Tech

By José Tadeu Arantes | Agência FAPESP – Gluten is a protein complex found in cereals such as wheat, rye and barley. It is responsible for the elastic texture of dough so that loaves and rolls can be baked into different shapes while remaining flexible and crusty. It also lengthens the shelf life of bread at room temperature, when associated with preservatives.

Gluten intolerance, however, has become a global epidemic, and gluten-free products are increasingly popular. The problem is that most of those available on the market are far from corresponding to consumers’ expectations in terms of appearance, aroma, flavor and durability. A research line focusing on ways to enhance gluten-free products is being pursued in Brazil by nutritionist Vanessa Dias Capriles, a professor at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP) in Santos.

Her work is supported by FAPESP via Young Investigator and Multiuser Equipment grants. The research has resulted so far in 14 articles in scientific journals. The latest is published in Foods.

“Three conditions are currently recognized as grounds for prescribing a gluten-free diet: celiac disease, wheat allergy, and non-celiac gluten sensitivity. Celiac disease is a chronic dysfunction of genetic origin that affects 1.4% of the world population and can lead to multisystem disorders, with severe complications when left untreated. Wheat allergy is an immune reaction to the proteins in wheat. Non-celiac gluten sensitivity is a condition that can be caused by gluten or other components of wheat such as rapidly fermentable carbohydrates. Unlike celiac disease, it isn’t an autoimmune condition, and its symptoms, albeit often similar, aren’t associated with such severe complications,” Capriles told Agência FAPESP.

To meet demand from people with these conditions, but also from a much larger number of consumers who, for health-related or faddish reasons, want to eliminate gluten from their diet completely or partially, the volume of gluten-free products available is growing spectacularly and they are fast becoming a global trend instead of a niche market.

“However, the development of these products is a major technological challenge,” Capriles said. “Bread made with wheat flour has been an important human food for millennia. The sense impressions it causes are deeply ingrained in people’s lifestyle. That’s why it’s important to develop enhanced versions of these products. Market research shows that consumers are dissatisfied with the appearance, aroma, variety and convenience of the products currently available.”

Besides deficient sensory quality, gluten-free bread is often nutritionally poor. “Generally speaking, it’s made with refined starch such as rice bran combined with corn, potato and cassava starch,” she said. “It contains little fiber, proteins, vitamins or minerals, and relatively large amounts of fat. It’s not enriched with micronutrients in many countries.”

The research under way at UNIFESP has three goals: improving the overall nutritional value of gluten-free products, increasing their acceptability to consumers, and seeking technologically feasible solutions.

“We’ve obtained more than 15 formulations we consider optimal, using different techniques to create and optimize these products. They contain 50%-100% gluten-free wholemeal flour, and as a result, they contain a large proportion of fiber, with more proteins, vitamins and minerals,” Capriles said. “Qualitative consumer surveys show our gluten-free wholemeal bread products achieve comparable acceptability to bread made with regular wheat flour.”

The group researched different raw materials, including wholemeal flour from cereals such as rice, sorghum and millet; pseudo-cereals such as amaranth, quinoa and buckwheat; and others such as chickpeas, dry beans and pine nuts.

To increase the fiber content, they tried using psyllium, with positive results. Psyllium is a fibrous material made from husks of the seeds of the plant Plantago ovata. Every 100 grams supply 80 grams of soluble fiber. It is hygroscopic and expands to form a gelatinous mass when mixed with water. It is popular among consumers who are looking for functional foods and is often recommended to help treat constipation, diabetes and atherosclerosis.

“We succeeded in producing bread with 17% psyllium. Because it absorbs water, dough made with psyllium can be molded into many shapes, just like rolls and loaves made with conventional wheat flour,” Capriles said. “In more recent studies, we associated psyllium with chickpea flour and obtained surprisingly good results. Besides high acceptability and nutritiousness, its advantages include a low glycemic response [it does not raise blood sugar significantly] and heightened satiety in healthy people. Another very interesting point is that it maintained its acceptability even after being stored at room temperature for seven days.”

Next steps include finding partners in industry to transfer the technology to, she added, as well as moving ahead with the research and development on a collaborative basis.

The article “Psyllium improves the quality and shelf life of gluten-free bread” is at www.mdpi.com/2304-8158/10/5/954.

Journal

Foods

DOI

10.3390/foods10050954

WASHINGTON, July 21, 2021 -- As the Summer Olympics draw near, the world will shift its focus to photo finishes and races determined by mere fractions of a second. Obtaining such split-second measurements relies on faultlessly rounding a raw time recorded by a stopwatch or electronic timing system to a submitted time.

Researchers at the University of Surrey found certain stopwatches commit rounding errors when converting raw times to final submitted times. In American Journal of Physics, by AIP Publishing, David Faux and Janet Godolphin outline a series of computer simulations based on procedures for converting raw race times for display.

Faux was inspired when he encountered the issue firsthand while volunteering at a swim meet. While helping input times into the computer, he noticed a large portion of times they inputted were rounded to either the closest half-second or full second.

"Later, when the frequencies of the digit pairs were plotted, a distinct pattern emerged," he said. "We discovered that the distribution of digit pairs was statistically inconsistent with the hypothesis that each digit pair was equally likely, as one would expect from stopwatches."

Stopwatches and electronic timing systems use quartz oscillators to measure time intervals, with each oscillation calculated as 0.0001 seconds. These times are then processed for display to 0.01 seconds, for example, to the public at a sporting venue.

Faux and Godolphin set to work simulating roughly 3 million race times corresponding to swimmers of all ages and abilities. As expected, the raw times indicated each fraction of a second had the same chance of being a race time. For example, there was 1% chance a race time ended in either 0.55 seconds or 0.6 seconds.

When they processed raw times through the standard display routine, the uniform distribution disappeared. Most times were correctly displayed.

Where rounding errors occurred, they usually resulted in changes of one one-hundredth of a second. One raw time of 28.3194 was converted to a displayed time of 28.21.

"The question we really need to answer is whether rounding errors are uncorrected in electronic timing systems used in sporting events worldwide," Faux said. "We have so far been unable to unearth the actual algorithm that is used to translate a count of quartz oscillations to a display."

The researchers collected more than 30,000 race times from swimming competitions and will investigate if anomalous timing patterns appear in the collection, which would suggest the potential for rounding errors in major sporting events.

URBANA, Ill. - When kids sit down to eat lunch at school, fruits and vegetables may not be their first choice. But with more time at the lunch table, they are more likely to pick up those healthy foods. If we want to improve children's nutrition and health, ensuring longer school lunch breaks can help achieve those goals, according to research from the University of Illinois.

"Ten minutes of seated lunch time or less is quite common. Scheduled lunch time may be longer, but students have to wait in line to get their food. And sometimes lunch periods are shared with recess. This means the amount of time children actually have to eat their meals is much less than the scheduled time," says Melissa Pflugh Prescott, assistant professor in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition at U of I.

Prescott and study co-authors Xanna Burg, Jessica Metcalfe, and Brenna Ellison compared fruit and vegetable consumption during 10 and 20 minutes of seated lunch time, and the results were clear.

"During shorter lunch periods, children ate significantly less of the fruit and vegetable parts of their meal, while there was no significant difference in the amount of beverages or entrees they consumed. It makes sense that you might eat the part of the meal you look forward to first, and if there's enough time left you might go towards the other parts. But if there's not enough time those items suffer, and they tend to be fruits and vegetables," Prescott explains.

This particularly impacts children from low-income families who participate in the National School Lunch Program and who may not have resources to bring their own lunch from home to avoid lunch line wait times, she adds.

Prescott and her colleagues conducted the study with elementary- and middle school-aged children enrolled in a summer camp on the University of Illinois campus. The researchers set up the lunch area as a school cafeteria where students would go through the lunch line and select their food. They prepared the meals according to National School Lunch Program guidelines.

"We tried to make this as comparable to everyday school as possible. We worked with the local school district and used the same food distributors as they did, and we selected the menu items based on the local public school menu," Prescott explains.

Each day was randomly assigned to be either a short or a long lunch day. Each short lunch day was paired with a long lunch day featuring an identical menu. The researchers wanted to rule out that food types served would create any differences in what the children ate.

Research assistants took a picture of each tray as the children exited the lunch line. They monitored the time from the children sat down until they were done eating, and observed behavior throughout the meal, including any food sharing, interaction with peers, and phone use.

After the lunch period was over, the children placed their tray with any leftovers on a rack and filled out a two-question survey about the taste and appearance of their meal. The researchers measured all servings before and after the meal to obtain an estimate of how much each child ate.

While fruits were consumed at an overall higher rate than vegetables, consumption of both food types was significantly higher for longer seated lunch times, Prescott says.

She notes the study has implications for the effectiveness of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, which the U.S. government implemented in 2010 to improve nutrition standards for school meals.

"In my opinion, one of the best things about the new nutrition standards is that they require a variety of vegetables be served each week, to ensure children from all income and resource levels get exposed to different healthy foods they might not have access to at home. But if we have lunch periods that are too short to allow children the opportunity to get used to those foods, then we're almost setting the policies up to fail," Prescott says.

"A main takeaway from our study is that children need protected time to eat their fruits and vegetables. Our findings support policies that require at least 20 minutes of seated lunch time at school," she states.

School lunch time policies can be decided at the district level, with some room for individual schools to set their own standards; for example, schools can institute a longer lunch time than the district mandates.

Prescott notes that longer lunch times can also have beneficial effects for children beyond healthy eating.

"The amount of seated time children have is also a really valuable time for them to connect with their peers; they might have limited opportunities to do so throughout the school day. We found significantly fewer social interactions during the 10-minute lunch times. That indicates other positive outcomes may come from longer lunch breaks as well," she concludes.

Every brain function, from standing up to deciding what to have for dinner, involves neurons interacting. Studies focused on neuronal interactions extend across domains in neuroscience, primarily using the approaches of spike count correlation or dimensionality reduction. Pioneering research from Carnegie Mellon University has identified a way to bridge these approaches, resulting in a richer understanding of neuronal activity.

Neurons use electrical and chemical signals to relay information throughout the body, and we each have billions of them. Understanding how neurons interact with each other is important, because these correlations influence learning, decision-making, motor control and many other functions of life.

Historically, two approaches have been used to study interactions among neurons: spike count correlation and dimensionality reduction. Spike count correlation describes pairs of neurons, whereas dimensionality reduction is applied to a population of neurons. While both the pairwise and population methods are equally valid and scientifically sound, efforts to relate the two approaches have been sparse, until now. This is the novelty of collaborative research, recently published in Neuron.

"What we are providing through this study is a common language and way to navigate between two approaches," says Matt Smith, an associate professor of biomedical engineering and the Neuroscience Institute. "Essentially, scientists have been speaking different dialects of the same language when it comes to neuronal research. What we've been able to show is that they're speaking the same language, and they can communicate with each other."

To build a bridge between the two approaches, the group established concrete mathematical and empirical relationships between pairwise correlation and metrics of population-wide covariability based on dimensionality reduction. Their results provide a cautionary tale that using a single statistic on its own yields a one-sided description. A fuller, more interpretable description of interactions between neurons can be gleaned by considering a range of metrics, from both approaches.

Akash Umakantha, a graduate student with the Neuroscience Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and co-first author of the paper, alongside Carnegie Mellon graduates Rudina Morina and Benjamin Cowley, uses an analogy to help explain this work and its impact.

"There are different ways of viewing the world and different ways to explain the activity of neurons in the brain," points out Umakantha. "Let's replace neurons with friends in a social network setting. In this scenario, one approach to better understanding your network would be to look at groups of two people for trends or commonalities. Another approach could be to look at everyone together. Both are equally valid, it's just that there are different ways of capturing what is going on. Leveraging the understanding from multiple vantage points, and connecting them, ultimately broadens our perspective."

In the big picture, these concepts offer broad implications and relevance to people in different neuroscience domains, who have different ways of characterizing what is going on in the brain.

"Bridging these approaches could foster more collaboration and ways to move ideas across neuroscience domains, so that we are not entrenched in one way of thinking about something," says Byron Yu, professor of biomedical engineering and electrical and computer engineering. "A better cross-fertilization of ideas ultimately benefits everyone."

For more than 30 years, scientists on the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have focused on human-induced climate change. Their fifth assessment report led to the Paris Agreement in 2015 and, shortly after, a special report on the danger of global warming exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The Nobel Prize-winning team stressed that mitigating global warming "would make it markedly easier to achieve many aspects of sustainable development, with greater potential to eradicate poverty and reduce inequalities."

In a first-of-its-kind study that combines assessments of the risks of toxic emissions (e.g., fine particulate matter), nontoxic emissions (e.g., greenhouse gases) and people's vulnerability to them, University of Notre Dame postdoctoral research associate Drew (Richard) Marcantonio, doctoral student Sean Field (anthropology), Associate Professor of Political Science Debra Javeline and Princeton's Agustin Fuentes (formerly of Notre Dame) found a strong and statistically significant relationship between the spatial distribution of global climate risk and toxic pollution. In other words, countries that are most at risk of the impacts of climate change are most often also the countries facing the highest risks of toxic pollution.

They also measured other variables, including the correlation of the spatial distribution of toxic environments, total mortality due to pollution and climate risk, and they found a strong interconnection. They write in their in their forthcoming PLOS paper, "Global distribution and coincidence of pollution, climate impacts, and health risk in the Anthropocene": "Deaths resulting from toxic pollution are highest where the distribution of toxic pollution is greatest and, critically, also where the impacts of climate change pose the greatest risk."

"It is not surprising to find that these risks are highly correlated, but this article provides the data and analysis to inform policy, data and analysis that were previously lacking," Javeline said.

To complete the study, Javeline, Marcantonio, Field and Fuentes used data from three indexes. ND-GAIN is an index of 182 countries that summarizes a country's vulnerability and exposure to climate impacts risks and its readiness to improve climate resilience. EPI ranks 180 countries on 24 performance indicators across 10 issue categories covering environmental health and ecosystem vitality. Lastly, GAHP estimates the number of toxic pollution deaths for a country, including deaths caused by exposure to toxic air, water, soil and chemical pollution globally.

In order to make their results the most advantageous for policymakers, the authors created what they call "Target," a measure that combines a country's climate impacts risk, toxic pollution risk and its potential readiness to mitigate these risks. Based on these criteria, the top 10 countries they recommend concentrating on are Singapore, Rwanda, China, India, Solomon Islands, Bhutan, Botswana, Georgia, the Republic of Korea and Thailand. Among those countries appearing at the bottom of the list are Equatorial Guinea, Iraq, Jordan, Central African Republic and Venezuela. These nations are most likely to have outstanding governance issues that currently stand in the way of effectively addressing pollution.

"Notably, our results find that the top one-third of countries at risk of toxic pollution and climate impacts represent more than two-thirds of the world's population, highlighting the magnitude of the problem and unequal distribution of environmental risk. Given that a large portion of the world's population lives in countries at higher toxic pollution and climate impacts risk, understanding where and how to target in pollution risk mitigation is critical to maximizing reductions of potential human harm," they write.

The authors also note that by mitigating toxic pollution in large countries with high populations such as China and India, neighboring countries will also benefit. China's Air Pollution and Prevention and Control Action Plan of 2013, which specifically targets toxic emissions, is producing impressive results. Researchers have found a 40 percent reduction in toxic emissions since the plan was enacted.

"The idea of Target is to highlight where action can be taken to reduce risk to human health and flourishing, but how that targeting is done -- e.g., incentives vs. sanctions -- requires moral reflection to determine what actions should be taken and who should take them. This is especially true given the general inverse relationship between who is most responsible for producing these risks versus who is most at risk," Marcantonio said.

During the 2021-22 academic year, the University, through its annual Notre Dame Forum, will engage in a series of conversations devoted to the theme "Care for Our Common Home: Just Transition to a Sustainable Future." Inspired by Laudato Si' and Pope Francis' continued emphasis on these issues, the forum will feature a wide range of discussions and events over the coming year. Since its establishment in 2005, the Notre Dame Forum has featured major talks by leading authorities on issues of importance to the University, the nation and the larger world, including the challenges and opportunities of globalization, the role of presidential debates, immigration and the place of faith in a pluralistic society.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Exoskeletons - wearable devices used by workers on assembly lines or in warehouses to alleviate stress on their lower backs - may compete with valuable resources in the brain while people work, canceling out the physical benefits of wearing them, a new study suggests.

The study, published recently in the journal Applied Ergonomics, found that when people wore exoskeletons while performing tasks that required them to think about their actions, their brains worked overtime and their bodies competed with the exoskeletons rather than working in harmony with them. The study indicates that exoskeletons may place enough burden on the brain that potential benefits to the body are negated.

"It's almost like dancing with a really bad partner," said William Marras, senior author of the study, professor of integrated systems engineering and director of The Ohio State University Spine Research Institute.

"The exoskeleton is trying to anticipate your moves, but it's not going well, so you fight with the exoskeleton, and that causes this change in your brain which changes the muscle recruitment - and could cause higher forces on your lower back, potentially leading to pain and possible injuries."

For the study, researchers asked 12 people - six men and six women - to repeatedly lift a medicine ball in two 30-minutes sessions. For one of the sessions, the participants wore an exoskeleton. For the other, they did not.

The exoskeleton, which is attached to the user's chest and legs, is designed to help control posture and motion during lifting to protect the lower back and reduce the possibility of injury.

The researchers used infrared sensors to evaluate the participants' brain activity and measured the force on each participant's lower back during each session. They also tracked the number of times each participant was able to lift the medicine ball in each session.

Then, in separate sessions, they asked those same participants to perform that same task - lifting a medicine ball for 30 minutes, in one session wearing an exoskeleton - but added a mental task: They had the participants subtract 13 from a random number between 500 and 1,000 each time they lifted the ball.

They found that when the participants were simply lifting and lowering the ball, the exoskeleton slightly reduced the load on the participants' lower backs. But when the participants had to do math in their heads while lifting and lowering the ball, those benefits disappeared.

Although exoskeleton users on an assembly line may not have to do math in their heads, any kind of mental strain such as psychological stress or instructions they must follow could have the same effect, Marras said.

"When we looked at what was happening in the brain, there was more competition for those resources in the brain," Marras said. "The person was doing that mental math, but the brain was also trying to figure out how to help the body interact with the exoskeleton, and that confused the way the brain recruited the muscles to perform the task."

When those muscles compete with one another, the brain worked less efficiently and forces on the back increased, the researchers found.

"If you are a business spending hundreds or thousands of dollars per exoskeleton, there is a very good chance that the exoskeleton isn't doing any good for your employees," Marras said.

"All exoskeletons aren't bad, but people are messy, and everyone is different: You've got to use exoskeletons with some intelligence and some understanding of what the job entails."

BROOKLYN, New York, Weekday, Month xx, 2021 - The remarkable structural properties of the Venus' flower basket sponge (E. aspergillum) might seem fathoms removed from human-engineered structures. However, insights into how the organism's latticework of holes and ridges influences the hydrodynamics of seawater in its vicinity could lead to advanced designs for buildings, bridges, marine vehicles and aircraft, and anything that must respond safely to forces imposed by the flow of air or water.

While past research has investigated the structure of the sponge, there have been few studies of the hydrodynamic fields surrounding and penetrating the organism, and whether, besides improving its mechanical properties, the skeletal motifs of E. Aspergillum underlie the optimization of the flow physics within and beyond its body cavity.

A collaboration across three continents at the frontiers of physics, biology, and engineering co-led by Maurizio Porfiri at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, applied super computational muscle and special software to gain a deeper understanding of these interactions, creating a first-ever simulation of the deep-sea sponge and how it responds to and influences the flow of nearby water.

The work, "Extreme flow simulations reveal skeletal adaptations of deep-sea sponges" published in the journal Nature, revealed a profound connection between the sponge's structure and function, shedding light on both the basket sponge's ability to withstand the dynamic forces of the surrounding ocean and its ability to create a nutrient-rich vortex within the body cavity "basket."

"This organism has been studied a lot from a mechanical point of view because of its amazing ability to deform substantially in spite of its brittle, glassine structure," said first author Giacomo Falcucci of Tor Vergata University of Rome and Harvard University. "We were able to investigate aspects of hydrodynamics to understand how the geometry of the sponge offers a functional response to fluid, to produce something special with respect to interaction with water"

"By exploring the fluid flow within and outside the body cavity of the sponge, we uncovered the footprints of an expected adaptation to the environment. Not only does the sponge's structure contribute to a reduced drag, but also it facilitates the creation on low-velocity swirls within the body cavity that are used for feeding and reproduction" added Porfiri, a co-author of the study.

The structure of E. Aspergillum, reproduced by co-author Pierluigi Fanelli of the University of Tuscia, Italy, resembles a delicate glass vase in the form of a thin-walled, cylindrical tube with a large central atrium, siliceous spicules -- thus their commonly used appellation, "glass sponges". The spicules are composed of three perpendicular rays, giving them six points. The microscopic spicules "weave" together to form a very fine mesh, which gives the sponge's body a rigidity not found in other sponge species and allows it to survive at great depths in the water column.

To understand how Venus flower basket sponges do this, the team made extensive use of the Marconi100 exascale-class computer at the CINECA high performance computing center in Italy, which is capable of creating comprehensive simulations using billions of dynamic, temporospatial data points in three dimensions.

The researchers also exploited special software developed by study co-author Giorgio Amati, of SCAI (Super Computing Applications and Innovation) at CINECA, Italy. The software enabled super computational simulations based on Lattice Boltzmann methods, a class of computational fluid dynamics methods for complex systems that represents fluid as a collection of particles and tracks the behavior of each of them.

The in-silico experiments, featuring approximately 100 billion virtual particles, reproduced the hydrodynamic conditions on the deep-sea floor where E. Aspergillum lives. Results processed by Vesselin K. Krastev at Tor Vergata University allowed the team to explore how the organization of holes and ridges in the sponge improves its ability to reduce the forces applied by moving seawater (a mechanical engineering question formulated by Falcucci and Succi), and how its structure affects the dynamics of flow within the sponge body cavity to optimize selective filter feeding and gamete encounter for sexual reproduction (a biological question formulated by Porfiri and a biologist expert on ecological adaptations in acquatic creatures, co-author Giovanni Polverino from the Centre for Evolutionary Biology at The University of Western Australia, Perth).

"This work is an exemplary application of discrete fluid dynamics in general and the Lattice Boltzmann method, in particular," said co-author Sauro Succi of the Italian Institute of Technology and Harvard University. Sauro Succi is internationally recognized as one of the fathers of the Lattice Boltzmann Method. "The accuracy of the method, combined with access to one of the top super computers in the world made it possible for us to perform levels of computation never attempted before, which shed light on the role of fluid flows in the adaption of living organisms in the abyss."

"Our investigation of the role of the sponge geometry on its response to the fluid flow, has a lot of implications for the design of high-rise buildings or, really, any mechanical structure, from skyscrapers to low-drag novel structures for ships, or fuselages of airplanes," said Falcucci. "For example, will there be less aerodynamic drag on high-rise buildings built with a similar latticework of ridges and holes? Will it optimize the distribution of forces applied? Addressing these very questions is a key objective of the team."

EAST LANSING, Mich. - In the wild, inheriting advantageous physical traits may be the difference between a long life and a short one. But for the spotted hyena, another kind of inheritance, one that has nothing to do with genetics, turns out to be extremely important for health and longevity -- social networks inherited from their mothers.

A new study, based on 27 years of observational data from Michigan State University Distinguished Professor Kay Holekamp, expands a previously established theoretical model of spotted hyena social networking to show how these networks emerge, how long they last and how they affect a hyena's life trajectory.

The paper is featured as the front cover for the journal Science.

"There are a lot of species where genetic inheritance to be bigger and stronger allows an animal to dominate, but that doesn't happen in hyena society," said Holekamp, professor in the Department of Integrative Biology and director of the interdisciplinary program in Ecology, Evolution and Behavior who co-authored the paper. "We see tiny cubs dominating great huge males, so we know body size is not a good predictor of who will be socially dominant in spotted hyenas."

Co-authors Erol Akcay, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Amiyaal Ilany, senior lecturer at Israel's Bar-Ilan University, used sophisticated modeling techniques of social evolution to establish general theoretical principles for how social networks among hyenas are passed on. But to test and expand the model, they needed data from the wild.

"The foundation of this paper was laid when Amiyaal asked to have access to our hyena data because he wanted to model association patterns in hyenas, and I'm always delighted to share data," said Holekamp, whose research group has close observational records for several generations of hyena from the Masai Mara National Game Reserve in Kenya.

By meticulously tracking of hundreds of individual hyenas based on their specific spot patterns, social networks could be determined by proximity -- who spent time with whom, how closely and for how long. Combining this rich dataset with the social evolution models developed by Akçay and Ilany, the team was able to show that, remarkably, hyena cubs become friends with their mothers' close associates very early in life.

"We knew that the social structure of hyenas is based in part on one's rank in the agonistic hierarchy, which we know is inherited from mothers," Akçay said. "But what we found, that affiliative, or friendly interactions are also inherited, hadn't been shown."

Networks of mothers and their offspring are similar early on because hyena cubs stick close to their mothers for the first two years of life. But the researchers noticed that even as the young hyenas stopped spending so much time in proximity with their mothers, they continued to sustain similar networks. This was particularly true for female offspring, who generally remain members of the clan for life.

"We have data in some cases showing that the network similarity between mothers and offspring, especially female offspring, was still very high after six or so years," Ilany said. "You may not be seeing your mother as often, or she even may have died, but you still have similar friends."

Importantly, higher-ranking mothers imprinted their social networks on their cubs more accurately and for a longer time than lower-ranking mothers, and these networks had a direct effect on life-span and reproductive success.

Mother-offspring pairs with more similar social networks lived longer, the team found, underscoring how factors other than genetics hold sway in key evolutionary outcomes.

"One explanation for why inheritance of social networks works better for high- than low-ranking hyenas may be that low-ranking females tend to go off on their own more often to avoid competition with higher-ranking hyenas, so their cubs have fewer learning opportunities than cubs of high-ranking females," Holekamp said. "This shows the beauty of the hyena's fusion-fission society. The low-rankers can make the best of a bad situation by using separation to get away from their competition."

The paper is just one example of how the unprecedented amount of data collected by Holekamp's research group since the 1980s is leading to an explosion of new research and insight into the social evolution of hyenas.

"The long-term nature of our research allows scientists to address questions about fitness consequences that you can't do with a long-lived organism unless you sit and watch them year after year after year," Holekamp said. "We are at a point where we have really fabulous fitness data in addition to documenting years of interesting behavioral phenomena, and we can follow individuals over time to find out what the fitness consequences are of these behavior patterns."

An international collaboration elucidates the mechanisms that facilitate accurate identification of moving images. The findings have been published in Nature Communications

Imagine meeting a friend on the street, and imagine that with every step they take, your visual system has to process their image from scratch in order to recognize them. Now imagine if the same thing were to happen for every object and creature that moves around us. We would live in a constant state of uncertainty and inconsistency. Luckily, that is not the case. Our visual system is able to retain information obtained in motion, thereby presenting us with a more consistent picture of our surroundings. These are the findings of a study conducted by SISSA, in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and published in Nature Communications, which explains the neuronal underpinnings of this phenomenon.

"One of the biggest challenges of all the sensory systems is to maintain a consistent representation of our surroundings, despite the constant changes taking place around us. The same holds true for the visual system," explains Davide Zoccolan, director of the Visual Neuroscience Laboratory at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati (SISSA). "Just look around us: objects, animals, people, all on the move. We ourselves are moving. This triggers rapid fluctuations in the signals acquired by the retina, and until now it was unclear whether the same type of variations apply to the deeper layers of the visual cortex, where information is integrated and processed. If this was the case, we would live in tremendous confusion."

It has been known for a while that the signals produced by the retina following presentation of visual stimuli reach a set of consecutive processing stages within the visual cortex, arranged according to a finely-tuned hierarchy. It is this processing sequence that enables us to recognize an object or a face and to do so irrespective of its angle or position. This has been demonstrated in the case of static stimuli and can be explained by the invariance in the encoding of the images that is gradually built up along the cortical hierarchy.

To investigate the existence of a similar process in dynamic situations, researchers from SISSA, University of Pennsylvania (Penn), and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven), led by Zoccolan, analyzed the signals produced by neurons across different visual cortical areas in rodents following presentation of dynamic visual stimuli. The findings have been published in Nature Communications.

"We used three distinct datasets: one collected by Liviu Soltuzu at SISSA, one collected by Kasper Vinken at KU Leuven in the group led by Hans Op de Beeck and one made freely available by the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle," said the scientist. "The visual stimuli used in each were of different types. In SISSA, we created dedicated video clips showing objects moving at different speeds. The other datasets were acquired using various kinds of clips, including from films."

Next, the researchers analyzed the signals registered in the different areas of the visual cortex through a combination of sophisticated algorithms and models developed by Eugenio Piasini and Vijay Balasubramanian from Penn in collaboration with SISSA scientists (Liviu Soltuzu, Paolo Muratore and Riccardo Caramellino). The researchers developed a theoretical framework to help connect the images in the movies to the activity of specific neurons in order to determine how neural signals evolve over different time scales.

"The art in this science was figuring out an analysis method to show that the processing of visual images is getting slower as you go deeper and deeper in the brain," explains Balasubramanian. "Different levels of the brain process information over different time scales--some things could be more stable, some quicker. It's very hard to tell if the timescales are changing across the brain, so our contribution was to devise a method of doing this."

The results remained consistent, irrespective of the nature of the visual stimuli: "We observed an increased persistence of neuronal responses recorded in deeper stages of the visual system, a sort of 'perceptual constancy' that guarantees some amount of stability in the encoding of visual information and eliminates the fluctuations observed in earlier visual areas" explains Zoccolan. "And not only that. We also noticed a form of 'intrinsic' persistence that increased along the hierarchy of visual areas. In the deeper areas, the neural response remains for a few hundred milliseconds even after the stimulus disappears, which guarantees a minimum duration for the encoding of the images, and this in turn ensures that the information is properly processed and that the reaction to the stimulus is correctly calibrated."

It appears that the visual system has developed an ideal strategy for providing us with a more consistent, safer world: limiting too-rapid fluctuations on one hand while ensuring we do not lose potentially valuable information on the other.

LA JOLLA, CA--You can't make a banana split without bananas. And you can't generate stable regulatory T cells without Vitamin C or enzymes called TET proteins, it appears.

Regulatory T cells (Tregs) help control inflammation and autoimmunity in the body. Tregs are so important, in fact, that scientists are working to generate stable induced Tregs (iTregs) in vitro for use as treatments for autoimmune diseases as well as rejection to transplanted organs. Unfortunately, it has proven difficult to find the right molecular ingredients to induce stable iTregs.

Now scientists at La Jolla Institute for Immunology and Emory University School of Medicine report that Vitamin C and TET proteins can work together to give Tregs their life-saving power.

"Vitamin C can be used to stabilize iTregs generated in vitro," says LJI Instructor Xiaojing Yue, Ph.D., who served as co-first author for the EMBO Reports study. "We hope that these kinds of induced Tregs can be used in the future for treatment of autoimmune diseases and organ transplantation."

The recent study, led by LJI Professor Anjana Rao, Ph.D., and Emory Instructor Benjamin G Barwick, Ph.D., builds on the previous discovery that Vitamin C can enhance the enzymatic activity of TET proteins and prompt the generation of stable iTregs under lab conditions.

This finding was encouraging, but the scientists did not want to work toward new autoimmune therapies without first analyzing the gene expression patterns and other key epigenetic features of the induced Tregs.

"We wanted to study the entire system at a whole genome level using next generation sequencing technology to better understand the molecular features of these cells," says Yue.

Study co-first author Daniela Samaniego-Castruita, a graduate student at LJI, spearheaded the analysis of gene expression and epigenetic changes in the iTregs. A major type of epigenetic modification involves the DNA itself through the addition or removal of molecules called methyl groups from cytosines, one of the four DNA bases. The methyl groups can be further oxidized by TET enzymes. All of these interactions can eventually change how cells "read" the DNA code.

Another type of epigenetic change involves the alteration of DNA accessibility: whether DNA is loosely or tightly coiled. As the DNA coils unwind, regulatory regions become exposed which subsequently influence gene expression.

In their analysis, the researchers found TET proteins are absolutely required for maintaining the gene expression and epigenetic features that make Tregs as what they are; and adding Vitamin C led to iTregs with similar similar gene expression and epigenetic features as normal "wild type" Tregs found in the body. The study also reveals an intriguing connection between TET enzymatic activity, Vitamin C and IL-2/STAT5 signaling.

"In mice that are deficient for components of IL-2/STAT5 signaling, such as IL-2, IL-2 receptors or STAT5, the Tregs cannot develop properly or they can have impaired function," Yue says.

The researchers demonstrate that on one hand, TET-deficiency in Treg cells leads to impaired IL-2/STAT5 signaling; on the other hand, Vitamin C confers iTregs enhanced IL-2/STAT5 signaling by increasing the expression level of IL-2 receptor and the functional form of STAT5, and STAT5 binding to essential regions in the genome, rendering these cells survive better in tough environments with low IL-2 supplementation.

"We are looking for more small molecules to stabilize TET activity and generate induced Tregs that are even more stable," says Yue. "These induced Tregs could eventually be used to treat patients."

"This research gives us a new way to think about treating autoimmune diseases," says Samaniego-Castruita.

A new study published in JCPP Advances has compared the wellbeing of UK students who remained at home for schooling during the first lockdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic with those who accessed school in person.

In the study, which included 11,765 students in grades 8-13 (aged 12-21 years), females, students who had experienced food poverty, and those who had previously accessed mental health support were at greatest risk of depression, anxiety, and a deterioration in wellbeing. Students who accessed in-person schooling had poorer mental health, but this was accounted for by their different characteristics and background circumstances.

"Identifying circumstances that could make some school pupils especially vulnerable during lockdowns is important, both for allocating limited in-school places and for effectively supporting their education and wellbeing," said lead author Karen L. Mansfield, PhD, of the University of Oxford, in the UK. "We managed to capture responses from a diverse group of pupils during the first UK partial school closure period, and our results highlighted established risk factors as well as other circumstances of heightened relevance during lockdown that were related to pupils' mental health and wellbeing."

Although in-school transmission of COVID-19 among K-12 students is low when safeguards are in place, the risk of acquiring COVID-19 during school bus transportation is unclear. A study published in the Journal of School Health reports on the bus transport experience of an independent school in Virginia.

For the study, the school monitored 1,154 students with asymptomatic PCR testing every 2 weeks initially and later every week from August 28, 2020-March 19, 2021, during highest community transmission. Fifteen buses served 462 students while operating at near capacity of 2 students in every seat, using a physical distancing minimum of 2.5 feet, universal masking, and simple ventilation techniques.

There were 39 infectious COVID-19 cases who were present on buses during the study period, which resulted in the quarantine of 52 students. Universal testing and contact tracing revealed no transmission linked to bus transportation.

"The pandemic has made it very difficult for public schools to meet the transportation needs of students. Many districts simply do not have enough buses and drivers to allow distancing of 3-6 feet or skipping of bus rows while still providing rides to all children," said corresponding author Dana Ramirez, MD, of Children's Hospital of the King's Daughters. "With more students returning to face-to-face instruction, safe transportation to school is an equity issue, as many families are unable to drive their children to school each day. As members of the Virginia Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics School Re-Opening Task Force, we recognize that schools are under pressure to make data-driven operational decisions. We hope the model we describe and our data can be of assistance in demonstrating that school buses can safely operate at normal capacity even at high community COVID-19 case loads."

Students who participated in a meditation-based Quiet Time program utilizing the Transcendental Meditation (TM) technique for four months had significant improvements in overall emotional stress symptoms, quality of sleep, and English Language Arts (ELA) academic achievement according to a new randomized controlled trial published last month in Education. The study was conducted by researchers from the Center for Wellness and Achievement in Education and Stanford University. This was the first randomized control trial to investigate the effects of TM on standardized academic tests.

"Students have been experiencing increased levels of stress and it's impacting their academic performance," said Laurent Valosek, lead author of the study and Executive Director of the Center for Wellness and Achievement in Education. "This research shows the impact of meditation on the mental and physical health of high school students, and shows that meditation plays a vital role in promoting improved academic outcomes, even when compared to more time spent reading."

Student emotional well-being and its impact on academic outcomes

According to the American Psychological Association, teens report stress well above what they believe to be healthy. 31% of teens report feeling overwhelmed and 36% report feeling fatigued as a result of stress. Over a third of teens report that their stress level has increased in the past year, while around half of teens don't feel they are doing enough to manage their stress.

This increased stress is linked to poor academics, as well as a number of other measures including lower attendance, and unhealthy behaviors around sleep, eating, and substance use. Stress also increases negative affect, resulting in strained relationships with classmates and teachers, as well as rule infractions and suspensions.

Transcendental Meditation improves emotional balance and academic performance

A new randomized control study published in Education involved 98 ninth grade students at a West Coast public high school. The study found that during a four-month period, the students practicing the TM technique experienced significant improvements in measures of health and academics as compared to students who engaged in sustained silent reading.

These findings are consistent with past research on TM showing benefits related to emotional health and intelligence. This was the first randomized control trial to investigate the effects of a meditation-based school program on standardized tests.

"As a former high school administrator, I have seen first-hand the effects of stress, anxiety, and fatigue on students' mental and physical well-being. High levels of psychological distress not only lead to lower academic performance, but cause serious consequences for the whole child," said Margaret Peterson, co-author of the study and Executive Director of the California World Language Project at Stanford Graduate School of Education. "In my 30 years as an educator, Transcendental Meditation has been the single, most effective tool I have seen to help reduce stress and improve performance in students."

Within students who were below proficiency at baseline, 69% of the meditation students improved at least one performance level at posttest compared to 33% of the control students. This is particularly noteworthy because the control group was doing sustained silent reading, suggesting that introducing meditation to the school day may be more effective in improving academic outcomes than additional time spent reading.

An adhesive tape patented by Staffordshire University researchers to recover trace evidence from crimes scenes is being adopted to analyse microplastics more efficiently.

Man-made polymer particles or ‘microplastics’ are proven to be present in land, air and water environments. However, despite extensive global studies, there is no standardised approach for their collection and analysis.

Currently, studies regularly involve retrieving microplastic samples from water using a filtration method. Samples are commonly analysed in situ on the filter or after removal from it by hand, which is time consuming and risks accidental loss of the particles and cross contamination.

Claire Gwinnett, Professor of Forensic and Environmental Science, is part of the team that created Easylift® tape more than a decade ago and has more recently applied her expertise in fibre analysis to microplastics.

She explained: “Easylift® tape was developed for the forensic market. However, what we have found is that the same benefits are true when looking at particulates from any environment.

“We realised that it holds great potential for microplastics work particularly when you are out in the field, for example on a boat or on a beach, where the risk of losing or contaminating your microplastic samples is huge.”

A new paper, published in Environmental Advances, addresses the shortcomings of current research methods and sets out a new workflow using Easylift® tape. The technique uses the self-adhesive tape to ‘lift’ microplastic particles from a filter then safely preserves them between the tape and a sheet of suitable material – in this case glass.

This method was trialled by Professor Gwinnett during an expedition to collect microplastic samples along the Hudson River in New York with the Rozalia Project where it proved highly effective, with a mean fibre recovery rate of 96.4%. It also enables multiple analytical techniques to be applied to the samples afterwards and preserves them for future study.

Professor Gwinnett said: “The ultimate goal is that this will become the standardised workflow for microplastics research across the world. At the moment, scientists are extrapolating data and it is only through constant monitoring that we will we truly know how much microplastic pollution is out there. If there is a standardised method to globally track microplastics then we can much better understand the risks and where we should be targeting our efforts for mitigation.

“We know plastic pollution is widespread, but we need to understand how much is in different locations, where it has come from and where it is going. What we need is a global collaborative effort to gather that large-scale data.”

Easylift® tape is already being employed more widely and was used to collect microplastic samples during a transatlantic sailing expedition on former racing vessel the SV Jolokia last year. The Marine Education Centre based in New York State is also training ‘citizen scientists’ to take samples from the Hudson River and other locations using the tape.

Staffordshire University is now collaborating with the University of Oxford and Nekton Mission to analyse microplastic samples from an expedition to the Antarctic where these particulates will be retrieved from ice cores using Easylift® tape.

Professor Gwinnett added: “We need the ability for people to constantly monitor plastic pollution without massive expertise and the beauty of Easylift® is that it can be used by anyone – volunteers, sailing crews, people working in waste-water management can all use this in a robust way.

“It will allow us to share microplastic samples with partner institutions across the world for further analysis and to validate research methods. As with evidence recovered from crime scenes, we will also be able to store microplastic samples to be re-examined in a decade’s time or longer. Being able to collaborate and share research in this way is an exciting step forward.”

Read the full paper The application of tape lifting for microplastic pollution monitoring in Environmental Advances.

Journal

Environmental Advances

DOI

10.1016/j.envadv.2021.100066

Smartphone gaming can be harmful to players who game to escape their negative mood and feelings of boredom, a new study has found.

Researchers at the University of Waterloo found that bored "escape players"--those who have difficulty engaging with the real environment and sustaining attention--may seek "flow," which is a deep and effortless state of concentration in an activity linked to loss of awareness of time and space.

"We found that people who experience intense boredom frequently in everyday life reported playing smartphone games to escape or alleviate these feelings of boredom," said Chanel Larche, study lead author and a PhD candidate in cognitive neuroscience at Waterloo. "The problem with this boredom 'fix' is that they end up playing whenever they are bored, and end up experiencing problems tied to excessive game play.

"During gameplay, players may achieve optimal arousal, engaged focus and attention and a reduction in feelings of monotony, but this heightened urge-to-play among escape players can have negative consequences and lead to excessive time gaming."

Larche conducted this study with Waterloo's cognitive neuroscience professor Michael Dixon.

Using the popular smartphone game Candy Crush, Larche and Dixon had 60 participants with current level standings in the game between 77 and 3307 play at various difficulty levels from too easy--which meant there was a lack of skill-challenge balance, low flow and low arousal--to balanced, which was more challenging and that caused greater flow, arousal, less boredom and a stronger urge to continue gameplay. This was done to determine whether players would choose to continue playing a game where there was a balance of challenge and skill conducive to flow, rather than an easier game that would generate less flow.

Their results confirmed that individuals who game to escape boredom by using smartphone games such as Candy Crush become more immersed in gameplay than non-escape players. However, when escape players find these games more rewarding as a relief from boredom, they may play more frequently and for longer periods.

"Those who play to escape experience greater flow and positive affect than other players, which sets up a cycle of playing video games to elevate a depressed mood," Dixon said. "This is maladaptive because, although it elevates your mood, it also increases your urge to keep playing. Playing too long may lead to addiction and means less time is available for other healthier pursuits. This can actually increase your depression."

Larche says these findings might encourage game developers to consider implementing responsible video gaming tools directly within their games. For example, having a time-limit option to allow players to specify how long they wish to play could be helpful for players susceptible to problematic escape play.