Tech

Shake, rattle and roll.

Even though they are miles from the epicenter of an earthquake, buildings can collapse due to how an earthquake energy makes the ground shake and rattle. Now, a team of engineers led by Guoliang Huang, a James C. Dowell Professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of Missouri College of Engineering, has designed a flexible material that can help buildings withstand multiple waves of energy traveling through a solid material, including the simultaneous forward and backward and side-to-side motions found in earthquakes.

"Our elastic material can stretch and form to a particular surface, similarly to a wrap on a vehicle," Huang said. "It can be applied to the surface of an existing building to allow it to flex in an earthquake. What is unique about the structured lattice-type material is that it protects against both types of energy waves -- longitudinal and sheer -- that can travel through the ground."

Huang said the material also can be used by the defense industry to protect against vibration in mechanical parts, such as aircraft or submarine engines.

"For over 20 years, no one had a natural solution for this issue in a solid material," Huang said. "Now, we've designed, modeled and fabricated a new material with properties that do not exist naturally for what we believe is a nearly perfect protective device."

The Army Research Office, which provided funding for the basic research effort at the University of Missouri associated with this project, is encouraged by the results from Huang's team.

"The results that the University of Missouri team has recently published are encouraging," said Dan Cole, the program manager at the Army Research Office, a part of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory. "This research could lead to new strategies for steering mechanical waves away from critical regions in solid objects, which could enable novel capabilities in soldier protection and maneuvering."

Blobs can wreak havoc in plasma required for fusion reactions. This bubble-like turbulence swells up at the edge of fusion plasmas and drains heat from the edge, limiting the efficiency of fusion reactions in doughnut-shaped fusion facilities called “tokamaks.” Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have now discovered a surprising correlation of the blobs with fluctuations of the magnetic field that confines the plasma fueling fusion reactions in the device core.

New aspect of understanding

Further investigation of this correlation and its role in the loss of heat from magnetic fusion reactors will help to produce on Earth the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars. “These results add a new aspect to our understanding of the plasma edge heat loss in a tokamak,” said physicist Stewart Zweben, lead author of a paper in Physics of Plasmas that editors have selected as a featured article. “This work also contributes to our understanding of the physics of blobs, which can help to predict the performance of tokamak fusion reactors.”

Fusion reactions combine light elements in the form of plasma — the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei that makes up 99 percent of the visible universe — to produce massive amounts of energy. Scientists are seeking to create and control fusion on Earth as a source of safe, clean and virtually limitless power to generate electricity.

PPPL researchers discovered the surprising link last year when re-analyzing experiments made in 2010 on PPPL’s National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) — the forerunner of today’s National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade (NSTX-U). The blobs and fluctuations in the magnetic field, called “magnetohydrodynamic (MHD)” activity, develop in all tokamaks and have traditionally been seen as independent of each other.

Surprise clue

The first clue to the correlation was the striking regularity of the trajectory of large blobs, which travel at roughly the speed of a rifle bullet, in experiments analyzed in 2015 and 2016. Such blobs normally move randomly in what is called the “scrape-off layer” at the edge of tokamak plasma, but in some cases all large blobstraveled at nearly the same angle and speed. Moreover, the time between the appearance of each large blob at the edge of the plasma was nearly always the same, virtually coinciding with the frequency of dominant MHD activity in the plasma edge.

Researchers then tracked the diagnostic signals of the blobs and the MHD activity in relation to each other to measure what is called the “cross-correlation coefficient,” which they used to evaluate a set of the 2010 NSTX experiments. Roughly 10 percent of those experiments were found to show a significant correlation between the two variables.

The scientists then analyzed several possible causes of the correlation, but could find no single compelling explanation. To understand and control this phenomenon, Zweben said, further data analysis and modeling will have to be done — perhaps by readers of the Physics of Plasmas paper.

Support for this work comes from the DOE Office of Science, with portions of the research performed under the auspices of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

PPPL, on Princeton University's Forrestal Campus in Plainsboro, N.J., is devoted to creating new knowledge about the physics of plasmas — ultra-hot, charged gases — and to developing practical solutions for the creation of fusion energy. The Laboratory is managed by the University for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit energy.gov/science.

Journal

Physics of Plasmas

DOI

10.1063/5.0006515

WASHINGTON, May 26, 2020 -- The subject of the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics, chirped pulse amplification is a technique that increases the strength of laser pulses in many of today's highest-powered research lasers. As next-generation laser facilities look to push beam power up to 10 petawatts, physicists expect a new era for studying plasmas, whose behavior is affected by features typically seen in black holes and the winds from pulsars.

Researchers released a study taking stock of what upcoming high-power laser capabilities are poised to teach us about relativistic plasmas subjected to strong-field quantum electrodynamics (QED) processes. In addition, the proposed new study designs for further exploring these new phenomena.

Appearing in Physics of Plasmas, from AIP Publishing, the article introduces the physics of relativistic plasma in supercritical fields, discusses the current state of the field and provides an overview of recent developments. It also highlights open questions and topics that are likely to dominate the attention of people working in the field over the next several years.

Strong-field QED is a lesser-studied corner of the standard model of particle physics that has not been explored at big collider facilities, such as SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory or CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, due to the lack of strong electromagnetic fields in accelerator settings. With high-intensity lasers, researchers can use strong fields, which have been observed in phenomena such as gamma ray emission and electron-positron pair production.

The group explores how the findings could potentially lead to advances in studies of fundamental physics and in the development of high-energy ion, electron, positron and photon sources. Such findings would be crucial for expanding on many types of scanning technology present today, ranging from materials science studies to medical radiotherapy to next-generation radiography for homeland security and industry.

The QED processes will result in dramatically new plasma physics phenomena, such as the generation of dense electron-positron pair plasma from near vacuum, complete laser energy absorption by QED processes, or the stopping of an ultrarelativistic electron beam, which could penetrate a centimeter of lead by a hair's breadth of laser light.

"What kind of new technology these new plasma physics phenomena might translate is largely unknown, especially because the field of QED plasmas itself is a kind of uncharted territory in physics," author Peng Zhang said. "At the current stage, even adequate theoretical understanding is significantly lacking."

The group hopes the paper will help bring the attention of more researchers to the exciting new fields of QED plasmas.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- An interdisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign conducted a two-year study on the efficacy of workplace wellness programs and found that such programs have little impact on employee health, health beliefs and medical utilization.

Since the passage of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, the workplace wellness industry has grown rapidly, spurred in part by the law's incentives for firms to adopt such programs by raising the financial benefits offered to program participants. Among large U.S. firms offering health benefits in 2019, 84% also offered a workplace wellness program to reduce health care costs and improve employee health.

But a randomized controlled trial showed that, after 24 months, a comprehensive workplace wellness program had no significant effects on measured physical health outcomes such as weight, blood pressure, cholesterol or blood glucose; rates of medical diagnoses; or the use of health care services; according to a new paper co-written by U. of I. scholars David Molitor, Laura Payne and Julian Reif.

The paper, which was published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, comes out of the Illinois Workplace Wellness Study, which examined a workplace wellness program offered to employees from the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois.

"Many employers use workplace wellness programs in an attempt to improve employee health and reduce medical costs, but randomized evaluations of their efficacy are rare," said Molitor, a professor of finance at the Gies College of Business and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. "Our randomized evaluation found no significant effect of the program on employee health measures or medical use."

The comprehensive workplace wellness program, dubbed iThrive, was designed to represent a typical corporate wellness program offered by employers. It included three annual components: an on-site biometric screening and survey; an online health risk assessment; and a choice of wellness activities.

In the study, individual employees were randomly assigned to a treatment group that was eligible to participate in a two-year comprehensive workplace wellness program, or a control group that was ineligible. The researchers evaluated the effects of the program on health beliefs, self-reported health behaviors, clinician-collected biometrics, and claims-based medical diagnoses and medical use.

In a randomized controlled trial of more than 4,800 U. of I. employees, the researchers found that those invited to join the wellness program showed no significant differences in clinical outcomes compared with the control group.
Measures taken at 12- and 24-month intervals included 16 clinician-collected biometric outcomes; administrative claims related to medical diagnoses such as diabetes, hypertension and hyperlipidemia, and medical use such as office visits, inpatient visits, and emergency room visits; and 14 self-reported health-behavior and health-belief outcomes.

The program included paid time off for annual on-site health screenings, health risk assessments and ongoing wellness activities - for example, physical activity programs encouraging campus walks over lunch breaks, smoking-cessation programs and chronic disease self-management programs.

The program affected two self-reported health outcomes: It increased the proportion of employees reporting that they have a primary care physician and improved employee beliefs about their own health, the authors report.

"A significantly higher proportion of employees in the treatment group reported having a primary care physician after 24 months," Molitor said. "The workplace wellness program also significantly improved a set of employee health beliefs on average. But we found no significant effect of the program on employee health measures or medical use, demonstrating a mismatch between employee perceptions of workplace wellness programs and an actual improvement in health. These findings shed light on employees' perceptions of workplace wellness programs, which may influence long-run effects on health."

The study adds to a growing body of evidence from randomized evaluations showing that workplace wellness programs affect some self-reported outcomes but are unlikely to significantly improve employee health or reduce medical use in the short term, said Reif, a professor of finance at the Gies College of Business and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

"Many prior studies found that workplace wellness programs improved health and reduced medical use, but those results were likely due to differences in who participates. Our study complements recent randomized studies and demonstrates the value of using randomized evaluations to determine causal impact," Reif said.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers has developed a virtual 3D heart, digitally showcasing the heart's unique network of neurons for the first time. Using the rat heart as a model, the investigators in this study--appearing May 26 in the journal iScience--created a comprehensive map of the intrinsic cardiac nervous system (ICN) at a cellular scale. This map allows for gene expression data to be superimposed within it, which can help determine the functional role that specific neuron clusters play. The researchers say this map will allow neurologists and cardiologists alike to more precisely study the neuroanatomy of the heart and lays the groundwork for developing virtual maps for other major organs.

While people normally associate neurons with the brain, they play important roles in other organs as well. "Many cardiologists aren't even aware there are neurons in the heart, let alone that they are critical to heart health," says senior author James Schwaber (@JamesSchwaber), director of the Daniel Baugh Institute for Functional Genomics and Computational Biology at Thomas Jefferson University. With the newly developed virtual framework, scientists can study the organization and function of the heart's neurons at an unprecedented level of detail. "By using this 3D reference space, we can build a comprehensive picture of the heart's structure which is foundational to address various health concerns."

The 3D model is made possible by interweaving imaging, collection, anatomical mapping, and gene expression techniques. First, a diamond knife is used to create fine slices throughout the length of the heart, where microscopic images and tissues samples are taken at each cut using 3Scan software. These images are used to create the base of the 3D reconstruction. In parallel, laser capture microdissection is used to remove individual neurons from the collected samples, while recording their precise placement within the heart's anatomy. Researchers then used single-cell transcriptomics to determine the gene expression profiles of each of these collected neurons. Once all the data are collected, they are fit onto the 3D model to create a comprehensive picture of the heart's neural network.

"With the spatial mapping of the gene expression, we can begin to discuss the precise roles that these neurons play. Do separate clusters of the ICN neurons have different functions, or do they work into an integrated way to influence heart health? Now we can address these questions in way that wasn't possible before," says co-author Zixi Jack Cheng, a cardiovascular anatomist and physiologist from the University of Central Florida College of Medicine.

The map revealed a consistent spatial pattern of the intrinsic cardiac nervous system moving from the top to the bottom of the heart. And although the 3D map was constructed using the hearts of rats, the researchers say the protocols generated to create it will likely have long-term impacts on human medicine. For instance, some cases of severe heart disease have been reversed or remediated by stimulating the vagus nerve--though it is unclear why this treatment is effective in some patients and not others. "Evaluating these cardiac neurons from an anatomical and molecular perspective may help us better understand their function and develop therapies that can produce these protective effects of the vagus nerve onto the hearts of more patients," says co-author Jonathan Gorky, a recent MD/PhD graduate from Thomas Jefferson University and medical resident at Massachusetts General Hospital.

"Now that we have a comprehensive map of the heart, the way we pursue bioelectronic medicine will significantly change as we have information available at a level of resolution that just wasn't accessible before this," says co-author Rajanikanth Vadigepalli, a systems biologist with a chemical and control systems engineering pedigree at Thomas Jefferson University.

All the techniques and technologies used to create the atlas are made readily available through the Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions program (SPARC), so other researchers can recreate and build upon the 3D framework--whether it be with other animal hearts or with other organs such as the liver or lungs. "The SPARC program has created an online portal that allows other research teams to access our and other's data, empowering them to understand, expand, explore, and contribute to how we think about the innervation aspects of each organ of the body. Thereby, we can start to create a community that extends beyond a single area of focus onto all the integrative aspects of the brain and body," says co-author Susan Tappan, a developmental neuroscientist and the scientific director at MBF Bioscience.

Already, the combined efforts of this research team and the SPARC program have generated new projects across several labs that are working to understand the autonomic nervous system for other organs of the body. Though much research is left to be done, these efforts work towards the larger goal of creating effective treatments utilizing neuromodulation.

New Haven, Conn. -- Researchers at the Yale School of Public Health have found that death records of LGBTQ youth who died by suicide were substantially more likely to mention bullying as a factor than their non-LGBTQ peers. The researchers reviewed nearly 10,000 death records of youth ages 10 to 19 who died by suicide in the United States from 2003 to 2017.

The findings are published in the current issue of JAMA Pediatrics.

While LGBTQ youth are more likely to be bullied and to report suicidal thoughts and behaviors than non-LGBTQ youth, this is believed to be the first study showing that bullying is a more common precursor to suicide among LGBTQ youth than among their peers.

"We expected that bullying might be a more common factor, but we were surprised by the size of the disparity," said lead author Kirsty Clark, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale School of Public Health. "These findings strongly suggest that additional steps need to be taken to protect LGBTQ youth -- and others -- against the insidious threat of bullying."

Death records from LGBTQ youths were about five times more likely to mention bullying than non-LGBTQ youths' death records, the study found. Among 10- to 13-year-olds, over two-thirds of LGBTQ youths' death records mentioned that they had been bullied.

Bullying is a major public health problem among youth, and it is especially pronounced among LGBTQ youth, said the researchers. Clark and her co-authors used data from the National Violent Death Reporting System, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-led database that collects information on violent deaths, including suicides, from death certificates, law enforcement reports, and medical examiner and coroner records.

Death records in the database include narrative summaries from law enforcement reports and medical examiner and coroner records regarding the details of the youth's suicide as reported by family or friends, the youth's diary, social media posts, and text or email messages, as well as any suicide note. Clark and her team searched these narratives for words and phrases that suggested whether the individual was LGBTQ. They followed a similar process to identify death records mentioning bullying.

"Bullies attack the core foundation of adolescent well-being," said John Pachankis, the Susan Dwight Bliss Associate Professor of Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health and study co-author. "By showing that bullying is also associated with life itself for LGBTQ youth, this study urgently calls for interventions that foster safety, belonging and esteem for all young people."

HOUSTON - (May 22, 2020) - Beneath the ocean's surface, a virus is hijacking the metabolism of the most abundant organism on Earth. That may be of interest to those of us above who breathe.

Rice University scientists analyzed the role of ferredoxin proteins produced when phages alter the ability of Prochlorococcus marinus to store carbon and counter the greenhouse gas effect arising from fossil fuel consumption.

P. marinus is a photosynthetic cyanobacteria that resides primarily in the tropics and subtropics, where an estimated 10-to-the-27 (an octillion) of them use sunlight to produce oxygen and collectively store four gigatons of carbon annually. Some of this carbon provides critical feedstocks for other marine organisms.

But phages are not their friends. The virus strengthens itself by stealing energy the bacteria produces from light, reprogramming its victim's genome to alter how it transfers electrons.

P. marinus and its carbon-storing mechanism are sensitive to temperature, so it bears watching as climate change warms the oceans and extends its range, said Ian Campbell, a Rice postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the study in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

"The growth in the range of this organism in the oceans could increase the total carbon stored by these microbes," he said. "Alternatively, the viruses that infect these bacteria could alter carbon fixation and potentially prevent gigatons of carbon from being taken out of the air annually, according to one recent projection."

Campbell said the goal of the study was to explore the variety of ways viruses interact with their hosts. In the process, the researchers discovered the phage wrests control of electron flow in the host itself, rewiring the bacteria's metabolism. "When the virus infects, it shuts down production of the bacterial proteins and replaces it with its own variants," he said. "I compare it to putting a different operating system in a computer."

The researchers used synthetic biology techniques to mix and match phage and cyanobacterial proteins to study how they interact. A part of the study led by Rice biochemist George Phillips also determined for the first time the structure of a key cyanophage ferredoxin protein.

"A phage would usually go into a cell and kill everything," said Rice synthetic biologist Jonathan Silberg, the study's lead scientist and director of the university's Systems, Synthetic and Physical Biology program.

"But Ian's results suggest these phages are establishing a complex control mechanism," he said. "I wouldn't say they've zombified their hosts, because they allow the cells to continue doing some of their own housekeeping. But they're also plugging in their own ferredoxins, like power cables, to fine tune the electron flow."

Instead of working directly with cyanophages and P. marinus, Campbell and his team used synthetic biology tools to reprogram much larger, better-understood Escherichia coli bacteria to express genes that mimicked interactions between the two.

"Taking a phage and a cyanobacteria from the ocean and trying to study the biology, especially electron flow, would be really hard to do through classical biochemistry," Silberg said. "Ian literally took partners from both the phage and the host, put them together by encoding their DNA in another cellular system, and was able to quickly develop some interesting results.

"It's an interesting application of synthetic biology to understand complex things that would otherwise be arduous to measure," he said.

The researchers suspect the protein they modeled in E. coli, the Prochlorococcus P-SSM2 phage ferredoxin, is nothing new. "People knew phages encode different things that do electron transfer, but they didn't know how to connect the wires between the phage and the host," Silberg said. "They also didn't know a lot about the phage's evolution. The structure makes it clear this phage can be traced to specific ancestral proteins involved in photosynthesis."

AUGUSTA, Ga. (May 25, 2020) - More than a quarter century after the Gulf War, female veterans who saw combat have nearly a twofold risk of reporting more than 20 total medical symptoms, like cognition and respiratory troubles, than their fellow female veterans who were not deployed, investigators report.

A sizeable percentage of the female combat veterans still report neurological symptoms; about two-thirds report difficulty remembering new information and trouble concentrating, investigators report in the Journal of Women's Health.

An association with more headaches among the combat veterans also was reported and there were "strong associations" between deployment status and respiratory symptoms with 39% of combat veterans still reporting difficulty breathing or shortness of breath. More than half also report a low tolerance for heat and cold.

"It's been over 25 years since the war ended and these are very persistent health outcomes," says Dr. Steven S. Coughlin, interim chief of the Division of Epidemiology in the Medical College of Georgia Department of Population Health Sciences. "This tells us that the way the Gulf War illness manifests itself may be different in female than male veterans, so it's important to take gender into account," says Coughlin.

Twenty years ago, female Gulf War veterans were reporting similar problems, investigators say. The newly reported findings indicate the women are showing increased frequency of symptoms over time and above the rate that would be expected with normal aging, the investigators say. Their reported symptoms correspond with higher rates of diabetes, osteoporosis, thyroid problems, asthma and irritable bowel syndrome in this and similar groups.

Additional studies are needed to find biomarkers of Gulf War illness in these former soldiers and effective treatments, they write.

"We think this has a lot of importance for the health of these veterans and hopefully, when combined with information from other studies, it will lead to improved treatment," Coughlin says.

Three hundred-and-one female Gulf War veterans from all military branches participated in the study, including 203 who were deployed and 98 who were not sent directly into a war zone.

Other persistent problems war zone veterans report include about a third saying they frequently cough when they do not have a cold. Many of their reported symptoms fit the definition of Gulf War illness, which includes having at least three of six symptom categories that include fatigue, neurological/cognitive/mood problems, pain as well as respiratory, gastrointestinal and skin problems. Younger, non-white, female Army veterans were likely to report the most symptoms, they say.

Their significant symptom burden would likely impact the veterans' quality of life and require medical evaluation and treatment, Coughlin and his colleagues write.

"We are trying to fill in this gap in the published literature about Gulf War illness among women veterans because they have been greatly understudied," Coughlin says, referencing the first conflict in which the United States included a sizeable female contingent directly in warfare.

The gender differences they are finding are consistent with earlier studies as well as other current ones coming out of Florida-based Nova Southeastern University, for example, where they are conducting a clinical trial to try to reverse some of the ill effects, he says.

The findings also are more evidence that the female veterans of the Gulf War may have more chronic health issues and conditions than other groups of women generally or female veterans specifically.

Coughlin theorizes that females may be more susceptible to some of the wartime hazards because on average their body size is smaller and because of other differences in physiology. "We can only speculate," he adds.

When troops started to come home from the Middle East following the conflict that lasted from August 1990 through February 1991, they reported a constellation of symptoms, including headaches, gastrointestinal complaints, skin ailments, forgetfulness, fatigue, particularly after exertion, and musculoskeletal pain, says Coughlin, who served as a senior epidemiologist with the Department of Veterans Affairs Central Office in Washington, D.C. The leading theory early on was that it was a psychogenic illness, somewhat similar to the PTSD experienced by many Vietnam War veterans. Now the consensus is that much of it results from the neurological impact of neurotoxins soldiers on the frontline were exposed to, Coughlin says.

"They were inundated with pesticides, there are a lot of biting flies and pests in that part of the world so they had uniforms infused with pesticides, a lot of them even wore a dog's flea collar for extra protection," he says. Soldiers also were asked to take pyridostigmine bromide, a drug given to patients with myasthenia gravis to improve muscle strength, prophylactically to help protect them from nerve agents in field, but the drug itself is mildly toxic to nerves and there is some evidence that, in combination with some of the insecticides used, it becomes more potent.

"Every time the alarms went off, they would have to take these little white pills," Coughlin says. There were other environmental toxins as well, like blown up munitions factories and low dose exposure to sarin nerve gas and others. "It's similar to what you see among agricultural workers exposed to pesticides," he notes. The veterans also were exposed to hazards such as smoke from oil well fires and burn pits used to incinerate waste, the investigators write.

The new study looked at the frequency and patterns of health symptoms in the female veterans as well as military service and lifestyle. The investigators theorized that symptoms associated with Gulf War illness would be more prominent in the women who saw conflict.

They found the deployed veterans were significantly more likely to report seven symptoms consistent with Gulf War illness, including low tolerance for heat or cold, difficulty breathing or shortness of breath, frequent coughing without having a cold, difficulty concentrating and remembering recent information, feeling down or depressed and anxious, the investigators write. Those deployed were more than twice as likely to report more total symptoms and nonwhites -- including American Indians, Alaska natives as well as Asian Americans and Pacific Islands Americans -- were four times more likely to report symptoms than whites. Older women were less likely than younger women to report symptoms and those enlisted in the Air Force and Navy were significantly less likely to report more symptoms than those in the Army.

Participants in the study were a mean age of early 50s and other demographics, like race, ethnicity and education, were similar, but those who saw combat were more likely to have served in the Army or Navy and less likely to have served in the Air Force.

They were taken from a national cohort of 1,318 Gulf War veterans created from the Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program 585 Gulf War Era Cohort and Biorepository pilot study. Outcomes of female veterans in the group have not been reported separately. Women comprised 7% of the 700,000 military personnel to serve in the Gulf War, the largest number of women to serve in a war zone in U.S. military history at that time. The influx of the some 50,000 female Gulf War veterans resulted in the establishment of specialty clinics for them at VA hospitals. Evidence indicates about 19% of women veterans still have delayed or unmet health care needs, possibly because of expanded military roles for women, including increased exposure to combat, the investigators write.

Female veterans who have been involved in conflicts since the Vietnam War report higher rates of poor sleep quality, fatigue, insomnia, chronic pain, including headache and musculoskeletal complaints, respiratory problems and skin problems, as well as cognitive and mood related complaints, Coughlin and his colleagues write.

Revolutionary 'green' types of bricks and construction materials could be made from recycled PVC, waste plant fibres or sand with the help of a remarkable new kind of rubber polymer discovered by Australian scientists.

The rubber polymer, itself made from sulfur and canola oil, can be compressed and heated with fillers to create construction materials of the future, say researchers in the Young Chemist issue of Chemistry - A European Journal.

"This method could produce materials that may one day replace non-recyclable construction materials, bricks and even concrete replacement," says Flinders University organic chemist Associate Professor Justin Chalker.

The powdered rubber can potentially be used as tubing, rubber coatings or bumpers, or compressed, heated then mixed with other fillers to form entirely new composites, including more sustainable building blocks, concrete replacement or insulation.

Cement is a finite resource and heavily polluting in its production, with concrete production estimated to contribute more than 8% of global greenhouse gases emissions, and the construction industry worldwide accounting for about 18%.

"This is also important because there are currently few methods to recycle PVC or carbon fibre," says Associate Professor Chalker and collaborator Dr Louisa Esdaile, with support from other Flinders, Deakin University and University of Western Australia researchers.

"This new recycling method and new composites are an important step forward in making sustainable construction materials, and the rubber material can be repeatedly ground up and recycled," says lead author Flinders PhD Nic Lundquist. "The rubber particles also can be first used to purify water and then repurposed into a rubber mat or tubing."

Co-author and research collaborator Dr Louisa Esdaile says the important research looks at ways to repurpose and recycle materials, so that these materials are multi-use by design.

"Such technology is important in a circular economy," says Dr Esdaile, a special contributor to this month's Young Chemist issue of Chemistry - A European Journal (ChemEurJ).

The new manufacturing and recycling technique, labelled 'reactive compression molding,' applies to rubber material that can be compressed and stretched, but one that doesn't melt. The unique chemical structure of the sulfur backbone in the novel rubber allows for multiple pieces of the rubber to bond together.

The project started two years ago in the Flinders University Chalker Laboratory as a third-year project by Ryan Shapter, with Flinders University PhD candidates Nicholas Lundquist and Alfrets Tikoalu and others contributing to the paper in this month's special Young Chemist issue of ChemEurJ.

Analysis of osteopathic medical school survey data reveals women are 1.75 times more likely to choose primary care than men, according to a study in The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association. Researchers sought to understand the factors that are associated with an increased likelihood of specializing in primary care.

"Considering the critical need for primary care physicians in the United States, there's great value in understanding our primary care pipeline," says Caleb Scheckel, DO, an oncology specialist at the Mayo Clinic Hospital Rochester and co-author of the study. "Based on our findings, it's fair to say that osteopathic medical schools that invest in female candidates, invest in primary care."

Ensuring routine access to primary care is a critical way to improve health outcomes and reduce costs. According to the research, even one additional primary physician per 10,000 people in a population decreases emergency department visits, hospitalizations and elective operations.

Mapping the path to primary care

"The shortage of primary physicians and the shifting physician workforce make identifying influences on specialty choice mission-critical," says Katherine Stefani, a third-year medical student at Midwestern University Arizona College of Osteopathic Medicine and lead author of the study. "The data reveals that perceived lifestyle--more than debt, prestige or ability--has the strongest impact on specialty choice among osteopathic medical school students."

Researchers analyzed self-reported data from annual American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine graduate surveys spanning a ten-year period. They looked at the following factors influencing specialty choice:

Intellectual and technical content;

Debt level;

Lifestyle;

Prestige/income level; and

Personal experience and abilities.

Regardless of specialty choice, the students surveyed said lifestyle was the most important factor when it came to picking a specialty. Students entering primary care were more likely to report prestige and income level to be of "no or minor influence" compared with students entering non-primary care specialties.

Debt level was more likely to be a "major influence" to students choosing to enter non-primary care specialties than to those entering primary care. A 2019 study demonstrated that the use of loan forgiveness programs mitigated the effect of debt on specialty selection.

"There's no simple solution to fixing the primary care shortage," says Dr. Scheckel. "But what is clear is the growth in the number of osteopathic primary care physicians is being driven by female students."

Osteopathic medical schools are responsible for training a large portion of primary care physicians, with an estimated 56% of current osteopathic physicians practicing in a primary care field. The proportion of women actively practicing osteopathic medicine has also increased, from 18% in 1993 to 42% today.

INDIANAPOLIS, IND. - Researchers from the Indiana Biosciences Research Institute (IBRI), a leading independent, industry-inspired applied research institute, and Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) Center for Diabetes Research, identified two classes of compounds that prevent most of the effects of interferon-α (IFNα) on human beta cells, paving the way for potential future clinical trials of treatments for type 1 diabetes (T1D).

Dr. Decio Eizirik, scientific director of the IBRI Diabetes Center and Professor at the ULB Center for Diabetes Research, and Dr. Maikel Colli, a researcher at the ULB Center for Diabetes Research, used an innovative "multi-omics" approach, funded by JDRF, the European IMI consortium INNODIA and the Belgian Funding Agency Welbio, that combined genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic techniques with advanced bioinformatic tools to analyze the initial changes present in human beta cells exposed to IFNα.

"This is a beautiful example of international collaboration and translational research led by scientists at the IBRI and the ULB," said Eizirik. "Indeed, it started with use of complex omics technology and bioinformatics and ended up with the identification of two agents that may be one day re-purposed for the early treatment of T1D."

T1D is a chronic autoimmune disease resulting in the destruction of the insulin-producing beta cells. Nearly 1.6 million Americans are affected by T1D. The early steps of the disease involve local release of pro-inflammatory mediators (cytokines) at the pancreatic islet level. One of these mediators is IFNα. In line with this, pancreatic islets obtained from living donors with recent onset T1D have a significant increase in the expression of IFN-stimulated genes, while inhibition of IFNα signaling prevents the development of T1D in animal models. There are currently no effective treatments to prevent T1D.

"JDRF's mission is to cure, treat and prevent T1D. To do so, we must validate key biological pathways as integral in T1D disease processes. Dr. Eizirik's work provides excellent justification for IFNα as a contributing factor in the development and progression of T1D," said Sanjoy Dutta, Ph.D., JDRF vice president of research. "Importantly, his work identifies two drug candidates that, based on his findings, should be beneficial to those at risk of or living with T1D. We look forward to clinical testing of such drugs in people with T1D."

The study, which was recently published in Nature Communications ("An integrated multi-omics approach identifies the landscape of interferon-α mediated responses of human pancreatic beta cells"), is based on collaborations with colleagues from Belgium, Spain, UK, Italy and USA. The changes induced by IFNα were similar to observations made in beta cells obtained from patients affected by T1D. IFNα promotes rapid changes in chromatin (the complex DNA+protein present in the nucleus) accessibility. These changes are probably required to enable gene expression to fight local viral infections but may contribute to trigger autoimmunity and T1D in genetically susceptible individuals.

Furthermore, beta cells exposed to IFNα increased expression of proteins inhibiting the immune system, such as PDL1 and HLA-E, which may help to decrease and/or delay the autoimmune assault. This latest finding may explain why cancer immunotherapies using PDL1 blockers causes T1D in some patients.

This research that was led by Eizirik and Colli also included support from:

Mireia Ramos-Rodriguez, Endocrine Regulatory Genomics, Department of Experimental & Health Sciences, University Pompeu Fabra; and the Endocrine Regulatory Genomics Laboratory, Germans Trias i Pujol University Hospital and Research Institute

Ernesto S. Nakayasu, Biological Sciences Division, Pacific Northwest National Lab

Maria I. Alvelos, ULB Center for Diabetes Research, Medical Faculty

Miguel Lopes, ULB Center for Diabetes Research, Medical Faculty

Jessica L.E. Hill, Institute of Biomedical & Clinical Science, University of Exeter Medical School

Jean-Valery Turatsinze, ULB Center for Diabetes Research, Medical Faculty

Alexandra Coomans de Brachène, ULB Center for Diabetes Research, Medical Faculty

Mark Russell, Institute of Biomedical & Clinical Science, University of Exeter Medical School

Helena Raurell-Vila, Endocrine Regulatory Genomics, Department of Experimental & Health Sciences, University Pompeu Fabra; and the Endocrine Regulatory Genomics Laboratory, Germans Trias i Pujol University Hospital and Research Institute

Angela Castela, ULB Center for Diabetes Research, Medical Faculty

Jonas Juan-Mateu, ULB Center for Diabetes Research, Medical Faculty

Bobbie-Jo M. Webb-Robertson, Biological Sciences Division, Pacific Northwest National Lab

Lars Krogvold, Division of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Oslo University Hospital

Knut Dahl-Jorgensen, Division of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Oslo University Hospital

Lorella Marselli, Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, Islet Cell Laboratory, University of Pisa

Piero Marchetti, Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, Islet Cell Laboratory, University of Pisa

Sarah J. Richardson, Institute of Biomedical & Clinical Science, University of Exeter Medical School

Noel Morgan, Institute of Biomedical & Clinical Science, University of Exeter Medical School

Thomas O. Metz, Biological Sciences Division, Pacific Northwest National Lab

Lorenzo Pasquali, Endocrine Regulatory Genomics, Department of Experimental & Health Sciences, University Pompeu Fabra; the Endocrine Regulatory Genomics Laboratory, Germans Trias i Pujol University Hospital and Research Institute; and Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute (IJC)

Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have created a whole new library of atomically thin, two-dimensional (2D) materials using a novel and powerful approach of engineering the composition of transition metal dichalcogenides.

Materials that are atomically thin offer a platform to explore a wide range of intriguing physical properties and could provide many future applications. For example, 'transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers' are atomically thin semiconductors which are tipped to bring about the next generation of transistors, solar cells, LEDs, and more.

Transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers take the form MX2, with 'M' being a metal atom from the transition block of the periodic table and 'X' being a chalcogen atom (such as S, Se, or Te). However, fine-tuning the composition of 2D transition metal dichalcogenides to make new materials other than the standard compounds is usually challenging.

Now, a research team led by Professor Loh Kian Ping from the NUS Department of Chemistry, and Professor Stephen J. Pennycook from the NUS Department of Materials Science and Engineering, has synthesised and characterised for the first time, an atlas of atomically thin materials based on inserting the same metal atom between two transition metal dichalcogenides monolayers.

This insertion is known as intercalation, hence the researchers have named this new library 'ic-2D', to denote a class of materials where the atoms 'intercalate' themselves into the gap between the layers of crystals.

The researchers' results were published in Nature on 13 May 2020.

Creation of a new atomically thin material

"If we splice two layers of transition metal dichalcogenide a little apart, we can see the chalcogen sites have slots like an egg holder. Another layer of metal atoms can occupy the slots in the same way we can arrange eggs in the egg holder. This is the magic of ic-2D materials," explained Prof Pennycook.

This is a new way of thinking when it comes to transition metal dichalcogenides. In the past, theoreticians tried predicting new properties based the traditional bonding sites of metal and chalcogen atoms in the material. However, their theories did not address the situation when the same metal atom sits in the gap between two crystals.

As such, the research team developed a way to synthesis the novel materials by providing conditions where the metal atoms are in excess of the chalcogens. In this way, more than 10 different types of ic-2D materials have been experimentally discovered by the team, some of which are ferromagnetic.

Discovering the library of ic-2D materials

Theoretical calculations performed by the team have shown that the 'self-intercalation' method the team developed is applicable to a large class of 2D layered materials. This means that there is a new library of ic-2D materials waiting to be discovered.

"This new method for engineering the composition of a broad class of transition metal dichalcogenides offers a powerful approach to transform layered 2D materials into ultra-thin, covalently bonded ic-2D crystals with ferromagnetic properties. This technique is expected to be compatible with most material growth methods," said Prof Loh, who is also from the NUS Centre for Advanced 2D Materials.

Dr Zhao Xiaoxu, the first author of the paper, unveiled the novel materials with an electron microscope, and found that the intercalated metal atoms consistently occupy the same vacancies resulting in distinct patterns depending on the intercalation concentrations.

Prof Loh commented, "With versatility in composition control, we have shown that it is possible to tune, in one class of materials, properties that can vary dramatically. This discovery presents a rich landscape of ultra-thin 2D materials that await the further discovery of new properties."

Next steps

Moving forward, the research team plans to incorporate this new library of materials into memory devices for practical applications, and intercalate foreign atoms to exploit novel functionalised ic-2D materials.

Six-month old infants recognize when adults imitate them, and perceive imitators as more friendly, according to a new study from Lund University in Sweden. The babies looked and smiled longer at an adult who imitated them, as opposed to when the adult responded in other ways. Babies also approached them more, and engaged in imitating games. The research is published in PLOS One.

In the study, a researcher met 6-month old babies in their homes and played with them in four different ways. The researcher either: imitated everything the babies did as a mirror, or as a reverse mirror, imitated only the bodily actions of the babies while keeping an immobile face, or responded with a different action when the babies acted. The latter is called contingent responding and is how most parents would respond to their baby - when the baby does or needs something, you react accordingly.

The researchers found that the babies looked and smiled longer, and tried to approach the adult more often, during the close mirroring of their actions.

"Imitating young infants seems to be an effective way to catch their interest and bond with them. The mothers were quite surprised to see their infants joyfully engaging in imitation games with a stranger, but also impressed by the infants' behaviours", says Gabriela-Alina Sauciuc, researcher at Lund University and main author of the study.

There was also much testing behavior during imitation. For example, if the baby hit the table and the researcher imitated that action, the baby would then hit the table several times, while carefully watching the researcher's responses. Even when the researcher did not show any emotions at all while imitating, the babies still seemed to recognize that they were being imitated - and still responded with testing behavior.

"This was quite interesting. When someone actively tests the person who is imitating them, it is usually seen as an indication that the imitated individual is aware that there is a correspondence between their own behaviour and the behaviour of the other", Sauciuc says.

Scientists have long speculated that, through frequent exposure to being imitated, babies learn about cultural norms and interactional routines, or that shared actions are accompanied by shared feelings and intentions. But the empirical evidence to back up such theories is largely missing.

"By showing that 6-month-old infants recognise when they are being imitated, and that imitation has a positive effect on interaction, we begin to fill up this gap. We still have to find out when exactly imitation begins to have such effects, and what role imitation recognition actually plays for babies", Sauciuc concludes.

A researcher at the Center for Theoretical Physics of Complex Systems, within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS, South Korea), Professor Ivan Savenko, has reported a conceptually new method to study the properties of superconductors using optical tools. The theory was published in Physical Review Letters and co-authored by Doctor Vadim Kovalev, physicist at the A.V. Rzhanov Institute of Semiconductor Physics (Russia).

Below some temperature, the resistivity of a material can disappear, and thus, superconducting properties emerge. These are usually extremely low temperatures, between -200°C and -272°C, where commonly unbound electrons suddenly change their behavior and pair up, forming Cooper pairs. This transition manifests itself with supercurrents, which can circulate in the material forever without losses.

However, superconducting properties can appear slightly above the critical temperature. In this so-called fluctuating regime, Cooper pairs start to appear and disappear, drastically altering the electric conductivity and other properties of the superconductor. More than fifty years ago, Aslamazov and Larkin developed a theory which says that the conductivity of fluctuating superconductors is mediated by both unbound electrons and Cooper pairs. However, fluctuating superconductivity is such a challenging research topic that it continues to be investigated. In this new study, the researchers suggest a way to monitor these electron transport phenomena with optical spectroscopy, an experimentally available optical platform.

"While the resistivity-based and magnetic methods to monitor superconductors are well established, it is very hard to "marry" light and superconductivity," explains Savenko. "This is a hot research field where we can expect new discoveries in fundamental science and innovative applications."

Superconductivity and light are two seemingly unrelated phenomena. Usually, superconductors are not very sensitive to external light: they can only weakly interact with it, and rather serve as mirrors. This study, instead, shows that light at terahertz (THz) frequencies, which lie between the radio and infrared domains, could be used to optically explore the properties of superconductors.

The researchers modelled the optical and electrical responses of a 2D fluctuating semiconducting layer exposed to THz waves. Approaching the critical temperature, the emerging Cooper pairs cause significant changes in electric conductivity and light absorption by the system. The unbound electrons act as mediators, interacting with both Cooper pairs and light.

"The design we developed is very simple. Therefore, we believe that our discovery can be applicable to multiple cases," says Savenko. "We expect that the corresponding experiment will be conducted in the near future. It should show either the modification of the electric current, or the alteration of the reflected or transmitted light spectrum, depending on the density of the Cooper pairs."

Tsukuba, Japan - Try whispering at one end of the Echo Wall in the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. People at the far end of the curved wall will still hear you, from 65 meters away. This is the whispering-gallery effect. Now, researchers from Japan have used the underlying principles of the whispering-gallery effect to stop counterfeiters in their tracks.

High-security identification should be exceptionally resistant to counterfeiting. Unfortunately, identity thieves eventually learn how to duplicate even highly complex patterns. The only way to permanently defeat identity thieves is to create a pattern that is impossible to duplicate.

In a study published this month in Materials Horizons, researchers from the University of Tsukuba used whispering-gallery waves to create a pattern that cannot be duplicated. In so doing, they created a new, impenetrable anti-counterfeiting system.

"Instead of using sound waves, we used light waves to follow the concave surface of micrometer-size dye particles," explains Professor Yohei Yamamoto, senior author of the study. "This creates a complex color pattern that cannot be counterfeited."

To create their millimeter-size microchips, the researchers first deposited small dye particles, where fluorescence from the particles can be turned on and off. They then selectively lit up the chip in a defined pattern; regions of bright particles, and regions of dark particles.

Each dye particle has a unique diameter and shape. Because of the principles that underpin the whispering-gallery effect--in this case, light instead of sound--the fluorescence emitted by each particle is unique. This creates a unique color pattern, a fingerprint, across the microchip that is impossible to reproduce or forge.

"We attained a pixel density of several million per square centimeter on our optimized microchips," says Professor Yamamoto. "We have developed a high-security, two-step optical authentication system: the micropattern itself, and the underlying pixel-by-pixel fluorescence fingerprint of the microchip."

The researchers used their technology to create a millimeter-size approximation of the Mona Lisa. This approximation contains a unique, embedded fluorescence fingerprint that cannot be duplicated.

Businesses, governments, and many other organizations require unambiguous authentication that cannot be forged. By using a microchip that is impossible to counterfeit, high-security organizations have a new option for preventing fraud, ensuring secrecy, and vouching for the integrity of data and equipment.