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Politicians may have good reason to turn to angry rhetoric, according to research led by political scientists from Colorado--the strategy seems to work, at least in the short term.

In a new study, Carey Stapleton at the University of Colorado Boulder and Ryan Dawkins at the U.S. Air Force Academy discovered that political furor may spread easily: Ordinary citizens can start to mirror the angry emotions of the politicians they read about in the news. Such "emotional contagion" might even drive some voters who would otherwise tune out of politics to head to the polls.

"Politicians want to get reelected, and anger is a powerful tool that they can use to make that happen," said Stapleton, who recently earned his PhD in political science at CU Boulder.

He and Dawkins, an assistant professor, published their results this month in the journal Political Research Quarterly.

The researchers surveyed roughly 1,400 people online from across the political spectrum, presenting them with a series of mock news stories about a recent political debate. They discovered that when it comes to politics, anger may lead to more anger. Subjects who read about an enraged politician from their own party were more likely to report feeling mad themselves than people who didn't. Those same steaming partisans also reported that they were more likely to get involved in politics, from attending rallies to voting on Election Day.

"Anger is a very strong, short-term emotion that motivates people into action," said Stapleton. "But there can be these much more negative implications in the long term. There's always the potential that anger can turn into rage and violence."

Tempers rising

Anger and politics in the U.S. have long gone hand-in-hand--the nation's second president, John Adams, once referred to Alexander Hamilton as a "bastard brat of a Scotch peddler." But Stapleton and Dawkins' findings come at a time when American politics has grown especially divisive.

According to the Pew Research Center, in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election, "around nine-in-ten Trump and Biden supporters said there would be 'lasting harm' to the nation if the other candidate won." That anger boiled over with deadly results when a mob of supporters of then-President Trump stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Stapleton, who is not related to the Colorado political family, wanted to find out just how contagious those kinds of emotions could be. He will start a position as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Notre Dame in the fall.

"Most political science research to date has focused on what we do when we feel an emotion like anger, rather than how our emotions affect other people," Stapleton said.

Fighting words

To find out how the emotions of politicians might rub off on their supporters, he and Dawkins ran an experiment. The duo wrote a series of news stories about a debate on immigration policy between two candidates for an open Congressional seat in Minnesota. Unbeknownst to the study's subjects, neither the candidates nor their debate were real.

In some cases, the faux politicians used language that tipped into outrage (although it might still look tame in the current political landscape). "When I look at our borders, I'm enraged by what I see," as an example. In other cases, the soap boxers stuck to more neutral language.

The team's results are among the first to show what many Americans have long known--that political anger can be a powerful force.

"We report being angrier after seeing our fellow partisans being angry," Stapleton said. "When the other side is angry, it doesn't seem to affect us much at all."

If Democrats read about a fellow Democrat getting mad, for example, they often reported feeling angry themselves. In contrast, blue voters who encountered neutral information or saw an angry quote from a Republican didn't experience the same swings in emotion.

The study also brought a twist: The people who were the most susceptible to those shifts weren't the die-hard partisans on either side of the aisle. They were more moderate voters.

"The really far left and right are already so amped up," Stapleton said. "But these weakly-aligned partisans who are notoriously less likely to participate in elections were more susceptible to changing their emotions."

For Stapleton, the results carry an important lesson for ordinary voters: When watching the news, people should pay attention to how politicians may try to appeal to or even manipulate emotions to get what they want. But, he added, anger is only part of the picture. In a previous study, he and his colleagues discovered that optimistic people are much more likely to be politically active than pessimists.

"Anger is one way we can get people to vote and get engaged in politics, but it's not the only way," he said. "It doesn't have to be all doom and gloom."

Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) launched a new online tool that could more quickly advance medical discoveries to reverse progressive hearing loss. The tool enables easy access to genetic and other molecular data from hundreds of technical research studies involving hearing function and the ear. The research portal called gene Expression Analysis Resource (gEAR) was unveiled in a study last month in Nature Methods. It is operated by a group of physician-scientists at the UMSOM Institute for Genome Sciences (IGS) in collaboration with their colleagues at other institutions.

The portal allows researchers to rapidly access data and provides easily interpreted visualizations of datasets. Scientists can also input their own data and compare it to other datasets to help determine the significance of their new finding.

"It saves scientists a huge amount of time," said study corresponding author Ronna Hertzano, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Otorhinolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery at UMSOM and founder of the gEAR. "Instead of relying only on identifying mutations in genes for hearing loss, researchers can easily identify which cells express any gene in the ear, and how this expression changes, for example, as a result of noise exposure or in processes of regeneration in other species."

Dr. Hertzano and her team recently added data from the BRAIN initiative to a specialized domain of the gEAR portal to provide access to those performing neuroscience studies to better understand brain function and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. The portal is free and available to any researcher seeking access.

Users of the portal can do a variety of applications depending on their needs. They can access the dataset uploader and add their dataset into gEAR to view their data in a private setting. This enables them to see their findings in the context of other public data before posting their results online or submitting their paper for publication. Once a manuscript is published, a permalink can be included in the manuscript which links readers directly to a curated view of that dataset.

"The gEAR portal currently includes over 800 datasets, which we carefully reviewed before inputting," said Dr. Hertzano. "We currently have more than 1,200 registered users and over 80 citations in research studies. We are expecting a large increase now that our methods paper is published." She and her colleagues did a soft launch of the portal a few years earlier and publicized its existence via discussions with colleagues and user workshops at scientific meetings.

The Hearing Restoration Project, a non-profit research consortium funded by the Hearing Health Foundation, provided initial support of gEAR in an effort to better understand the mystery of hair cell regeneration - why hair cells in the ear regenerate in certain animals but not in humans. Our hair cells do not naturally regenerate when they die off due to aging, excess noise, or exposure to certain potent medications like chemotherapy drugs for cancer. For this reason, hearing loss is usually permanent and cannot be reversed. The consortium uses genomic analyses to compare molecular processes in species that do not regenerate hair cells. "The gEAR team closely interacts with the consortium researchers who also serve as our focus group, providing priceless feedback and suggestions," Dr. Hertzano said.

Understanding how the expression of certain genes plays a role in hair cell regeneration - and how enzymes and other proteins mediate that process - could lead to new treatments to reverse hearing loss by triggering a regeneration of these cells.

"By enabling rapid access to enormous datasets, the gEAR portal can serve as a valuable hub for community building around common research areas," said Claire M. Fraser, PhD, the Dean's Endowed Professor of Medicine, Microbiology and Immunology, and Director of IGS. "Having access to data in large repositories is not enough. What's essential is that gEAR curates and organizes the data into an accessible format so it can be used to address important scientific questions."

Study lead author Joshua Orvis, Lead Bioinformatics Software Engineer at IGS and study co-author Yang Song, PhD, Bioinformatics Analyst II at IGS, were instrumental in the development of gEAR. Researchers from the University of Maryland, College Park, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, University of Iowa, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Bar-Ilan University in Israel also contributed to this study.

"The gEAR portal is a beautiful example of the value of close collaboration of clinicians, biologists, and engineers to bridge the gap in technology and make the critically important 'omic' data generated across the world immediately accessible to biologists in a meaningful format," said E. Albert Reece, MD, PhD, MBA, Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, UM Baltimore, and the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor, and Dean, University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Why do alterations of certain genes cause cancer only in specific organs of the human body? Scientists at the German Cancer Consortium (DKTK), the Technical University of Munich (TUM), and the University Medical Center Göttingen have now demonstrated that cells originating from different organs are differentially susceptible to activating mutations in cancer drivers: The same mutation in precursor cells of the pancreas or the bile duct leads to fundamental different outcomes. The team discovered for the first time that tissue specific genetic interactions are responsible for the differential susceptibility of the biliary and the pancreatic epithelium towards transformation by oncogenes. The new findings could guide more precise therapeutic decision making in the future.

There have been no major improvements in the treatment of pancreatic and biliary tract cancer in the last decades and no effective targeted therapies are available to date. "The situation for patients with pancreatic and extrahepatic bile duct cancer is still very depressing with approximately only 10% of patients surviving five years," says Dieter Saur, DKTK Professor for Translational Cancer Research at TUM's university hospital Klinikum rechts der Isar, DKTK partner site Munich.

DKTK is a consortium centered around the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, which has long-term collaborative partnerships with specialist oncological centers at universities across Germany.

"To discover novel therapeutic strategies that improve prognosis of these patients, it is essential to understand the fundamental genetic networks and interactions that drive these tumors in a tissue-specific fashion. This will allow highly precise molecular interventions in future."

The research team looked at the development of biliary tract and pancreatic cancer in mice, replacing the normal "oncogenes" PIK3CA and KRAS with a version containing a mutation identical with that in human cancers. Expression of these oncogenes in the common precursor cells of the extrahepatic bile duct and the pancreas led to very different outcomes. Mice with the mutated PI3K gene developed mostly biliary tract cancer, mice with the mutated KRAS gene instead developed exclusively pancreatic cancer.

This was unexpected because both genes are mutated in both human cancer types. Subsequent analyses discovered the fundamental genetic processes underlying the differential sensitivity of the different tissue types towards oncogenic transformation.

"Our results are an important step toward solving one of the biggest mysteries in oncology: Why do alterations of certain genes cause cancer only in specific organs?" says Chiara Falcomatà the first author of the new publication. "Our studies in mice revealed how genes co-operate to cause cancer in different organs. We identified main players, the order in which they occur during tumor progression, and the molecular processes how they turn normal cells into threatening cancers. Such processes are potential targets for new treatments".

In the mice, the team uncovered a stepwise process of genetic alterations, which drive the development of these cancer types. Some cooperating genetic events overactivate the PI3K signaling pathway, making them cancerous. Others disrupt regulators proteins, inactivating their ability to suppress cancer progression.

"Understanding the genetic interactions in different cancer types will guide more precise therapeutic decision making in the future" says Günter Schneider, Professor for Translational Cancer Research at the University Medical Center Göttingen. "Our ability to engineer specific genetic alterations in mice allows us to study the function of cancer genes and to model specific cancer subtypes. Such mouse models are also invaluable for testing anticancer drugs before using them in clinical trials".

"What we showed is that the function of an oncogene is different depending on the tissue type and what other genes are altered," says Roland Rad Professor at TUM and a DKTK researcher. "These oncogenes need to hijack the intrinsic signaling network of a specific tissue to allow cancer development. Interestingly, such networks exist only in specific tissue types making them susceptible for cancer development."

These findings have important implications for therapeutic interventions. "The concept that multiple tissue-specific genetic interactions drive cancer progression demonstrates that no single gene can predict responsiveness of a cancer to a particular therapy," says Saur. "In future, it is key to mechanistically understand the tissue specific determinants of therapeutic response and resistance to get precision medicine to the next level."

Several of the authors including Dieter Saur and Roland Rad are based at TranslaTUM, TUM's Center for Translational Cancer Research. In this interdisciplinary research institute, doctors work with colleagues from the fields of natural sciences and engineering on research into causes, diagnostics and potential treatments of cancerous diseases.

WINSTON-SALEM, NC, JULY 19, 2021 -- Wake Forest researchers and clinicians are using patient-specific tumor 'organoid' models as a preclinical companion platform to better evaluate immunotherapy treatment for appendiceal cancer, one of the rarest cancers affecting only 1 in 100,000 people. Immunotherapies, also known as biologic therapies, activate the body's own immune system to control, and eliminate cancer.

Appendiceal cancer is historically resistant to systemic chemotherapy, and the effect of immunotherapy is essentially unknown because clinical trials are difficult to perform due to lack of adequate patient numbers, resulting in a lack of data and limited research models.

Researchers at the Wake Forest Organoid Research Center (WFORCE), a joint venture between the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM), and the Wake Forest Comprehensive Cancer Center, were the first to create appendiceal cancer organoids to use as a predictive model for potential treatment options (published 2018). The Comprehensive Cancer Center is a major high volume center with a global reputation in the treatment of appendiceal cancer.

These cancer organoids are part of WFIRM's "Body-on-a-Chip" system that allows scientists to engineer the organoids, or human tissue equivalents, that function in a very similar manner as actual human tissues and organs.

In this new study, published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research, their results indicate that various types immunotherapies tested on the organoids can potentially support treatment decisions and can achieve personalized results, identifying beneficial treatments while sparing patients from harmful side effects of drugs for which they will obtain no benefit.

"For this study we reconstructed patients' tumors as organoids, supercharged with a built-in immune system directly obtained from the patient," said senior author Konstantinos I. Votanopoulos, MD, PhD, professor of surgery at the Comprehensive Cancer Center and co-director of WFORCE. "In this way we created a personalized interface to study how effective the immunotherapy drugs are in activating a patient's own immune system to kill the cancer. This platform is breaking new ground for appendiceal cancer, and it can also be applied in research for other rare cancers where preclinical models are lacking."

This research study utilizes the WFIRM's "Body-on-a-Chip" system that allows scientists to engineer the organoids, or humanoid tissue equivalents, that function in a very similar manner as actual human organs.

Cells from tumor biopsies from 26 patients were obtained to grow the organoids - tiny, 3D tissue-like structures, in the lab that that mimic the cancerous tumors. The immune enhanced tumor organoids were treated with one of three immunotherapy drugs and then assessed for responsiveness.

"In the future, by verifying that that the tumor and its organoids behave in the same fashion, we could modify clinical trial design and optimize cost by targeting patients with organoids that have exhibited favorable results," Votanopoulos said.

Current strategies to understand tumor progression center on analyses of the tumor cells in isolation, but do not capture the interactions between a tumor and its surrounding space, known as the microenvironment or stroma. This leads to inaccuracies in predicting tumor progression and chemotherapy or immunotherapy response. Patient-derived tumor organoids are used as a testing and predicting platform to model diseases, evaluate efficacy and/or toxicity of new and existing drugs, and can be used to test environmental hazards.

Co-author Shay Soker, PhD, professor of regenerative medicine who leads tumor organoid research at WFIRM and co-directs WFORCE, said new technologies and biological models that improve prognostication will have a significant effect on patient mortality. "Using the organoids as a preclinical platform can lead to development of novel therapeutics which target and control tumor cells specifically, sparing healthy tissue from the side effects of chemotherapy and immunotherapy treatments," he said. "For rare cancers like appendiceal cancer, this technology can make a difference in overall quality of life for patients."

A new mathematical model helps predict the tiny changes in carbon-based materials that could yield interesting properties.

Scientists at Tohoku University and colleagues in Japan have developed a mathematical model that abstracts the key effects of changes to the geometries of carbon material and predicts its unique properties.

The details were published in the journal Carbon.

Scientists generally use mathematical models to predict the properties that might emerge when a material is changed in certain ways. Changing the geometry of three-dimensional (3D) graphene, which is made of networks of carbon atoms, by adding chemicals or introducing topological defects, can improve its catalytic properties, for example. But it has been difficult for scientists to understand why this happens exactly.

The new mathematical model, called standard realization with repulsive interaction (SRRI), reveals the relationship between these changes and the properties that arise from them. It does this using less computational power than the typical model employed for this purpose, called density functional theory (DFT), but it is less accurate.

With the SRRI model, the scientists have refined another existing model by showing the attractive and repulsive forces that exist between adjacent atoms in carbon-based materials. The SRRI model also takes into account two types of curvature in such materials: local curvatures and mean curvature.

The researchers, led by Tohoku University mathematician Motoko Kotani, used their model to predict the catalytic properties that would arise when local curvatures and dopants were introduced into 3D graphene. Their results were similar to those produced by the DFT model.

"The accuracy of the SRRI model showed a qualitative agreement with DFT calculations, and is able to screen through potential materials roughly one billion times faster than DFT," says Kotani.

The team next fabricated the material and determined its properties using scanning electrochemical cell microscopy. This method can show a direct link between the material's geometry and its catalytic activity. It revealed that the catalytically active sites are on the local curvatures.

"Our mathematical model can be used as an effective pre-screening tool for exploring new 2D and 3D carbon materials for unique properties before applying DFT modelling," says Kotani. "This shows the importance of mathematics in accelerating material design."

The team next plans to use their model to look for links between the design of a material and its mechanical and electron transport properties.

Researchers from the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI and the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), working in an international team, have developed a new method for complex X-ray studies that will aid in better understanding so-called correlated metals. These materials could prove useful for practical applications in areas such as superconductivity, data processing, and quantum computers. Today the researchers present their work in the journal Physical Review X.

In substances such as silicon or aluminium, the mutual repulsion of electrons hardly affects the material properties. Not so with so-called correlated materials, in which the electrons interact strongly with one another. The movement of one electron in a correlated material leads to a complex and coordinated reaction of the other electrons. It is precisely such coupled processes that make these correlated materials so promising for practical applications, and at the same time so complicated to understand.

Strongly correlated materials are candidates for novel high-temperature superconductors, which can conduct electricity without loss and which are used in medicine, for example, in magnetic resonance imaging. They also could be used to build electronic components, or even quantum computers, with which data can be more efficiently processed and stored.

"Strongly correlated materials exhibit a wealth of fascinating phenomena," says Thorsten Schmitt, head of the Spectroscopy of Novel Materials Group at PSI: "However, it remains a major challenge to understand and exploit the complex behaviour that lies behind these phenomena." Schmitt and his research group tackle this task with the help of a method for which they use the intense and extremely precise X-ray radiation from the Swiss Light Source SLS at PSI. This modern technique, which has been further developed at PSI in recent years, is called resonant inelastic X-ray scattering, or RIXS for short.

X-rays excite electrons

With RIXS, soft X-rays are scattered off a sample. The incident X-ray beam is tuned in such a way that it elevates electrons from a lower electron orbital to a higher orbital, which means that special resonances are excited. This throws the system out of balance. Various electrodynamic processes lead it back to the ground state. Some of the excess energy is emitted again as X-ray light. The spectrum of this inelastically scattered radiation provides information about the underlying processes and thus on the electronic structure of the material.

"In recent years, RIXS has developed into a powerful experimental tool for deciphering the complexity of correlated materials," Schmitt explains. When used to investigate correlated insulators in particular, it works very well. Up to now, however, the method has been unsuccessful in probing correlated metals. Its failure was due to the difficulty of interpreting the extremely complicated spectra caused by many different electrodynamic processes during the scattering. "In this connection collaboration with theorists is essential," explains Schmitt, "because they can simulate the processes observed in the experiment."

Calculations of correlated metals

This is a specialty of theoretical physicist Keith Gilmore, formerly of the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in the USA and now at the Humboldt University in Berlin. "Calculating the RIXS results for correlated metals is difficult because you have to handle several electron orbitals, large bandwidths, and a large number of electronic interactions at the same time," says Gilmore. Correlated insulators are easier to handle because fewer orbitals are involved; this allows model calculations that explicitly include all electrons. To be precise, Gilmore explains: "In our new method of describing the RIXS processes, we are now combining the contributions that come from the excitation of one electron with the coordinated reaction of all other electrons."

To test the calculation, the PSI researchers experimented with a substance that BNL scientist Jonathan Pelliciari had investigated in detail as part of his doctoral thesis at PSI: barium-iron-arsenide. If you add a specific amount of potassium atoms to the material, it becomes superconducting. It belongs to a class of unconventional high-temperature iron-based superconductors that are expected to provide a better understanding of the phenomenon. "Until now, the interpretation of RIXS measurements on such complex materials has been guided mainly by intuition. Now these RIXS calculations give us experimenters a framework that enables a more practical interpretation of the results. Our RIXS measurements at PSI on barium-iron-arsenide are in excellent agreement with the calculated profiles," Pelliciari says.

Combination of experiment and theory

In their experiments, the researchers investigated the physics around the iron atom. "One advantage of RIXS is that you can concentrate on a specific component and examine it in detail for materials that consist of several elements," Schmitt says. The well-tuned X-ray beam causes an inner electron in the iron atom to be elevated from the ground state in the core level to the higher energy valence band, which is only partially occupied. This initial excitation of the core electron can cause further secondary excitations and trigger many complicated decay processes that ultimately manifest themselves in spectral satellite structures. (See graphic.)

Since the contributions of the many reactions are sometimes small and close to one another, it is difficult to find out which processes actually took place in the experiment. Here the combination of experiment and theory helps. "If you have no theoretical support for difficult experiments, you cannot understand the processes, that is, the physics, in detail," Schmitt says. The same also applies to theory: "You often don't know which theories are realistic until you can compare them with an experiment. Progress in understanding comes when experiment and theory are brought together. This descriptive method thus has the potential to become a reference for the interpretation of spectroscopic experiments on correlated metals."

Germany is not meeting its legal obligations to protect refugee women and girls from discrimination. This is the conclusion of a "shadow report" by the University of Göttingen, the association Pro Asyl and the refugee councils of Bavaria, Hesse, Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt. Shadow reports are a useful tool to present important information in parallel with official government reports. Based on current research results and a survey of 65 women's counselling centres, psychosocial counselling centres and institutions working with refugees from all 16 federal states, the study finds that Germany does not adequately protect refugee women and girls and does not meet the requirements of the Istanbul Convention.

"The Istanbul Convention - also known as the Council of Europe convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence - has been in force in Germany for over two years," explains migration researcher Professor Sabine Hess from the University of Göttingen. "With its ratification, the Federal Republic of Germany made a binding commitment to protect women from all forms of violence, regardless of their residence status, to contribute to the elimination of discrimination against them and to promote their equality and rights."

The authors of the report criticise the situation in Germany. In particular, they highlight: long periods of time in holding centres for refugees; the lack of strategies for protection against violence in these camps; the lack of expertise with regard to vulnerable people and those affected by violence; inadequate healthcare for women and girls as well as inadequate counselling and support structures.

"The German government is really not fulfilling its legal obligations, under the Istanbul Convention, to protect women and girls from violence, regardless of their residence status," says Hess. "On the contrary, the recent tightening of German asylum and residence law is emphatically at odds with the concept of protection against violence. It is absolutely essential that action is taken to change this."

"The project's main objective is to integrate a certain degree of automation, so that an operator can control a small fleet of up to 10 drones from a single ground station," says Luis E. Moreno, LABYRINTH's coordinator and researcher at the UC3M's Robotics Lab. "The idea is that the operator indicates the mission to be undertaken (for example, monitoring traffic in a particular area) and the system automatically converts this mission into a set of routes that each drone has to follow, automatically calculating alternative routes when necessary," he explains. In addition to planning and controlling routes, two other areas of technology are being subject to work: communication using 5G networks (so that drones are connected at all times) and the computer security behind the entire system.

Researchers have already developed an initial strategy for planning routes and preventing collisions for drone swarms in three-dimensional environments, in an article published in the Sensors journal. In order to do this, they first designed a 3D model that simulates an urban environment, where they established take-off and landing zones. Then they tested a planning algorithm that was responsible for calculating optimal, fluid routes for a set of drones. Finally, they implemented different measures (flights at different altitudes, distance control, etc.) to obtain a strategy for avoiding possible collisions.

Researchers at the LABYRINTH project are developing these technologies within the framework of U-Space, a new European drone air traffic management system led by the SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) initiative. This new framework is designed to integrate low-level drone operations, below 120 metres (400 feet), safely and efficiently into European airspace.

"Air controllers use ATM (Air Traffic Management) to safely manage the traffic of commercial aircraft. Similarly, developing an Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) system that allows drones to share airspace with other drones and aircraft is imperative," explains Francisco Valera, another scientist taking part in this project and a member of NETCOM (Networks and Communications Services) at the UC3M. This research group, along with Telefonica I+D and the IMDEA Networks Institute, recently presented an experimental study about the use of mobile technologies in drone networks in the Sensors journal.

Possible applications

Drones can be useful in different applications, such as delivering and transporting goods, monitoring in different environments, or accessing places that are difficult to reach in emergency situations, for example. However, there have been concerns about the safety of these flights until now, which have limited their use and it is often illegal to use drones in certain public areas. It is estimated that by 2035 there will be approximately 400,000 drones flying within Europe, so the biggest challenge in this regard will be safely managing drone traffic in cities and other areas with high levels of congestion.

The foreseen applications within the LABYRINTH project framework concern different environments in Spain. For example, work is being undertaken with the Directorate-General for Traffic (DGT, in its Spanish acronym) to use drones to improve road transport, analysing aspects such as speed control, measuring the distance between vehicles, identifying license plates, and following up on and providing support in the event of accidents. Another initiative with the National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA, in its Spanish acronym) is intending to use drones at airports to control unauthorised access, inspect tracks, or use them as a deterrent against birds. In the case of managing emergencies at large gatherings (such as at concerts or sporting events), a collaboration with the SAMUR-Protección Civil of Madrid is in place for pre-emergency surveillance operations (identifying exit routes, medical care points or danger zones, calculating street capacity) and assistance with medical operations (faster routes to incidents, transporting specialised material or medicine).

LABYRINTH (Ensuring drone traffic control and safety) is a project funded by the European Union's H2020 Programme (GA 861696) that is being coordinated by the UC3M. This R&D&I consortium is made up of 13 research centres and industrial partners from 5 countries (Germany, Austria, Belgium, Spain, and Italy). The Spanish institutions that are participating, along with the UC3M, are the Directorate-General for Traffic (DGT), the National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA), the SAMUR-ProtecciónCivil of Madrid and the companies Expace on Board Systems, Inncome, PONS Seguridad Vial and Telefonica I+D. The Western Ligurian Sea Port Authority (Italy), the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the German Institute for Standardization (DIN), the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), and the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation (EUROCONTROL) are also taking part in the project.

More information: Website for the LABYRINTH project: http://labyrinth2020.eu

Video: https://youtu.be/cvz1A_tkCZM

This summer, if you see a butterfly with wings that are blue on top with orange spots underneath, you may have crossed paths with a male European Common Blue (or Polyommatus icarus), a newly introduced species in Canada.

Could it be a fluke? Probably not, according to a group of researchers from the University of Ottawa who have taken a close look at this captivating blue creature. They are in fact the first to study its ecology.

"The results of our study suggest that the Polyommatus icarus (P. icarus) could become widespread in the future since it prefers urban areas," said uOttawa PhD student Stephanie Rivest, who is the first author of the article "Anthropogenic disturbance promotes the abundance of a newly introduced butterfly, the European common blue (Polyommatus icarus; Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae), in Canada" published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology.

"It can reach extremely high densities and its caterpillars depend on a host plant that is ubiquitous across Canada."

A new home

Commonly found in Europe, P. icarus was discovered near Montreal, Québec in 2005. Its introduction provided Rivest's team with a rare opportunity to study a non-native insect during the early stages of its colonization and gain further insights into the progression of an invasion.

"The rate that animal and plant species are being introduced beyond their home ranges is increasing globally, but only a few of these species will become invasive - which means they are widespread, abundant, and have negative effects on ecological communities," explained Rivest. "That's why it's so important for newly introduced species to be studied, like we did here, so that we can better understand and predict which introduced species are likely to become invasive."

Predicting the spread

"We found that P. icarus is most abundant in urban areas and where its preferred caterpillar food plant, Birds Foot Trefoil (Lotus corniculatus), is found," said Rivest. "This plant was introduced to North America in the mid-1700s and can now be found in every Canadian province."

"Our study also shows that P. icarus can reach extremely high densities relative to native butterflies and that it is a low-moderate disperser - that is, adults are not great fliers," explained Rivest.

This butterfly might not win a flying contest, but it could still become widespread in Canada.

"Building on our initial assessment of P. icarus, we need future studies to model the predicted trajectory of range expansion and to investigate other potentially important factors," added Dr. Heather Kharouba, Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Ottawa and head of the lab where the research was conducted.

A population on the rise

When the study began in 2017, the European Common Blue (Polyommatus icarus) could only be found in southwestern Québec. That's where Rivest and her colleagues conducted their field surveys. They collected information about butterfly communities and their habitat in several sites, and later measured the ability of P. icarus adults to fly. To do that, they marked as many P. icarus individuals as possible with a permanent marker.

"Each individual received a unique marking on their wing so that if they were ever recaptured, we could measure the distance they flew," said Rivest. "We captured and marked an astounding number of individuals, 4629 to be exact!"

These butterflies have now found their way outside of Québec.

"Since our study began in 2017, there has been an increase in the number of P. icarus observations on citizen science websites like eButterfly and iNaturalist," said Stephanie Rivest. "These observations suggest that P. icarus has expanded its range since individuals can now be found in Toronto, over 400 km away from our study region."

"We encourage the public to contribute to the monitoring of P. icarus by uploading their observations of this easy to identify butterfly species."

Computer vision technology is increasingly used in areas such as automatic surveillance systems, self-driving cars, facial recognition, healthcare and social distancing tools. Users require accurate and reliable visual information to fully harness the benefits of video analytics applications but the quality of the video data is often affected by environmental factors such as rain, night-time conditions or crowds (where there are multiple images of people overlapping with each other in a scene). Using computer vision and deep learning, a team of researchers led by Yale-NUS College Associate Professor of Science (Computer Science) Robby Tan, who is also from the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Faculty of Engineering, has developed novel approaches that resolve the problem of low-level vision in videos caused by rain and night-time conditions, as well as improve the accuracy of 3D human pose estimation in videos.

The research was presented at the 2021 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), a top ranked computer science conference.

Combating visibility issues during rain and night-time conditions

Night-time images are affected by low light and man-made light effects such as glare, glow, and floodlights, while rain images are affected by rain streaks or rain accumulation (or rain veiling effect).

“Many computer vision systems like automatic surveillance and self-driving cars, rely on clear visibility of the input videos to work well. For instance, self-driving cars cannot work robustly in heavy rain and CCTV automatic surveillance systems often fail at night, particularly if the scenes are dark or there is significant glare or floodlights,” explained Assoc Prof Tan.

In two separate studies, Assoc Prof Tan and his team introduced deep learning algorithms to enhance the quality of night-time videos and rain videos, respectively. In the first study, they boosted the brightness yet simultaneously suppressed noise and light effects (glare, glow and floodlights) to yield clear night-time images. [See Figure 1a below] This technique is new and addresses the challenge of clarity in night-time images and videos when the presence of glare cannot be ignored. In comparison, the existing state-of-the-art methods fail to handle glare. [See Figure 1b below]

Night-time images

In tropical countries like Singapore where heavy rain is common, the rain veiling effect can significantly degrade the visibility of videos. In the second study, the researchers introduced a method that employs a frame alignment, which allows them to obtain better visual information without being affected by rain streaks that appear randomly in different frames and affect the quality of the images. Subsequently, they used a moving camera to employ depth estimation in order to remove the rain veiling effect caused by accumulated rain droplets. [See Figure 2 below]. Unlike existing methods, which focus on removing rain streaks, the new methods can remove both rain streaks and the rain veiling effect at the same time.

Rain images

Figure 2: Top image shows the input (existing method), middle image shows the intermediate output of removing rain streaks, and bottom image shows the final output of removing both rain streaks and the rain veiling effect using the Yale-NUS research team’s new method.

3D Human Pose Estimation: Tackling inaccuracy caused by overlapping, multiple humans in videos

At the CVPR conference, Assoc Prof Tan also presented his team’s research on 3D human pose estimation, which can be used in areas such as video surveillance, video gaming, and sports broadcasting.

In recent years, 3D multi-person pose estimation from a monocular video (video taken from a single camera) is increasingly becoming an area of focus for researchers and developers. Instead of using multiple cameras to take videos from different locations, monocular videos offer more flexibility as these can be taken using a single, ordinary camera – even a mobile phone camera.

However, accuracy in human detection is affected by high activity, i.e. multiple individuals within the same scene, especially when individuals are interacting closely or when they appear to be overlapping with each other in the monocular video.

In this third study, the researchers estimate 3D human poses from a video by combining two existing methods, namely, a top-down approach or a bottom-up approach. By combining the two approaches, the new method can produce more reliable pose estimation in multi-person settings and handle distance between individuals (or scale variations) more robustly.

The researchers involved in the three studies include members of Assoc Prof Tan’s team at the NUS Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering where he holds a joint appointment, and his collaborators from City University of Hong Kong, ETH Zurich and Tencent Game AI Research Center. His laboratory focuses on research in computer vision and deep learning, particularly in the domains of low level vision, human pose and motion analysis, and applications of deep learning in healthcare.

“As a next step in our 3D human pose estimation research, which is supported by the National Research Foundation, we will be looking at how to protect the privacy information of the videos. For the visibility enhancement methods, we strive to contribute to advancements in the field of computer vision, as they are critical to many applications that can affect our daily lives, such as enabling self-driving cars to work better in adverse weather conditions,” said Assoc Prof Tan.

Oncotarget published "Dynamic cellular biomechanics in responses to chemotherapeutic drug in hypoxia probed by atomic force spectroscopy" which reported that by exploiting single-cell, force spectroscopy methods, the authors probed biophysical and biomechanical kinetics of brain, breast, prostate, and pancreatic cancer cells with standard chemotherapeutic drugs in normoxia and hypoxia over 12-24 hours.

After exposure to the drugs, they found that brain, breast, and pancreatic cancer cells became approximately 55-75% less stiff, while prostate cancer cells became more stiff, due to either drug-induced disruption or reinforcement of cytoskeletal structure.

However, the rate of the stiffness change decreased up to 2-folds in hypoxia, suggesting a correlation between cellular stiffness and drug resistance of cancer cells in hypoxic tumor microenvironment.

Also, they observed significant changes in the cell body height, surface roughness, and cytoadhesion of cancer cells after exposure to drugs, which followed the trend of stiffness.

These Oncotarget results show that a degree of chemotherapeutic drug effects on biomechanical and biophysical properties of cancer cells is distinguishable in normoxia and hypoxia, which are correlated with alteration of cytoskeletal structure and integrity during drug-induced apoptotic process.

Dr. Yongki Choi from The North Dakota State University said, "Cell surface plays important roles in fundamental cellular functions such as signaling, communication, adhesion, transport, and tumor metastasis"

The cell surfaces dynamically interact with physical, chemical, and biological environments surrounding cells and thus, alteration in cell's surface structure substantially influences overall cell functions.

In particular, deformability of cells associated with cell shape, motility, and invasion has shown implications for cell death and cancer metastasis, which is critical information for developing new anticancer drugs with increased efficacy in cancer chemotherapy.

While a number of studies have shown the relationship between chemotherapy-induced cell death and alteration in cellular mechanics such as stiffness, the impact of drugs on biomechanical and biophysical properties of cancer cells is not fully understood yet. Furthermore, stiffness at the tissue-level is significantly affected by the tumor stage, invasiveness, and location within the tumor due to the deposition of extracellular matrix, which influences the cellular behavior and metastatic capacity at the single-cell level as well.

Several studies using the AFM-based force measurements also have shown a significant change in cell stiffness with increasing metastatic efficiency in human cancer cell lines and chemotherapy exposure in leukemia cells.

In this work, these researchers quantified the drug effects on the biomechanical and biophysical properties of four cancer cell lines: MDA-MB-231 triple negative breast cancer, PANC-1 pancreatic cancer, PC-3 prostate cancer, and U-118 MG glioblastoma cell lines.

The Choi Research Team concluded in their Oncotarget Research Output that they have examined changes in biomechanical parameters of cancer cells exposed to an inhibitor of actin polymerization cytochalasin D in normoxia and hypoxia.

The PANC-1 cells became less stiff under increasing duration of exposure to cytochalasin D, and the decrease of stiffness was slower in hypoxia than normoxia.

Also, morphology and non-specific binding force measurements of the cells exposed to cytochalasin D showed a reduction in cell height and cellular adhesion, but an increase in cellular roughness.

Similar changes in biomechanical properties of other cancer cell lines treated with chemotherapeutic drugs and cytochalasin D suggest that the drug-induced cytotoxicity is partly due to dynamic changes in the cytoskeletal structure.

Although it is difficult to generalize drug effects on biomechanical and biophysical parameters of cancer cells, a combination of these parameters could help identify and distinguish the drug-induced apoptotic process in normoxia and hypoxia.

Butterflies and moths (order Lepidoptera) are one of the most diverse animal groups. To date, scientists have found as many as 5,000 species from the Alps alone. Having been a place of intensive research interest for 250 years, it is considered quite a sensation if a previously unknown species is discovered from the mountain range these days. This was the case when a Swiss-Austrian team of researchers described a new species of alpine moth in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal Alpine Entomology, solving a 180-year-old mystery.

Decades of research work

Initially, the team - Jürg Schmid, a full-time dentist, author and passionate butterfly and moth researcher from Switzerland, and Peter Huemer, head of the natural science collections of the Tyrolean State Museums in Innsbruck and author of more than 400 publications, needed a lot of patience.

Almost thirty years ago, in the 1990s, the two researchers independently discovered the same moth species. While they found it was similar to a moth of the leaf-roller family Tortricidae and commonly named as Dichrorampha montanana which had been known to science since 1843, it was also clearly different. Wing pattern and internal morphology of genitalia structures supported a two-species hypothesis. Moreover, the two were found at the same time in the same places - a further indication that they belong to separate species. Extensive genetic investigations later confirmed this hypothesis, but the journey of presenting a new species to science was far from over.

The Hidden Alpine Moth

To "baptise" a new species and give it its own name, scientists first have to check that it hasn't already been named. This prevents the same species from having two different names, and essentially means looking at descriptions of similar species and comparing the new one against them to prove it is indeed unknown to science. In the case of this new moth, there were six potentially applicable older names that had to be ruled out before it could be named as new.

Intensive and time-consuming research of original specimens in the nature museums of Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt and London eventually led to the finding that all six ancient names actually referred to one and the same species - Dichrorampha alpestrana, which has been known since 1843 and had to be adopted as the valid older name for Dichrorampha montanana as having been described a couple of months earlier. Similarly, all other available names proved to belong to Dichrorampha alpestrana. The species discovered by Schmid and Huemer, however, was different, not yet named, and could finally be described as new to science. The authors chose to name it Dichrorampha velata - the Latin species name means "veiled" or "hidden," pointing to the complicated story behind its discovery.

Lots of unanswered questions

The Hidden Alpine Moth is a striking species with a wingspan of up to 16 mm and a characteristic olive-brown color of the forewings with silvery lines. It belongs to a group of mainly diurnal moths and is particularly common locally in colorful mountain flower meadows. For now, we know that its distribution extends at least from Salzburg and Tyrol through southern Switzerland and the Jura to the French and Italian Alps, with isolated finds known from the Black Forest in Germany, but the researchers believe it might have a wider range in Central Europe.

The biology of the new species is completely unknown, but Huemer and Schmid speculate that its caterpillars may live in the rhizome of yarrow or chrysanthemums like other species of the same genus. As with many other alpine moths, there is a strong need for further research, so we can get a better understanding of this fascinating insect.

PULLMAN, Wash. --Students who identify as LGBTQ+ in Washington state school districts with conservative voting records reported experiencing more bullying than their peers in more politically liberal areas, according to a new study.

For the study in the journal Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, researchers explored the relationships among school district voting records in the 2016 presidential election, bullying experiences in schools and mental health outcomes of LGBTQ+ youth in the state.

The study shows LGBTQ+ students are at a higher risk for psychological distress and suicidality as a result of bullying, particularly in school districts that voted for former President Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Students in conservative voting districts also reported their teachers were less likely to intervene in instances of bullying than students who responded from more liberal voting districts.

"To my knowledge, nobody has really looked at this connection between a school district's political attitudes and the experiences of LGBTQ+ students in schools," said Paul Kwon, professor of psychology at Washington State University and coauthor of the study. "This project highlights an inequity that is not talked about a lot and shows the need for more explicit and inclusive anti-bullying legislation and policies that help mitigate the risks to LGBTQ+ youth regardless of district political attitudes."

Kwon and his colleagues' work supports previous research showing anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice is consistently related to political ideology and beliefs. For the current study, they analyzed the responses of nearly 50,000 students in 8-12 grades to the 2018 Washington State Healthy Youth Survey. The survey asks students about a variety of factors including sexual and gender identity, bullying and whether or not teachers intervened during instances of bullying. In total, 20% or nearly 10,000 students in the survey identified as being LGBTQ+.

According to the analysis, when teachers intervened "almost always" in instances of bullying, LGBTQ+ students reported experiencing bullying rates that were nearly identical to non-LGBTQ+ students.

When intervention did not occur, LGBTQ+ youth experienced more bullying, and subsequently, more psychological distress and suicidality.

"This was especially prevalent in more conservative school districts where LGBTQ+ youth report less teacher intervention despite experiencing more bullying," Kwon said. "Over 35% of youth in our study are students in a conservative leaning school district, possibly placing them at greater risk for more bullying experiences and higher psychological distress."

While each school district in Washington is mandated to enact policy that at minimum, complies with legislation prohibiting harassment, intimidation and bullying, Kwon and colleagues suggest individual school boards, regardless of political leanings, implement policy that goes beyond minimum protections for LGBTQ+ youth.

For example, the researchers suggest school policy should include explicit parameters for training and education for teachers regarding LGBTQ+ bullying as well as steps for teachers and administrators to intervene following LGBTQ+ bullying experiences. In addition, they suggest that all school websites explicitly describe anti-bullying policies as they relate to LGBTQ+ youth using specific examples.

"We also recommend educators discuss anti-bullying policy with students and families at the start of each school year, while concurrently highlighting LGBTQ+ identities, particularly in conservative districts," Kwon said. "After all, students have little choice in the school they attend, almost no choice in the school district they belong to and are unable to vote until they are 18. Thus, they are subjected to the environment of the school and broader culture of the school district chosen for them."

New models of neutron stars show that their tallest mountains may be only fractions of millimetres high, due to the huge gravity on the ultra-dense objects. The research is presented today at the National Astronomy Meeting 2021.

Neutron stars are some of the densest objects in the Universe: they weigh about as much as the Sun, yet measure only around 10km across, similar in size to a large city.

Because of their compactness, neutron stars have an enormous gravitational pull around a billion times stronger than the Earth. This squashes every feature on the surface to miniscule dimensions, and means that the stellar remnant is an almost perfect sphere.

Whilst they are billions of times smaller than on Earth, these deformations from a perfect sphere are nevertheless known as mountains. The team behind the work, led by PhD student Fabian Gittins at the University of Southampton, used computational modelling to build realistic neutron stars and subject them to a range of mathematical forces to identify how the mountains are created.

The team also studied the role of the ultra-dense nuclear matter in supporting the mountains, and found that the largest mountains produced were only a fraction of a millimetre tall, one hundred times smaller than previous estimates.

Fabian comments, "For the past two decades, there has been much interest in understanding how large these mountains can be before the crust of the neutron star breaks, and the mountain can no longer be supported."

Past work has suggested that neutron stars can sustain deviations from a perfect sphere of up to a few parts in one million, implying the mountains could be as large as a few centimetres. These calculations assumed the neutron star was strained in such a way that the crust was close to breaking at every point. However the new models indicate that such conditions are not physically realistic.

Fabian adds: "These results show how neutron stars truly are remarkably spherical objects. Additionally, they suggest that observing gravitational waves from rotating neutron stars may be even more challenging than previously thought."

Although they are single objects, due to their intense gravitation, spinning neutron stars with slight deformations should produce ripples in the fabric of spacetime known as gravitational waves. Gravitational waves from rotations of single neutron stars have yet to be observed, although future advances in extremely sensitive detectors such as advanced LIGO and Virgo may hold the key to probing these unique objects.

WHAT:

In a perspective published in Neuropsychopharmacology, leaders from the National Institutes of Health address how using appropriate language to describe mental illness and addiction can help to reduce stigma and improve how people with these conditions are treated in health care settings and throughout society. The authors define stigma as negative attitudes toward people that are based on certain distinguishing characteristics. More than a decade of research has shown that stigma contributes significantly to negative health outcomes and can pose a barrier to seeking treatment for mental illness or substance use disorders.

Thirty five?percent of people with serious mental illness in the U.S., and nearly 90% of people with substance use disorders,?do not receive?treatment. The perspective authors point to evidence that stigma-related bias among clinicians can contribute to a treatment-averse mindset and to flawed clinical care, including failure to implement proven methods of treatment. Further, when a person with a mental illness or substance use disorder continues to experience stigma, they may begin to internalize it. This "self-stigma" can lead to lower self-esteem and feelings of self-worth and can become an ongoing source of distress that may exacerbate symptoms and create barriers to successful treatment.

Conversely, efforts to reduce stigma may reduce the psychological burden it places on individuals and can be an important component of removing barriers to care. The authors highlight numerous studies showing that using?scientifically accurate language?and terms?that?centralize the experience of patients?with mental illness and substance use disorders is one key component to reducing stigma. They argue that a shift in language is?crucial for mobilizing resources toward mental health and addiction services and eroding the prejudices that keep people who need?those services from seeking or receiving them. Though stigma is difficult to eliminate, they contend that changing the language we use to describe these conditions can make a significant and immediate difference for the people experiencing them.