, already suggested that Chara (presently placed in Charophyceae) is closely related to land plants. Zygnematophyceae are considered to be the extant lineage closest to land plants, but they have a sexual reproduction system, in which gametes (reproductive cells) that are almost equal in size fuse to form zygotes, rather than with a large egg and a small swimming sperm cell. In the present study, we reveal the genome of Chara braunii*1), which is considered to have separated from land plants 550 to 750 million years ago.

[Results]

Here, 60 researchers from 40 institutions of 13 countries participated in the genome analysis of Chara braunii, a representative of Charophyceae*2). They have obtained a draft genome sequence, which is practically sufficient for comparison with the genomes of other organisms. The draft genome sequence is deposited at the DNA Data Bank of Japan (DDBJ*3)) and available through the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC).

This study was originated by the researchers at Kanazawa University and Kobe University. Chara braunii individuals were collected at Lake Kasumigaura, Ibaraki and at Saijo city, Ehime, Japan. Strains were established, free from other algae, which can be grown in laboratories, and used for genome analysis. The genome size was estimated to be large (about 2 Gbp, about two-thirds of the human genome). Illumina next generation sequencers at the National Institute of Genetics, Japan, were used for most of genome sequencing. After assembling raw sequences into scaffolds, the scaffold sequences that appeared to have originated from bacteria were excluded, and 1.75 Gbp of scaffold sequences were obtained. cDNA (mRNA was reverse transcribed into complementary DNA) was cloned in Escherichia coli at the University of Tokyo and the resulting library was randomly selected and sequenced by a conventional sequencer to produce short sub-sequences (referred to as expressed sequence tag, EST). These data were used together with the high-throughput sequence data obtained from cDNA by using Illumina next generation sequencers at the University of Tokyo and another data obtained from cDNA by the European group to predict the genes contained, and 35,422 gene structures were estimated.

The last common ancestor of Charophyceae and land plants was estimated, in this study, to possess all the genes known from land plants for cell division except one, TANGLED1. Among the genes known to be involved in the phytohormone biosynthesis and responses of land plants, Chara braunii was found to possess all the genes involved in the ethylene signaling system, while Klebsormidium nitens lacks one gene, EIN2. In addition, Chara braunii is found to have genes encoding Aux/IAA and ARF, transcription factors (genes that regulate expression of other genes) involved in the auxin response. These genes were not found in Klebsormidium nitens. On the other hand, since the TIR1-type receptor is not found in either Chara braunii or in Klebsormidium nitens, there may be unknown mechanisms acting in auxin response. Receptors for abscisic acid (PYR), jasmonic acid, and salicylic acid were not identified, indicating that the receptors found in land plants were probably gained after separation of Charophyceae and land plants. Furthermore, Chara braunii has an ortholog of GUN1, a key of the system to regulate the synthesis of chloroplast proteins by the "retrograde-" signaling from chloroplast to nucleus as seen in land plants. Chara braunii possesses more transcription factors than other green algae whose genomes have been determined.

The morphological complexity of Charophyceae may have originated from expansion of gene families after separation from land plants; thus such expansion should be independent from that of land plants. In particular, reactive oxygen species (ROS) gene network, LysM receptor-like kinases and expansion of trihelix transcription factor families should be noted. Transcriptomic analysis of sexual reproductive structures reveals intricate control by transcription factors, activity of the ROS gene network, and proteins involved in storage of nutrients and the ancestral use of plant-like storage and stress protection proteins in the zygote.

These analyses based on the Chara braunii draft genome sequence show that a variety of traits important for land plants for their terrestrial life already exist in the common ancestors of Charophyceae and land plants, which reveals that those traits peculiar to land plants were acquired before the emergence of the oldest land plants.

[Future prospects]

The present study successfully revealed the genome sequence of Chara braunii. This sequence will be referred to in developmental and genetic studies in land plants, and contribute to understanding the evolution of land plants. Since Chara cells are so large, they have been used for electrophysiological studies using a micro-electrode to measure the membrane potential. Knowledge of its genome will be beneficial understanding the molecular mechanisms underlying such physiological parameters.

In addition, Chara braunii is a cosmopolitan species distributed widely around the globe except in Antarctica and is ecologically adapted to a variety of environments. The Chara braunii strains used in this study were collected at Lake Kasumigaura, Ibaraki and at Saijo city, Ehime, Japan. The one from Lake Kasumigaura appears to be adapted to shallow water with abundant light, while the one from Saijo city is apparently adapted to deep water with lower light levels. By studying the genome sequences in relation to different environmental conditions, it may be possible to analyze and elucidate adaptation mechanisms.

Researchers at the University of York has shown that a drug commonly used to help smokers overcome addiction to cigarettes does not have the same effect in shisha smokers.

Smoking tobacco through a waterpipe, often referred to as shisha or hookah smoking, is becoming popular, particularly among young people, across the globe. It is often considered a 'safer' alternative to cigarette smoking - a common misconception.

Research at the University of York, involving a trial with more than 500 daily shisha smokers in Pakistan, where shisha smoking is particularly common, showed that varenicline - a medication used to help tackle cigarette smoking - did not make a difference in assisting shisha smokers break the habit.

Professor Kamran Siddiqi, from the University of York's Department of Health Sciences, said: "Shisha smokers inhale large volumes of tobacco and charcoal smoke exposing themselves to the same health risks as cigarette smokers, including a variety of cancers.

"Flavoured tobacco smoking, such as fruit shisha, has become particularly popular with young people, and in some countries, the hookah is a tourist attraction in some bars and restaurants.

"Whilst most countries, Pakistan included, recognise the dangers of shisha smoking, it can be difficult to regulate and medications to help people quit can prove too expensive in some parts of the world."

The research trial consisted of both men and women living in Pakistan; half were treated with the drug varenicline, and the other with a placebo drug. The treatment programme was supplemented with advice on changing behaviours to address some of the psychological aspects of addiction.

Results showed that varenicline was not more effective than placebo interventions. The researchers suggest that this is not necessarily because the drug does not work in shisha smokers, but that despite the willingness of participants to quit, only a minority made a serious attempt at quitting all forms of tobacco.

The study demonstrated that shisha smokers in the trial were highly dependent and many smoked cigarettes as well, reducing the efficacy of the drug.

Dr Omar Dogar, from the University of York's Department of Health Sciences, said: "The drug, varenicline, attaches to the nicotine receptors in the brain and deactivates them, alleviating the symptoms of craving, but along with the drug there still has to be a willingness to quit smoking.

"There are many layers to addiction, neurological and psychological, and one of the things we found in this trial is that the social aspect of shisha smoking played a significant role in its appeal. Almost 90% of our study participants smoked shisha with others."

The study suggests that more work is needed to break the social norms of shisha smoking and improving tobacco control policies. The way in which loose leaf tobacco is sold and bought in Pakistan, for example, means that standard packaging carrying health warnings do not always exist and it is still fairly cheap for most people to buy.

Professor Siddiqi said: "Shisha smokers may have a better chance of quitting if shisha smoking is less affordable and not served in cafes, bars and restaurants, as it is in many places in Asia and the Middle East.

"An approach, similar to that taken against cigarette smoking, to raise awareness of the risks, particularly with young people, and control its use in public spaces would be a step forward, alongside traditional drug and behavioural interventions."

Dr Max Ortiz Catalan of Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, has developed a new theory for the origin of the mysterious condition, 'phantom limb pain'. Published in the journal Frontiers in Neurology, his hypothesis builds upon his previous work on a revolutionary treatment for the condition, that uses machine learning and augmented reality.

Phantom limb pain is a poorly understood phenomenon, in which people who have lost a limb can experience severe pain, seemingly located in that missing part of the body. The condition can be seriously debilitating and can drastically reduce the sufferer's quality of life. But current ideas on its origins cannot explain clinical findings, nor provide a comprehensive theoretical framework for its study and treatment.

Now, Max Ortiz Catalan, Associate Professor at Chalmers University of Technology, has published a paper that offers up a promising new theory - one that he terms 'stochastic entanglement'.

He proposes that after an amputation, neural circuitry related to the missing limb loses its role and becomes susceptible to entanglement with other neural networks - in this case, the network responsible for pain perception.

"Imagine you lose your hand. That leaves a big chunk of 'real estate' in your brain, and in your nervous system as a whole, without a job. It stops processing any sensory input, it stops producing any motor output to move the hand. It goes idle - but not silent," explains Max Ortiz Catalan.

Neurons are never completely silent. When not processing a particular job, they might fire at random. This may result in coincidental firing of neurons in that part of the sensorimotor network, at the same time as from the network of pain perception. When they fire together, that will create the experience of pain in that part of the body.

"Normally, sporadic synchronised firing wouldn't be a big deal, because it's just part of the background noise, and it won't stand out," continues Max Ortiz Catalan. "But in patients with a missing limb, such event could stand out when little else is going on at the same time. This can result in a surprising, emotionally charged experience - to feel pain in a part of the body you don't have. Such a remarkable sensation could reinforce a neural connection, make it stick out, and help establish an undesirable link."

Through a principle known as 'Hebb's Law' - 'neurons that fire together, wire together' - neurons in the sensorimotor and pain perception networks become entangled, resulting in phantom limb pain. The new theory also explains why not all amputees suffer from the condition- the randomness, or stochasticity, means that simultaneous firing may not occur, and become linked, in all patients.

In the new paper, Max Ortiz Catalan goes on to examine how this theory can explain the effectiveness of Phantom Motor Execution (PME), the novel treatment method he previously developed. During PME treatment, electrodes attached to the patient's residual limb pick up electrical signals intended for the missing limb, which are then translated through AI algorithms, into movements of a virtual limb in real time. The patients see themselves on a screen, with a digitally rendered limb in place of their missing one, and can then control it just as if it were their own biological limb . This allows the patient to stimulate and reactivate those dormant areas of the brain.

"The patients can start reusing those areas of brain that had gone idle. Making use of that circuitry helps to weaken and disconnect the entanglement to the pain network. It's a kind of 'inverse Hebb's law' - the more those neurons fire apart, the weaker their connection. Or, it can be used preventatively, to protect against the formation of those links in the first place," he says.

The PME treatment method has been previously shown to help patients for whom other therapies have failed. Understanding exactly how and why it can help is crucial to ensuring it is administered correctly and in the most effective manner. Max Ortiz Catalan's new theory could help unravel some of the mysteries surrounding phantom limb pain, and offer relief for some of the most affected sufferers.

It doesn't matter if it's rye, oats, or wheat. As long as it is wholegrain, it can prevent type 2 diabetes. This is the finding of a new study from researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and the Danish Cancer Society Research Center. The comprehensive study is a strong confirmation of previous research findings on the importance of whole grains for prevention of type 2 diabetes.

The ability to use wholegrains for prevention of type 2 diabetes - previously sometimes known as adult-onset diabetes - has been known for a long time. But the role of different wholegrain sources has not been investigated. It has also been unclear how much wholegrain is needed to reduce the risk of developing diabetes.

"Most studies similar to ours have previously been conducted in the USA, where people mainly get their wholegrain from wheat," says Rikard Landberg, Professor in Food and Health at Chalmers University of Technology, and senior researcher on the study. "We wanted to see if there was a difference between different cereals. One might expect there would be, because they contain different types of dietary fibre and bioactive substances, which have been shown to influence risk factors for type 2 diabetes."

The study was conducted in Denmark, where there is a big variation in wholegrain-intake. The study showed that it made no difference which type of wholegrain product or cereal the participants ate - ryebread, oatmeal, and muesli, for example, seem to offer the same protection against type 2 diabetes.

What is more important is how much wholegrain one eats each day - and the study also provides important clarification to the scientific knowledge when it comes to daily dosages.

The participants were divided into 4 different groups, based on how much wholegrain they reported eating. Those with the highest consumption ate at least 50 grams of wholegrain each day. This corresponds to a portion of oatmeal porridge, and one slice of rye bread, for example.

The proportion who developed type 2 diabetes was lowest in the group which reported the highest wholegrain consumption, and increased for each group which had eaten less wholegrain. In the group with the highest wholegrain intake, the diabetes risk was 34 percent lower for men, and 22 percent lower for women, than in the group with the lowest wholegrain intake.

"It is unusual to be able to investigate such a large range when it comes to how much wholegrain people eat," says Rikard Landberg. "If you divided American participants into 4 groups, the group that ate the most wholegrain would be the same level as the group that ate the least wholegrain in Denmark. In Europe, Scandinavia eats the most, Spain and Italy the least."

Additionally, the study was uncommonly large, with 55,000 participants, over a long time span - 15 years.

If you compare wholegrains' role in the risk of developing type 2 diabetes against other foods that have been investigated in other studies, it is one of the most effective ways to reduce the risk when it comes to diet. Drinking coffee, and avoiding red meat, are other factors that can similarly reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes.

"Our results are in line with dietary advice, which recommends switching out foods containing white flour for wholegrains," says Rikard Landberg. "You get extra health benefits - white flour has some negative effects on health, while wholegrain has several positive effects, beyond protection against type 2 diabetes."

Wholegrains are defined as consisting of all three main components of the grain kernel: endosperm, germ, and bran. Those who avoid all cereals, in an attempt to follow a low carb diet, therefore lose out on the positive health effects of wholegrain, which come principally from the bran and the germ. Rikard Landberg thinks that cereals, and carbohydrates in general, should not be avoided in diet.

"Carbohydrates are a very varied group of foodstuffs, including sugar, starch, and fibre. We should discuss these more individually, and not throw them together in one group, because they have totally different effects on our physiology and health. When it comes to wholegrains, the research results are clear: among the many studies which have been made, in varied groups of people around the world, there hasn't been a single study which has shown negative health effects."

More on: Wholegrains

Wholegrains consist of all three main components of the grain kernel: endosperm, germ and bran. It can be both loose grains, and wholegrain flour. Grains such as oatmeal and rye, wheatberries, bulgur, and wholegrain couscous are all wholegrains. In bread and pasta, the wholegrain content can vary. Common cereals include wheat, rye, oats, corn, maize, rice, millet and sorghum.

Swedish dietary advice is to eat around 70g of wholegrain a day for women, and 90g a day for men. Some examples of how much wholegrain different foods contain:

1 50g slice of rye bread: 16 g wholegrain.

1 35g serving of oatmeal porridge: 35 g wholegrain

1 12g crispbread: 12 g wholegrain

Source: the Swedish National Food Administration and Chalmers University of Technology

More on: The study

The study used data from a prospective Danish cohort study on diet, cancer and health. It covered more than 55,000 participants, who were between 50-65 years old when the study started. During the initiation of the cohort study in the early 1990s, healthy participants had filled in detailed forms of their eating habits. Through these, the researchers established the participants' total wholegrain intake per day, which of the most common cereals they got their wholegrain from, (wheat, rye, oats, in grams per day), and the total number, and different types, of wholegrain products (in grams per day) - rye bread, other wholegrain breads, oatmeal porridge and muesli.

The cohort study was linked with data from Denmark's national diabetes register, to investigate which participants developed type 2 diabetes during a 15 year period - which in total was over 7000 people.

The tiniest of premature infants - weighing just over two pounds at birth on average - start out receiving nutrition intravenously. Over the next several days or weeks, they are transitioned to enteral (or through the gut) feeds, often delivered through feeding tubes if the baby still cannot suck or swallow. During this transition, preemies are fed through a mixture of methods, but the total protein intake tends to drop, which interferes with growth. To help clinicians maximize nutrition and growth in these infants, researchers quantified the gains and losses of different nutrition delivery practices during the transition to enteral feeds. Their results were published in the Journal of Pediatrics.

"Growth and nutrition are essential for premature babies, since as they get bigger they generally require less intervention," says lead author Gustave Falciglia, MD, MSc, neonatologist at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago and Assistant Professor of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "Our study provides important information to help neonatologists assess the total nutritional effects of their combined orders as they gradually decrease intravenous nutrition and increase enteral feeds."

Currently, the electronic health record does not calculate the total nutrition babies receive from various nutritional delivery practices during the transition to full enteral feeds. Managing optimal nutrition during the transition is a complex process and the study suggests that an automated system is needed to help clinicians weigh the tradeoffs in calorie and protein intake with different nutrition delivery practice decisions.

"Ultimately, we would like to develop an automated tool to provide immediate feedback on the calories and protein the baby is getting through multiple vehicles used to deliver nutrition during the transitional stages," says Dr. Falciglia. "This would substantially help clinicians optimize nutrition and growth in very low birth weight infants."

The study was a retrospective analysis of detailed nutritional and fluid data received by 115 very low birth weight infants over 4,643 days at Lurie Children's regional neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The median gestational age was 28 weeks and median birth weight was 1,060 grams. Infants admitted within the first week of life and discharged after the first month of life were included. The study excluded infants with chromosomal abnormalities or congenital anomalies because of the uncertain influence these conditions may have had on metabolism and growth.

Changes in calories and protein intake were estimated during five transition phases from full intravenous nutrition to full enteral nutrition. In each phase, researchers determined the effects of nutrition delivery practices including intravenous nutrition, intravenous lipids, central line, feeding fortification, fluid restriction and excess non-nutritive fluid intake. Based on their findings, the authors recommend specific approaches to maximize calorie and protein intake during various transition phases.