Tech

If you've ever watched Planet Earth, you know the ocean is a wild place to live. The water is teaming with different ecosystems and organisms varying in complexity from an erudite octopus to a sea star. Unexpectedly, it is the sea star, a simple organism characterized by a decentralized nervous system, that offers insights into advanced adaptation to hydrodynamic forces--the forces created by water pressure and flow.

Researchers from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering found that sea stars effectively stay attached to surfaces under extreme hydrodynamic loads by altering their shape. The researchers, including the Henry Salvatori Early Career Chair in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Mitul Luhar and doctoral student Mark Hermes, found sea stars create a "downforce" due to their shape. This mean that instead of being lifted by the flow forces, the sea stars are pushed downward toward the rock or floor surface they are on.

Sea stars are incredibly adaptive, said Luhar, assistant professor in the USC Viterbi Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering. "When there is high wave activity and high water forces, sea stars will grow skinnier and take on a lower profile. When the sea star is transported to a sheltered environment with lower hydrodynamic forces, they pop up a bit and their cross sections get bigger."

Understanding such shape shifting could help design underwater robots that can similarly adapt to extreme hydrodynamic environments, Luhar said.

Interaction between Shape and Force

The researchers tested this understanding of sea star shape and its impact on force in the water with both computational and 3-D printed models. "Right away what we noticed," Luhar said, "is that instead of the sea stars being pulled away from the surfaces they were on, they were being pushed down--simply because of their shape."

Luhar said the researchers saw this downforce effect as key to how the sea star--and in the future, an underwater robot--could stay attached to a sea bed or a rock as opposed to being lifted up away from it, even in the most extreme conditions.

The researchers tested other shapes, as well. With a cone or a dome, Luhar said, the water flows up and then down, following the contours of the shape reasonably well (see fig...) With the flow ultimately pushing downward, an equal and opposite force is created, resulting in an overall lifting effect. With the sea star shape--which is similar to a triangular wedge--the water flows upward, with the angles on each side acting like a ramp that pushes water away from its surface.

"As the sea star pushes the flow away, the flow creates an equal and opposite force that pushes down on the sea star," Luhar said. "A cone or sphere does not create that same 'ramp effect,' and thus does not create a similar downforce."

To get the full three-dimensional understanding of what the force fields look like, Luhar said they use the computational models to further illuminate what they witnessed with the 3-D printed shapes. Of the shapes they considered, Luhar said the spherical dome performed the worst in terms of lift versus downforce, meaning, it performed poorest in staying attached to the bottom surface or ground.

Soft Robotics

The next step is studying a soft structure than can morph in real time, Luhar said. Hermes is working on developing this structure currently. Key to its design is allowing it to be responsive in the water channel, Luhar said, thus giving it the ability to adapt its shape as needed to stay adherent to a rock or sea bed, or alternately, to allow it to lift up with the water flow.

"Let's say the water changes speed," Luhar said. "We can determine what shape would be best and the robot could shift its form accordingly."

Ultimately, Luhar said, the idea is to understand how to develop a robot that will work with the flow, instead of fight through it.

"If we can take advantage of the surrounding environment instead of battle it, we can also create more efficiency and performance gains," Luhar said.

Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological conditions, affecting more than 65 million worldwide. For those dealing with epilepsy, the advent of a seizure can feel like a ticking time bomb. It could happen at any time or any place, potentially posing a fatal risk when a seizure strikes during risky situations, such as while driving.

A research team at USC Viterbi School of Engineering and Keck Medicine of USC is tackling this dangerous problem with a powerful new seizure predicting mathematical model that will give epilepsy patients an accurate warning five minutes to one hour before they are likely to experience a seizure, offering enhanced freedom for the patient and cutting the need for medical intervention.

The research, published in the Journal of Neural Engineering, is led by corresponding authors Dong Song, research associate professor of biomedical engineering at USC Viterbi School of Engineering and Pen-Ning Yu, former PhD researcher in Song's lab, in collaboration with Charles Liu, professor of clinical neurological surgery and director of the USC Neurorestoration Center. The other authors are David Packard Chair in Engineering and professor of biomedical engineering, Ted Berger, and medical director of the USC Comprehensive Epilepsy Program at the Keck Medical Center, Christianne Heck.

The mathematical model works by learning from large amounts of brain signal data collected from an electrical implant in the patient. Liu and his team have already been working with epilepsy patients with implantable devices, which are able to offer ongoing real-time monitoring of the brain's electrical signals in the same way that an electroencephalogram (EEG) uses external electrodes to measure signals. The new mathematical model can take this data and learn each patient's unique brain signals, looking out for precursors, or patterns of brain activity that show a "pre-ictal" state, in which a patient is at risk of seizure onset.

Song said the new model is able to accurately predict whether a seizure may happen within one hour, allowing the patient to take the necessary intervention.

"For example, it could be as simple as just alerting the patient their seizure is coming the next hour, so they shouldn't drive their car right now, or they should take their medicine, or they should go and sit down" Song said. "Or ideally in future we can detect seizure signals and then send electrical stimulation through an implantable device to the brain to prevent the seizure from happening."

Liu said that the discovery would have major positive implications for public health, given epilepsy treatment had been severely impacted in the past year by the pandemic.

"This is hopefully, going to change the way we deal with epilepsy going forward and it's driven by the needs that have been in place for a long time, but have been highlighted and accelerated by COVID," Liu said.

He said that currently, patients with medically intractable epilepsy­-epilepsy that cannot be controlled with medication-are admitted electively to the hospital for video EEG monitoring. With the advent of COVID, these elective admissions completely halted and epilepsy programs across the country ground to a halt over the past year. Liu said this highlights the need for a new workflow by which EEG recordings from scalp or intradural electrodes can be acquired at home and analyzed computationally.

"So we need to create a new workflow by which, instead of bringing patients to the ICU, we take the recordings from their home and use the computation models to do everything they would have done in the hospital," Liu said. "Not only can you manage patients using physical distancing, you can also scale in a way that only technology allows. Computation can analyze thousands of pages of data at once, whereas a single neurologist cannot."

How the Seizure Prediction Model Works

Song said the new model was different to previous seizure prediction models in that it extracts both linear and non-linear information from the patient's brain signals.

"Linear is the simple feature. If you understand the parts, you can understand the whole," Song said. "Whereas the non-linear feature means that even if you understand the parts, when you scale up it has some emergent properties that cannot be explained."

"For some patients, linear features are more important and for other patients, non-linear features are more important," Song said.

Song said that while other models predict brain activity over a short time scale, a matter of milliseconds, his team's model examined an extended time scale.

"The brain is a multi-temporal scale device so we need to understand what happens not just in the short term, but many more steps in the future," Song said.

He said that the model is also unique in that it is patient-specific-it extracts the information that is significant for each individual patient. Because every brain is very different in terms of the signals that indicate a "pre-ictal" state.

"Patients are all different from each other, so in order to accurately predict seizures, we need to record signals, we need to look at a lot of different features and we need to have an algorithm to select the most important feature for prediction," Song said.

"I can't tell you how exciting, this is. At USC we've been very interested in trying to create tools that enhance the public health dimension of these diseases that we're treating, and it's really difficult," Liu said

"Epileptologists are still relatively few in number in many parts of our country and world. While they can identify many subtle features on EEG, the kinds of models that Song can create can identify additional features at a massive scale necessary to help the millions of patients affected by epilepsy in our region and worldwide," Liu said.

Heck, who is also co-director for the USC Neurorestoration Center, said that there are two important issues to the clinical relevance of this technology.

"One is that a majority of patients who suffer from epilepsy live with fear and anxiety about their next seizure which may strike like lightening in the most inopportune moment, perhaps while driving, or just walking in public. An ample warning provides a critical 'get safe' opportunity," Heck said. "The second relevant issue clinically is that we have brain implants, smart devices, that this engineered technology can enhance, giving greater hope for efficacy of our existing therapies."

Allergy sufferers are no strangers to problems with pollen. But now - due to climate change - the pollen season is lasting longer and starting earlier than ever before, meaning more days of itchy eyes and runny noses. Warmer temperatures cause flowers to bloom earlier, while higher CO2 levels cause more pollen to be produced.

The effects of climate change on the pollen season have been studied at-length, and according to some scientists, has grown by as much as 20 days in the past 30 years, at least in the US and Canada. But one important element is often overlooked - "Pollen is meant to fly," says Dr Annette Menzel, Professor of ecoclimatology at the Technical University of Munich. "Transport phenomena have to be taken into account."

Along with her colleagues, she studied the transport of pollen in Bavaria, Germany, in order to better understand how the pollen season has changed over time. "The transport of pollen has important implications for the length, timing, and severity of the allergenic pollen season," says Dr Ye Yuan, a coauthor on the study.

Menzel and her team focused on Bavaria - a state in southeast Germany - and used six pollen monitoring stations scattered around the region to analyze data. Their results were recently published in Frontiers in Allergy. They found that certain species of pollen, such as from hazel shrubs and alder trees, advanced the start of their seasons by up to 2 days per year, over a period of 30 years (between 1987 and 2017). Other species, which tend to bloom later in the year, such as birch and ash trees, moved their seasons 0.5 days earlier on average each year, across that same time period.

Pollen can travel hundreds of kilometers and, with changing weather patterns and altered species distributions, it's possible that people are becoming exposed to "new" pollen species - meaning pollen that our bodies are unaccustomed to encountering each year.

While it can sometimes be difficult to differentiate between local and transported pollen, the researchers focused on pre-season transports. So, for example, if pollen from birch trees was present at the monitoring station, but local birch trees would not flower for at least another 10 days, that pollen was considered to be transported from far away.

"We were surprised that pre-season pollen transport is a quite common phenomenon being observed in two-thirds of the cases," says Menzel. As for why it's important to understand how much pollen is from far away, Yuan says that: "Especially for light-weight allergenic [pollen], long distance transport could seriously influence local human health."

By examining another element besides simple pollen concentration, scientists can delve deeper into how exactly the pollen season is being affected by climate change. For example, Menzel says that the pollen season may be even longer than estimated based on flowering observations by "taking into account pollen transport, as it has been done in our current study."

While the Munich study did not track how far pollen was transported, and only differentiated between local and long-range transport (meaning pollen coming from outside Bavaria), it provides a crucial key in our understanding of annual pollen patterns. Yuan says that future studies should account for "climate change scenarios [and] land use/land cover changes." He also adds that citizen scientists may be able to contribute to pollen studies, who can help collect local observations and contribute to data collection.

It doesn't look like the pollen season will shorten any time soon, but more research on the subject can provide a better understanding of global patterns and changes so that we can better address these issues in the future.

Ultra-fast, cheap LAMP-based COVID tests could be performed by non-experts at work and in public spaces, giving results in under an hour

With the hope of contributing to the fight against cancer, researchers in Sweden have published a new molecular mapping of proteins that regulate the cell division process - identifying 300 such proteins.

The release of the data, which was published today in the scientific journal, Nature, is significant because it helps bring medical research closer to the point of being able to target specific proteins to treat cancer.

Identifying and understanding what characterizes these proteins is important, says co-author Emma Lundberg, a professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology whose research group at Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab) in Stockholm contributed to the mapping of these proteins. The long-term hope is that doing so will lead to progress in development of tailor-made cancer drugs and treatments, adapted to the specific anatomical condition of the individual patient in relation to the underlying disease, Lundberg says.

In addition to the 300 newly-identified proteins, the researchers report that 20 percent of the human proteome (all protein molecules that the genome encodes for) indicates cell-to-cell variation, that is, fluctuation in gene expression within otherwise identical cells.

This information presents medical research with new insights into the cell cycle, in which a balance is moderated between those proteins which promote cell proliferation and those which inhibit it.

Lundberg says the work is now incorporated into the open-access research database, the Human Protein Atlas.

"Our hope is that this provides a valuable resource for a better understanding of, among other things: cell-to-cell variation, the human cell cycle, and the newly-identified proteins in the cell cycle and their role in the formation of tumors," she says.

In order to identify the cell cycle-specific proteins, the researchers used so-called immunofluorescent microscopy. The researchers then combined the collected data with RNA sequencing of individual cells to describe the temporal presence of RNA and proteins throughout the cell cycle.

What The Study Did: National COVID-19 registry data are used in this study to describe the epidemiology, clinical characteristics, complications, and hospital and postdischarge outcomes of pediatric patients with multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) and to compare each in patients with severe COVID-19.

Authors: Adrienne G. Randolph, M.D., of Boston Children's Hospital, is the corresponding author.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jama.2021.2091)

Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

Small changes to people's writing style can reveal which social group they "belong to" at a given moment say psychologists.

Groups are central to human identity, and most people are part of multiple groups based on shared interests or characteristics - ranging from local clubs to national identity.

When one of these group memberships becomes relevant in a particular situation, behaviour tends to follow the norms of this group so that people behave "appropriately".

The new study - by Lancaster University, the University of Exeter, Imperial College London and University College London - demonstrates that group normative behaviour is reflected in a person's writing style.

It also shows that assessing writing style can reveal - with an accuracy of about 70% - which of two groups affected a person while they were writing a particular piece of text.

The paper, published in the journal Behavior Research Methods, is entitled: "ASIA: Automated Social Identity Assessment using linguistic style."

Professor Mark Levine of Lancaster University said: "Our work shows that it is possible to see changes in the way people are thinking about themselves - just from the way they write. These identity traces seem to be present even when we control for the topics that people are writing about - or where they are doing the writing. The ASIA tool kit is an important advance in our ability to study the way psychological identity plays a role in shaping behaviour."

To demonstrate their method, researchers studied how people who are parents and feminists change their writing style when they move from one identity to another on anonymous online forums such as Reddit, Mumsnet and Netmums.

"People are not just one thing - we change who we are, our identity, from situation to situation," said Dr Miriam Koschate-Reis from the University of Exeter.

"In the current situation, many people will need to switch between being a parent and being an employee as they are trying to manage home schooling, childcare and work commitments.

"Switches between identities influence behaviour in multiple ways, and in our study we tracked which identity was active by focussing on language.

"We found that people not only change their writing style to impress their audience - they change it based on the group identity that is influencing them at the time.

"So, when we asked people in an experiment to think about themselves as a parent, their language patterns reflected this."

The study avoided "content" words (a parent might mention "childcare" for example) and focussed on stylistic patterns including use of pronouns, "intellectual" words and words expressing emotions.

Commenting on the possible uses of the new method, Dr Koschate-Reis said: "We are currently focussing on mental health.

"It is the first method that lets us study how people access different group identities outside the laboratory on a large scale, in a quantified way.

"For example, it gives us the opportunity to understand how people acquire new identities, such as becoming a first-time parent, and whether difficulties 'getting into' this identity may be linked to postnatal depression and anxiety.

"Our method could help to inform policies and interventions in this area, and in many others."

Group identities have been found to affect thoughts, emotions and behaviour in many settings - from work contexts to education to political activism.

Research is ongoing to understand how much control we have over switches between different identities - most of which are thought to be triggered by the social context.

Dr Koschate-Reis said it might be possible to manipulate the cues that trigger an identity switch by going to a location associated with the identity.

For example, students might find it easier to write in an "academic style" when they are in the library rather than the local coffee shop.

MEMPHIS, TN, FEBRUARY 24, 2021:- Early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease has been shown to reduce cost and improve patient outcomes, but current diagnostic approaches can be invasive and costly. A recent study, published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, has found a novel way to identify a high potential for developing Alzheimer's disease before symptoms occur. Ray Romano, Ph.D., RN, completed the research as part of his Ph.D. in the Nursing Science Program at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) College of Graduate Health Sciences. Dr. Romano conducted the research through the joint laboratory of Associate Professor Todd Monroe, Ph.D., RN, at The Ohio State University, who is also a graduate of the UTHSC Nursing Science Ph.D. Program and Dr. Ronald Cowan, M.D., Ph.D. who is the Chair of Psychiatry at UTHSC.

Dr. Romano said, "There is a real need to find ways to diagnose Alzheimer's disease in the primary care setting where most patients first present with concerns for their memory."

The research found that cognitively healthy people at increased genetic risk of late-onset Alzheimer's disease showed significantly lower sensitivity to thermal pain but felt greater unpleasantness related to that pain when compared to people at lower risk of the disease. These results suggest that altered pain perception could potentially be used as a biomarker of late-onset Alzheimer's disease before symptoms occur.

Previous research had identified a specific genetic allele, APOE4, as a marker associated with an increased incidence of developing late-onset Alzheimer's disease. In his ground-breaking study, Dr. Romano was able to identify individuals who were cognitively healthy but had the APOE4 allele. He was then able to determine whether people with the APOE4 allele responded differently to experimentally-induced painful stimuli than did cognitively healthy individuals who did not have this allele.

Dr. Cowan noted, "This work also highlights the great strength of joint collaboration between nursing and psychiatry, which have been highly productive for our research programs." The study included 49 cognitively healthy adults aged 30-89. Twelve of the subjects had the APOE4 allele, and 37 did not. They were assessed for group differences in pain thresholds and feelings of unpleasantness in response to experimentally-induced thermal pain stimuli. Dr. Romano believes that this is the first report of a connection of APOE4 allele status with an altered response in pain in a cognitively healthy sample of adults across the lifespan.

Use of this biomarker to identify people at risk of Alzheimer's disease before the onset of serious symptoms would be much less invasive than other methods of Alzheimer's diagnosis, which include lumbar punctures and positron emission topography (PET) scans. These are expensive tests that are not practical in primary care settings.

"In this exploratory study, Dr. Romano demonstrated that healthy adults with a specific gene for developing late-stage Alzheimer's disease experience pain differently than people without the genetic marker," Dr. Monroe said. "Next, we need to examine the brain's pain systems to determine why this may be occurring. If future studies confirm these results, findings may eventually translate into earlier screening in people at risk of developing Alzheimer's disease leading to more treatment options."

Approximately 5.8 million people in the U.S. live with Alzheimer's disease - the sixth-leading cause of death in the country, according to the Alzheimer's Association. It is estimated that 500,000 new cases of the disease are diagnosed in the U.S. annually.

Plants and animals can rapidly respond to changes in their environment, such as a Venus flytrap snapping shut when a fly touches it. However, replicating similar actions in soft robots requires complex mechanics and sensors. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have printed liquid metal circuits onto a single piece of soft polymer, creating an intelligent material that curls under pressure or mechanical strain. Watch a video of the smart material here.

Ideally, soft robots could mimic intelligent and autonomous behaviors in nature, combining sensing and controlled movement. But the integration of sensors and the moving parts that respond can be clunky or require an external computer. A single-unit design is needed that responds to environmental stimuli, such as mechanical pressure or stretching. Liquid metals could be the solution, and some researchers have already investigated their use in soft robots. These materials can be used to create thin, flexible circuits in soft materials, and the circuits can rapidly produce heat when an electric current is generated, either from an electrical source or from pressure applied to the circuit. When the soft circuits are stretched, the current drops, cooling the material. To make a soft robot capable of autonomous, intelligent movement, Chao Zhao, Hong Liu and colleagues wanted to integrate liquid metal circuits with liquid crystal elastomers (LCE) -- polymers that can undergo large changes to their shape when heated or cooled.

The researchers applied a nickel-infused gallium-indium alloy onto an LCE and magnetically moved the liquid metal into lines to form an uninterrupted circuit. A silicone sealant that changed from pink to dark red when warmed kept the circuit protected and in place. In response to a current, the soft material curled as the temperature increased, and the film turned redder over time. The team used the material to develop autonomous grippers that perceived and responded to pressure or stretching applied to the circuits. The grippers could pick up small round objects and then drop them when the pressure was released or the material was stretched. Finally, the researchers formed the film into a spiral shape. When pressure was applied to the circuit at the bottom of the spiral, it unfurled with a rotating motion, as the spiral's temperature increased. The researchers say that these pressure- and stretch-sensitive materials could be adapted for use in soft robots performing complex tasks or locomotion.

Improving road safety in cities could result in a lower rate of violent crime, according to research from UCL.

Experts analysing crime and car accident data in Mexico City found a surprisingly high level of synchronicity between the two on a weekly cycle, suggesting that applying more resources to prevent road accidents would improve crime rates by enabling more efficient policing.

For the paper, published today in Cities as Complex Systems special issue in PLOS ONE, experts plotted the time and locations of nearly one million car accidents and 200,000 violent crimes from January 2016 to March 2020 in Mexico City, creating a 'heartbeat' - so-called because of its resemblance to an electrocardiogram - of the city.

The pattern of crash and crime occurrences were similar day by day, repeating on the weekly cycle, the concept of which had previously been unexplored. Experts observed 'valleys' during the night and peaks in the evening, where at a city level, crime peaked at 7.5 times more than in the depth of valleys, and car accidents peaked at 12.3 times.

Lead author Dr Rafael Prieto Curiel (UCL CASA) explained: "Distinct parts of the city have different heartbeats in terms of crime and of crashes. A neighbourhood with bars and restaurants has a different heartbeat than a residential neighbourhood or one with offices or schools. The land-use of the region can help us explain why we observe distinct heartbeats and make projections and forecasts".

Crime and road accidents have been observed and analysed together before, but not in terms of cyclic behaviour. The team analysed both by capturing weekly occurrences of crime and accidents, using geotagged data capturing time and location. This created the heartbeat of the city.

This heartbeat was then analysed for a more specific location, relating to distance from the Mexico City Metro and other public transport stations, to create 'tiles' of the city. Nearby tiles were found to have similar heartbeats, in that they saw peaks and valleys in crime and crashes at similar times during the week. These peaks and valleys related to economic activities, such as residents commuting to work.

The team further observed that crimes and crashes reach their respective intensity peak on Friday night and valley on Tuesday morning. The mathematical method the team used can be applied to other cities.

Using the weekly cycle makes it easier to predict peaks and valleys in the near future, with potential implications on city policing. Whereas most cities have resources - albeit of differing levels - in place to tackle and prevent crime, road safety has had comparatively less resource attributed to it.

Dr Prieto Curiel added: "Focusing more on preventing road accidents would improve crime prevention in urban areas and give more resource to police tackling crime. Serious road accidents usually require the presence of police officers to divert traffic and secure the area.

"Unfortunately, due to the temporal synchronisation between crashes and crime, the times when more officers are engaged with road accidents is also when they are most needed due to the high levels of crime. Therefore, road accidents reduce the presence of police officers and could increase response time to other emergencies."

Road accidents kill more than 1.35 million people around the world each year and 50 million people suffer non-fatal injuries in a crash. Three times more people are killed by cars than all types of crime and violence combined.

Additionally, crime and road accidents are becoming a more relevant urban problem. In Mexico, some of its cities suffer nearly twice the number of crimes per capita than the national level, so most of the urban population fears crime, In the US, for example, 54% of road accident deaths in 2018 occurred in urban areas, up from less than 40% in 2000.

The family of ENDOU enzymes is found in most organisms, yet its functions are only poorly understood. In humans, it has been connected with cancer. RNA viruses, such as SARS-CoV2, contain a gene corresponding to ENDOU, and this is important for virus replication and the suppression of the immune response. However, so far only few details of the role of these enzymes are known. The research group led by the molecular geneticist Dr. Wenjing Qi from the University of Freiburg now contributes some more details to its function in a study published by the renowned scientific journal Nature Communications. They suggest that the gene ENDU-2 could be responsible for triggering tumors in the body from a distance. In addition, the team discovered a novel, seemingly contradictive response: Under stress, ENDU-2 can contribute both to the protection of the organism and to its destruction.

The researchers studied the nematode worm C. elegans, which is frequently used for such genetic investigations. More than 60 percent of the genes are similar in worms and humans, including one for ENDOU, which is called ENDU-2. The current theory of tumor development suggests that cells only become cancer cells when errors, called mutations, accumulate in their genes. These arise, for example, from radiation, certain chemicals, or during aging. Qi showed back in 2017 that such errors do not have to occur in the cancer cells themselves, but they can also arise elsewhere in the body. Cancer is therefore triggered remotely, so to speak. The researcher suspected that the damaged cells in this case send signals to accomplish this, which then reprogram the other tissues. They now discovered the signal for this: ENDU-2.

„ENDOU/ENDU-2 is not only selectively discharged from stressed cells and circulated throughout the body, but it can also bind to the messenger RNA (mRNA) of many genes at the site of origin and in the target cells", Qi explains. These mRNAs are the working copies of genes and are needed as blueprints for the production of all proteins and enzymes. What surprised the researcher was that ENDU-2 can perform two different functions under stress: at the site of origin, it cuts and destroys the mRNA, which reduces metabolism and prevents the already stressed organism from making faulty new proteins. At the destination, the RNA remains intact, and ENDU-2 helps these cells to survive. For this, however, it must be dosed precisely; otherwise it can cause tumor formation.

One conclusion that can be drawn from this could be that the worm specifically protects the embryos, i.e. its offspring, in times of great stress. "In this way, it seems guaranteed that whenever the organism's self-healing powers are not sufficient for mother and child, it at least ensures the survival of the progeny", speculates Prof. Dr. Ralf Baumeister, who was also involved in the study and in whose department Qi leads a research group. The Freiburg scientists now know that the loss of ENDU-2 can also reprogram stem cells. These then lose their immortality within a few generations. Next, the team wants to explore which conditions cause ENDU-2 to distinguish between destruction and protection.

Researchers have developed a data transfer system that can transmit information 10 times faster than a USB. The new link pairs high-frequency silicon chips with a polymer cable as thin a strand of hair. The system may one day boost energy efficiency in data centers and lighten the loads of electronics-rich spacecraft.

The research was presented at this month's IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference. The lead author is Jack Holloway '03, MNG '04, who completed his PhD in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) last fall and currently works for Raytheon. Co-authors include Ruonan Han, associate professor and Holloway's PhD adviser in EECS, and Georgios Dogiamis, a senior researcher at Intel.

The need for snappy data exchange is clear, especially in an era of remote work. "There's an explosion in the amount of information being shared between computer chips -- cloud computing, the internet, big data. And a lot of this happens over conventional copper wire," says Holloway. But copper wires, like those found in USB or HDMI cables, are power-hungry -- especially when dealing with heavy data loads. "There's a fundamental tradeoff between the amount of energy burned and the rate of information exchanged." Despite a growing demand for fast data transmission (beyond 100 gigabits per second) through conduits longer than a meter, Holloway says the typical solution has been "increasingly bulky and costly" copper cables.

One alternative to copper wire is fiber-optic cable, though that has its own problems. Whereas copper wires use electrical signaling, fiber-optics use photons. That allows fiber-optics to transmit data quickly and with little energy dissipation. But silicon computer chips generally don't play well with photons, making interconnections between fiber-optic cables and computers a challenge. "There's currently no way to efficiently generate, amplify, or detect photons in silicon," says Holloway. "There are all kinds of expensive and complex integration schemes, but from an economics perspective, it's not a great solution." So, the researchers developed their own.

The team's new link draws on benefits of both copper and fiber optic conduits, while ditching their drawbacks. "It's a great example of a complementary solution," says Dogiamis. Their conduit is made of plastic polymer, so it's lighter and potentially cheaper to manufacture than traditional copper cables. But when the polymer link is operated with sub-terahertz electromagnetic signals, it's far more energy-efficient than copper in transmitting a high data load. The new link's efficiency rivals that of fiber-optic, but has a key advantage: "It's compatible directly with silicon chips, without any special manufacturing," says Holloway.

The team engineered such low-cost chips to pair with the polymer conduit. Typically, silicon chips struggle to operate at sub-terahertz frequencies. Yet the team's new chips generate those high-frequency signals with enough power to transmit data directly into the conduit. That clean connection from the silicon chips to the conduit means the overall system can be manufactured with standard, cost-effective methods, the researchers say.

The new link also beats out copper and fiber optic in terms of size. "The cross-sectional area of our cable is 0.4 millimeters by a quarter millimeter," says Han. "So, it's super tiny, like a strand of hair." Despite its slim size, it can carry a hefty load of data, since it sends signals over three different parallel channels, separated by frequency. The link's total bandwidth is 105 gigabits per second, nearly an order of magnitude faster than a copper-based USB cable. Dogiamis says the cable could "address the bandwidth challenges as we see this megatrend toward more and more data."

In future work, Han hopes to make the polymer conduits even faster by bundling them together. "Then the data rate will be off the charts," he says. "It could be one terabit per second, still at low cost."

The researchers suggest "data-dense" applications, like server farms, could be early adopters of the new links, since they could dramatically cut data centers' high energy demands. The link could also be a key solution for the aerospace and automotive industries, which place a premium on small, light devices. And one day, the link could replace the consumer electronic cables in homes and offices, thanks to the link's simplicity and speed. "It's far less costly than [copper or fiber optic] approaches, with significantly wider bandwidth and lower loss than conventional copper solutions," says Holloway. "So, high fives all round."

WATERTOWN, Mass. - Gene therapy has traditionally been conceptualized as a one-time, curative treatment option; however, research shows that there may be a need for subsequent doses years after initial treatment. While adeno-associated viral (AAV) vectors are a core part of this powerful therapeutic approach, they present two key challenges in gene therapy.

The first challenge is their immunogenicity. In gene therapy, the formation of neutralizing antibodies (Nabs) in response to AAV vector administration precludes retreatment of a patient due to the potentially dangerous immune response that would occur after a second or third administration of the therapy.

The second obstacle relates to their durability. AAV vectors are non-replicating, so transgene expression is expected to wane over time, especially in children expected to grow, most likely necessitating redosing. As many gene therapies in development are being investigated for the treatment of rare, often lethal, pediatric disorders, the durability of these therapies is of particular concern.

Researchers led by Takashi K. Kishimoto, Ph.D., showed the benefits of an immune tolerance platform called ImmTORTM to overcome these challenges and ultimately unlock the potential of gene therapy. In a Science Advances paper titled "Enhancement of liver-directed transgene expression at initial and repeat doses of AAV vectors admixed with ImmTOR nanoparticles," researchers demonstrate that the addition of ImmTOR nanoparticles to AAV vectors has the potential enhance the efficacy, safety and durability of gene therapies by mediating more efficient transgene expression at the first dose and by enabling vector redosing by preventing the formation of capsid-specific antibodies.

ImmTOR combines nanoparticle technology with an approved anti-inflammatory and immunomodulatory drug, rapamycin, or the tolerogenic adjuvant, to generate antigen-specific immune tolerance. In the study, researchers evaluated the effects of ImmTOR on repeat administration of the same AAV vector expressing secreted embryonic alkaline phosphatase (SEAP), a widely used reporter gene transgene, in immunologically naïve mice. Co-administration of ImmTOR and AAV8-SEAP showed a beneficial effect on transgene expression after the first dose and reached levels approximately two-to-three-fold higher than that observed in mice treated with the AAV vector alone. The first dose benefit was immediate, dose dependent and not mouse strain or capsid specific.

The study also investigated the extent to which the addition of ImmTOR nanoparticles to AAV vectors, known as admixing, has on expression and its potential mechanism. Admixing of ImmTOR and AAV showed even higher levels of vector genome copies in the liver and mRNA and protein expression of the transgene SEAP, compared to sequential administration of AAV-SEAP and ImmTOR or dosing with AAV-SEAP alone in mice. The cumulative benefit of enhancing first dose transgene expression and enabling repeat dosing can provide up to a four-fold increase in transgene expression compared to gene therapy with AAV vector alone.

New Orleans, LA -- A new study of how the 2020 major hurricanes and the COVID-19 pandemic affected each other as well as disaster response found that although prior experience enabled community-based organizations to respond to the pandemic, the pandemic is also creating new challenges to preparing for and responding to natural disasters. The research is published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, available here.

"Two major crises hit Louisiana and coastal communities in the Southeastern United States in 2020 - a significant increase in the frequency and severity of hurricanes, and the COVID-19 pandemic," says Benjamin Springgate, MD, MPH, Chief of Community & Population Medicine at LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 26 representatives of community-based programs in southern Louisiana. The participants ranged in age from 28 to 70. The majority (61.5%) were non-Hispanic white; 30.8% were Black; one participant (3.8%) was Latinx and one participant (3.8%) was Vietnamese. Three-fourths of the participants lived in Orleans Parish, and most represented local-level organizations. Participants represented 24 community-based agencies and organizations that provide a wide variety of services, including environmental and social justice issues impacting underserved communities, community health promotion, health and mental health services, disaster preparedness and recovery, funding of community initiatives, community development, faith-based services, affordable housing, child welfare advocacy and support, and criminal justice reform.

"Local leaders noted that due to the pandemic, it is now harder to plan for evacuations in the event of a hurricane," adds Dr. Springgate. "Organizations find it is also more difficult to provide in-person client services and challenging to plan for providing food and other resources to residents who may shelter in place during a storm."

The analysis also identified several strengths based on disaster preparedness experience and capabilities.

"Local organizations identified several strengths based on their disaster preparedness experience - particularly that based on prior experience with hurricanes, they already had a framework for how to respond and adapt to the novel challenges presented by COVID," Dr. Springgate notes.

The analysis shows that the increase in demand for disaster-related services has been accompanied by a decrease in the availability of services due to a decline in available financial resources as well as the constraints on services delivery imposed by protocols designed to prevent the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

The authors conclude that despite the anticipated challenges to delivering services in response to a natural disaster, the networks of partnerships and prior experiences with disaster preparedness and response, along with certain features of the community that have fostered resilience to adverse events, represent key assets in coping with the pandemic and with the current hurricane season. Though limited to a particular setting with extensive experience with climate-related disasters and preparedness and response, the lessons for interaction with a pandemic context may have important implications for approaches in other areas to consider enhancing preparedness and response resources, training and partnerships.

Researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have developed a new machine learning-powered platform, known as OC-SMART, that can process ocean color in satellite images 10 times faster than the world's leading platform. The work, which will be adopted by NASA, is one of the first machine learning-based platforms in ocean color analysis that can process both coastal and open ocean regions globally to reveal data on sea health and the impact of climate change.

The work, led by Knut Stamnes, a physics professor at Stevens, and spearheaded by Yongzhen Fan Ph.D. '16, a visiting physics scholar in Stamnes' lab, solves a 30-year-old problem in retrieving data from both coastal regions and open ocean areas. For decades, NASA's SeaDAS platform exceled at analyzing ocean color from open ocean with clean air, but it frequently recovered inaccurate results from coastal areas and inland waters such as the Great Lakes, where the complex interplay among the atmosphere, sea, light, reflections, and air particulates made analysis difficult.

"It is vital to study coastal areas and inland waters," said Stamnes, an expert on radiative transfer whose work appears in the December 2020 issue of Remote Sensing of Environment. "Even though these areas make up a small fraction of the world in terms of mass, it's where we live and where all the biological activity happens."

The OC-SMART platform, or Ocean Color-Simultaneous Marine and Aerosol Retrieval Tool, adds to SeaDAS' capabilities by taking data from satellite imagery and processing them through special algorithms, which are built on powerful machine learning techniques and extensive simulations of radiative transfer. In this project, radiative transfer is defined as the complex flow of electromagnetic energy between the ocean and the atmosphere. This process impacts how ocean color is perceived and analyzed by SeaDAS, the world's leading platform for processing ocean color from satellite images for decades.

The OC-SMART software will now be incorporated into NASA's SeaDAS platform. Final products of the software include useful data on chlorophyll concentrations and the presence of phytoplankton and pollution, all helpful indicators of the ocean's state. Notably, Stamnes said, OC-SMART will be adapted to the upcoming NASA PACE mission scheduled to launch in 2023. Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem, or PACE, is a NASA Earth-observing satellite mission that will continue and advance observations of global ocean color, biogeochemistry, and ecology, as well as the carbon cycle, aerosols and clouds.

"OC-SMART is a general, all-purpose, easy to use platform," said Wei Li, a physicist at Stevens who worked on the project and has been contacted by several researchers in other countries since the software became publicly available.

The European Space Agency has a platform similar to OC-SMART, but it focuses mainly on European coastal areas and not worldwide. A tool that could process coastal as well as open ocean regions globally was needed, said Nan Chen, a physicist at Stevens who was also involved in the project.

"For years, scientists were having difficulty processing ocean color in coastal regions and places that experience heavy pollution or other air particles such as sandstorms," Fan, the lead author, added. "That's why we developed OC-SMART in order to solve these problems."

The OC-SMART comes at a time when there is growing interest in analyzing ocean color in coastal areas, said Stamnes. OC-SMART is also one of the first tools in ocean color analysis to use machine learning, which has only begun to make inroads into oceanography.

"There are satellites now in orbit that are giving us more information on what's going on around the coasts and in places like the big lakes," said Stamnes. "So, this opens new areas of research. And with machine learning, it's a whole new game."