Tech

California produces nearly 4 million tons of world-class wine each year, but with that comes thousands of tons of residue like grape skins, seeds, stems and pulp. What if scientists could harness that viticultural waste to help promote human health?

Maybe they can, according to new research from food scientists at the University of California, Davis. In a study published in the journal LWT - Food Science and Technology, the team discovered a wealth of potentially health-enhancing compounds and sugar molecules called oligosaccharides within chardonnay wine-grape pomace.

Oligosaccharides are found in many plant and animal tissues, including human breast milk. Recent advances have revealed oligosaccharides' vast potential to support intestinal health.

"We were surprised by the diversity of the oligosaccharides in the chardonnay wine grapes, including the presence of structural elements found in mother's milk," said Amanda Sinrod, lead author and a master's candidate working with Professor Daniela Barile.

The UC Davis team analyzed the molecular composition of chardonnay residue provided by Jackson Family Wines and Sonomaceuticals, a company founded by two food industry businesswomen to develop new uses for viticulture waste. Wine-grape pomace, or marc, comprises about 30 percent of the original wine-grape material, and much of it is left to decompose in the sun.

Potential source for food or supplements

"It's all about sustainable wine production and finding a second life for wine grapes," Barile explained. "Up to this point, chardonnay marc has been regarded as a byproduct of winemaking with little or no value. Early results are encouraging that marc could be a valuable source for oligosaccharides and other compounds that support health and nutrition."

UC Davis researchers were among the first to decode the magic of oligosaccharides in mother's milk. The sugar molecules don't nourish the baby directly. Instead, they feed a strain of bacteria in the infant's intestines that helps build immunity against illness and disease. That discovery is helping scientists develop methods and products to improve human health.

Barile's lab innovates technologies for recovering health-enhancing compounds from various agricultural and industrial waste streams, such as whey, legumes and chickpeas. Her team previously discovered oligosaccharides in both red and white wine residue and is pleased with preliminary findings from the chardonnay analysis.

"There is more research to be done, but early results are promising that chardonnay marc can become a source for developing supplements and other food products to support health," Barile said.

Oligosaccharides appeared to be especially abundant in the wine-grape skins. In earlier research, scientists detected oligosaccharides in the finished wine product, but not in large concentrations. Researchers didn't include bottled wine in this study.

The chardonnay marc samples were also rich in flavonoids, healthy compounds found in many fruits and vegetables. Researchers are exploring whether the oligosaccharides work independently or synergistically with these bioactive compounds to support intestinal health. The team is studying how growing conditions, vintages and processing might affect the health potential of viticulture waste.

"We observed significant differences in the relative abundance and type of oligosaccharides in different parts of the marc, so further research is needed to maximize their potential in food product design," Sinrod said.

For elite runners competing in long-distance races, every second counts. So when Nike introduced "advanced shoe technology" in 2017, questions arose about whether the new design would significantly affect performances in professional sports. A new paper published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living found that the new footwear indeed reduced running times for both elite male and female competitors.

The study analyzed seasonal best times for elite male and female runners in three race categories - 10 kilometers, half marathon and marathon races - between 2012 and 2019. The researchers found a statistically significant decrease in race times after 2017, which coincided with the premiere of the Nike Vaporfly 4%.

Female elite athletes appeared to gain the most benefit from the design improvement, which features a thicker, lighter foam and rigid plate along the midsole. Their seasonal best times between 2016 and 2019 decreased anywhere from 1.7 to 2.3 percent, versus 0.6 to 1.5 percent for the men. For example, the new shoe technology improved female marathon time by about 2 minutes and 10 seconds, a 1.7 percent boost in performance.

"As far as chronometric performance is concerned, it is in our opinion a major advancement," said Dr. Stéphane Bermon, lead author of the paper and director of the World Athletics Health and Science Department.

The mechanics behind the improvements in performance remain somewhat of a mystery. One advantage of the new shoe technology is that it uses the latest generation of lightweight foam in the midsole, which provides the runner with a higher energy return. The embedded stiff plate in the midsole also contributes to maximizing energy return in each step. In effect, the shoe works to propel the runner forward with a little less effort.

The statistical gap between genders was unexpected, according to Bermon. One advantage could come down to weight between the sexes.

"Women are lighter and could possibly benefit more from the enhanced rebound effect achieved by the foam/stiff plate combination," he said. "Their slightly different running pattern, compared to men, could represent a more favorable condition for this footwear technology to play its ergogenic role."

A previous 2018 statistical analysis had already suggested a 3 to 4 percent decrease in half marathon and marathon race times based on hundreds of thousands of self-reported results. However, the present study was the first to look at the top seasonal best times for elite athletes.

While the research included a majority of results from East African runners, like Ethiopian and Kenyan, who have come to dominate the sport, the paper noted that non-East-African elite runners experienced similar improvements in performance.

"These results confirm that advanced footwear technology has benefits to the elite male and female distance runners," Bermon said. "Whether this technology will be banned or simply controlled, as it is currently, is still to be decided by World Athletics."

No immediate follow-up studies are planned, though Bermon said additional research is needed to understand whether mass adoption of the new footwear by both recreational and elite runners causes more or fewer injuries, especially in light of all the different types of running styles.

By cracking open a cellular membrane, Northwestern University synthetic biologists have discovered a new way to increase production yields of protein-based vaccines by five-fold, significantly broadening access to potentially lifesaving medicines.

In February, the researchers introduced a new biomanufacturing platform that can quickly make shelf-stable vaccines at the point of care, ensuring they will not go to waste due to errors in transportation or storage. In its new study, the team discovered that enriching cell-free extracts with cellular membranes -- the components needed to made conjugate vaccines -- vastly increased yields of its freeze-dried platform.

The work sets the stage to rapidly make medicines that address rising antibiotic-resistant bacteria as well as new viruses at 40,000 doses per liter per day, costing about $1 per dose. At that rate, the team could use a 1,000-liter reactor (about the size of a large garden waste bag) to generate 40 million doses per day, reaching 1 billion doses in less than a month.

"Certainly, in the time of COVID-19, we have all realized how important it is to be able to make medicines when and where we need them," said Northwestern's Michael Jewett, who led the study. "This work will transform how vaccines are made, including for bio-readiness and pandemic response."

The research will be published April 21 in the journal Nature Communications.

Jewett is a professor of chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and director of Northwestern's Center for Synthetic Biology. Jasmine Hershewe and Katherine Warfel, both graduate students in Jewett's laboratory, are co-first authors of the paper.

The new manufacturing platform -- called in vitro conjugate vaccine expression (iVAX) -- is made possible by cell-free synthetic biology, a process in which researchers remove a cell's outer wall (or membrane) and repurpose its internal machinery. The researchers then put this repurposed machinery into a test tube and freeze-dry it. Adding water sets off a chemical reaction that activates the cell-free system, turning it into a catalyst for making usable medicine when and where it's needed. Remaining shelf-stable for six months or longer, the platform eliminates the need for complicated supply chains and extreme refrigeration, making it a powerful tool for remote or low-resource settings.

In a previous study, Jewett's team used the iVAX platform to produce conjugate vaccines to protect against bacterial infections. At the time, they repurposed molecular machinery from Escherichia coli to make one dose of vaccine in an hour, costing about $5 per dose.

"It was still too expensive, and the yields were not high enough," Jewett said. "We set a goal to reach $1 per dose and reached that goal here. By increasing yields and lowering costs, we thought we might be able to facilitate greater access to lifesaving medicines."

Jewett and his team discovered that the key to reaching that goal lay within the cell's membrane, which is typically discarded in cell-free synthetic biology. When broken apart, membranes naturally reassemble into vesicles, spherical structures that carry important molecular information. The researchers characterized these vesicles and found that increasing vesicle concentration could be useful in making components for protein therapeutics such as conjugate vaccines, which work by attaching a sugar unit -- that is unique to a pathogen -- to a carrier protein. By learning to recognize that protein as a foreign substance, the body knows how to mount an immune response to attack it when encountered again.

Attaching this sugar to the carrier protein, however, is a difficult, complex process. The researchers found that the cell's membrane contained machinery that enabled the sugar to more easily attach to the proteins. By enriching vaccine extracts with this membrane-bound machinery, the researchers significantly increased yields of usable vaccine doses.

"For a variety of organisms, close to 30% of the genome is used to encode membrane proteins," said study co-author Neha Kamat, who is an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at McCormick and an expert on cell membranes. "Membrane proteins are a really important part of life. By learning how to use membrane proteins effectively, we can really advance cell-free systems."

Robotics field aims at mimicking what natural biological entities have achieved throughout millennia of evolution - actions like moving, adapting to the environment, or sensing. Beyond traditional rigid robots, the field of soft robotics has recently emerged using compliant, flexible materials capable to adapt to their environment more efficiently than rigid ones. With this goal in mind, scientists have been working for years in the so-called biohybrid robots or biobots, generally composed of muscle tissue, either cardiac or skeletal, and an artificial scaffold, achieving crawling, grasping or swimming living robots. Unfortunately, current biobots were far to emulate the performance of natural entities in terms of mobility and strength.

Now, researchers at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) led by ICREA Research Professor Samuel Sanchez have overcome both challenges and achieved a breakthrough in the field of biobots by using bioengineering tools. Sanchez and his colleagues at IBEC have applied 3D bioprinting and engineering design for the development of biobots at the cm. range that can swim and coast like fishes, with unprecedented velocities. The key: to use the spontaneous contraction of muscle cells-based materials with a very special compliant skeleton.

Self-training of IBEC Biobots through an engineered innovative skeleton:

While most of the researchers usually work with stiff or tethered scaffolds to prepare artificial robots, researchers at IBEC used biological robots based on a flexible serpentine spring made of a polymer called PDMS, which was designed and optimized via simulations and then printed using 3D-technology. The advantage of this innovative scaffold lies in the improved training and development of the tissue through mechanical self-stimulation upon spontaneous contractions, which creates a feedback loop due to the restoring force of the spring. This self-training event leads to enhanced actuation and larger contraction force in the biobot performance. Such serpentine springs have not been included before in a soft robotic living system.

"We bioengineered BIOBOTS composed of muscle cells that move like worms or fishes, react to electrical stimuli and exert surprising forces and velocities thanks to their self-training with the 3D printed soft skeleton.", states Samuel Sanchez, ICREA Research Professor at IBEC.

IBEC Biobots swim at unprecedented speed and coast like fishes:

Besides the capacity to "self-train", biohybrid swimmer based on skeletal muscle cells developed by IBEC researchers moved at speeds 791x faster than the reported skeletal muscle-based biobots up to date, and comparable with other cardiomyocyte-based bioswimmers (based on heart cells).

"The enhanced forces resulting from the self-stimulation process made ourf biobots design the fastest swimming biohybrid robot up to today by 791x", explains Maria Guix, first author of the paper.

But these new biobots were also able to perform other movements: they were able to coast when placed near the bottom surface, resembling the swimming style of certain fish near surfaces, such as the burst-and-coast behavior of zebrafishes, characterized by sporadic bursts followed by coasting phases.

The work of Sanchez, Guix and colleagues at IBEC open the door to a new generation of stronger and faster biological robots based on muscle cells, of interest both for environmental and drug delivery purposes, but also for the development of bionic prosthetics. In the biomedical field, the possibility of printing such 3D muscle models with human muscles, offers the opportunity to use such highly functional devices for medical platforms for drug testing.

Vigorous and rapid air exchanges might not always be a good thing when it comes to addressing levels of coronavirus particles in a multiroom building, according to a new modeling study.

The study suggests that, in a multiroom building, rapid air exchanges can spread the virus rapidly from the source room into other rooms at high concentrations. Particle levels spike in adjacent rooms within 30 minutes and can remain elevated for up to approximately 90 minutes.

The findings, published online in final form April 15 in the journal Building and Environment, come from a team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The team includes building and HVAC experts as well as experts in aerosol particles and viral materials.

"Most studies have looked at particle levels in just one room, and for a one-room building, increased ventilation is always useful to reducing their concentration," said Leonard Pease, lead author of the study. "But for a building with more than one room, air exchanges can pose a risk in the adjacent rooms by elevating virus concentrations more quickly than would otherwise occur.

"To understand what's happening, consider how secondhand smoke is distributed throughout a building. Near the source, air exchange reduces the smoke near the person but can distribute the smoke at lower levels into nearby rooms," Pease added. "The risk is not zero, for any respiratory disease."

The team modeled the spread of particles similar to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, via air-handling systems. Scientists modeled what happens after a person has a five-minute coughing bout in one room of a three-room small office building, running simulations with particles of five microns.

Researchers looked at the effects of three factors: different levels of filtration, different rates of outdoor air incorporation into the building air supply, and different rates of ventilation or air changes per hour. For downstream rooms, they found an expected clear benefit from increasing outdoor air and improving filtering, but the effect of increased ventilation rate was less obvious.

More clean outdoor air reduces transmission

Scientists studied the effects of adding varying amounts of outdoor air to the building air supply, from no outside air to 33 percent of the building's air supply per hour. As expected, the incorporation of more clean outdoor air reduced transmission risk in the connected rooms. Replacement of one-third of a building's air per hour with clean outdoor air in downstream rooms reduced infection risk by about 20 percent compared to the lower levels of outdoor air commonly included in buildings. The team noted that the model assumed that the outdoor air was clean and virus free.

"More outside air is clearly a good thing for transmission risk, as long as the air is free of virus," said Pease.

Strong filtration reduces transmission

The second factor studied--strong filtration--also was very effective at reducing transmission of the coronavirus.

The team studied the effects of three levels of filtration: MERV-8, MERV-11, and MERV-13, where MERV stands for minimum efficiency reporting value, a common measure of filtration. A higher number translates to a stronger filter.

Filtration decreased the odds of infection in the connected rooms markedly. A MERV-8 filter decreased the peak level of viral particles in connected rooms to just 20 percent what it was without filtration. A MERV-13 filter knocked down the peak concentration of viral particles in a connected room by 93 percent, to less than one-tenth of what it was with a MERV-8 filter. The researchers note that the stronger filters have become more common since the pandemic began.

Increasing ventilation--a more complex picture

The most surprising finding of the study involved ventilation--the effect of what researchers call air changes per hour. What's good for the source room--cutting transmission risk within the room by 75 percent--is not so good for connected rooms. The team found that a rapid rate of air exchange, 12 air changes per hour, can cause a spike in viral particle levels within minutes in connected rooms. This increases the risk of infection in those rooms for a few minutes to more than 10 times what it was at lower air-exchange rates. The higher transmission risk in connected rooms remains for about 20 minutes.

"For the source room, clearly more ventilation is a good thing. But that air goes somewhere," said Pease. "Maybe more ventilation is not always the solution."

Interpreting the data

"There are many factors to consider, and the risk calculation is different for each case," said Pease. "How many people are in the building and where are they located? How large is the building? How many rooms? There is not a great deal of data at this point on how viral particles move about in multiroom buildings.

"These numbers are very specific to this model--this particular type of model, the amount of viral particles being shed by a person. Every building is different, and more research needs to be done," Pease added.

Co-author Timothy Salsbury, a buildings control expert, notes that many of the trade-offs can be quantified and weighted depending on circumstances.

"Stronger filtration translates to higher energy costs, as does the introduction of more outside air than would usually be used in normal operations. Under many circumstances, the energy penalty for the increased fan power required for strong filtration is less than the energy penalty for heating or cooling additional outside air," said Salsbury.

"There are many factors to balance--filtration level, outdoor air levels, air exchange--to minimize transmission risk. Building managers certainly have their work cut out for them," he added.

Additional experimental studies underway

The team is already conducting a series of experimental studies along the same lines as the modeling study. Like the newly published study, the additional analyses look at the effects of filtration, outdoor air incorporation and air changes.

These ongoing studies involve real particles made of mucus (not incorporating the actual SARS-CoV-2 virus) and consider differences among particles expelled from various parts of the respiratory tract, such as the oral cavity, the larynx, and the lungs. Investigators deploy an aerosolizing machine that disperses the viral-like particles much as they'd be dispersed by a cough, as well as fluorescent tracking technology to monitor where they go. Other factors include varying particle sizes, how long viral particles are likely to be infectious, and what happens when they drop and decay.

Plastics are a part of nearly every product we use on a daily basis. The average person in the U.S. generates about 100 kg of plastic waste per year, most of which goes straight to a landfill. A team led by Corinne Scown, Brett Helms, Jay Keasling, and Kristin Persson at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) set out to change that.

Less than two years ago, Helms announced the invention of a new plastic that could tackle the waste crisis head on. Called poly(diketoenamine), or PDK, the material has all the convenient properties of traditional plastics while avoiding the environmental pitfalls, because unlike traditional plastics, PDKs can be recycled indefinitely with no loss in quality.

Now, the team has released a study that shows what can be accomplished if manufacturers began using PDKs on a large scale. The bottom line? PDK-based plastic could quickly become commercially competitive with conventional plastics, and the products will get less expensive and more sustainable as time goes on.

"Plastics were never designed to be recycled. The need to do so was recognized long afterward," explained Nemi Vora, first author on the report and a former postdoctoral fellow who worked with senior author Corinne Scown. "But driving sustainability is the heart of this project. PDKs were designed to be recycled from the get-go, and since the beginning, the team has been working to refine the production and recycling processes for PDK so that the material could be inexpensive and easy enough to be deployed at commercial scales in anything from packaging to cars."

The study presents a simulation for a 20,000-metric-ton-per-year facility that puts out new PDKs and takes in used PDK waste for recycling. The authors calculated the chemical inputs and technology needed, as well as the costs and greenhouse gas emissions, then compared their findings to the equivalent figures for production of conventional plastics.

"These days, there is a huge push for adopting circular economy practices in the industry. Everyone is trying to recycle whatever they're putting out in the market," said Vora. "We started talking to industry about deploying 100% percent infinitely recycled plastics and have received a lot of interest."

"The questions are how much it will cost, what the impact on energy use and emissions will be, and how to get there from where we are today," added Helms, a staff scientist at Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry. "The next phase of our collaboration is to answer these questions."

Checking the boxes of cheap and easy

To date, more than 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic material have been produced, and the vast majority of this has ended up in landfills or waste incineration plants. A small proportion of plastics are sent to be recycled "mechanically," meaning they are melted down and then re-shaped into new products. However, this technique has limited benefit. Plastic resin itself is made of many identical molecules (called monomers) bound together into long chains (called polymers). Yet to give plastic its many textures, colors, and capabilities, additives like pigments, heat stabilizers, and flame retardants are added to the resin. When many plastics are melted down together, the polymers become mixed with a slew of potentially incompatible additives, resulting in a new material with much lower quality than newly produced virgin resin from raw materials. As such, less than 10% of plastic is mechanically recycled more than once, and recycled plastic usually also contains virgin resin to make up for the dip in quality.

PDK plastics sidestep this problem entirely - the resin polymers are engineered to easily break down into individual monomers when mixed with an acid. The monomers can then be separated from any additives and gathered to make new plastics without any loss of quality. The team's earlier research shows that this "chemical recycling" process is light on energy and carbon dioxide emissions, and it can be repeated indefinitely, creating a completely circular material lifecycle where there is currently a one-way ticket to waste.

Yet despite these incredible properties, to truly beat plastics at their own game, PDKs also need to be convenient. Recycling traditional petroleum-based plastic might be hard, but making new plastic is very easy.

"We're talking about materials that are basically not recycled," said Scown. "So, in terms of appealing to manufacturers, PDKs aren't competing with recycled plastic - they have to compete with virgin resin. And we were really pleased to see how cheap and how efficient it will be to recycle the material."

Scown, who is a staff scientist in Berkeley Lab's Energy Technologies and Biosciences Areas, specializes in modeling future environmental and financial impacts of emerging technologies. Scown and her team have been working on the PDK project since the outset, helping Helms' group of chemists and fabrication scientists to choose the raw materials, solvents, equipment, and techniques that will lead to the most affordable and eco-friendly product.

"We're taking early stage technology and designing what it would look like at commercial-scale operations" using different inputs and technology, she said. This unique, collaborative modeling process allows Berkeley Lab scientists to identify potential scale-up challenges and make process improvements without costly cycles of trial and error.

The team's report, published in Science Advances, models a commercial-scale PDK production and recycling pipeline based on the plastic's current state of development. "And the main takeaways were that, once you've produced the PDK initially and you've got it in the system, the cost and the greenhouse gas emissions associated with continuing to recycle it back to monomers and make new products could be lower than, or at least on par with, many conventional polymers," said Scown.

Planning to launch

Thanks to optimization from process modeling, recycled PDKs are already drawing interest from companies needing to source plastic. Always looking to the future, Helms and his colleagues have been conducting market research and meeting with people from industry since the project's early days. Their legwork shows that the best initial application for PDKs are markets where the manufacturer will receive their product back at the end of its lifespan, such as the automobile industry (through trade-ins and take-backs) and consumer electronics (through e-waste programs). These companies will then be able to reap the benefits of 100% recyclable PDKs in their product: sustainable branding and long-term savings.

"With PDKs, now people in industry have a choice," said Helms. "We're bringing in partners who are building circularity into their product lines and manufacturing capabilities, and giving them an option that is in line with future best practices."

Added Scown: "We know there's interest at that level. Some countries have plans to charge hefty fees on plastic products that rely on non-recycled material. That shift will provide a strong financial incentive to move away from utilizing virgin resins and should drive a lot of demand for recycled plastics."

After infiltrating the market for durable products like cars and electronics, the team hopes to expand PDKs into shorter-lived, single-use goods such as packaging.

A full circle future

As they forge plans for a commercial launch, the scientists are also continuing their techno-economic collaboration on the PDK production process. Although the cost of recycled PDK is already projected to be competitively low, the scientists are working on additional refinements to lower the cost of virgin PDK, so that companies are not deterred by the initial investment price.

And true to form, the scientists are working two steps ahead at the same time. Scown, who is also vice president for Life-cycle, Economics & Agronomy at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), and Helms are collaborating with Jay Keasling, a leading synthetic biologist at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley and CEO of JBEI, to design a process for producing PDK polymers using microbe-made precursor ingredients. The process currently uses industrial chemicals, but was initially designed with Keasling's microbes in mind, thanks to a serendipitous cross-disciplinary seminar.

"Shortly before we started the PDK project, I was in a seminar where Jay was describing all the molecules that they could make at JBEI with their engineered microbes," said Helms. "And I got very excited because I saw that some of those molecules were things that we put in PDKs. Jay and I had a few chats and, we realized that nearly the entire polymer could be made using plant material fermented by engineered microbes."

"In the future, we're going to bring in that biological component, meaning that we can begin to understand the impacts of transitioning from conventional feedstocks to unique and possibly advantaged bio-based feedstocks that might be more sustainable long term on the basis of energy, carbon, or water intensity of production and recycling," Helms continued.
"So, where we are now, this is the first step of many, and I think we have a really long runway in front of us, which is exciting."

Rising levels of dementia is putting pressure on residential aged care facilities, including in rural and regional centres where nursing homes and staff are already under pressure.

Now a pilot program of personalised interventions, including residents' favourite songs, has been shown to make a big difference to dementia behaviours, drug use and carers' wellbeing.

Harmony in the Bush, a study led by Flinders University in five nursing homes in Queensland and South Australia, developed a multimodal person-centred non-pharmacological intervention program incorporating individual music selections to reduce, resulting in a significant reduction in resident agitation and staff stress levels.

The focus on resident-centred therapies, rather than drug interventions, led to less dysfunctional behaviours and psychological symptoms in the trial group of 74 people living with dementia and reduced stress reported by the 87 staff in aged care homes who took part in the study.

More than one-third of the residents reported mild-severe pain and mild-severe sadness before the intervention.

"The Harmony in the Bush model is effective in reducing agitation among dementia residents with the important spinoff of significant reduction in staff stress levels in nursing homes in rural Australia," says researcher Dr Vivian Isaac, lead author on a new article in BMC Geriatrics.

The Flinders Rural and Remote Health team also found a reduction in the use of psychotropic medications and inappropriate medications when comparing residents' medication charts data covering three months pre- and post- the Harmony in the Bush intervention, as published recently in BMC Psychiatry.

In Australia, 60-70% of the people residing in nursing homes have dementia and about 70-90% of residents with dementia suffer from psychiatric or behavioral symptoms.

"The study found that the model gives staff with a structure to learn person-centred practice over about one month to reduce the impact of behavioural and psychiatric symptoms of dementia.

"The results show a statistically significant decline in aggressive behaviours, physically non-aggressive behaviours, and inappropriate verbal behaviour, hiding or hoarding - with a similar reduction in staff stress and resident safety when resources for specialised dementia care may be limited."

The study provides promising evidence on the potential of this novel model in low-resourced settings, researchers says.

Further studies will look at the cost-effectiveness and reliability of the model, which researchers have based on the Progressively Lowered Stress Threshold principles and person-centred music in nursing homes (using personal devices during rest time) to reduce agitation and other stressful behaviours.

Music has proved helpful in dementia to raise mood, stimulate memories and provide a soothing effect.

These behaviours include agitation, mood dysregulation, and disturbed thoughts and perceptions, which pose a major challenge for the residents with dementia and nursing home staff.

IL-11 is known to promote the development of colorectal cancer in humans and mice, but when and where IL-11 is expressed during cancer development is unknown. "To address these questions experimentally, we generated reporter mice that express the green fluorescent protein (EGFP) gene in interleukin 11 (IL-11)-producing (IL11+) cells in vivo. We found IL-11+ cells in the colons of this murine colitis-associated colorectal cancer model," said Dr. Nishina, the lead author of a study published April 16 in Nature Communications. "The IL-11+ cells were absent from the colon under normal conditions but rapidly appeared in the tissues of mice with colitis and colorectal cancer."

In the study, Dr. Nishina and colleagues characterized the IL-11+ cells by flow cytometry and found that most IL-11+ cells express stromal cell surface markers, such as Thy1, podoplanin, and Sca-1, suggesting that IL-11+ cells are stromal fibroblasts. RNA-seq analysis revealed that the expression of approximately 350 genes was elevated in IL-11+ fibroblasts compared IL-11- fibroblasts. These genes were also elevated in murine and human colorectal cancer tissues in vivo. IL-11 released from IL-11+ cells induced activation signals in nearby tumor cells and fibroblasts in a paracrine or autocrine manner. Thus, IL-11+ fibroblasts and tumor cells constitute the tumor microenvironment that supports tumor growth.

"We looked at human cancer databases and found that elevated expression of genes enriched in IL-11+ fibroblasts correlate with short duration of disease-free survival. We think IL-11+ fibroblasts can be new therapeutic targets for treating human colorectal cancer," said Prof. Nakano, the senior author of the study.

These results were published in Nature Communications on April 16, 2021 (10.1038/s41467-021-22450-3). This research was conducted in collaboration with Associate Professors Nobuhiro Tada and Hideo Yagita of Juntendo University, Professor Masato Ohtsuka of Tokai University, Professors Koji Matsushima and Chiharu Nishiyama of Tokyo University of Science, Professor Masanobu Oshima of Kanazawa University, and Naohiro Inohara of Michigan University.

A group of University of Wyoming professors and students has identified an unusual belt of igneous rocks that stretches for over 2,000 miles from British Columbia, Canada, to Sonora, Mexico.

The rock belt runs through Idaho, Montana, Nevada, southeast California and Arizona.
"Geoscientists usually associate long belts of igneous rocks with chains of volcanoes at subduction zones, like Mount Shasta, Mount Hood, Mount St. Helens and Mount Rainer," says Jay Chapman, an assistant professor in UW's Department of Geology and Geophysics. "What makes this finding so interesting and mysterious is that this belt of igneous rocks is located much farther inland, away from the edge of the continent, and doesn't contain any evidence for producing volcanoes. In fact, all of the melting to generate the igneous rocks originally took place deep underground, five to 10 miles beneath the surface."

Chapman is lead author of a paper, titled "The North American Cordilleran Anatectic Belt," which was published online in February in the journal Earth-Science Reviews. The print version will be published this month.

The paper is a result of a special course taught by Simone Runyon, an assistant professor in UW's Department of Geology and Geophysics, and Chapman. Runyon, six UW graduate students and one undergraduate student, who took part in the course, are co-authors of the paper.

"It was really fascinating to start with a scientific question in a classroom, then collect and analyze data, and eventually publish our results," says Cody Pridmore, a UW graduate student from Orange, Calif., and co-author of the paper. "It's a process most college students don't get to experience."

One clue to the origin of the belt of igneous rocks is that the rocks chiefly formed 80 million to 50 million years ago, during a mountain-building event called the Laramide orogeny.

"The Laramide orogeny created most of the major mountain ranges we have in Wyoming, and the name actually comes from the Laramie Range," Chapman says. "Although there are no igneous rocks of this type and age present in those mountains, we suspect that the tectonic processes that created the mountains also contributed to melting Earth's crust."

The researchers have several working hypotheses about what caused the rocks to melt. One hypothesis is that water infiltrated the deep crust.

"The geochemistry of these rocks indicates that melting may have occurred at relatively low temperatures, below 800 degrees Celsius," says Jessie Shields, a Ph.D. student at UW from Minneapolis, Minn., who is working to solve this mystery. "That is still very hot, but not hot enough to produce very large volumes of magma. Water lowers the melting point of rocks, similar to how salt lowers the melting point of ice, and could increase the amount of magma generated."

This work has implications for what causes rocks to melt and where specific types of magmas can be found.

"Many of the igneous systems in the study area contain economically important ore deposits," says Runyon, who specializes in ore deposits. "Understanding the large-scale igneous processes that form these provinces helps us to better understand how ore deposits form and to better explore for natural resources."

The extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS) collaboration has released its latest scientific results. These results include two studies on dark energy led by Prof. ZHAO Gongbo and Prof. WANG Yuting, respectively, from National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences(NAOC).

The study led by Prof. Zhao was recently published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Based on eBOSS observations, Prof. ZHAO's team measured the history of cosmic expansion and structure growth in a huge volume of the past universe, corresponding to a distance range between 0.7 and 1.8 billion light years away from us. This volume had never been probed before.

This study took advantage of a method called "multi-tracer analysis," which mitigated the observational systematics proposed and implemented by Prof. ZHAO and Prof. WANG.

"This work detected the existence of dark energy at a significance of 11 sigma, which is the strongest evidence ever on dark energy from galaxy surveys," said Prof. ZHAO. "The eBOSS observations are consistent with the dynamical dark energy probed by our team using the BOSS survey four years ago."

One of the biggest challenges of the cosmological implications of galaxy surveys is data analysis, especially developing new methods to improve statistical accuracy and mitigate systematics. eBOSS, as the first galaxy survey that observes multiple types of galaxies in a vast cosmic volume, makes it possible to use multi-tracer analysis.

"Cross-correlating multiple types of galaxies is an efficient way to reduce statistical uncertainties, with observational systematics mitigated at the same time, which is key to obtaining robust cosmological results," said Prof. WANG.

Dark energy dominates the current universe, so it is vitally important to reveal its nature. The eBOSS collaboration, which consists of over 30 top research institutes on astronomy around the world including NAOC, was formed to tackle the problem of dark energy. Operating since 2014, eBOSS has taken over 1 million spectra in the redshift range of 0.6.

Although eBOSS has completed its mission, it is a starting point for the next chapter. The experience with eBOSS is valuable for cosmology involving larger galaxy surveys, including the Chinese Space Station Telescope (CSST), Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS).

A joint research study by the Pacific Water Research Centre at Simon Fraser University and the Fraser Basin Council points to the use of certified, nature-based solutions for protecting salmon and aquatic habitats in the Lower Mainland.

Salmon face various threats in the Lower Fraser Watershed (where the Fraser River passes through the Metro Vancouver geographical area), including habitat loss due to urban development and toxic stormwater runoff, which is projected to worsen due to climate change-driven extreme rain events.

The study released today found approaches for protecting salmon through the watershed can vary widely within the patchwork of municipal, regional and provincial regulations currently in place. While regulations and standards are different across the board, 90 per cent of experts surveyed agree that urban development practices compromise the long-term health of the watershed.

Researchers believe adopting salmon-friendly urban development policies and certifications, such as the Fraser Basin Council's voluntary Salmon-Safe BC urban standards eco-certification program, throughout the region would advance progressive land and water management in the Lower Mainland.

"There is a great opportunity for municipalities to work in collaboration with the provincial government, and enact policies and standards that can lessen the threats to salmon," said Zafar Adeel, executive director of the Pacific Water Research Centre (PWRC). "By having projects be certified Salmon-Safe, we'd make sure organizations and governments are applying the same standards throughout the region. This would work in the same way we currently use LEED certification for projects and buildings trying to reach a certain level of sustainability."

One of the most successful approaches that planners can use to reduce the risk to salmon from urban development is to adopt nature-based solutions, also known as green infrastructure. The idea is to use features such as green roofs or permeable pavement, which are designed to retain rainfall where it lands and prevent it from washing into storm sewer systems. Such projects can be used to mitigate toxic stormwater runoff into the river. They have also been found to eliminate more than 90 per cent of pollutant commonly found in roadway runoff by retaining and degrading pollutants in soils and plant life.

A new study has found up to half of all children with language difficulties and mental and physical health problems have been exposed to intimate partner violence, prompting calls for health and social care services to provide more effective identification and early intervention.

The research, led by the Murdoch Children's Research Institute (MCRI) and published in The BMJ, showed children exposed to intimate partner violence from infancy were twice as likely to have a psychiatric diagnosis, emotional and behavioural difficulties, and impaired language skills at age 10. They were also more likely to have asthma and sleep problems.

The study also found that children exposed to intimate partner violence in the year they turned 10 were two to three times more likely to experience poor mental health, elevated blood pressure and sleep difficulties. But with the exception of language difficulties and asthma, child health outcomes at age 10 were not affected if their only exposure to intimate partner violence occurred before they turned five, highlighting the need for more effective early intervention.

The research involved 1507 first-time mothers and their first-born children. Women were recruited to the study from six public maternity hospitals in Melbourne. More than one in four women and children in the study were exposed to intimate partner violence during the first 10 years after the child's birth.

MCRI Professor Stephanie Brown said the findings showed the size of the burden of ill health carried by children growing up in households where intimate partner violence occurred.

"Intimate partner is the most common form of violence against women and their children and is a global public health issue," she said. "It's not limited to physical and sexual violence and is often characterised by a pattern of psychological control and coercion. Children may pick up on this and experience constant fear or anxiety at home.

"The impact of COVID-19 has increased pressures on families and heightened the need for more effective intervention and support for women and children experiencing domestic abuse."

Professor Brown said that many women experiencing intimate partner violence were unsure about seeking support from family health and social care services.

"Services need to aware of the impact of intimate partner violence on children's health and wellbeing and work to overcome barriers that may get in the way of women seeking support for themselves and their children," she said.

"Barriers may include fear of judgement, the perception that health services can't help, the cost of GP appointments, limited availability of low cost psychological and other allied health services, and lack of services that take a holistic approach to women and children's health and wellbeing.

"If child health and social services do not recognise and respond to intimate partner violence as a potential contributing factor to poor child health outcomes, interventions to support children with health and developmental problems are likely to be less effective."

MCRI Dr Deirdre Gartland said some mothers and children experience good health and wellbeing despite their exposure to intimate partner violence.

"It is important to recognise that not all children exposed to intimate partner violence have poor physical and mental health," she said.

"Women are doing everything they can to protect and look after their children to give them the best possible outcomes despite the situations they are in."

Researchers from The University of Melbourne, La Trobe University, The Royal Women's Hospital, Queensland University of Technology, Griffith University and Deakin University also contributed to the findings.

An increasing number of young women are at increased risk of having children born with impaired neurological conditions, due to poor iodine intake.

Dietary changes, including a growing trend towards the avoidance of bread and iodised salt, as well as a reduced intake of animal products containing iodine can contribute to low iodine levels.

A small pilot study undertaken by the University of South Australia (UniSA) comparing iodine levels between 31 vegan/plant-based participants and 26 omnivores has flagged the potential health risk.

Urine samples showed iodine readings of 44 ug/L in the plant-based group, compared to the meat eaters' 64 ug/L level. Neither group came close to the World Health Organization's recommended 100 grams per litre.

Participants from both groups who chose pink or Himalayan salt instead of iodised salt had severely deficient iodine levels, averaging 23 ug/L.

The findings have been published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

While the study was undertaken in South Australia, it builds evidence on a 2017 US study (1) that found nearly two billion people worldwide were iodine deficient, resulting in 50 million experiencing clinical side effects.

UniSA research dietitian Jane Whitbread says adequate iodine is essential for fetal intellectual development.

"Mild to moderate iodine deficiency has been shown to affect language development, memory and mental processing speeds," Ms Whitbread says.

"During pregnancy, the need for iodine is increased and a 150mcg supplement is recommended prior to conception and throughout pregnancy. Unfortunately, most women do not take iodine supplements before conceiving. It is important to consume adequate iodine, especially during the reproductive years."

Dietary sources of iodine include fortified bread, iodized salt, seafoods including seaweeds, eggs, and dairy foods.

Concerns about the link between poor iodine status and impaired neurological conditions in newborns prompted the mandatory fortification of non-organic bread with iodised salt in 2009 in Australia.

It has since been reported that women who consume 100g of iodine-fortified bread every day (approximately three pieces) have five times greater chance of meeting their iodine intake compared to women who don't consume that much. The average amount of bread consumed by women in this study was one piece of bread.

The growing preference of Himalayan salt over iodized table salt may also be problematic, Ms Whitbread says. A quarter of women in the study reported using the pink salt which contains an insignificant level of iodine.

Another issue is that plant-based milks have low levels of iodine and are not currently fortified with this nutrient.

Neither group met the estimated average requirement (EAR) for calcium.

The vegan/plant-based group also did not reach the recommended levels for selenium and B12 without supplementation, but their dietary intake of iron, magnesium, vitamin C, folate and fibre was higher than the meat eaters. This reflects the inclusion of iron-rich soy products, wholemeal foods, legumes, and green leafy vegetables in their diet.

The researchers recommended that both new salts and plant milks be fortified with iodine as well as a campaign to raise awareness about the importance of iodine in the diet, especially for women in their reproductive years.

They also called for a larger study sample to determine iodine status of Australian women.

Topological photonics has attracted a lot of attention recently. The application of topological band theory to photonics not only opens the door to novel devices, but also stimulates the exploration of new topological phases. In the photonic regime, symmetries that are unique to electromagnetic (EM) waves can intrinsically protect the band degeneracies in the momentum space. Topological systems realized using such symmetries are uniquely "photonic", having no counterparts in electronic or phononic systems.

Among various topological features in momentum space, nodal chain is a special configuration of nodal line where two nodal curves touch at isolated points. It is generally perceived that the two nodal lines should reside on two separate mirror planes, each protected by their corresponding mirror symmetries. The chain points are then found to be stabilized on their intersection lines as shown in Fig. 1. However, the in-plane type of nodal chain embedded in mere one mirror symmetry is generally unstable.

In a new paper published in Light Science & Application, a team of scientists, led by Professor C. T. Chan from Department of Physics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China, and co-workers have proposed a photonic in-plane nodal chain which is stabilized by the intrinsic symmetry of EM waves. The in-plane nodal chain is uniquely stable in photonics due to the internal symmetries of the Maxwell equations and has no counterparts in other systems. They further developed non-Abelian nodal link in the absence of Parity-Time (PT) symmetry and protected by generalized quaternion charges.

In Fig. 2, the authors present the stable in-plane nodal chain in a photonic bianisotropic metamaterials. The chain point is located at the Γ point of zero frequency and is thus stable against perturbation due to the internal symmetry of EM waves. By introduced Lorentz resonance, a dispersionless longitudinal mode appears and intersects the propagating transverse mode as nodal ring. The in-plane nodal chain(blue) thread through the nodal ring(red) and from into nodal link. The nodal link is constructed by three adjacent bands which give enough freedom to define non-Abelian charges. The non-Abelian charges represent the frame rotations of a set of real eigenfunctions, which form the elements of non-Abelian (generalized) quaternion groups.

The generalized quaternion charges can elegantly explain or predict admissible transitions of the nodal link. In order to demonstrate the transition rule of the nodal link, artificial plasmon resonances are considered to introduce cut-off frequencies and force the chain point to break. In Fig. 2c-f, the green loop (larger one) possesses nontrivial generalized quaternion charge of -1, which governs that the encircled nodal line pairs cannot disappear. When the nodal chain break along horizontal direction, a new nodal ring (blue) has to emerge so as to conserve the charge of -1. In a different configuration, the nodal chain is allowed to break along vertical direction, since the green circle is still encircling a pair of nodal lines, and the -1 non-Abelian charge remains conserved.

By designing bi-anisotropic metamaterials, the authors realized the proposed topological structures in photonics. They further characterized the in-plane nodal chain and non-Abelian nodal link with microwave experiments.

Guilt and social pressure lead people to underreport COVID-19 protocol violations, according to study of experimental data across 12 countries.

Article Title: A guilt-free strategy increases self-reported non-compliance with COVID-19 preventive measures: Experimental evidence from 12 countries

Funding: J.-F. Daoust acknowledges the financial support from SSPS Open Access (University of Edinburgh). M. Foucault and S. Brouard acknowledge the financial support from ANR - REPEAT grant (Special COVID-19), CNRS, Fondation de l'innovation politique, as well as regions Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Occitanie. Richard Nadeau and Éric Bélanger acknowledge the financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC/CRSH). M. Becher gratefully acknowledges IAST funding from the ANR under the Investments for the Future ("Investissements d'Avenir'") program, grant ANR-17-EURE-0010. D. Stegmueller acknowledges funding from Duke University and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2017S1A3A2066657). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249914