Tech

In a paper published by the Behavioral Sciences & Law journal, experts from the University of Surrey take a critical look at the growing use of algorithmic risk assessment tools, which act as a form of expert scientific evidence in a growing number of criminal cases.

The review argues that because of several issues, such as the biases of the developers and weak statistical evidence of the AI's predictive performance, judges should act as gatekeepers and closely scrutinise whether such tools should be used at all.

The paper outlines three steps that judges should consider:

Fitness, this is to consider whether using the AI tool is relevant to the case at all

Accuracy, this is to understand whether the tool can truly distinguish between reoffenders and non-reoffenders

Reliability, this would require the judges to scrutinise the trustworthiness of tool's outcomes in practice. This stage would not be required if the judge found the AI lacking in the one of the first two steps.

Dr Melissa Hamilton, author of the paper and Reader in Law and Criminal Justice at the University of Surrey's School of Law, said: "These emerging AI tools have the potential to offer benefits to judges in sentencing, but close attention needs to be paid to whether they are trustworthy. If used carelessly these tools will do a disservice to the defendants on the receiving end."

Doctors could soon be administering an entire course of treatment for life-threatening conditions with a 3D printed capsule controlled by magnetic fields thanks to advances made by University of Sussex researchers.

Engineers and pharmaceutical scientists from the University of Sussex and The University of Texas at Austin have developed a triggerable and remotely controllable system for on-demand drug delivery.

Using 3D printing technology and magnetic actuation, researchers have been able to prove the concept of a drug release triggered by magnetic fields capable of inhibiting the proliferation of cancer cells in vitro.

While the research is in its initial phases, the researchers are working towards a system where it is possible to drive the drug delivery system towards the required position in the body using external means such as permanent magnets. The technology would allow for a drug to be applied close to the lesion.

The researchers foresee that the targeted delivery offered by the new system could help eliminate harmful side effects caused by treatments like chemotherapy which damage neighbouring healthy cells. The device also offers a level of control that would guard against inappropriate dosing which has become the main cause of adverse effects from drug therapy.

Kejing Shi, doctoral researcher in the University of Sussex's School of Life Sciences and lead author of the study, said: "The device offers the potential for personalised treatment through the loading of a given drug in a particular concentration and releasing it within different dosage patterns. All results confirmed that the device can provide a safe, long-term, triggerable and reutilizable way for localized disease treatments such as cancer."

Professor Ali Nokhodchi, head of Pharmaceutics Research Lab at the University of Sussex School of Life Sciences and corresponding author of the article, said: "The device delivers enhanced efficacy and safety through optimal drug distribution and absorption in the targeted location at the (sub)cellular level. This device has the potential to be used in treatments for cancer, diabetes, pain, and myocardial infarction which require variable release kinetics where patients' suffer from discomfort or inconvenience if they currently rely on untunable monotonic drug treatment."

In the study, to be published in the August edition of Colloids and Surfaces B: Biointerfaces, a device containing anticancer drug 5-fluorouracil and composed of a magnetic polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) sponge cylinder and a 3D printed reservoir showed an inhibition effect on Trex cell growth.

Repeated, localised drug release was achieved by switching the applied magnetic field on and off. Varying the intensity of the magnetic field when applied to the device causes the internal magnetic sponge to be compressed at different ratios, which releases different amounts of the drug.

In vitro cell culture studies demonstrated the stronger the magnetic field applied, the higher the drug release and the greater inhibition effects on Trex cell growth.

The researchers say that this kind of smart treatment could be available for patients in hospitals within a decade.

Dr Elizabeth-Rendon Morales, Senior Lecturer in Engineering at the University of Sussex's School of Engineering and Informatics, said: "Fine tuning and characterizing the device performance allows the system being capable of releasing the drug within different dosage patterns thus, having the potential to offer personalized treatment."

Dr Rodrigo Aviles-Espinosa, a Lecturer in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Sussex's School of Engineering and Informatics, says "Advancing this process further, we could create different compartments in the capsule with different sponges or employ other techniques where the macroporous sponge properties can be tailored to hold two or more substances without being mixed which could deliver more complex courses of treatment."

A study by the Centre for Chromosome Biology at NUI Galway, Ireland, in partnership with the University of Zurich, has uncovered new insights into how the replication of DNA occurs which can be applied to help develop novel cancer treatments.

The breakthrough research looked at a protein called CDC7 which is a trigger for cancer cells to replicate their DNA and form tumors. The NUI Galway research shows how drugs that block CDC7 work, indicating how they could be further developed to stop cancer growth.

The key characteristic of all cancers is that cells divide in an uncontrolled way forming a tumour. When a cell divides into two cells its DNA needs to be replicated so that both mother cell and daughter cell get a complete copy of the DNA. There are specific points on the DNA called origins of replication and CDC7 works by activating a set of proteins at these origins to trigger the initiation of DNA replication. Drugs that act against CDC7 block initiation of DNA replication and therefore block the growth of cancer cells.

Professor of Molecular Medicine at the Centre for Chromosome Biology and Discipline of Biochemistry in the School of Natural Sciences at NUI Galway, Corrado Santocanale said: "Cancer incidence is continuously increasing both in Ireland and around the world with scientists and researchers constantly looking for new and innovative treatments. My team has shown that CDC7 has another role to play in addition to activating proteins at replication origins."

He added: "We know that many types of cancers are stressed by constantly replicating their DNA and we have discovered that when replication stress occurs in cancer cells, CDC7 works with another protein called MRE11 to overcome the stress and restart replication, so the cancer cells can keep growing. However, if drugs that block CDC7 are added, the cancer cells are unable to overcome the replication stress."

The new research is particulary relevant for the more aggressive cancers such as pancreatic and colon cancers which have high levels of replication stress, diseses in which drugs that block CDC7 are likely to be particularly effective.

The researchers also found that if cells have a mutation in the breast cancer gene BRCA2, CDC7 actually increases DNA damage, increasing the likelihood of breast cancer developing and suggesting that drugs that block CDC7 could also be investigated to help in the prevention of certain types of breast cancers.

Professor Noel Lowndes, Director of the Centre for Chromosome Biology said " This study, published in the prestigious journal EMBO Reports, demonstrates how basic research, that increases our knowledge biological processes, is vital to uncover new directions to take in the effort to develop effective cancer treatments.

Oxygen first accumulated in the Earth's atmosphere about 2.4 billion years ago, during the Great Oxidation Event. A long-standing puzzle has been that geologic clues suggest early bacteria were photosynthesizing and pumping out oxygen hundreds of millions of years before then. Where was it all going?

Something was holding back oxygen's rise. A new interpretation of rocks billions of years old finds volcanic gases are the likely culprits. The study led by the University of Washington was published in June in the open-access journal Nature Communications.

"This study revives a classic hypothesis for the evolution of atmospheric oxygen," said lead author Shintaro Kadoya, a UW postdoctoral researcher in Earth and space sciences. "The data demonstrates that an evolution of the mantle of the Earth could control an evolution of the atmosphere of the Earth, and possibly an evolution of life."

Multicellular life needs a concentrated supply of oxygen, so the accumulation of oxygen is key to the evolution of oxygen-breathing life on Earth.

"If changes in the mantle controlled atmospheric oxygen, as this study suggests, the mantle might ultimately set a tempo of the evolution of life," Kadoya said.

The new work builds on a 2019 paper that found the early Earth's mantle was far less oxidized, or contained more substances that can react with oxygen, than the modern mantle. That study of ancient volcanic rocks, up to 3.55 billion years old, were collected from sites that included South Africa and Canada.

Robert Nicklas at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Igor Puchtel at the University of Maryland, and Ariel Anbar at Arizona State University are among the authors of the 2019 study. They are also co-authors of the new paper, looking at how changes in the mantle influenced the volcanic gases that escaped to the surface.

The Archean Eon, when only microbial life was widespread on Earth, was more volcanically active than today. Volcanic eruptions are fed by magma - a mixture of molten and semi-molten rock - as well as gases that escape even when the volcano is not erupting.

Some of those gases react with oxygen, or oxidize, to form other compounds. This happens because oxygen tends to be hungry for electrons, so any atom with one or two loosely held electrons reacts with it. For instance, hydrogen released by a volcano combines with any free oxygen, removing that oxygen from the atmosphere.

The chemical makeup of Earth's mantle, or softer layer of rock below the Earth's crust, ultimately controls the types of molten rock and gases coming from volcanoes. A less-oxidized early mantle would produce more of the gases like hydrogen that combine with free oxygen. The 2019 paper shows that the mantle became gradually more oxidized from 3.5 billion years ago to today.

The new study combines that data with evidence from ancient sedimentary rocks to show a tipping point sometime after 2.5 billion years ago, when oxygen produced by microbes overcame its loss to volcanic gases and began to accumulate in the atmosphere.

"Basically, the supply of oxidizable volcanic gases was capable of gobbling up photosynthetic oxygen for hundreds of millions of years after photosynthesis evolved," said co-author David Catling, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences. "But as the mantle itself became more oxidized, fewer oxidizable volcanic gases were released. Then oxygen flooded the air when there was no longer enough volcanic gas to mop it all up."

This has implications for understanding the emergence of complex life on Earth and the possibility of life on other planets.

"The study indicates that we cannot exclude the mantle of a planet when considering the evolution of the surface and life of the planet," Kadoya said.

Researchers at Uppsala University have developed a method for identifying functional mutations and their effect on genes relevant to the development of glioblastoma - a malignant brain tumour with a very poor prognosis. The study is published in Genome Biology.

The human genome consists of nearly 22,000 genes. Many studies have explored the nearly two per cent of our DNA that produces proteins. Considerably less is known about the 98 per cent that does not encode protein. However, these non-coding regions contain important information and regulate whether a gene is active in different tissues, in different stages of development and in diseases such as cancer.

Cancer is caused by mutations that lead to uncontrolled cell division. One of the most aggressive types of cancer is glioblastoma, a form of brain tumour with a very poor prognosis. Relatively little is known about how mutations in non-coding regions drive glioblastoma. To address this knowledge gap, researchers at Uppsala University have performed whole-genome sequencing of DNA in tumour tissues from patients with glioblastoma and analysed the identified mutations.

"One of our key tasks was to identify functional mutations associated with regulatory elements and potential relevance to the development of cancer cells, and to distinguish them from all random variations without presumed significance," says Professor Karin Forsberg-Nilsson at the Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, Uppsala University.

The researchers assumed that DNA sequences that have remained unchanged in mammals throughout evolution are likely to have important functions. Therefore, they intersected the thousands of mutations they had found with information about evolutionary conservation of the genetic regions where the mutations lie.

"We chose to focus on a subset of mutations in the best-preserved genetic regions that are likely to affect gene regulation," says Professor Kerstin-Lindblad-Toh at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Microbiology, Uppsala University as well as the Broad Institute (US).

The researchers validated their results using the gene SEMA3C, partly because they found a large number of mutations in non-coding regulatory regions near this gene and partly because previous findings, by others, suggest that SEMA3C is linked to a poor cancer prognosis.

"We studied how mutations in non-coding regions affect SEMA3C's function and activity. Our results show that a specific, evolutionarily conserved, mutation in the vicinity of SEMA3C disrupts the binding of certain proteins whose task is to bind genes and regulate their activity," says Forsberg-Nilsson.

The study also identifies more than 200 other genes enriched for non-coding mutations in the regions concerned. These likely have regulatory potential, thus further increasing the number of genes that are relevant to the development of brain tumours.

"Our results confirm the importance of the association between genetic alterations in non-coding regions, their biological function and disease pathology," concludes Forsberg-Nilsson.

The largest study of its kind in the U.S. shows thousands of different types of bacteria living on cell phones and shoes, including groups that have barely been studied by scientists.

"This highlights how much we have to learn about the microbial world around us," said David Coil, a researcher at the University of California, Davis Genome Center and first author on the paper, published June 9 in the journal PeerJ.

In recent years scientists have started to better understand the communities of microbes, or microbiomes, found in basically every environment on the planet. We all carry around with us our own personal microbiome. While some of the microbes found in and on people can be harmful, the overwhelming majority of these microbes are harmless -- and some are even beneficial.

In 2013-2014, Coil, with Russell Neches and Professor Jonathan Eisen of the UC Davis Genome Center, UC Davis graduate student and professional cheerleader Wendy Brown, Darlene Cavalier of Science Cheerleaders, Inc. and colleagues launched an effort to sample microbes from spectators at sporting events across the country. Volunteers swabbed cell phones and shoes from almost 3,500 people and sent the samples to the Argonne National Laboratory, University of Chicago, for processing.

The researchers amplified and sequenced DNA from the samples and used the sequence information to identify major groups of bacteria in the samples.

They found that shoes and cell phones from the same person consistently had distinct communities of microbes. Cell phone microbes reflected those found on people, while shoes carried microbes characteristic of soil. This is consistent with earlier results.

The shoe microbes were also more diverse than those found on a person's phone.

Although samples were collected at events across the country, the researchers did not find any conclusive regional trends. In some cases, there were big differences between samples collected at different events in the same city. In others, samples from distant cities looked quite similar.

Microbial dark matter

Surprisingly, a substantial proportion of the bacteria came from groups that researchers call "microbial dark matter." These microbes are difficult to grow and study in a lab setting and thus have been compared to invisible "dark matter" that astronomers think makes up much of the universe.

Since they are so difficult to grow in a lab, these dark matter groups have only been discovered as scientists have used genetic sequencing technology to look for microbes in the world around us. Although many of the dark microbial groups come from remote or extreme environments, such as boiling acid springs and nutrient poor underground aquifers, some have been found in more mundane habitats, such as soil.

"Perhaps we were naïve, but we did not expect to see such a high relative abundance of bacteria from these microbial dark matter groups on these samples," Eisen said.

A number of these dark microbe groups were found in more than 10 percent of samples, with two groups, Armatimonadetes and Patescibacteria, being found in almost 50 percent of swabs and somewhat more frequently in those from shoes than those from phones. Armatimonadetes is known to be widespread in soil.

"A remarkable fraction of people are traveling around with representatives from these uncultured groups on commonplace objects," Coil said.

Researchers have developed a new method to create microcapsules, which are tiny droplets surrounded by a solid shell. The technique can be used to make microcapsules that respond to changes in pH, which are useful for applications such as anti-corrosion coatings.

The study "Fabrication of pH-responsive monodisperse microcapsules using interfacial tension of immiscible phases" was published in the journal Soft Matter.

"There are a number of ways that have been used to make microcapsules," said Nancy Sottos, a Maybelle Leland Swanlund Chair and head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "However, those methods are tedious, slow, and they clog the devices. Additionally, the capsules are not the same size."

The new technique, developed by members of the Autonomous Materials Systems Group at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, involves using emulsion templates to make the microcapsules. "It's like making a salad dressing. You slowly mix in the oil to the water. The faster you mix, the smaller the droplets. Then you form a shell wall around the emulsion droplets." said Sottos, who is the AMS Group leader.

The researchers used a needle that contains capillary tubes inside it. The liquid core of the microcapsule enters through a central tube and the shell material comes through an outer tube. The needle vibrates uniformly across the surface of water. When the needle crosses the surface, the droplets are detached from the capillary tubes, forming uniformly sized emulsion droplets for microcapsules.

"This technique gives you control over the shell thickness, the core volume, and the overall size of the capsule," said Dhawal Thakare, a graduate student in the AMS Group. "Our technique is simple and can be assembled very easily in a lab environment."

Using this technique, the researchers have made pH-responsive capsules that can break open when there is a pH change in the environment. "Drug delivery often uses pH changes to release the capsule contents. We were interested in using them to encapsulate anti-corrosive agents," Sottos said. "When the pH changes, the microcapsules open up and release the anti-corrosive agents."

"Although the technique gives you precise control over the microcapsules, it is hard to make capsules that are very small. Another disadvantage is that you are introducing fluids through capillaries. As the viscosity of the fluid increases, the pressure increases, and there are higher chances of not attaining an unobstructed flow," Thakare said.

The researchers are interested in expanding the range of materials that they can encapsulate and improve the technique so that they can make smaller microcapsules.

CORVALLIS, Ore. - A seven-year field experiment on 88 tree stands across Oregon's western Cascade Range found no discernable difference in the abundance and occupancy rates of rare Oregon slender salamanders on recently harvested tree stands - clear-cuts - compared to stands late in the harvest rotation - older than 50 years.

The findings are published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management. The project was a collaboration of Oregon State University, Weyerhaeuser, Port Blakely Tree Farms, Bureau of Land Management and the Oregon Department of Forestry.

To their surprise, the researchers found that a different, more commonly found terrestrial salamander, the Ensatina, was negatively affected by timber harvest. The study emphasizes, however, the importance of downed wood in the detection of both species. When there is dead wood on the ground, there are more Oregon slender and Ensatina salamanders, regardless of harvest stage.

The Oregon slender salamander only exists on the western slopes of the Cascades, where it lives most of the year underground or burrowed in woody debris on the forest floor. This fully terrestrial salamander is primarily found in mature evergreen forests, including timber plantations.

Due to concern over the effects of harvesting trees, the Oregon slender salamander is considered "sensitive" by the state of Oregon and has been petitioned for Endangered Species Act candidacy.

The study comes with a recommendation from the researchers: After harvest, leave downed wood behind to provide adequate habitat for the salamander.

"That dead, decaying wood is essential habitat for maintaining the moisture and temperature salamanders need," said study lead author Tiffany Garcia, a wildlife ecologist in Oregon State's College of Agricultural Sciences. "We found that more downed wood meant more salamanders. If there's not enough downed wood and places for them to hide, you won't find them. The size and the type of the downed wood also matters. It needs to be in large enough pieces to keep moisture for a long time, at least until the trees grow back. If they are small pieces they'll just dry out."

There hasn't been much research on the Oregon slender salamander. It only emerges and is active when there is no snow on the ground and when it's not too dry, leaving a total of a few months in the spring and the fall to find them.

The study was conducted from 2013-2019. In cooperation with private and state landowners, all 88 harvest stands were randomly selected from the harvest plans of Weyerhaeuser, Port Blakely Tree Farms, the Oregon Department of Forestry and U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

To be included, the stands had to have been harvested more than 50 years ago, be scheduled for harvest within three years of inclusion in the study, be larger than 80 square meters, and had verified occurrence of Oregon slender salamanders pre-harvest.

"One of the unique things about this study is that we did non-destructive sampling," Garcia said. "We couldn't destroy the habitat because we wanted to do repeat sampling over multiple years. This is a new way of searching for this species."

Now more than ever, people who want to learn a new language turn to their mobile devices for help as language learning applications have become increasingly available. While these apps allow users to study a new language from anywhere at any time, how effective are they?

That is a question Shawn Loewen, professor in the Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages at Michigan State University, is trying to answer.

Loewen, who is the director of the Second Language Studies program, recently conducted a study focusing on Babbel, a popular subscription-based language learning app and e-learning platform, to see if it really worked at teaching a new language. Helping Loewen with the study as a research assistant was Daniel Isbell, a recent graduate of MSU's Second Language Studies Ph.D. Program who was a doctoral candidate at the time.

"Despite the fact that millions globally are already using language learning apps, there is a lack of published research on their impact on speaking skills," Loewen said. "There are virtually no other studies that have investigated mobile language learning apps in a quasi-experimental way. Therefore, this robust and methodologically rigorous study makes an important contribution to the field."

In the study, which is published in Foreign Language Annals, 85 undergraduate students at MSU used Babbel for 12 weeks to learn Spanish. At the beginning of the study, the students took a pre-test to assess their existing oral proficiency, vocabulary and grammar in Spanish. After 12 weeks, the 54 students who completed all study requirements took the same test again to see how much knowledge they had gained.

The study showed that nearly all students who completed the requirements improved in their Spanish language knowledge and/or ability to communicate after 12 weeks of using Babbel.

"On the whole, learners in this study increased their oral proficiency, as measured by an improvement on a well-established and valid speaking test, the Oral Proficiency Interview," Loewen said. "These results establish that using Babbel can facilitate the development of oral communication skills and not just grammar and vocabulary acquisition, as a previous study had demonstrated."

Also, as one might expect, learning gains in terms of oral proficiency, grammar and vocabulary were correlated with the amount of time students invested in using the app.

Among the report's findings, 59% of participants improved oral proficiency by at least one sublevel on the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages proficiency scale. The proportion of learners who improved rose even higher among those who spent more time using the app. For those who studied at least six hours, 69% increased at least one sublevel, improving to 75% for those who studied for at least 15 hours.

Additionally, when considering the improved learning outcomes for those who logged more hours in the app and the fact that 36% of participants who started the study ended up quitting, a key takeaway for prospective language learning app users becomes clear: However convenient and effective a language learning app may be, what might be most important is that learners stick with it and put in the necessary time to make progress.

A ten-year study shows that Asian black bears' diets vary greatly depending on sex, stage of life, and resource availability, providing important information on foraging strategy according to age-sex classes. Researchers in Japan published their findings on April 15 in Mammal Study.

Scientists knew Asian black bears were omnivores, feeding mostly on plants. The bears also eat animal materials such as deer and insects. Their diets change based on the abundance of those resources each season. However, scientists did not previously know exactly how much and under what conditions the bears' diets changed.

Japanese wildlife scientists and ecologists at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute, and Tokyo University of Agriculture, have analyzed the bears' diet profiles. Their end goal was to better understand bears' feeding habits in relation to their age, sex and acorn production.

"Several thousand bears are killed annually as nuisances in Japan. In the context of reducing human-bear conflict, understanding dietary differences among age-sex classes of bears would help to facilitate the management of habitat conditions to preserve a suitable habitat for bears, to separate their habitats and human settlements, or both." said Tomoko Naganuma, an Assistant Professor at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology.

The study took place on a 460 square kilometer area in the southern Ashio-Nikko mountains in central Japan. The research team took hair samples from the backs and shoulders of trapped bears. They first divided out the hair samples by growth rate, so they could later chart bear diets across reproductive season (from June to July) and hyperphagia seasons (from mid-September and October, when bears become more active and eat more to help prepare for winter hibernation). Researchers analyzed the samples for carbon-nitrogen isotope ratios, reliable indicators of the bears' diets.

The researchers found that the bears' consumption of plant-based food was relatively constant during the reproductive season among the age-sex classes studied. However, older bears are more carnivorous. Adult males are especially more likely to consume deer than other members within the population. The larger body mass of adult males may be advantageous in competing for food. . During the hyperphagia season, bears were mostly dependent on acorn, regardless of its abundance. However, during years of poor acorn production in the study area, the bears consume increased proportion of animal materials, suggesting that they consume them as alternatives to acorn.

"Because distribution, abundance, and composition of food resources vary in each bear habitat, it will be important to investigate the foraging strategy in various populations," Naganuma said of next steps in better understanding the relationships between bears and their environment.

Magnesium is a promising material for use in structural materials because they are lightweight, have high-specific strength, and high-specific stiffness. However, its limited formability at room temperature keeps its potential use limited.

Activation of non-basal slip systems has been observed in several magnesium alloys which showed improvement of ductility. To elucidate the mechanism of the activation of non-basal slip systems, So Yoshikawa and Daisuke Matsunaka of Shinshu University conducted molecular dynamics simulations of defect nucleation in the vicinity of the I1-type stacking fault.

Stacking fault is one kind of defect in crystals. Previous first-principles calculations found that the alloying elements capable of improving ductility reduce the stacking fault energy. Yoshikawa and Matsunaka applied shear stress to atomic models of about 60,000 atoms including an I1-type stacking fault and observed its deformation behavior. Analyzing atomic configurations at each snapshot in the simulations, they discussed defect nucleation from the I1-type stacking fault. Then, they found that dislocations associated with pyramidal slips as well as (11-21) twins were generated from the I1-type stacking fault, depending on the applied stress state.

This study successfully obtained the atomistic picture of dislocation generation from I1-type stacking fault. To elucidate effects of alloying elements on mechanical properties at the atomic level, the team will progress their computational and theoretical study to other defect events in magnesium and construct a highly accurate interatomic potential for molecular dynamics simulations of magnesium alloys through machine learning techniques.

Plastic deformation in hexagonal close-packed (HCP) metals such as magnesium is more complex than body centered cubic and face centered cubic metals. Detailed understanding of deformation mechanisms in magnesium, brought from this study and others in the field, would contribute to not only efficient designing high-performance magnesium alloys but also the development of materials science of HCP metals.

Two decades of research among female athletes over the age of 13 years shows that a lack of nutrition knowledge about what they need to eat to stay healthy and compete may contribute to poor performance, low energy and nutrient intake, and potential health risks, according to a Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School study.

Mary Downes Gastrich, associate professor at the school, who recently published a review study in the Journal of Women's Health, talks about why female athletes often do not meet their nutritional requirements and energy needs, ranging from a lack of education and poor time management skills to chronic dieting and disordered eating behaviors.

What were the main reasons found for nutritional deficiencies and low energy?

In our comprehensive literature review, prior studies have found a lack of general knowledge of nutrition among athletes, coaches and other sports team specialists. Other factors included poor time management and food availability, disordered eating behaviors such as chronic dieting or a drive for lower body weight. Some female athletes may purposefully restrict their calorie intake for performance or aesthetic reasons, while others may unintentionally have low energy expenditure due to increased training or lack of education on how to properly fuel themselves for their sports' demands.

In addition, specific sports, such as gymnastics, distance running, diving, figure skating and classical ballet emphasize a low body weight; thus, making these athletes at greater risk for inadequate calorie consumption, poor body image, disordered eating or a serious mental health disorder diagnosis of an eating disorder such as anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa.

What nutritional deficiencies did the studies show?

Current studies suggest that female athletes' diets are often not optimal for the types and amounts of carbohydrates, fats and total energy intake. However, we found that most female athletes -- other than those who participate in sports promoting leanness, such as dancing, swimming and gymnastics -- may be consuming adequate protein needs.

When the energy and nutrients from the foods consumed does not match the level of energy expenditure in the sport and nutrient needs for proper body function and growth, it can affect female athletes' bone health and reproductive system. Deficiencies in vitamin D, zinc, calcium, magnesium and B vitamins can occur from exercise-related stress and inadequate dietary intakes. Recent reports suggest that up to 42% of female athletes have insufficient vitamin D levels and up to 90% fall short of the adequate intake for calcium. These two deficiencies can increase the risk of bone stress fractures and also place these athletes at risk for osteoporosis later in life.

Diminished bone mineral density can increase the risk of fracture from repetitive stress on the bones during training and competition. The age that sport training begins is an important factor influencing bone mineral density. A study of teen and young adult female elite gymnasts found that the earlier the age of strenuous exercise, the more negative the effect on bone acquisition later on in life.

Female athletes with insufficient diets, who regularly miss menstruation or have a low body mass index should supplement their diet with the recommended 1500?milligrams of calcium a day as well as other dietary supplements, including vitamin D for bone health and optimal calcium absorption. However, for safety reasons, all athletes should consult their physician and/or a registered dietitian nutritionist before taking any dietary supplements.

In addition, insufficient iron consumption may lead to iron deficiency anemia, which is more common in females participating in intense training, like distance running, due to the potential for additional loss of iron through urine, the rupture of red blood cells and gastrointestinal bleeding.

What is "disordered eating" and what role does it play?

To optimize their performance, some female athletes often strive to maintain or reach a low body weight, which may be achieved by unhealthy dieting. Such "disordered eating" can include various unhealthy eating behaviors, including chronic dieting, excessive calorie counting, food-related anxiety and use of laxatives, which could potentially result in a more serious clinical diagnosis of an eating disorder.

Prior work has shown a higher prevalence of eating disorders among female athletes competing in leanness sports, such as dancing, swimming and gymnastics, compared with female athletes competing in non-leanness sports, such as basketball, tennis or volleyball.

What can be done to improve nutrition in female athletes?

Our review from prior studies suggests that the nutrition status of female athletes needs to be more closely monitored due to greater risks of disordered eating, low energy availability and its effects on performance, as well as lack of accurate sports nutrition knowledge.

Interdisciplinary teams -- including physicians, registered dietitian nutritionists, psychologists, parents and coaches -- would be beneficial in screening, counseling and helping female athletes improve their overall diet, performance and health. These teams should be regularly trained on the negative health effects of inadequate calorie intake on both performance and long-term health. Early detection of low energy availability is essential in preventing further health issues, and diagnosed stress injuries should be considered a red flag, signaling further evaluation.

Toronto, Ontario--Harmful flame retardants may be lurking on your hands and cell phone, according to a peer-reviewed study published today in Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

The researchers found that halogenated flame retardants added to plastic TV cases can move from the TV to indoor air and dust, to hands, and then to cell phones and other hand-held electronic devices. Once on your cell phone, that surface provides an ongoing source of exposure to these chemicals each time you touch your cell phone.

"It's well-known that viruses are transferred between surfaces and hands," said co-author Miriam Diamond, a Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Toronto. "Our study shows that toxic chemicals like flame retardants do the same. That's another reason we should all wash our hands often and well."

Halogenated flame retardants, such as polybrominated diphenyl ethers, are known to pose a health risk to children. Previous studies have found that exposure to these chemicals can cause lower IQ in children and behavioral problems.

The authors were surprised to find higher levels of almost all halogenated flame retardants, all organophosphate flame retardants, and phthalate plasticizers on the surfaces of cell phones and other hand-held electronic devices like tablets, compared to non-hand-held devices like desktop computers. This included finding higher levels of long-banned polybrominated diphenyl ethers on new cell phones than on the surfaces of older desktop computers. The researchers suggest that these old chemicals got to the new phones by transfer from hands.

Why are TVs a source of flame retardants? The answer lies in the odd story of old "instant-on" cathode ray tube TVs manufactured in the 1970s. This technology, which involved warming the cathode ray tube so that the TV would immediately project an image when turned on, resulted in several hundred TV fires in the 1970s. The response was to recommend flammability standards that led to large amounts of flame retardants added to the outside casings of the TVs.

However, those same levels of flame retardants continued to be used --as much as a quarter of the weight of the plastic case-- even after the industry moved to current TVs that pose a minimal fire risk. Thus, recently manufactured TVs contain high levels of unnecessary and harmful flame retardants. We are exposed because the flame retardants are not bonded to the cases, but escape over time to contaminate our indoor environments.

"If a flame retardant is used in the TVs, we then find it throughout the house, including on the hands of the resident," said co-author Lisa Melymuk, an Assistant Professor of Environmental Chemistry at Masaryk University.

The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us to wash our hands regularly and well to avoid getting ill. The results of this study suggest that frequent handwashing can also reduce our exposure to harmful flame retardants.

"However, to reduce health harm from flame retardants, the electronics industry should stop their unnecessary use," said Arlene Blum, Executive Director of the Green Science Policy Institute. "Fire safety can be achieved by innovative product design and materials instead of the use of toxic chemicals that can remain in our homes--and in us--for years to come."

Chemists have long sought to understand the origins of life, with one popular model suggesting life began when simple RNA molecules capable of copying themselves formed spontaneously in the primitive environment. How this happened exactly is fraught with difficulties. New research by a team of chemists led by Ruiqin Yi of the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Tokyo Institute of Technology and Albert Fahrenbach, a lecturer at the University of New South Wales, suggests that mixtures of simple organic compounds in water exposed to high energy radiation react to form a variety of more complex organic compounds that could help make RNA. Researchers from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Tokyo Tech and the University of Arizona also assisted in the work.

To conduct this work, the team took a mixture of very simple small molecules, common table salt, ammonia, phosphate and hydrogen cyanide, and exposed them to a high energy gamma radiation source at Tokyo Tech. These conditions simulate environments irradiated by naturally occurring radioactive minerals, which were likely much more prevalent on early Earth. They also allowed their reactions to intermittently dry down, simulating evaporation in shallow puddles and beaches. Their reactions surprisingly made a variety of compounds which might have been important for the origins of life, including precursors for amino acids and other small compounds known to be useful for making RNA.

They showed that this set of conditions creates what they call a 'continuous reaction network', in which a wide variety of compounds are constantly being formed and destroyed, and these react with each other to form new compounds. These continuous reaction networks make up a complex set of reactions, and because of the way they occur, they can make a whole set of important compounds at once. The team thinks this makes their study especially insightful, as prebiotic chemistry on the primitive Earth could not have been as selective and goal-directed as modern organic chemists working in the lab, who can add chemicals at precisely the right time and purify the exact compounds they want to make.

The team thinks models of this type can help explain what sorts of environments are most amenable to making RNA in primitive planetary settings. Indeed, since the surfaces of rocky planets are so variable (think cool mountain streams, bubbling hot springs and sunny beaches), there are many places where such chemistry might happen, only under slightly different conditions. These studies in turn could help other scientists identify the best areas to look for life beyond Earth.

As lead author Ruiqin Yi says, 'While we haven't yet made RNA, this work raises new questions. Can we tweak these reactions to make all of the necessary building blocks for RNA from such mixtures in a continuous fashion? Can we generate other useful compounds such as more complex amino acids in this "messy" chemistry from complex chemical reaction networks?'

No one can say whether androids will dream of electric sheep, but they will almost certainly need periods of rest that offer benefits similar to those that sleep provides to living brains, according to new research from Los Alamos National Laboratory.

"We study spiking neural networks, which are systems that learn much as living brains do," said Los Alamos National Laboratory computer scientist Yijing Watkins. "We were fascinated by the prospect of training a neuromorphic processor in a manner analogous to how humans and other biological systems learn from their environment during childhood development."

Watkins and her research team found that the network simulations became unstable after continuous periods of unsupervised learning. When they exposed the networks to states that are analogous to the waves that living brains experience during sleep, stability was restored. "It was as though we were giving the neural networks the equivalent of a good night's rest," said Watkins.

The discovery came about as the research team worked to develop neural networks that closely approximate how humans and other biological systems learn to see. The group initially struggled with stabilizing simulated neural networks undergoing unsupervised dictionary training, which involves classifying objects without having prior examples to compare them to.

"The issue of how to keep learning systems from becoming unstable really only arises when attempting to utilize biologically realistic, spiking neuromorphic processors or when trying to understand biology itself," said Los Alamos computer scientist and study coauthor Garrett Kenyon. "The vast majority of machine learning, deep learning, and AI researchers never encounter this issue because in the very artificial systems they study they have the luxury of performing global mathematical operations that have the effect of regulating the overall dynamical gain of the system."

The researchers characterize the decision to expose the networks to an artificial analog of sleep as nearly a last ditch effort to stabilize them. They experimented with various types of noise, roughly comparable to the static you might encounter between stations while tuning a radio. The best results came when they used waves of so-called Gaussian noise, which includes a wide range of frequencies and amplitudes. They hypothesize that the noise mimics the input received by biological neurons during slow-wave sleep. The results suggest that slow-wave sleep may act, in part, to ensure that cortical neurons maintain their stability and do not hallucinate.

The groups' next goal is to implement their algorithm on Intel's Loihi neuromorphic chip. They hope allowing Loihi to sleep from time to time will enable it to stably process information from a silicon retina camera in real time. If the findings confirm the need for sleep in artificial brains, we can probably expect the same to be true of androids and other intelligent machines that may come about in the future.

Watkins will be presenting the research at the Women in Computer Vision Workshop on June 14 in Seattle.