Tech

Pigment Blue 15:3 and Pigment Green 7 are also affected by this proposal. Because of these pigments in particular, the ECHA proposal is currently the subject of public debate.

As a consequence, the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) has reviewed the potential health hazards and risks posed by the pigments Blue 15:3 and Green 7.

he BfR concludes that the currently available data for both pigments indicate only a comparatively low level of toxicity. However, since the available data on harmful properties of both pigments are incomplete, the BfR is currently unable to provide a reliable health risk assessment of these pigments when used in tattoo inks. In particular, no assessment can be provided for the potential health risks involved in injecting these substanc es into deeper layers of the skin (intradermal application). The BfR recommends supplementing the available data sets for both pigments. As currently available data indicate only a comparatively low level of toxicity, however, the BfR does not see an acute need for further action at this time. In the view of the BfR, further work in this area should take into account that the pigments Blue 15:3 and Green 7 might be substituted by less well-investigated substances.

A growing area of medicine looks at how cellular binding observed in nature - where molecules like viruses or proteins bind to specific receptors on a cell - can be mimicked to aid drug delivery.

Those developing targeted drug therapies aim to recreate this precise binding to develop nano-sized drug carriers that attach only to diseased cells. Once attached, these carriers would release their therapeutic load without affecting healthy cells. If drugs can be specifically targeted in this way, treatments would cause far fewer side effects.

One way to identify which cells are diseased is the number of receptors they express. Cancer cells, for example, tend to express more certain types of receptor than healthy cells.

Now, in a multi-centre collaboration led by Imperial and UCL, involving Beijing University of Chemical Technology, the Institute of Physics in Beijing and the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, researchers have demonstrated how a mysterious molecular concept that the authors dubbed 'range selectivity' could be used to target diseased cells with high specificity. Range selectivity, until now a mysterious phenomenon, is where molecules called ligands attach only to cells whose receptors reach a certain number.

Senior author and principal investigator Dr Stefano Angioletti-Uberti, of Imperial's Department of Materials, said: "I came across the concept of range selectivity completely by accident. During my theoretical investigation of receptor-ligand binding I noticed that ligands weren't attaching above a certain threshold of receptor density and had my team re-check our code before realising it wasn't a bug."

In nature, range selectivity happens because of a balance of attractive and repulsive forces at the molecular level. Past a certain threshold the repulsive force must outweigh the attractive, and so binding is far less likely to take place. This is due to certain physical properties of ligand-receptor interactions.

Following their realisation, the group at Imperial used statistical mechanical modelling to show how modifying certain parameters could tune the balance of attractive and repulsive forces. This provided a 'molecular handle' to tune the upper and lower limit of the selectivity range. Their colleagues at UCL, led by Professor Giuseppe Battaglia, then confirmed these theoretical predictions using experimental data.

Researchers found they could tune the force balance using a 'molecular handle'

Dr Angioletti-Uberti added: "The key to unlocking highly targeted drug therapies could lie in directing drug carriers towards cells with a precise number of receptors.

"If we can find out which receptor densities are specific to different diseases and apply what we've demonstrated to drug carriers, we could treat those diseases effectively with fewer side effects."

Alongside drug targeting, the researchers say their work offers an important insight that could change the way future studies in this field are conducted. For example, researchers could now take into account that simply increasing the number of receptors does not necessarily increase the probability of binding, and in fact may cause it to significantly decrease.

It also offers clues that could go some way to explain why tumours evade attack from the immune system.

Dr Angioletti-Uberti said: "Could it be that tumour cells' receptor densities fall outside the range toward which immune cells are programmed to target?"

The authors are now looking into how to optimise receptor density on cells to ensure maximum binding, as many parameters like receptor and ligand type can affect the strength of these bonds.

Dr Angioletti-Uberti added: "Nature might already be using this form of binding to its own advantage, or indeed our disadvantage. Understanding this fully could lead to a wealth of disease-targeting possibilities."

A polymer previously used to protect solar cells may find new applications in consumer electronics, reveals a KAUST team studying thin films capable of converting thermal energy into electricity.

When two sides of a semiconductor are at different temperatures, electron migration from hot to cool areas can generate a current. This phenomenon, known as the thermoelectric effect, typically requires semiconductors with rigid ceramic structures to maintain the heat difference between the two sides. But the recent discovery that polymers also exhibit thermoelectric behavior has prompted a rethink of how to exploit this method for improved energy harvesting, including incorporation into wearable devices.

Derya Baran and her team at KAUST are helping to engineer self-powered devices using a conducting polymer containing a blend of poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) and polystyrenesulfonate (PEDOT:PSS) chains. Relatively inexpensive and easy to process for applications, including inkjet printing, PEDOT:PSS is one of the top-performing thermoelectric polymers thanks to its ability to take in efficiency-boosting additives known as dopants.

Diego Rosas-Villalva, a researcher in Baran's group, explains that thermoelectric PEDOT:PSS thin films are often exposed to dopants in the form of strong acids. This process washes away loose PSS chains to improve polymer crystallinity and leaves behind particles that oxidize PEDOT chains to boost electrical conductivity.

"We use nitric acid because it's one of the best dopants for PEDOT," says Rosas-Villalva. "However, it evaporates rather easily, and this decreases the performance of the thermoelectric over time."

After the doping step is completed, the PEDOT:PSS film has to undergo a reverse procedure to neutralize or "dedope" some conductive particles to improve thermoelectric power generation.

Typical dedopants include short hydrocarbons containing positively charged amine groups. The KAUST researchers were studying a polymerized version of these amine chains, known as ethoxylated polyethylenimine, when they noticed a remarkable effect--PEDOT:PSS films dedoped with polyethylenimine retained twice as much thermoelectric power after one week compared with untreated specimens.

The team's investigations revealed that polyethylenimine was effective at encapsulating PEDOT:PSS films to prevent nitric acid escape. In addition, this coating modified the electronic properties of the thermoelectric polymer to make it easier to harvest energy from sources, including body heat.

"We were not expecting that this polymer would improve the lifetime of the device, especially because it's such a thin film--less than 5 nanometers," says Villalva. "It's been incorporated into other organic electronics before, but barely explored for thermoelectrics."

Chemotherapy-based cancer treatment has distressing side effects for patients and increases the risk of developing resistance to the treatment. In an attempt to solve these problems, scientists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have developed a technique for quickly identifying from a large number of existing drugs the optimal synergistic combination and dose of products that can kill the tumour cells without affecting healthy cells. In partnership with the University Hospital of Geneva (HUG) and the University Medical Center in Amsterdam, they have demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach in colorectal cancer. The results are published in an article in the journal Molecular Oncology. The best drug combinations identified were assessed using in vitro tests and, for the first time, in vivo on mouse models. All the combinations were shown to be more effective than chemotherapy and did not cause any apparent toxicity in the healthy cells or in the animals. This study further paves the way for personalised, effective and safe cancer treatment.

"The technique we've designed and patented is called TGMO, which stands for phenotypically-driven therapeutically guided multidrug optimisation. It combines testing and highly-advanced statistical analysis," begins Patrycja Nowak-Sliwinska, professor at the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences of UNIGE's Faculty of Science. "It can be used to rapidly perform - in a few steps - simultaneous tests on cancerous and healthy cells (from the same patient), and evaluate all the possible combinations of drugs that we selected for the purpose. The positive synergies are preserved, while the antagonisms are rejected."

The experiment incorporated 12 drugs, all recently approved for commercialization or in the final phase of clinical trials. Colorectal cancer cell lines that had been perfectly characterised for the requirements of scientific studies were submitted to the TGMO-based "machinery". The aim of the search was to determine the combination of products closest to the desired outcome: the death of cancer cell together with an absence of effect on the healthy cell - and all using the lowest possible drug doses. The procedure resulted in multidrug combinations of three or four drugs, all slightly different from each other.

80% reduction of tumour growth

The activity of the combinations was then verified under somewhat more complex conditions than a single cell: first on a three-dimensional model of a human tumour containing cancer cells and other types, as is the case in reality, and finally on mice serving as an experimental model for colorectal cancer. The drug combinations reduced tumour growth by about 80% and consistently outperformed the effectiveness of chemotherapy. They revealed a total absence of toxicity in the healthy cells - unlike with chemotherapy - and significant activity on cancer cells freshly taken from current patients in Switzerland.

"It's the first time that in vivo tests have been carried out with drug combinations derived from our TGMO technology," enthuses Patrycja Nowak-Sliwinska. "The study shows that it is possible to efficiently identify low-dose synergistic and selective optimized drug combinations, regardless of the mutation status of the tumour, and which are more effective than conventional chemotherapy. We are currently discussing setting up a clinical study on patients so we can take things a stage further. But this stage, financing of which depends very much on the interest that a private sector might have in our approach, is first and foremost the work of clinical physicians."

Results in under two weeks

TGMO technology is designed in such a way that it achieves results in under two weeks, which is the same as the time that doctors take to determine the treatment to be administered to a patient as soon as a diagnosis has been made. "This approach clearly represents the future for oncology patients," continues Thibaud Koessler, head of Gastrointestinal Oncology in the HUG Oncology Department and one of the authors of the article. "The ability to test different drugs ex vivo and to select the combination for each patient that the cancer will be most sensitive to should increase the effectiveness of treatments while reducing the toxicity, two of the most problematic aspects in current therapies."

Surviving on a warming planet can be a matter of timing--but simply shifting lifecycle stages to match the tempo of climate change has hidden dangers for some animals, according to new research from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour and Cornell University.

The study, published in PNAS, has uncovered drastic consequences for birds that are breeding earlier in lockstep with earlier starts of spring: chicks hatching earlier face increased risk of poor weather conditions, food shortages and mortality.

The researchers, who examined decades of data on weather, food availability and breeding in Tree Swallows, say that the timing of when to breed and when food is available is becoming decoupled for some animals--highlighting the complexity behind how organisms respond to climate change.

"Simply moving dates earlier to track climate change isn't necessarily risk free. Riskier conditions earlier in the year can expose animals to unintended consequences when responding to bouts of unusually warm spring weather," says Ryan Shipley, postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and first author on the paper.

In recent years, studies have raised concerns about whether or not species can adapt, or "keep pace" with climate change. Particular emphasis has been placed on phenology-the timing of life cycle events such as breeding and migration--and the importance of adjusting this to track rising temperatures and earlier arrivals of spring.

But the authors say that breeding earlier may place animals at greater risk of exposure to inclement weather events that tend to occur more frequently earlier in the year. They found that Tree Swallows had been advancing breeding by 3 days every decade for the last 30 years, but earlier-hatching offspring were at greater risk of exposure to inclement weather, which in turn reduced the availability of the flying insects they rely on for food.

"Our results raise the possibility that animals relying on food resources that can rapidly change in abundance due to the weather may be particularly at risk to climate change," says Shipley.

The study has exposed strong fitness consequences for birds that are advancing breeding at a similar rate to climate change. But it may also provide clues to the mystery of why aerial insectivorous birds, such as swallows, swifts, flycatchers, and nightjars, are declining faster than other groups in much of North America and Europe.

Weather in spring can change quickly and tends to be more unpredictable earlier in the year. The activity of flying insects is determined by weather, which means they are stochastically available.

"For birds that feed on flying insects, one day is feast, the next is famine.
This means during unusually warm springs, parents are betting current conditions that prompt earlier egg laying are indicative of similar good conditions for rearing hatched young 3 weeks in the future," says Shipley.

The results lay bare a previously unobserved threat to aerial insectivorous birds. "Considerable attention has been given to potential widespread decline of insect populations and this might be hitting insectivorous birds particularly hard. But we show a mechanism that doesn't require change in insect abundance--just availability over short time, like a few days."

The researchers studied a population of Tree Swallows in Ithaca, New York, that have been the focus of a remarkable 30-year experiment--studies of this length are rare in the field of ornithology. This allowed them to analyze a series of long-term data of Tree Swallow reproduction (over 30 years) daily insect abundance (over 25 years) and weather (over 100 years). "Long-term studies like these are essential to understand how and why species are affected by climate change. They can also provide valuable insights into how organisms function, interact and evolve in complex ecological networks," says Maren Vitousek, a professor at Cornell University, which operates the Tree Swallow's long-term research facility in Ithaca.

When it comes to making decisions about investments, medical treatment, or insurance policies, we are more worried about financial loss than we are confident about monetary gain. But the intricacies of how our brain functions to bring about these sentiments are not clear.

New York University neuroscientist Christine Constantinople will examine this process under a five-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health--a project that will shed new light on this every-day, but not well understood, phenomenon. The work will also enhance our understanding of how the brain makes mathematical calculations, with the findings having potential implications for education and related fields.

Constantinople's grant (DP2 MH126376-01) is a New Innovator Award, which supports innovative research from early-career researchers and is part of the NIH Common Fund's High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, which backs studies with the potential for broad impact in the biomedical, behavioral, or social sciences.

"The High-Risk, High-Reward Research program catalyzes scientific discovery by supporting research proposals that, due to their inherent risk, may struggle in the traditional peer-review process despite their transformative potential," NIH said in announcing this year's recipients.

"The breadth of innovative science put forth by the 2020 cohort of early career and seasoned investigators is impressive and inspiring," said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. "I am confident that their work will propel biomedical and behavioral research and lead to improvements in human health."

Constantinople's research will specifically focus on how neurons perform arithmetic for economic decision-making, including integration and summation of information as well as subtraction and multiplication.

"This type of exploration is crucial because our aversion to loss is often not based on actual probabilities--in fact, we often overestimate the likelihood of a negative outcome and make sub-optimal choices as a result," explains Constantinople, an assistant professor in NYU's Center for Neural Science. "With a better grasp of the neural mechanisms underlying our often-misguided economic judgments, subsequent work can begin to address how to improve them."

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PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Government officials vastly undercounted the death toll among Florida nursing home residents after the destruction of Hurricane Irma in 2017, according to new research led by a Brown University scholar who studies disaster management in the long-term care industry.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported a total of 123 deaths statewide linked to the Category 4 storm, which made landfall in the Florida Keys with winds over 130 mph. The CDC number was based on death certificate data from across the entire state -- including the deaths of 14 residents in a Broward County nursing home that lost power for its air conditioning system after the storm.

The new study -- published on Tuesday, Oct. 6, in JAMA Network Open -- compared deaths at nursing homes across Florida in the 30 days after Irma to those reported over the same period in 2015, when no hurricanes occurred in the state. It found the actual death toll is more than double the CDC number considering the nursing home population alone.

Dr. David Dosa -- an associate professor of medicine and of health services, policy and practice at Brown who led the study with colleagues from Brown and the University of South Florida in Tampa -- identified an additional 139 deaths among Florida nursing home residents linked to Irma. Extending the timeframe to 90 days after Irma, they counted an additional 433 deaths.

"Our results suggest that this wasn't an isolated phenomenon at one or two nursing homes," Dosa said. "This occurred across the state."

The deaths occurred primarily among those living for at least 90 days in a nursing home, a population in which residents are often physically frail or cognitively impaired. They did not occur among short-stay skilled nursing home residents, who make up one-third of nursing home populations and are typically recuperating from illness or surgery.

Dosa's earlier work has shown that long-term stay nursing home residents are particularly vulnerable during emergency evacuations. That leaves nursing home administrators in an unenviable position as they weigh the risks of transporting residents out of harm's way or sheltering in place when a major storm is approaching.

The study looked at the outcomes for 61,564 people age 65 or older living in a total of 640 Florida nursing homes when Irma hit in September 2017. The 2015 comparison group consisted of 61,813 nursing home residents age 65 and older. For both groups, more than two thirds of residents were female and nearly 80% were white. Approximately 40% of both groups were residents over age 85.

Compared with 2015, researchers identified an additional 262 nursing home deaths 30 days after the hurricane occurred and 433 more deaths at 90 days. Dosa said the CDC's data don't give full consideration to indirect deaths in nursing homes where the cause of death is more likely to be attributed to natural causes.

"We tend to underestimate nursing home deaths for a variety of different reasons, because these are frail, older adults who are likely to die with heart failure, COPD and dementia among other causes of death," Dosa said. "When they die, we attribute their deaths to natural causes rather than taking into account the near-term impact of the disaster."

The study's findings reinforced previous research showing the devastating impact on mortality and morbidity among nursing home residents after Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav and Ike. They also expose the cracks in the elder care system that intensified when nursing homes were generally left out during the distribution of personal protective equipment in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dosa said. Recent data show that nearly one quarter of COVID-related deaths in the U.S. have occurred in long-term care settings.

"One would hope that this sort of research allows us to focus on populations at risk during disaster situations," Dosa said. "The purpose behind this research is to come up with insights that can help us better care for these populations."

Too often, nursing homes have not been front and center in disaster management, Dosa said. After Irma, he said, Florida shopping malls had already reopened with restored power while residents were succumbing to heat exposure at the sweltering Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills in Broward County. Four former employees at the nursing home now face criminal charges, and the nursing home has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court in its effort to appeal the state's revocation of its license.

"We need to prioritize nursing homes," Dosa said. "I hope that this work adds to the idea that nursing homes need to be front and center in disaster management."

WASHINGTON--Warmer winters due to climate change are causing lakes in the Northern Hemisphere to experience more ice-free years, according to a new study.

Researchers recently analyzed nearly 80 years of lake ice data, stretching from 1939 to 2016, for 122 lakes that typically freeze every winter. They found ice-free years have become more than three times more frequent since 1978 and 11% of lakes studied experienced at least one completely ice-free year since 1939. This trend is linked to abnormally warm winter temperatures, and the study authors project it will continue with increasing frequency due to climate change. Such ice-free years could have significant ecological, cultural and economic impacts.

"Lake ice is becoming increasingly absent," said Alessandro Filazzola, a community ecologist at York University and the University of Alberta in Canada and lead author of the new study in AGU's journal Geophysical Research Letters. "Even under low carbon emissions scenarios, we're going to have continued ice-free events."

Communities around lakes often depend on freezing events for winter recreation activities like ice fishing and ice festivals, which can bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single weekend.

Lake ice also serves as an ecological "reset," said Sapna Sharma, an aquatic ecologist at Canada's York University and coauthor of the new study. Lakes are warmer in years without ice cover, and they stratify earlier, which could make them more prone to toxic algal blooms. This, in turn, can harm fish or make lakes dangerous for swimming. "The consequences are more widespread than simply one individual unable to go ice fishing," Sharma said.

Interestingly, the authors saw the same warming trend regardless of location, suggesting global climate change is already having an impact on Earth's lakes. "This isn't just happening in one lake in the northern United States," Filazzola said. "It's happening in thousands of lakes around the world."

A lake ice database

In the new study, Filazzola and his colleagues wanted to understand how the frequency of lakes' ice-free years has changed over time. They selected 122 lakes in North America, Europe and Asia with a long, consistent record of data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The NSIDC lake ice database contains historically available data from harbors, newspapers and other written records and modern data sourced from people who live near the lakes.

Lake Suwa in Japan boasts one of the oldest lake ice records in the database, stretching back to 1443. The record has been maintained by 15 generations of Shinto priests that have celebrated the appearance of lake ice each winter. Other culturally important lakes in the dataset include Lakes Baikal, Geneva, Balaton, Champlain and Michigan.

Filazzola, Sharma and their colleagues analyzed ice-free years in their chosen lakes, comparing how often this extreme event occurred in the first 40 versus the last 40 years of the study period. If a lake did not have 100% ice cover for at least one day, it was considered an ice-free year. They then compared the lake ice data with local air temperatures and climate cycles like El Niño and the North Atlantic Decadal Oscillation to better understand the drivers behind lake ice changes.

They found ice-free years occurred much more commonly in the second half of their study period, with 31 recorded ice-free events before 1978 and 108 ice-free events after that year. Since 1990, Lake Champlain and Grand Traverse Bay in Lake Michigan have both experienced three consecutive years without freezing. Lake Suwa, which once froze regularly, now freezes an average of two years every decade, according to the study.

"Even in the last 40 years versus the last 80 years, there's already an obvious pattern that's occurring and it's showing that we're already experiencing a response from warming, which will likely get worse," Filazzola said.

The results showed local winter air temperatures were the best predictor of ice-free years, which became significantly more likely once average winter temperatures rose to -4 degrees Celsius (25 degrees Fahrenheit). The researchers found lakes in more southern and coastal regions were most vulnerable to experiencing ice-free years since they have high rates of warming.

"I think it is intuitive," Sharma said of their results. "But it also gives us a historical snapshot to understand that the climate is changing. It's not normal that these lakes are not freezing."

"I am delighted by this paper," said John Magnuson, a limnologist at the University of Wisconsin Madison who has worked on past lake ice studies but was not involved in this research, calling it "a significant paper that provides new information and insights about a climate-sensitive component of lake ecosystems to climate change."

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Nursing home residents tend to fall asleep at all hours of the day, and during the night, their sleep may be interrupted by periods of wakefulness.

It's a vicious cycle of fragmented sleep that can place residents at risk for poor health outcomes, including depression and increased frailty, said Rosa Baier, an associate professor of the practice in health services, policy and practice who directs the Center for Long-Term Care Quality & Innovation at the Brown University School of Public Health.

But Baier and a team of colleagues identified an innovative way to cut in half the number of sleep disturbances experienced by residents in one California nursing home -- and it didn't involve prescribing sleeping pills. Instead, the facility installed interior lighting fixtures that change color and intensity over the course of the day and night.

"I think it's pretty novel," Baier said of the tuned lighting solution, which mimics natural light occurring during a 24-hour day. "The technology continues to evolve, and so one of the reasons we wanted to study these lights was that there hadn't been research done on this kind of lighting."

Baier led a team of seven researchers who studied the use of tuned LED lighting at ACC Care Center, a 99-bed nursing home in Sacramento, California, participating in a pilot lighting installation by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and the U.S. Department of Energy Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The team's results, published in Seniors Housing and Care Journal on Monday, Oct. 5. established preliminary data that can be used as providers in the long-term care industry consider the adoption of tuned lighting in other facilities.

Prior research had found that nursing home residents likely receive too little light during the day and too much at night. So the researchers randomly assigned corridors where a total of 63 long-term care residents experienced either tuned or static lighting conditions for two months, then switched the corridors to the other lighting. The tuned lighting brightened corridor lighting in the day and dimmed it during the night. The static condition mimicked the fluorescent lighting in place at the facility prior to installation of the tunable fixtures. The study spanned the period of December 2018 through March 2019.

Thirty-five of the 63 residents had been diagnosed with dementia, which is associated with conditions that include delusions, hallucinations, depression, agitation, anxiety, disinhibition, irritability and wandering. The mean age of residents in the study was 88.3 years old and 71% of them were women.

The study found that, on average, the residents experienced 3.6 nighttime sleep disturbances with static lighting compared to 1.8 with tuned lighting. Baier said the results weren't wholly surprising given the research team hypothesized the intervention would have a positive effect on sleep.

"We do know that there is a relationship between exposure to natural light and circadian rhythm, and circadian rhythm is important for healthy sleep," Baier said. "It's very reasonable to think that this might be a particular problem in this setting and something that we could address through environmental practices."

The study suggested that improving the sleep of even a few residents can have a positive effect on roommates and those in nearby rooms. Many of the residents in the study share rooms of two to as many as four people. Other research has demonstrated that the sleep habits of roommates can often determine whether a resident has a good night's sleep or not.

Tuned lighting systems first appeared on the market in 2014. They are more expensive than static fixtures because they have more than one color of LED chip inside, allowing for the mixing of warm and cool white. But the cost has decreased as sales volume has increased, according to study co-author Naomi Miller, senior lighting research scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Portland, Oregon.

Nursing homes first turned to these systems primarily for their energy savings feature. But Baier and her colleagues consider them a low-risk intervention to improve sleep and one that the long-term care industry should strongly consider at a time when nursing homes are shifting staff time and resources to contend with the coronavirus pandemic.

"People are prone to focus on the negative aspects of nursing homes, but the majority of people who I've encountered are really caring individuals and are doing some very innovative practices," Baier said. "This is an example of a facility that's very engaged and very proactive."

EUGENE, Ore. - Oct. 6, 2020 - Researchers probing peatlands to discover clues about past environments and carbon stocks on land have identified peatland that is twice as old and much deeper than previously thought.

Their findings, detailed in an open-access paper published Sept. 14 in the journal Environmental Research Letters, show that an inland site near Putussibau, not far from the Indonesia-Malaysia border, formed at least 47,800 years old and contains peat 18 meters deep - roughly the height of a six-story building.

The study provides new insights about the climate of equatorial rainforests, especially during the last ice age, said study co-author Dan Gavin, a professor of geography at the University of Oregon.

"This existence of this very deep and old peatland provides some clues on past climate," Gavin said. "It tells us that this area remained sufficiently wet and warm to support peat growth through the last ice age. The climate during that time is still poorly understood as there are few places in the very-wet tropics, where there is no dry season, that have such long sediment archives."

For the study, the research team, led by Monika Ruwaimana, a doctoral student at the UO and lecturer at Indonesia's Universitas Atma Jaya Yogyakarta, collected peat cores from two inland and three coastal sites associated with the Kapuas River in West Kalimantan, a province of Indonesia on Borneo.

The Putussibau site has been not been as disturbed as most other areas of Indonesia by deforestation and land conversion to agriculture.

"We thought the Putussibau site would be thinner because people had already built roads over it," Ruwaimana said. "But surprisingly we found depths of 17 to 18 meters. As comparison, the average peat depth in Indonesia is 5 to 6 meters."

In contrast, the coastal sites, particularly in the Kapuas River delta, contain shallower peatland that didn't begin forming until after the last ice age and after sea level stabilized between 4,000 and 7,000 years ago.

The lower base of the inlet peats that were examined is lower than the current riverbed, noted co-author Gusti Z. Anshari of the Universitas Tanjungpura in Pontianak, Indonesia.

"The inland peat contains an important archive about past hydrology and climates," he said. "The coastal peat bed is higher than the current riverbed, making it prone to dryness. The coastal peat burns every dry season because of water loss through hydrological conductivity."

Human disturbances related to land-use changes, he added, have caused high carbon emissions and create fire-loving degraded peats.

"The inland peat possibly played an important role in climate and carbon storage before and during the last ice age," Ruwaimana said.

During that glaciation, she noted, atmospheric carbon dioxide was much lower and previous evidence suggested that much of the region's carbon had moved into the oceans. The new findings, however, show inland peatlands persisted.

Across the sites, 37 radiocarbon dates were obtained. During a cool, dry period 20,000-30,000 years ago, Ruwaimana said, the new dating synthesized with previous dating across Indonesia indicated a hiatus of peatland formation.

"The significance is that conditions must have remained sufficiently wet so that the peat in the upper Kapuas was not lost during this period," she said. "The ages provide a clearer picture on its formation history and how it connects to the past climate. As this peat forms layer by layer like a pancake layer cake, each layer tells us the story about fire, plant and climate when that layer was formed."

With the revised depths of inland peatlands at these sites, the researchers suggest that previous estimates of carbon storage - 25.3 gigatons across Indonesia and 9.1 gigatons on Borneo - are too low. However, Ruwaimana said, more data is needed across the region for more accurate calculations.

Depths of the older peats obtained in the study, she noted, varied dramatically, with some peats of less than two meters depth being more than 10,000 years old.

The inland sites, the researchers wrote, may be the oldest tropical peats and contain the largest density of carbon in the world but are increasingly being threatened by changes in land use.

Lucas Silva, a professor of geography and head of the UO's Soil Plant Atmosphere research lab, also was a co-author on the study.

The loss of flowering plants and the widespread use of pesticides could be a double punch to wild bee populations. In a new study, researchers at the University of California, Davis, found that the combined threats reduced blue orchard bee reproduction by 57 percent and resulted in fewer female offspring. The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"Just like humans, bees don't face one single stress or threat," said lead author Clara Stuligross, a Ph.D. candidate in ecology at UC Davis. "Understanding how multiple stressors interplay is really important, especially for bee populations in agricultural systems, where wild bees are commonly exposed to pesticides and food can be scarce."

The study found that pesticide exposure had the greatest impact on nesting activity and the number of offspring the bees produced. Pesticide exposure reduced bee reproduction 1.75 times more than limiting their food.

IN FIELD EXPERIMENT

The team conducted their research by exposing the blue orchard bee to the neonicotinoid insecticide imidacloprid, the most widely used neonicotinoid in the United States. It's also among the most frequently applied insecticides in California.

Nesting female bees were set up in large flight cages containing wildflowers at high or low densities treated with and without the insecticide. The insecticide was applied based on label instructions. Bees can be exposed to insecticides by consuming pollen and nectar from the treated flowers. Similar research has been conducted on honeybees in labs, but there has been no comparable research on wild bees in field or semi-field conditions.

FEWER FEMALES, FEWER BEES IN THE FUTURE

The two main factors that affect bee reproduction are the probability that females will nest and the total number of offspring they have. The research found that pesticide-exposed and resource-deprived female bees delayed the onset of nesting by 3.6 days and spent five fewer days nesting than unexposed bees.

Co-author Neal Williams, a pollination ecologist and professor in the Department of Entomology and Nematology at UC Davis, said that's a substantial delay considering bees only nest for a few weeks. The production of female bees is also crucial to determining the health of future bee populations.

"In the bee world, males don't matter so much," said Williams. "Male numbers rarely limit population growth, but fewer females will reduce the reproductive potential of subsequent generations."

The study found pesticide exposure dramatically reduced the probability that a bee produced even a single daughter. Of all nesting females, only 62 percent of pesticide-exposed bees produced at least one daughter compared to 92 percent of bees not exposed to pesticides.

Study authors said the research can help farmers make decisions about how they manage the environment around orchards. It reinforces the need for growers to carefully think about the location where they plant flowers for bee forage, to prevent flowers from becoming traps that expose bees to pesticides.

Patients hospitalized with COVID-19 were more likely male, younger, and, in both the US and Spain, had fewer comorbidities and lower medication use than hospitalized influenza patients according to a recent study published by the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) community.

OHDSI has established an international network of researchers and observational health databases with a central coordinating center housed at the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University.

This global network study, which included more than 34,000 COVID-19 patients from across three continents, is intended to provide greater detail about the characteristics of patients suffering from the disease, and also to help inform decision-making around the care of hospitalized patients.

Patients hospitalized with COVID-19 were more typically male in the US and Spain, but more often female in South Korea. The ages of patients varied, but in Spain and the US, the most common age groups were between 60 to 75. Patients hospitalized with influenza were typically older than those hospitalized with COVID-19, and more likely to be female.

Many of the patients hospitalized with COVID-19 were seen to have other health conditions. For example, the prevalence of hypertensive disorder ranged from 24% to 70%, diabetes from 13% to 43%, and asthma from 4% to 15%, across data sources. Despite this, however, when compared to patients hospitalized with influenza in recent years, those with COVID-19 were seen to generally be healthier. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), cardiovascular disease and dementia were all more common among those hospitalized with influenza compared to those hospitalized with COVID-19.

"This study has allowed us to better understand the profiles of patients hospitalized with COVID-19," says co-lead author Edward Burn. "Despite recent discourse around the supposed poor health and limited life expectancy of COVID-19 patients, we see COVID-19 patients to be in no worse health than those typically hospitalized with influenza. This further highlights the high rate of mortality among COVID-19 patients."

This study was initiated during the OHDSI COVID-19 study-a-thon, an 88-hour global, inter-disciplinary collaboration. The initial COVID-19 data was provided by the Korean Health Insurance Review & Assessment Service (HIRA), and it empowered the community to generate some of the earliest multi-national studies during the pandemic. All analyses are performed at the individual sites, meaning no patient-level data needed to be shared and patient privacy could be maintained.

"The most interesting part of this study is that it was possible to provide the details of patients' characteristics across institutions without violating their privacy," said co-lead author Seng Chan You, who helped lead the efforts of mapping HIRA data to the OHDSI common data model. "It's important to know this is possible because we don't know what is coming next. When is the next pandemic? Whatever happens, we know we can provide important patient characteristics to allow collaborative global research."

The study was developed and executed by the OHDSI community, a multi-stakeholder, interdisciplinary collaboration that works to bring out the value of health data through large-scale analytics. All solutions are open-source, and links to the study protocol, code and results are posted in the paper.

"Open science and collaboration are tenets of the OHDSI community, and they were never more important than early in this pandemic," said Patrick Ryan, co-senior author of this study. "Our community collaborated for years to develop the high-level analytics which set the course for these studies, and our belief in both openly sharing patient data allowed us to generate this reliable, reproducible COVID patient data that will assist in important decision-making as we fight this disease."

"This study is foundational work for future collaborative evidence generation by both OHDSI and the EHDEN Consortium, which is mapping additional COVID data across Europe," said co-senior author Daniel Prieto-Alhambra. "Describing the baseline demographic, clinical characteristics, treatments and outcomes of COVID-19 patients overall and stratified by sex, age and specific comorbidities will greatly inform decision-making in this pandemic, and we are collaborating globally on these studies."

Robotic surgery plays a major role in modern management of prostate cancer, bladder cancer, and other conditions treated by urologists. But it also poses some special challenges as hospitals resume elective surgery amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Problems and solutions facing urologic robotic surgery in the era of COVID-19 are reviewed in Urology Practice®, an Official Journal of the American Urological Association (AUA). The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

Medical student Brandee Branche - along with Lance Hampton, MD, Urology Chair and Director of Robotic Surgery, and Riccardo Autorino, MD, PhD, Director of Urologic Oncology at VCU Health in Richmond, Va. - outline practical steps to performing robotic urologic surgery safely and effectively during the pandemic. They write: "At the crux of the matter is the protection of surgical staff and patients, and preservation of optimal surgical technique while adapting to new infectious disease protocols."

Screening, Prevention, and Perioperative Steps for Robotic Surgery During COVID

Robotic surgery now accounts for most minimally invasive surgical procedures performed by urologists and urologic oncologists, and will be an important priority as healthcare facilities resume non-emergency surgeries. Dr. Autorino and coauthors target key issues and recommended actions for resuming these critical procedures:

Patient Screening. Preoperative screening is recommended for all patients during the pandemic, but screening practices and resources vary widely. Because patients with COVID-19 are asymptomatic at first, simply checking for fever isn't enough - some type of diagnostic test is needed. "Priority tiering" of robotic surgery should be performed, based on the urgency of the procedure. For example, patients with high-risk cancers or active bleeding will be prioritized over those with less-advanced cancers, or those scheduled for reconstructive procedures.

Risk of Virus Transmission. Unanswered questions as to how the Coronavirus spreads pose challenges in preventing transmission during surgery. In addition to respiratory droplets and aerosols, previous research suggests that the virus could potentially be carried in smoke due to the use of electrocautery instruments in robotic surgery. "The anesthesia method should minimize aerosolization of the virus, and negative pressure rooms [isolation rooms] are strongly preferred for COVID-19 positive patients," Dr. Autorino and colleagues write.

Perioperative Practices. The authors address issues related to preparation before entering the operating room, patient positioning, equipment to reduce the risk of gas leakage, and guidelines for operating room filtration systems. Even in patients who have tested negative for COVID-19, "adequate personal protective equipment for the surgical team is essential to protect patients and health care workers."

Surgical Time and Trainee Learning. Guidelines for surgery during the pandemic recommend the number of staff members in the operating room be kept to a minimum - although there is some concern this and other infection control measures might lead to longer operating times. As elective procedures are canceled or postponed, innovative approaches will be needed to replace lost training opportunities for urology residents.

The pandemic also brings changes related to informed consent procedures, procedure costs and accessibility, and possible COVID risks during the postoperative period.

Priorities for further research include strategies for prioritizing surgical procedures and the potential for viral transmission in surgical smoke. Future considerations should include whether robotic surgery consoles should be positioned outside the OR, as this could potentially decrease transmission to the operating surgeon. Dr. Autorino and colleagues emphasize studies will also be needed to confirm any steps to reduce Coronavirus transmission are effective: "While we suggest altering the operating room environment to err on the side of safety, there must be evidence to sustain such changes in the long run."

Sanford Burnham Prebys today announced that two faculty members, Peter Adams, Ph.D., and Jerold Chun, M.D., Ph.D., have received National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director's Transformative Research Awards. The awards, which total $8.5 million and are two of only nine granted in 2020, come from the NIH Common Fund's High-Risk, High-Reward Program. The program supports researchers who propose groundbreaking, exceptionally innovative research with the potential to create new scientific paradigms, establish entirely new and improved clinical approaches or develop transformative technologies.

Adams, a professor in the Tumor Initiation and Maintenance and Development, Aging and Regeneration Programs, was awarded a five-year, $3.9 million grant to study how chromatin--the mix of DNA and proteins that make up human chromosomes--is stabilized in long-lived cells. Increasingly, scientists are learning that modifications in chromatin structure correlate with age, and view its stability as a potential target to counter human aging and age-related diseases. Conversely, chromatin instability is thought to promote aging and disease.

"Chromatin is not a static fixed structure," says Adams. "It's a dynamic and plastic 'breathing' complex, but it needs a level of stability, especially for cells that need to survive and maintain their function for decades, such as neurons in our brain and cardiomyocytes in our heart. Our research will expand our understanding of how long-lived cells preserve chromatin integrity through a process we have called "chromostasis."

"Aging is the single most important risk factor for many chronic, debilitating diseases," adds Adams. "We hope our research leads to innovative approaches to support healthy aging, prevent degenerative disease and cancer, and facilitate therapeutic cell reprogramming."

Chun, a professor in the Degenerative Diseases Program and senior vice president of Neuroscience Drug Discovery, was awarded a five-year, $4.6 million grant to advance a new line of research for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias.

Chun's team recently discovered that a process called "somatic gene recombination" occurs in neurons of the brain, creating new gene variants that are worsened in Alzheimer's disease. The team will now look at related neurodegenerative diseases beyond Alzheimer's disease and delve deeper into the processes that could produce disease-linked variants to provide new understanding and therapeutics.

"Alzheimer's disease and related dementias like Parkinson's disease affect millions of people in the U.S. alone, yet lack meaningful therapies" says Chun. "We are grateful to the NIH Common Fund and the National Institute on Aging for this support to explore a new facet of brain science that could help individuals and families impacted by these devasting diseases."

"The breadth of innovative science put forth by the 2020 cohort of early career and seasoned investigators is impressive and inspiring," adds NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. "I am confident that their work will propel biomedical and behavioral research and lead to improvements in human health."

Adams' grant is titled: Defining chromostasis--a candidate regulator of healthy aging and longevity (R01 AG071464-01).

Chun's grant is titled: Transformative research on somatic gene recombination in the normal and Alzheimer's disease-related dementia brain (R01 AG071465-01).

Scientists can have ambitious goals: curing disease, exploring distant worlds, clean-energy revolutions. In physics and materials research, some of these ambitious goals are to make ordinary-sounding objects with extraordinary properties: wires that can transport power without any energy loss, or quantum computers that can perform complex calculations that today's computers cannot achieve. And the emerging workbenches for the experiments that gradually move us toward these goals are 2D materials -- sheets of material that are a single layer of atoms thick.

In a paper published Sept. 14 in the journal Nature Physics, a team led by the University of Washington reports that carefully constructed stacks of graphene -- a 2D form of carbon -- can exhibit highly correlated electron properties. The team also found evidence that this type of collective behavior likely relates to the emergence of exotic magnetic states.

"We've created an experimental setup that allows us to manipulate electrons in the graphene layers in a number of exciting new ways," said co-senior author Matthew Yankowitz, a UW assistant professor of physics and of materials science and engineering, as well as a faculty researcher at the UW's Clean Energy Institute.

Yankowitz led the team with co-senior author Xiaodong Xu, a UW professor of physics and of materials science and engineering. Xu is also a faculty researcher with the UW Molecular Engineering and Sciences Institute, the UW Institute for Nano-Engineered Systems and the UW Clean Energy Institute.

Since 2D materials are one layer of atoms thick, bonds between atoms only form in two dimensions and particles like electrons can only move like pieces on a board game: side-to-side, front-to-back or diagonally, but not up or down. These restrictions can imbue 2D materials with properties that their 3D counterparts lack, and scientists have been probing 2D sheets of different materials to characterize and understand these potentially useful qualities.

But over the past decade, scientists like Yankowitz have also started layering 2D materials -- like a stack of pancakes -- and have discovered that, if stacked and rotated in a particular configuration and exposed to extremely low temperatures, these layers can exhibit exotic and unexpected properties.

The UW team worked with building blocks of bilayer graphene: two sheets of graphene naturally layered together. They stacked one bilayer on top of another -- for a total of four graphene layers -- and twisted them so that the layout of carbon atoms between the two bilayers were slightly out of alignment. Past research has shown that introducing these small twist angles between single layers or bilayers of graphene can have big consequences for the behavior of their electrons. With specific configurations of the electric field and charge distribution across the stacked bilayers, electrons display highly correlated behaviors. In other words, they all start doing the same thing -- or displaying the same properties -- at the same time.

"In these instances, it no longer makes sense to describe what an individual electron is doing, but what all electrons are doing at once," said Yankowitz.

"It's like having a room full of people in which a change in any one person's behavior will cause everyone else to react similarly," said lead author Minhao He, a UW doctoral student in physics and a former Clean Energy Institute fellow.

Quantum mechanics underlies these correlated properties, and since the stacked graphene bilayers have a density of more than 10^12, or one trillion, electrons per square centimeter, a lot of electrons are behaving collectively.

The team sought to unravel some of the mysteries of the correlated states in their experimental setup. At temperatures of just a few degrees above absolute zero, the team discovered that they could "tune" the system into a type of correlated insulating state -- where it would conduct no electrical charge. Near these insulating states, the team found pockets of highly conducting states with features resembling superconductivity.

Though other teams have recently reported these states, the origins of these features remained a mystery. But the UW team's work has found evidence for a possible explanation. They found that these states appeared to be driven by a quantum mechanical property of electrons called "spin" -- a type of angular momentum. In regions near the correlated insulating states, they found evidence that all the electron spins spontaneously align. This may indicate that, near the regions showing correlated insulating states, a form of ferromagnetism is emerging -- not superconductivity. But additional experiments would need to verify this.

These discoveries are the latest example of the many surprises that are in store when conducting experiments with 2D materials.

"Much of what we're doing in this line of research is to try to create, understand and control emerging electronic states, which can be either correlated or topological, or possess both properties," said Xu. "There could be a lot we can do with these states down the road -- a form of quantum computing, a new energy-harvesting device, or some new types of sensors, for example -- and frankly we won't know until we try."

In the meantime, expect stacks, bilayers and twist angles to keep making waves.