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The work was conducted under the auspices of the Russian Science Foundation; the project "Synthesis and research of a new class of nanocomposite ceramics with degenerate dielectric constant for optoplasmonic applications" is headed by Professor Sergey Kharintsev (KFU's Institute of Physics).

Professor Kharintsev, the first co-author, comments, "Under the influence of light, collective oscillations of electrons can be excited in metallic nanostructures, and as a result the electric field in the vicinity of the nanostructures strongly increases. The field of physics that studies the effects of generation and propagation of such electromagnetic excitations is called plasmonics. Its most striking achievements include optical visualization of single molecules and diagnostics of their vibrations with a spatial resolution of 0.16 nm (for example, the size of a water molecule is 0.3 nm). In practice, the achievements of plasmonics are widely used in the development of highly sensitive biomedical sensors, in the creation of new generation solar cells, in the development of the element base of nanophotonics and optoelectronics, in particular, light filters, polarizers, modulators, waveguides, etc."

Strong heating of nanostructures under plasmon resonance conditions underlies a number of unique applications of thermoplasmonics in biology and medicine. This is the basis of photothermal cancer therapy methods. It made possible to create a thermoplasmonic biosensor with a record sensitivity of 0.22 pmol per liter for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19 virus), as well as reusable protective masks in which copper nanoparticles are heated by sunlight to temperatures at which viruses die.

"We have developed an optical sensor, which is a metasurface composed of an ordered array of metallic titanium nitride (TiN) nanoantennas, each 500 times smaller than a human hair. By scanning ordered nanoantennas with a focused laser beam, they can be successively heated to a predetermined temperature (up to several hundred degrees) in less than one microsecond. Using such an optical sensor, we were able to determine for the first time the local glass transition temperature of a polymer with a spatial resolution of 200 nanometers," continues Kharintsev. "I would like to draw the attention of biologists, chemists and physicists to the fact that the functional properties of the created thermoplasmonic sensor go far beyond the scope of the mentioned application. This nanophotonic device can be used to study, for example, size effects in spatially limited (in three directions) 0D polymers. Using the sensor, it is possible to detect the glass transition temperature of spatially inhomogeneous polymer films, including multicomponent polymer mixtures. A thermoplasmonic optical sensor can be used to study structural changes and phase transitions, such as to determine the local crystallization (melting) temperature of nanoobjects. Attention should be paid to the possibility of using a thermoplasmonic sensor in the study of biological reactions on single cells (for instance, in the study of denaturation of individual proteins)."

As the interviewee noted, the team plans to use thermoplasmonic sensors in ultrafast calorimetry, another research priority of Kazan University chemists.

"I think you're on mute." This was the most-used phrase of 2020, according to Human Resources Online. Emblazoned on T-shirts and embossed on coffee-mugs, we used the meme to make fun of ourselves while learning video-conferencing tools like Zoom and Microsoft's Teams.

But for the more than 7 million Americans who suffer from vocal disorders, not being heard is a serious matter. Many people who have normal speaking skills have great difficulty communicating when their voice box, the larynx, fails. This can occur if the vocal cords, the two bands of smooth muscle tissue in the larynx, suffer damage from an accident, surgical procedure, viral infection or cancer.

There is no replacement for the vocal cords when the damage is severe or permanent. Now, a team of materials scientists at the University of Virginia School of Engineering has developed a soft material with promise of new treatments in the future. Their novel soft material, called an elastomer, is very stretchable and 10,000 times softer than a conventional rubber, matching the mechanical properties of vocal cords. The elastomer can be 3D printed for use in health care.

Liheng Cai, assistant professor of materials science and engineering and chemical engineering, oversees this research. Cai also holds a courtesy appointment in biomedical engineering and leads the Soft Biomatter Lab at UVA. Cai's lab works to understand and control the interactions between active soft materials, such as responsive polymers or biological gels, and living systems, such as bacteria or cells and tissues in the human body.

Cai's post-doctoral researcher Shifeng Nian and Ph.D. student Jinchang Zhu co-first authored the team's paper, "Three-Dimensional Printable, Extremely Soft, Stretchable, and Reversible Elastomers from Molecular Architecture-Directed Assembly," published and featured as a cover article in Chemistry of Materials. Collaborators include Baoxing Xu, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UVA, who conducted simulations to understand the deformation of 3D-printed, extremely soft structures.

The team developed a novel strategy to make such 3D-printable soft elastomers. They used a new type of polymer with a special architecture reminiscent of the bottlebrush for cleaning small glassware, but on the molecular scale. The bottlebrush-like polymer, when linked to form a network, enables extremely soft materials mimicking biological tissues.

Cai began to prove the potential of bottlebrush polymers as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's John H. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Cai's collaborative engineering of soft yet 'dry' rubber was published in Advanced Materials.

Now, Cai and his team have developed a new way to use strong - yet reversible depending upon the temperature - associations to crosslink bottlebrush-like polymers to form a rubber. The idea is to use chemical synthesis to append one glassy polymer to each end of a bottlebrush-like polymer. Such glassy polymers spontaneously self-organize to form nanoscale spheres that are the same as that of plastic water bottles. They are rigid at room temperature but melt at high temperature; this can be exploited to 3D print soft structures.

Their material's elasticity can be fine-tuned from approximately 100 to 10,000 pascals on the scale of pressure the material can withstand. The lower limit, approximately 100 pascals, is a million times softer than plastics and 10,000 times softer than conventional 3D-printable elastomers. Moreover, they can be stretched up to 600%.

"Their extreme softness, stretchiness and thermostability bode well for future applications," Cai said.

Cai credits Nian for developing the chemistry for synthesizing bottlebrush polymers with precisely controlled architecture to prescribe the softness and stretchability of elastomers. The elastomer can be used as an ink in a 3D printer to create a geometric shape with the qualities of rubber.

The 3D printer itself is about the size of a dorm room refrigerator. Zhu custom-designed the nozzle for the extruder system that shoots the materials in a prescribed amount in a 3D space, guided by a computer program specific to the object desired.

Nian earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from UVA in 2018, and joined Cai's Soft Biomatter lab as a post-doc. "Dr. Cai's group gives me an opportunity to expand my research from classical chemistry to materials development; we're inventing a lot of cool materials with special mechanical, electrical and optical properties," Nian said.

What's cool about the team's soft material is its ability to self-organize and assemble as each drop is deposited. When the silicone-based material is first loaded into the ink cartridge, it has the consistency of honey, half solid and half liquid. As printing progresses, the solvent binds the layers and then evaporates to seamlessly build the object. Moreover, you can re-do it if you make any mistakes, as the material is 100% reprocessable and recyclable.

"Conventional 3D-printable elastomers are intrinsically stiff; the process of printing often requires external mechanical support or post-treatment," Cai said. "Here, we demonstrate our elastomer's applicability as inks for direct-write printing 3D structures."

To study the way the material's molecules interconnect, Cai's team collaborated with Guillaume Freychet and Mikhail Zhernenkov, beamline scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory. They conducted experiments using the National Synchrotron Light Source II's sophisticated X-ray tool, specifically the soft matter interfaces beamline, to reveal the inner makeup of the printed materials without damaging the samples.

"The SMI beamline is ideally suited for this type of research due to its high x-ray beam intensity, excellent energy and momentum transfer tunability, and very low background. Working with Cai's team, we were able to see how the bottlebrush-like polymer assemble into a cross-linked network," Zhernenkov said.

Cai estimates that the team is two or three years away from seeing their elastomers in practical use, an accelerated pace enabled by the team's 3D-printing method. Sometimes called additive manufacturing, 3D printing is a research strength of UVA's Department of Materials Science and Engineering; researchers in this arena seek to understand the physics underlying additive manufacturing processes as they create new material systems.

Improving health is just one motivator for their research.

"We believe our findings will stimulate the development of new soft materials as inks for 3D printing, which can be the basis for a broad range of adaptive devices and structures such as sensors, stretchable electronics and soft robotics," Cai said.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- The field of mathematical topology is often described in terms of donuts and pretzels.

To most of us, the two differ in the way they taste or in their compatibility with morning coffee. But to a topologist, the only difference between the two is that one has a single hole and the other has three. There's no way to stretch or contort a donut to make it look like a pretzel -- at least not without ripping it or pasting different parts together, both of which are verboten in topology. The different number of holes make two shapes that are fundamentally, inexorably different.

In recent years, researchers have drawn on mathematical topology to help explain a range of phenomena like phase transitions in matter, aspects of Earth's climate and even how zebrafish form their iconic stripes. Now, a Brown University research team is working to use topology in yet another realm: training computers to classify how human cells organize into tissue-like architectures.

In a study published in the May 7 issue of the journal Soft Matter, the researchers demonstrate a machine learning technique that measures the topological traits of cell clusters. They showed that the system can accurately categorize cell clusters and infer the motility and adhesion of the cells that comprise them.

"You can think of this as topology-informed machine learning," said Dhananjay Bhaskar, a recent Ph.D. graduate who led the work. "The hope is that this can help us to avoid some of the pitfalls that affect the accuracy of machine learning algorithms."

Bhaskar developed the algorithm with Ian Y. Wong, an assistant professor in Brown's School of Engineering, and William Zhang, a Brown undergraduate.

There's been a significant amount of work in recent years to use artificial intelligence as a means of analyzing big data with spatial information, such as medical imaging of patient tissues. Progress has been made in training these systems to classify accurately, "but how they work is opaque and a little finicky," Wong said. "Just like people, sometimes computers hallucinate. You can have a few pixels in the wrong place, and it can confuse the algorithm. So Dhananjay has been thinking about ways we might be able to make those analyses a little more robust."

In developing this new system, Bhaskar took inspiration from modern art, specifically Pablo Picasso's "Bull." The series of 11 lithographs starts with a bull depicted in full detail. Each successive frame strips away a bit of detail, ending in a simple drawing capturing only the animal's fundamental attributes. By employing topology, Bhaskar thought he might be able to do something similar to understand the underlying form of tissue-like architectures.

The way in which cells migrate and interact depends on the physiology of the cells involved. For example, healthy tissues contain higher numbers of stationary epithelial cells. Processes like wound repair or cancer, however, often involve more mobile mesenchymal cells. Differences in physiology between the two cell types cause them to cluster together differently. Epithelial cells tend to aggregate into larger, more closely packed clusters. Mesenchymal cells tend to be more dispersed, with groups of cells branching off in different directions. But when assemblages contain a mix of both kinds of cells, it can be difficult to accurately analyze them.

The new algorithm uses a mathematical framework called persistent homology to examine microscope images of cell assemblages. Specifically, it looks at the topological patterns -- loops or holes -- that the cells form collectively. By looking at which patterns persist across different spatial resolutions, the algorithm determines which patterns are intrinsic to the image.

It starts by looking at the cells in their finest detail, determining which cells seem to be part of topological loops. Then it blurs the detail a bit by drawing a circle around each cell -- effectively making each cell a little larger -- to see which loops persist at that more coarse-grained scale and which get blurred out. The process is repeated until all the topological features eventually disappear. At the end, the algorithm produces a sort of bar code showing which loops persist across spatial scales. Those that are most persistent are stored as a simplified representation of the overall shape.

As it turns out, those persistent topological objects can be used to categorize clusters of differing types of cells. After training their algorithm on computer-simulated cells programmed to behave like different types of cells, the team turned it loose on real experimental images of migratory cells. Those cells had been exposed to varying biochemical treatments so that some were more epithelial, some were more mesenchymal, and some were somewhere in between. The study showed that the topological algorithm was able to correctly classify different spatial patterns according to which biochemical treatment the cells had received.

"It was able to pull out all of these experimental treatments just by identifying these persistent topological loops," Wong said. "We were kind of amazed at how well it did."

The team hopes that one day the algorithm could be used in laboratory experiments to test drugs, helping to determine how different drugs can alter cell migration and adhesion. Eventually, it may also be used on medical images of tumors, potentially helping doctors to determine how malignant those tumors may be.

"We're looking for ways to catch subtleties that might not be apparent to the human eye," Wong said. "We hope that this might be a human interpretable approach that complements existing machine learning approaches."

The rhythmic motions of hair-like cilia move liquids around cells or propel the cells themselves. In nature, cilia flap independently, and mimicking these movements with artificial materials requires complex mechanisms. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have made artificial cilia that move in a wave-like fashion when a rotating magnetic field is applied, making them suitable for versatile, climbing soft robots and microfluidic devices. Watch a video of the artificial cilia here.

Replicating movements found in nature -- for example, the small, whip-like movements of cilia -- could help researchers create better robots or microscopic devices. As cilia vibrate sequentially, they produce a traveling wave that moves water more efficiently and with a better pumping speed than when the cilia move at the same time. Previous researchers have recreated these wave-like movements, but the artificial cilia were expensive, needed sophisticated moving parts and were too large to be used for micro-scale devices. So, Shuaizhong Zhang, Jaap den Toonder and colleagues wanted to create microscale cilia that would move in a wave when a magnetic field was applied, pumping water quickly over them or acting as a soft robot that can crawl and climb.

The researchers infused a polymer with carbonyl iron powder particles and poured the mixture into a series of identical 50 μm-wide cylindrical holes. While the polymer cured, the team placed magnets underneath the mold, slightly altering the particles' alignments and magnetic properties in adjacent cilia. To test the artificial cilia's ability to move in water and glycerol, the researchers applied a rotating magnetic field. As magnets moved around the array, the cilia whipped back and forth, and flow was generated at a rate better than for most artificial cilia. Finally, the researchers flipped the array over, and it scuttled across a flat surface, reaching a maximum speed proportional to a human's running speed, and the robot reversed when the magnetic field flipped directions. The soft robot crawled up and down a 45-degree incline, climbed vertical surfaces, walked upside down and carried an object 10 times heavier than its own weight. The researchers say that because these artificial cilia are magnetically propelled and unconnected to any other device, they could be used to produce microfluidic pumps and agile soft robots for biomedical applications.

The authors acknowledge funding from a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant and the China Scholarship Council.

This paper is freely available as an ACS AuthorChoice article here.

The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS' mission is to advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and all its people. The Society is a global leader in promoting excellence in science education and providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple research solutions, peer-reviewed journals, scientific conferences, eBooks and weekly news periodical Chemical & Engineering News. ACS journals are among the most cited, most trusted and most read within the scientific literature; however, ACS itself does not conduct chemical research. As a leader in scientific information solutions, its CAS division partners with global innovators to accelerate breakthroughs by curating, connecting and analyzing the world's scientific knowledge. ACS' main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.

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Keto, gluten-free, organic: If a pet owner is on a specific diet, chances are their dog is on it, too, a new U of G study reveals.

But when it comes to a grain-free diet, owners seem to choose it more for their dogs than themselves, the study also found.

"It demonstrates that many variables, not just dietary habits, influence the selection of dog food," said study lead author Sydney Banton, a master's student in U of G's Department of Animal Biosciences.

The international Pet Food Consumer Habit Survey is the first of its kind to examine factors involved in pet owners choosing grain-free dog food in both Europe and North America. It has just been published in PLOS One.

The study found dog owners who are on gluten-free, organic or grain-free diets are likely to look for the same characteristics in the dry dog food they purchase.

Feeding their dog grain-free pet food was common among pet owners who prefer "premium" food, avoid grains or processed foods, follow vegetarian, vegan or ketogenic diets, or have strict diet routines.

"Grain-free brands make up more than 40 per cent of dry dog foods available in the U.S.," said Banton, who co-authored the study with pet nutrition and pet food expert Dr. Anna Kate Shoveller, Animal Biosciences, with help from Dr. Mike von Massow, Department of Food, Agricultural and Resource Economics. "We wanted to identify the variables that predict why dog owners choose grain-free food for their pet."

The research was supported through an agreement between the University and Montreal-based Rolf C. Hagen Group, the world's largest privately owned, multinational pet products manufacturer and distributor.

Researchers surveyed 3,300 pet owners from Canada, the U.S., Germany, France and the U.K. Participants were asked where they get their information about dog food, where they buy it and the most important factors in their choices.

Just over 21 per cent said they look for "no grain" as an attribute that influences their purchase. Dog owners in Germany showed the highest preference for grain-free dog food at 30 per cent, followed by 27 per cent in the U.S., 22 per cent in Canada and eight per cent in France.

Shoveller said the pet food industry is highly influenced by human trends and what pet owners believe about nutrition. Researchers focused on pet food innovations for dogs and cats must consider consumer trends and try to supply the best food formulations for consumers' beliefs, she said.

"We felt to best understand the risks associated with feeding a pet food formula without grains and with legumes, we should understand the consumers that chose that food and whether they do anything else that may put their dogs at risk for secondary metabolic disorders, such as dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM)."

A warning was issued in 2018 by the United States Food and Drug Administration indicating grain-free dog food may be linked to the occurrence of secondary DCM. The agency continues to investigate the possible link between DCM and grain-free dog food in dogs not believed to be genetically prone to its occurrence.

While some pet owners feed their dogs diets similar to their own, Banton said it is unclear why vegetarian or vegan pet owners would choose grain-free for their dog.

While most European and North American food-based dietary guidelines recommend consuming whole grains as part of a healthy diet, grains are perceived as unhealthy for dogs by many pet owners, said Banton.

"This is happening despite there being no scientific evidence that grains are detrimental to the health of dogs. Marketing strategies in the pet industry may be influencing these attitudes."

Research can provide a lot of scientific evidence for the development of pet foods, but it comes down to what the consumer decides, said Shoveller.

"They are the one making the choice at the pet store," she said. "If we can understand fully how they make decisions, we are better able bridge the gap in knowledge and assist them to make the right choices."

The sun delivers more energy to Earth in one hour than humanity consumes over an entire year. Scientists worldwide are searching for materials that can cost-effectively and efficiently capture this carbon-free energy and convert it into electricity.

Perovskites, a class of materials with a unique crystal structure, could overtake current technology for solar energy harvesting. They are cheaper than materials used in current solar cells, and they have demonstrated remarkable photovoltaic properties — behavior that allows them to very efficiently convert sunlight into electricity.

Revealing the nature of perovskites at the atomic scale is critical to understanding their promising capabilities. This insight can help inform models to determine the optimal makeup of perovskite materials for solar cells, which can be used to power vehicles, electronic devices and even home heating and other appliances.

“Perovskites do well at preventing recombination. We want to know what mechanism causes this and if we can exploit it to create better solar cells.” — Argonne scientist Ray Osborn

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory participated in a collaboration led by Duke University, along with DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and other collaborators, to study the inner workings of a perovskite material using the world-class X-ray scattering capabilities at Argonne and neutron scattering capabilities at Oak Ridge. The scattering capabilities enabled the scientists to observe the material’s behavior at the atomic scale, and the study revealed that liquid-like motion in perovskites may explain how they efficiently produce electric currents.

“There is a lot of excitement surrounding these materials, but we don’t fully understand why they are such good photovoltaics,” said Duke University’s Olivier Delaire, lead scientist on the study.

When light hits a photovoltaic material, it excites electrons, prompting them to pop out of their atoms and travel through the material, conducting electricity. A common problem is that the excited electrons can recombine with the atoms instead of traveling through the material, which can significantly decrease the electricity produced relative to the amount of sunlight hitting the material.

“Perovskites do well at preventing recombination,” said Argonne’s Ray Osborn. “We want to know what mechanism causes this and if we can learn from this to create better solar cells.”

The team studied one of the simplest perovskites — a compound of cesium, lead and bromine (CsPbBr3) — to figure out what is going on at the atomic scale.

Using X-ray scattering capabilities at Argonne’s Magnetic Materials group’s beamline (6-ID-D) at the lab’s Advanced Photon Source, a DOE Office of Science User Facility, the team captured the average positions of the atoms in a perovskite crystal at different temperatures. They found that each lead atom and its surrounding cage of bromine atoms form rigid units that behave like molecules. These units oscillate — or jiggle back and forth — in a liquid-like manner.

“The molecules in this material rotate about the other molecules like they’re hinged together, and around the hinges, the molecules act kind of floppy,” said Delaire.

One theory to explain how perovskites resist recombination is that these distortions in the lattice, or crystal structure, follow the free electrons as they traverse the material. The electrons might deform the lattice, causing the liquid-like disturbances, which then prevent them from falling back into their host atoms. This theory, which is bolstered by the new experimental results, can provide new insights into how to design optimal perovskite materials for solar cells.

The data also indicates that molecules in the material oscillate within two-dimensional planes, with no motion across planes — similar to a carnival ride that only swings left to right, but never front to back. The two-dimensional nature of the crystal distortions could be one more puzzle piece to explain how the perovskite can prevent electron recombination, contributing to the efficiency of the material.

According to Osborn, the two-dimensional patterns in the X-ray scattering data had never been seen. “Based on these unexpected measurements, we wanted to dig even deeper by not only looking at average atomic positions, but how the atoms move around in real time,” he said.

To investigate the motion of the atoms directly, the team used neutron scattering capabilities at the Spallation Neutron Source, a DOE Office of Science user facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Researchers at Argonne’s Materials Science division and Northwestern University grew the large, centimeter-scale crystals required for the neutron measurements.

The neutron scattering confirmed the unforeseen pattern seen in the X-ray scattering experiment, but showed, in addition, that it takes almost no energy for the molecules to oscillate in two dimensions. This helps to explain why the excited electrons can deform the lattice so easily.

“This work is a beautiful example of the complementarity of neutrons and X-rays in revealing both the structure and dynamics of complex materials,” said Osborn, who was involved in both sets of measurements.

The study represents a step towards taking full advantage of the largely untapped renewable energy from the sun, which could have significant impact on both the environment and economy.

During a 15-year study of wild bees visiting blueberry fields during their blooming season, researchers caught an unexpected glimpse of how extreme weather events can impact bee populations highlighting the need for more long-term studies, says a Michigan State University researcher.

"There are few bee studies in the U.S. that have sampled bees for many years at the same location," said Rufus Isaacs, a professor in the Department of Entomology within the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, "There are even fewer that use the same methods over more than a decade."

The research was published May 8 in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment.

Isaacs worked with Kelsey Graham, a former postdoctoral researcher who is now with the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service. Graham collected bees during the last sampling period and combined data from two former MSU students into the analysis.

During the study, bees were sampled during three separate periods in May and June during 2004-2006, 2013-2014 and 2017-2018. The bees were collected using brightly colored bowls full of soapy water located at 15 farms across southwest Michigan. Different bee species are active at different times of the year, nest in different places (in the ground or in the stems of plants) and have different host plants.

This study looked at a specific slice of the bees who were active during May-June and visited blueberry bushes while they were blooming. To the researchers' surprise, the very warm spring and hot summer of 2012 provided a unique opportunity to see how bee populations responded and recovered to the extreme weather event in subsequent years.

"The very advanced spring in 2012 was so unique, and flowers were open when the frosts came in April and May" Isaacs said. "This wasn't what we were trying to study but this helps explain the patterns we found."

The study captured 162 species or 35% of the bee species in Michigan from 2004-2018. The team saw a 61% decline in the number of bees between the first and second sampling periods, because of extreme warm temperatures in spring 2012. The freeze damaged flowers bees need for food. Some bee species recovered, but others such as the blueberry specialist bee, Andrena carolina, displayed a dramatic decline and slow recovery in the third sampling period.

"We also looked at the use of pesticides and found that the environmental affects had a bigger impact on the bee population," Isaacs said. "We were fortunate to combine the work of three separate projects for this analysis. If you only look at the short periods of time, you might come to different conclusions, but long-term over multiple samples we can see the bigger trends."

This study highlights the need to develop programs that monitor wild bees across the United States since they are important to food systems. "Our data will contribute to the national efforts to understand how to protect these beautiful and essential insects," Isaacs said.

The younger generation of workers, although raised with and on technology, are not as technology savvy as the older generations believe.

A new study by researchers in The University of Toledo John B. and Lillian E. Neff College of Business and Innovation published in the Journal of Applied Business and Economics analyzes the interesting paradox and outlines methods to bridge the technology gap and better prepare students for the realities of the workplace, including the Microsoft Office suite and beyond.

"The elements of a digital workplace and technological literacy are more relevant now than ever," said Daniel Pfaltzgraf, visiting instructor of business technology and management at UToledo and co-author of the study. "Technology was critical for business success before the coronavirus pandemic, but it has continued to grow exponentially over the last year."

Many millennials, individuals born between 1981 and 1996, and the Generation Z population, born after 1997, have learned to be great, efficient consumers of technology, such as sending pictures, sharing videos and texting or other short-form communication.

However, they are far less adept at understanding how to use technology to create useful solutions to their business challenges -- for example, using Outlook to send e-mail, Word to prepare documents, Excel to analyze data and PowerPoint to communicate through presentations.

"While students are quite adept at using their cell phones and basic software, they may not be computer fluent," said Dr. Gary Insch, professor of management at UToledo.

The other issue is that middle and high school students mostly use Google Chromebooks, Google Docs and Gmail before college.

"Those students are learning skills that are not relevant in the business world," Insch said. "Microsoft Office is one of the most desired skills by hiring managers. Most corporations do not run off Chrome OS, create reports in Google Docs, nor begin boardroom presentations on a Google Slide. In fact, recent research has shown that only 15 companies listed in the S&P 500 are using Google's productivity suite."

The researchers recommend three methods to prepare business students in the classroom to create versus consume and have a less difficult time adjusting to full-time employment:

Build proficiency of business software in an academic setting;

Have educators be the convener, not conveyer, of learning in a digitally focused classroom; and

Apply design thinking in a classroom setting.

"Regardless of academic discipline, the corporate world is increasingly relying on a suite of tools to enable virtual collaboration and creation in the globalized economy," Pfaltzgraf said. "The functions of employees today center around five technological needs as a part of the digital workplace: web conferencing, communication, virtual collaboration, productivity and project management."

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced more people to Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Webex and more, but the researchers say educators can use popular technology such as YouTube to better help students end a semester with a tangible output and a portfolio builder in addition to a letter on a transcript.

"Educators can utilize the popularity of video-sharing platforms to Generation Z and Millennials to unearth knowledge from YouTube, video courses like Lynda.com, and educational content found on social media to create a learning experience with students at the center, and later in the semester, have students create a deliverable to be uploaded to one of these tools," Insch said.

As the need for innovation and critical thinking are increasingly appearing on job postings and in recruiter pitches, the researchers encourage design thinking to drive innovation and promote critical thinking.

"Integrating design thinking into the classroom allows students to become the 'problem solver' of business challenges as they move through the process of listening to pain points, flaring on ideas, building solutions and testing them with people," Pfaltzgraf said.

Researchers used as an example a course titled Business Innovation Methods with Design Thinking that was piloted in fall 2020 with a group of 23 multidisciplinary students at UToledo who solved a problem through active participation, ideation and creation.

"With new tools to learn and new ways to express themselves, creating provides an outlet for students to be more productive and successful in their careers," Pfaltzgraf said.

A team of researchers at the Centre Spatial de Liège (CSL) of the University of Liège has just developed a method to identify the contributors and origins of stray light on space telescopes. This is a major advance in the field of space engineering that will help in the acquisition of even finer space images and the development of increasingly efficient space instruments. This study has just been published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Space telescopes are becoming more and more powerful. Technological developments in recent years have made it possible, for example, to observe objects further and further into the universe or to measure the composition of the Earth's atmosphere with ever greater precision. However, there is still one factor limiting the performance of these telescopes: stray light. A phenomenon that has been known fora long time, stray light results in light reflections (ghost reflections between lenses, scattering, etc.) that damage the quality of images and often lead to blurred images. Until now, the methods for checking and characterizing this stray light during the development phase of the telescopes have been very limited, making it possible to "just" know whether or not the instrument was sensitive to the phenomenon, forcing engineers to revise all their calculations in positive cases, leading to considerable delays in the commissioning of these advanced tools.

Researchers at the Centre Spatial de Liège (CSL), in collaboration with the University of Strasbourg, have just developed a revolutionary method for solving this problem by using a femto-second pulsed laser to send light beams to illuminate the telescope. "Stray light rays take (in the telescope) different optical paths from the rays that form the image," explains Lionel Clermont, an expert in space optical systems and stray light at CSL. Thanks to this, and using an ultra-fast detector (of the order of 10-9 seconds of resolution, i.e. a thousandth of a millionth of a second), we are measuring the image and the different stray light effects at different times. In addition to this decomposition, we can identify each of the contributors using their arrival times, which are directly related to the optical path, and thus know the origin of the problem." The CSL engineers have now demonstrated the effectiveness of this method in a paper, just published in the journal Scientific Reports, in which they present the first film showing ghost reflections in a refractive telescope arriving at different times. "We have also been able to use these measurements to reverse engineer theoretical models," says Lionel Clermont, "which will make it possible, for example, to build better image processing models in the future." By correlating these measurements with numerical models, the scientists will now be able to determine precisely the origin of the stray light and thus act accordingly to improve the system, both by improving the hardware and with the development of correction algorithms.

More than just a scientific curiosity, this method developed at the CSL could well lead to a small revolution in the field of high-performance space instruments. "We have already received a great deal of interest from the ESA (European Space Agency) and from industrialists in the space sector," says Marc Georges, an expert in metrology and lasers at CSL and co-author of the study. This method responds to an urgent problem that has been unresolved until now." In the near future, CSL researchers intend to continue the development of this method, to increase its TRL (Technology Readiness Level) and bring it to an industrial level. An industrial application is already planned for the FLEX (Fluorescence Explorer) project, an earth observation telescope that is part of ESA's Living Planet Program. The researchers hope to be able to apply it to scientific instruments as well.

Boulder, Colo., USA: Deep pools below waterfalls are popular recreational swimming spots, but sometimes they can be partially or completely filled with sediment. New research showed how and why pools at the base of waterfalls, known as plunge pools, go through natural cycles of sediment fill and evacuation. Beyond impacting your favorite swimming hole, plunge pools also serve important ecologic and geologic functions. Deep pools are refuges for fish and other aquatic animals in summer months when water temperatures in shallow rivers can reach lethal levels. Waterfalls also can liquefy sediment within the pool, potentially triggering debris flows that can damage property and threaten lives. Over geologic time, pools are importance because the energetic waterfall jet can erode the rock walls of the pool--slowly moving the waterfall upstream, while simultaneously creating a deep canyon in its wake.

Reporting in the journal Geology today, Joel Scheingross of the University of Nevada Reno, and Michael Lamb of the California Institute of Technology, provided a new theoretical framework to predict when plunge pools fill with sediment, and when they subsequently evacuate that sediment exposing the rock walls of the pool to erosion. They showed that waterfall plunge pools tend to fill with sediment during modest river floods when sediment is transported in the reach upstream of the waterfall, but the waterfall jet is too weak to move all the sediment it receives from upstream. In contrast, during large floods, a strong waterfall jet can more efficiently move sediment up and out of the pool, outpacing the delivery of sediment from upstream, and exposing bedrock to erosion.

Scheingross and Lamb showed that waterfall plunge pools are most likely to fill with sediment following landscape disturbances--such as wildfire or landslides--that cause large influxes of sediment to rivers, or during prolonged droughts when river floods are rare. This information is useful to scientists and land managers interested in maintaining habitat and mitigating natural hazards. They also showed that bedrock erosion in plunge pools likely occurs only during large, infrequent floods, which tend to happen every 10 years or even less frequently. Therefore, the slow march of waterfalls upstream over geologic time likely occurs by fits and starts at a cadence set by extreme flood events.

Florida State University researchers have more insight into a strange sea creature found in oceans around the world and what their presence means for the health of a marine ecosystem.

Scientists have thought that salps -- small marine organisms that look like clear, gelatinous blobs -- competed for resources with krill, shrimp-like creatures that are an important food source for many marine animals. But new research published in Limnology and Oceanography suggests that salps are actually competing for food with an organism known as a protist.

An image of a salp taken during research. New research published in Limnology and Oceanography suggests that salps are actually competing for food with an organism known as a protist. (Courtesy of Michael Stukel)

"These fascinating and bizarre animals are becoming more abundant in the vast and warming Southern Ocean, so we sought to understand how their presence changes marine ecosystems," said Michael Stukel, a researcher with FSU's Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies and an associate professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science.

Though salps might resemble jellyfish, they are one of the earliest examples of chordates to evolve, and therefore more closely related to humans.

These organisms live in oceans around the world and feed on phytoplankton. When their food source is abundant, salps rapidly multiply with the help of an unusual reproductive cycle, forming large blooms made of thousands of organisms. They remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by eating algae and then compacting them into tiny pellets that sink to the bottom of the ocean.

Salps are also a food source for some marine animals, but they don't provide much nutrition. Their importance to the marine food web is eclipsed by krill, which are nutritious food for all sorts of animals, from tiny anchovies to enormous whales. The old theory was that salp blooms crowded out krill, leading to more carbon sequestration but less food for marine organisms.

Instead, salps are probably replacing miniscule protists that are not an important food source for large organisms in the ocean. Although salps are much larger than those protists, they feed on the same microscopic algae. Imagine an elephant that eats the same food as an ant, Stukel said.

To understand what size prey the salps were eating, the researchers built a circular tank and filled it with salps and seawater, which contained their prey. They measured the fluorescence glowing from the salps' prey living in the water and tracked how it changed over time to understand what size prey were being eaten.

Because the protists are the same size as their prey, they needed to use a different method to see what size prey they were eating. The researchers filled one bottle with seawater, which held a typical amount of protists and prey, and another with diluted seawater, which decreased the frequency with which predator and prey met. After 24 hours, they could use the same fluorescence measuring technique to see what kind of prey the protists ate.

Learning that salps are likely competing with protists, and not with krill, is reason to rethink the role of salp blooms in the ocean ecosystem.

"If we get more of these really weird organisms, how is that going to change the way the ocean works -- for everything in the ocean, but also for humans?" Stukel said. "Our results suggest that salps are not even really competing with krill. They're going to be replacing protists, so if that happens, you'll get a lot more carbon sequestration and you'll probably even get a little bit more food availability, because although salps are not as good a prey as krill, they're still better prey than protists."

Scientists at SPECIFIC Innovation and Knowledge Centre, Swansea University, have found a way to replace the toxic, unsustainable solvents currently needed to make the next generation of solar technology.

Printed carbon perovskite solar cells have been described as a likely front runner to the market because they are extremely efficient at converting light to electricity, cheap and easy to make.

A major barrier to the large-scale manufacture and commercialisation of these cells is the solvents used to control crystallisation of the perovskite during fabrication: this is because they are made from unsustainable materials and are banned in many countries due to their toxicity and psychoactive effects.

SPECIFIC's researchers have discovered that a non-toxic biodegradable solvent called γ-Valerolactone (GVL) could replace these solvents without impacting cell performance.

GVL's list of advantages could improve the commercial viability of carbon perovskite solar devices:

It is made from sustainable feedstocks

There are no legal issues in its use around the world

It is suitable for use in large-scale manufacturing processes

It is non-toxic and biodegradable

Carys Worsley, who led the research as part of her doctorate, said:

"To be truly environmentally sustainable, the way that solar cells are made must be as green as the energy they produce. As the next generation of solar technologies approaches commercial viability, research to reduce the environmental impact of large-scale production will become increasingly important."

Professor Trystan Watson, research group leader, added:

"Many problems need to be resolved before these technologies become a commercial reality. This solvent problem was a major barrier, not only restricting large-scale manufacture but holding back research in countries where the solvents are banned.

We hope our discovery will enable countries that have previously been unable to participate in this research to become part of the community and accelerate the development of cleaner, greener energy."

May 19, 2021 - For patients with severe arthritis of the ankle, total ankle arthroplasty (TAA) provides better long-term function than ankle arthrodesis (AA), reports a study in The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery. The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio in partnership with Wolters Kluwer.

"Both established treatments for end-stage ankle arthritis are effective at pain relief and improved patient-reported outcomes," according to the research by Bruce Sangeorzan MD, and colleagues at the University of Washington and VA Puget Sound Health Care System. "However, it appears TAA leads to greater improvement in most patient-reported outcome measures at 48 months after surgery."

Study adds to evidence supporting TAA for ankle arthritis

End-stage ankle arthritis is characterized by complete loss of cartilage and "bone-on-bone" contact in the ankle joint, with patients experiencing pain and stiffness. The standard treatment for end-stage ankle arthritis is arthrodesis, which uses hardware such as plates and screws to fuse the ankle bones into a single piece.

However, in recent years, TAA has become a popular alternative. In TAA, a prosthesis is used to replace the deteriorated ankle joint - similar to how artificial joints are used in total hip or knee replacement surgery. However, questions remain regarding the results of TAA versus AA, especially in the long term.

Dr. Sangeorzan and colleagues compared the outcomes of the two procedures in 517 patients with end-stage ankle arthritis at six medical centers. Patients were treated according to their preferred procedure, with 414 undergoing TAA and 103 undergoing AA. All operations were performed by orthopaedic surgeons with extensive experience with each procedure, as well as hip and knee replacement and surgery for other deformities around the ankle.

At four years postoperatively, both procedures yielded showed improvements in key patient outcomes. By most measures, long-term results were better for patients undergoing TAA compared with AA, including patient-reported ankle function for activities of daily living and sports, as well as physical aspects of quality of life.

Through the first three years postoperatively, pain scores were also better after total ankle replacement. For example, average pain score (on a 0-to-10 scale) decreased from 6.3 to 1.9 in the TAA group versus 6.0 to 2.5 in the AA group. For both treatments, the improvements observed at two years postoperatively were maintained through four years postoperatively.

Seventy-eight percent of patients who underwent TAA were "completely satisfied" with the results of their surgery, compared to 60 percent of those who underwent AA. Patients who underwent TAA also had a lower rate of revision surgery: 8.7 versus 17.5 percent.

Although the study was designed as a randomized trial with a patient preference arm, too few patients were willing to be randomized, and the trial was converted to a prospective cohort study. According to coauthor Dan Norvell, PhD, the researchers controlled for the effects of potential selection bias in their analysis by evaluating and adjusting for unevenly distributed patient characteristics between treatment groups.

Drs. Sangeorzan and Norvell attribute the successful study recruitment and follow-up of the study to the efforts of site investigators, including James Davitt, MD, John G. Anderson, MD, Donald Bohay, MD, J. Chris Coetzee, MD, John Maskill, MD, Michael Brage, MD, Michael Houghton, MD, and their dedicated research staffs.

The findings are "highly relevant" to patients and surgeons during the planning stage when treating severe ankle arthritis, Dr. Sangeorzan and coauthors believe. They plan to perform further analyses to report the rates and risk factors for revision surgery for the two procedures with a longer follow-up period.

URBANA, Ill. - Women's ability to work as entrepreneurs can help alleviate poverty and malnutrition in developing countries. As local governments and development organizations aim to encourage business opportunities, it's important to identify projects suited for women's lives in rural households.

The soy kit, which includes common household items such as a pot, spoon, thermometer, and cheese cloth, enables entrepreneurs to create value-added products from soy in small-scale household settings. The kit has potential to improve the economic conditions of Malawi women in a sustainable way, a University of Illinois study concludes.

"The larger issue is about adding value to agricultural products in the developing world as a means of raising incomes," says Pete Goldsmith, director of the Soybean Innovation Lab (SIL) at Illinois and corresponding author on the study, published in Food and Nutrition Bulletin.

"Women are often the ones taking care of children and elders, and holding the household unit together, so if they have access to more money and better nutrition that's a critical component for improving the standard of living in developing countries," he explains.

"Not all agricultural technologies are consistent with women's skill sets, time constraints, and complementary resources. A food-based business such as the soy kit appears to be appropriate for women entrepreneurs but we had to test it to learn if that held up in practice," Goldsmith says.

Malnutrition Matters, a Canadian non-government organization (NGO), developed the soy kit. The USAID-funded Feed the Future Malawi Agriculture Diversification Activity distributed the kit to more than 200 households over a period of 18 months. The SIL researchers assisted with the rollout and helped train the women in bookkeeping so they could collect data on the project's economic feasibility.

The women entrepreneurs use the kit to process the soybeans and extract milk, from which they can make products such as flavored beverages, yogurt, cheese, and ice cream. The process also yields a co-product, okara, a high-protein pulp used for animal feed or as an ingredient in baking or food preparation.

The soy kit is a viable alternative to the soy cow, a popular technology widely implemented throughout Africa. The soy cow also extracts milk from soybeans to create value-added products. While it does so well, it is an expensive piece of equipment that produces large quantities of milk, requiring dedicated space, electricity, and access to refrigeration, Goldsmith explains.

The soy kit is a much more nimble tool, appropriate for individual households and easily adapted to local markets.

"The products have a shelf life for a couple hours, and you only make as much as you think you can sell. You don't need cold storage such as a refrigerator or freezer. You can put the products in sachets with some ice and take them to sell at fairs and by the roadside," Goldsmith says.

"The women know what people like, how to price the products, and where to find their customers. The project can leverage women's intrinsic knowledge of the marketplace," he notes.

Goldsmith and co-author Chungman Kim, an undergraduate student in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics (ACE) who worked on the research for an independent study project, collected and analyzed the women's bookkeeping data to track the economics of using the kit. To learn more about undergraduate student research opportunities, visit the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences website.

The Canadian soy kit costs about $200, but entrepreneurs can assemble a similar kit with locally sourced materials for about $80. The women may already have some of the items, and they can use them for other purposes, adding to the kit's versatility. Even if the women had to take out a small loan to acquire the kit without donor assistance, it would quickly pay off, Goldsmith says.

He and Kim calculated the income generation from the soy kit, estimating gross margins after subtracting production costs such as soybean, water, flavorings, sachets, and plastic bags. There are no capital investments in addition to the kit itself, since the women work from their own home, and the project requires no special storage or cooling facilities. The researchers found gross margins averaged 56%, and implicit wages - a means to estimate the value of labor - equaled $2 per hour.

While that is a significant amount in rural Malawi, it doesn't mean the women can work eight hours a day at this wage. They need to adapt their production level to marketplace demands and time constraints. Still, the soy kit provides a good source of income that aligns with the greater goals of alleviating poverty and malnutrition in Malawi, Goldsmith concludes.

SIL is a USAID-funded initiative comprising an international team of soybean researchers, currently operating at 120 locations in 26 countries.

"We provide technical support to development organizations addressing poverty and malnutrition. We can serve as the technical backstop, helping to determine appropriate ways to solve problems. This is what SIL and the University of Illinois do really well," Goldsmith explains.

He also credits Maggie Mzungu, Charity Kambani, and Elizabeth Venable of the Feed the Future Malawi Agriculture Diversification Activity with helping to roll out the soy kit project and collect data on the ground in Malawi.

Researchers at UVA Cancer Center have unveiled important new insights into how hormones known as androgens act on our cells - and the discovery could boost efforts to develop better treatments for prostate, ovarian and breast cancers.

The findings shed light on how androgens interact with their receptors inside cells to affect gene activity. This process is important in both healthy cells and certain cancers. Hormone therapy for prostate cancer, for example, aims to reduce the amount of androgen in the body, or to stop it from fueling the cancer cells. However, the approach does not work for some men, and for others it eventually fails. So scientists are eager to better understand how our cells - and cancer - interact with androgen.

"Our study reveals a new mechanism for how androgen regulates communication within prostate cancer cells," said Bryce M. Paschal, PhD, of the University of Virginia School of Medicine's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics. "Anti-androgen therapies continue to be the cornerstone for prostate cancer therapy. The better we understand how androgens work, the better clinicians will be positioned to understand why it fails, and how even better therapies can be designed."

Androgen and Cancer

In a new paper in the scientific journal Nature Communications, Paschal and his colleagues describe how a complex signaling system regulates androgen receptor activity. The system, they found, uses a "writer" and a "reader" to modify cellular proteins - sort of like how a computer reads and writes information.

Scientists have appreciated the importance of these modified proteins, but understanding just how they influence the androgen receptors has been difficult. One key to the regulation process, found by Paschal and his SOM team, is an enzyme, Parp7, produced by the PARP7 gene. Parp7 is part of a family of enzymes involved in important cellular functions including DNA repair.

Certain cancer drugs already target certain Parp enzymes; these drugs are used to treat prostate, ovarian and breast cancers in patients who have mutations in DNA-repair genes. And while androgens are usually discussed in the context of prostate cancer, androgens may be important in ovarian and breast cancer as well.

Paschal's new findings offer fresh insights into these Parp drugs and could lead to improved treatments that help patients get the best outcomes. Further, Paschal and his team found lower levels of Parp7 in prostate cancer that has spread to other parts of the body than in the initial tumors. That may suggest that a reduction in Parp7 is associated with the progression of the disease, the researchers say.

With their new androgen insights, Paschal and his colleagues have provided scientists with important new directions to explore in the battle against prostate and other cancers.

"Our next steps will be to use preclinical models to determine the role this pathway plays in prostate cancer progression, and whether inhibition of the pathways slows disease," Paschal said. "We are very excited by what we have learned thus far. Our study emphasizes there is still so much to be learned, and that basic science plays a critical role in defining the molecular context for enzyme and drug action. "