Tech

Published in the journal PLOS ONE, the study showed that tackling unhealthy lifestyle factors would provide the greatest benefit in increasing life expectancy among those with SMI. In particular, interventions that aim to stop smoking among people with schizophrenia and approaches to lessen sedentary behaviour among people with bipolar disorders appear to be the most promising ways to increase life expectancy, showing an increase of 2 years 5 months and an increase of one year 3 months respectively.

Currently people with SMI tend to live on average 12 to 15 years less than those in the general population. 80% of deaths of those with SMI are caused by common diseases such as heart disease, respiratory illnesses, diabetes, cancer and digestive disorders. All these diseases can be partly attributed to unhealthy lifestyle factors, social isolation and deprivation, and inadequate use of healthcare services. To inform public health policy, the study aimed to estimate how much tackling these changeable factors in the lives of people with SMI could translate into a gain in life expectancy.

Using data from systemic reviews, the researchers estimated the level of association between a range of different risk factors and the total number of deaths amongst those with SMI. The factors were categorised into three groups: behavioural risk factors such as smoking and physical inactivity, healthcare risk factors such as uptake of treatment and access to healthcare resources and social risk factors such as stigma and exclusion.

By considering the effectiveness of interventions aimed at changing these factors the researchers then calculated the gains in life expectancy that could occur. Examples of interventions to address the risk factors were smoking cessation initiatives, improving access to anti-psychotic medication and educative approaches to reduce stigma.

The analysis estimated that approaches that tackled all these factors could produce a potential gain in life expectancy from birth of four years for those with bipolar disorders and seven years for those with schizophrenia. Gains in life expectancies were also estimated later in life and at 65 years the projected gain was three years for bipolar disorder and four years for schizophrenia.

Lead author, Dr Alex Dregan from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Psychiatry, King's College London said: 'Our study shows that by addressing the health behaviours, healthcare engagement and social issues of people with severe mental illness we could potentially increase their life expectancy by about 4 to 7 years. The analysis indicates that, when considering different approaches to help those with severe mental illness, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and there is more benefit if a multi-faceted approach is taken which addresses behaviour, healthcare and social issues simultaneously. Greater investments in developing more effective interventions aimed at reducing unhealthy behaviours and treating the underlying symptoms would contribute to reducing the gap in premature mortality between those with severe mental illness and the general population.'

An international team with the participation of Prof. Dr. Michael Kues from the Cluster of Excellence PhoenixD at Leibniz University Hannover has developed a new method for generating quantum-entangled photons in a spectral range of light that was previously inaccessible. The discovery can make the encryption of satellite-based communications much more secure in the future.

A 15-member research team from the UK, Germany and Japan has developed a new method for generating and detecting quantum-entangled photons at a wavelength of 2.1 micrometres. In practice, entangled photons are used in encryption methods such as quantum key distribution to completely secure telecommunications between two partners against eavesdropping attempts. The research results are presented to the public for the first time in the current issue of Science Advances.

Until now, it has been only technically possible to implement such encryption mechanisms with entangled photons in the near-infrared range of 700 to 1550 nanometers. However, these shorter wavelengths have disadvantages, especially in satellite-based communication: They are disturbed by light-absorbing gases in the atmosphere as well as the background radiation of the sun. With the existing technology, end-to-end encryption of transmitted data can only be guaranteed at night, but not on sunny and cloudy days.

The international team, led by Dr. Matteo Clerici from the University of Glasgow, wants to solve this problem with its discovery. The photon pairs entangled at two micrometre wavelength would be significantly less influenced by the solar background radiation, says Prof. Dr. Michael Kues from the PhoenixD Cluster of Excellence at Leibniz University of Hannover. In addition, so-called transmission windows exist in the earth's atmosphere, especially for wavelengths of two micrometers, so that the photons are less absorbed by the atmospheric gases, in turn allowing a more effective communication.

For their experiment, the researchers used a nonlinear crystal made of lithium niobate. They sent ultrashort light pulses from a laser into the crystal and a nonlinear interaction produced the entangled photon pairs with the new wavelength of 2.1 micrometres.

The research results published in the journal Science Advances describe the details of the experimental system and the verification of the entangled photon pairs: "The next crucial step will be to miniaturize this system by converting it into photonic integrated devices, making it suitable for mass production and for the use in other application scenarios", says Kues.

After completing his studies and doctorate in physics at the Westfälische Wilhelms University of Münster, Kues worked at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique - Centre Énergie Matériaux et Télécommunications (Canada). There he headed the research group "Nonlinear integrated quantum optics" for four years. He then moved to the University of Glasgow and joined the international team around Dr. Matteo Clerici. Since spring 2019, Kues has been a professor at the Hannover Centre for Optical Technologies (HOT) at Leibniz Universität Hannover and is researching, within the PhoenixD Cluster of Excellence, the development of novel photonic quantum technologies exploiting micro- and nanophotonics approaches. Kues wants to expand his five-member research team and has currently advertised two positions for research assistants (PhD positions)..

Researchers from the University of Virginia and Crimson Capital published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines information channel usage patterns across customer journeys.

The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing is titled "Path to Purpose? How Online Customer Journeys Differ for Hedonic versus Utilitarian Purchases" and is authored by Jingjing Li, Ahmed Abbasi, Amar Cheema, and Linda Abraham.

A recent study published by Google's Zero Moment of Truth says consumer search behaviors are driven by six needs: surprise, help, reassurance, education, thrill, and to be impressed. These needs and purposes are shaped not only by the product category, but also by where consumers are in their journey, namely the "path-to-purpose." In a new study in the Journal of Marketing, researches use a hedonic-utilitarian (H/U) perspective--a purpose-oriented categorization of consumption--to explore information channel usage patterns across customer journeys. The study compares pre-purchase information search on search engines, social media, product reviews, deals, and product pages of H/U purchases between converted and unconverted sessions across early, middle, and late stages of customer pre-purchase journeys. The specific research questions are:

1) Do consumers use digital information channels differently for hedonic versus utilitarian (H/U) purchases?

2) How does this usage vary over the customer journey?

3) Does this usage vary between converted and unconverted sessions?

The study finds that consumers employ social media and on-site product pages as early as two weeks before the final hedonic purchase, utilize third-party reviews up to two weeks before the final utilitarian purchase, and use search engines, deals, and competitors' product pages closer to the time of utilitarian purchase.

These results have several implications for marketing managers. First, there are two actionable insights for retailers selling hedonic products such as toys: embracing social media and monitoring on-site product page views. The study shows that social media is used extensively throughout the customer journey and is increasingly becoming a channel for proactive information search. "Marketing managers should consistently invest in social media marketing to entice more consumers to visit their websites," says Li. Abbasi adds, "We find that there is a potential guilt-justification need for consumers who fail to complete hedonic purchases. Because social media is extensively used at the beginning of the journey, retailers could deploy social coupons with features that serve both the experiential and justification needs of hedonic purchases." Further, the research finds that on-site product pages are leveraged extensively at the beginning of the journey and start to reduce one week before the purchase. Due to the affective nature of hedonic purchases, retailers should constantly improve the experiential features of the product pages on their sites. Moreover, retailers can monitor their page views and reach out to heavy browsers with promotions with a longer redemption time (e.g., two weeks).

Second, for retailers selling utilitarian products such as office supplies, the study offers two prescriptions: benchmarking price and product and prioritizing search engine marketing (SEM). Consumers tend to optimize their utilitarian purchases by visiting third-party review sites, exploring deal sites, and browsing product pages on competing retailers' sites. Cheema explains that "Retailers should employ price and product benchmark analysis to understand if their prices are above or below market prices and what potential customers see and experience when searching for similar products. Given the rise of competitive intelligence, managers could invest more in automated benchmarking tools to monitor and analyze key competitive metrics, such as price, live deals, and Yelp reviews, in real-time." Consumers making utilitarian purchases tend to use search engines more towards the end of the journey. Because search engine optimization (SEO) is more powerful at driving organic traffic at the top of the funnel, but SEM is more effective at driving conversions at the bottom of the funnel, retailers should prioritize SEM over SEO. "Retailers should also choose paid keywords that are more related to product features and benefits because utilitarian purchases usually involve more product comparisons," says Abraham.

The study offers specific guidelines for a Black Friday (and Cyber Monday) marketing strategy. For retailers selling hedonic products, retailers can market promotional content on social media and send reminder emails inviting on-site traffic two weeks earlier than Black Friday, when customers start to engage in social media and on-site product pages. For retailers selling utilitarian products, they can extend their sales because consumers start to visit deals sites one week before purchases. Additionally, they can optimize their SEM strategies during Black Friday or Cyber Monday to enhance the conversion rate.

Bosons and fermions, the two classes into which all particles--from the sub-atomic to atoms themselves--can be sorted, behave very differently under most circumstances. While identical bosons like to congregate, identical fermions tend to be antisocial. However, in one dimension--imagine particles that can only move on a line--bosons can become as stand-offish as fermions, so that no two occupy the same position. Now, new research shows that the same thing--bosons acting like fermions--can happen with their velocities. The finding adds to our fundamental understanding of quantum systems and could inform the eventual development of quantum devices.

"All particles in nature come in one of two types, depending on their 'spin,' a quantum property with no real analogue in classical physics," said David Weiss, Distinguished Professor of Physics at Penn State and one of the leaders of the research team. "Bosons, whose spins are whole integers, can share the same quantum state, while fermions, whose spins are half integers, cannot. When the particles are cold or dense enough, bosons behave completely differently from fermions. Bosons form 'Bose-Einstein condensates,' congregating in the same quantum state. Fermions, on the other hand, fill available states one by one to form what is called a 'Fermi sea.'"

Researchers at Penn State have now experimentally demonstrated that, when bosons expand in one dimension--the line of atoms is allowed spread out to become longer--they can form a Fermi sea. A paper describing the research appears March 27, 2020 in the journal Science.

"Identical fermions are antisocial, you can't have more than one in the same place so when they are very cold they don't interact," said Marcos Rigol, professor of physics at Penn State and the other leader of the research team. "Bosons can be in the same place, but this becomes energetically too costly when their interactions are very strong. As a result, when constrained to move in one-dimension, their spatial distribution can look like that of non-interacting fermions. Back in 2004, David's research group experimentally demonstrated this phenomenon, which was theoretically predicted in the 1960s."

Even though the spatial properties of strongly interacting bosons and non-interacting fermions are the same in one dimension, bosons can still have the same velocities as each other, while fermions cannot. This is due to the fundamental nature of the particles.

"In 2005, Marcos, then a graduate student, predicted that when strongly interacting bosons expand in one dimension, their velocity distribution will form a Fermi sea," said Weiss. "I was very excited to collaborate with him in demonstrating this striking phenomenon."

The research team creates an array of ultracold one-dimensional gases made up of bosonic atoms ('Bose gases') using an optical lattice, which uses laser light to trap the atoms. In the light trap, the system is at equilibrium and the strongly interacting Bose gases have spatial distributions like fermions, but still have the velocity distributions of bosons. When the researchers shut off some of the trapping light, the atoms expand in one dimension. During this expansion, the velocity distribution of the bosons smoothly transforms into a one that is identical to fermions. The researchers can follow this transformation as it happens.

"The dynamics of ultracold gases in optical lattices are the source of many novel fascinating phenomena that only recently have started to be explored," said Rigol. "For example, Dave's group showed in 2006 that something as universal as temperature is not well defined after Bose gases undergo dynamics in one dimension. My collaborators and I related this finding to a beautiful underlying mathematical property of the theoretical models describing his experiments, known as 'integrability.' Integrability plays a central role in our newly observed dynamical fermionization phenomenon."

Because the system is "integrable," the researchers can understand it in great detail and by studying the dynamical behavior of these one-dimensional gases, the Penn State team hopes to address broad issues in physics.

"In the last half century many universal properties of equilibrium quantum systems have been elucidated," said Weiss. "It has been harder to identify universal behavior in dynamical systems. By fully understanding the dynamics of one-dimensional gases, and then by gradually making the gases less integrable, we hope to identify universal principles in dynamical quantum systems."

Dynamical, interacting quantum systems are an important part of fundamental physics. They are also increasing technologically relevant, as many actual and proposed quantum devices are based on them, including quantum simulators and quantum computers.

"We now have experimental access to things that if you would have asked any theorist working in the field ten years ago 'will we see this in our lifetime?' they would have said 'no way,'" said Rigol.

In addition to Rigol and Weiss, the research team at Penn State includes Joshua M. Wilson, Neel Malvania, Yuan Le, and Yicheng Zhang. The research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army Research Office. Computations were performed at the Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences.

The mass extinction at the end of the Permian Peri

od 252 million years ago -- one of the great turnovers of life on Earth -- appears to have played out differently and at different times on land and in the sea, according to newly redated fossils beds from South Africa and Australia.

New ages for fossilized vertebrates that lived just after the demise of the fauna that dominated the late Permian show that the ecosystem changes began hundreds of thousands of years earlier on land than in the sea, eventually resulting in the demise of up to 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species. The later marine extinction, in which nearly 95% of ocean species disappeared, may have occurred over the time span of tens of thousands of years.

Though most scientists believe that a series of volcanic eruptions, occurring in large pulses over a period of a million years in what is now Siberia, were the primary cause of the end-Permian extinction, the lag between the land extinction in the Southern Hemisphere and the marine extinction in the Northern Hemisphere suggests different immediate causes.

"Most people thought that the terrestrial collapse started at the same time as the marine collapse, and that it happened at the same time in the Southern Hemisphere and in the Northern Hemisphere," said paleobotanist Cindy Looy, University of California, Berkeley, associate professor of integrative biology. "The fact that the big changes were not synchronous in the Northern and Southern hemispheres has a big effect on hypotheses for what caused the extinction. An extinction in the ocean does not, per se, have to have the same cause or mechanism as an extinction that happened on land."

Members of Looy's lab have conducted experiments on living plants to determine whether a collapse of Earth's protective ozone layer may have irradiated and wiped out plant species. Other global changes -- a warming climate, a rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and an increase in ocean acidification -- also occurred around the end of the Permian period and the beginning of the Triassic and likely contributed.

On land, the end-Permian extinction of vertebrates is best documented in Gondwana, the southern half of the supercontinent known as Pangea that eventually separated into the continents we know today as Antarctica, Africa, South America and Australia. There, in the South African Karoo Basin, populations of large herbivores, or plant eaters, shifted from the Daptocephalus assemblage to the Lystrosaurus assemblage. These groups are now extinct.

In the ocean, the extinction is best documented in the Northern Hemisphere, in particular by Chinese fossils. The end-Permian extinction is perhaps best associated with the demise of trilobites.

To improve on previous dates for the land extinction, an international team of scientists, including Looy, conducted uranium-lead dating of zircon crystals in a well-preserved volcanic ash deposit from the Karoo Basin. Looy, who is also a curator of paleobotany at the campus's Museum of Paleontology and curator of gymnosperms at the University and Jepson Herbaria, confirmed that sediments from several meters above the dated layer were devoid of Glossopteris pollen, evidence that these seed ferns, which used to dominate late Permian Gondwanan floras, became extinct around that time.

At 252.24 million years old, the zircons -- microscopic silicate crystals that form in rising magma inside volcanoes and are spewed into the atmosphere during eruptions -- are 300,000 years older than dates obtained for the confirmed Permian-Triassic (P-T) boundary in China. This means that the sediment layer assumed to contain the P-T boundary in South Africa was actually at least 300,000 years too old.

Dates for an ash deposit in Australia, just above the layers that document the initial plant extinction, similarly came in almost 400,000 years older than thought. That work was published in January by Christopher Fielding and colleagues at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.

"The Karoo Basin is the poster child for the end-Permian vertebrate turnover, but until recently, it was not well-dated," Looy said. "Our new zircon date shows that the base of the Lystrosaurus zone predates the marine extinction with several hundred thousand years, similar to the pattern in Australia. This means that both the floral and faunal turnover in Gondwana is out of sync with the Northern Hemisphere marine biotic crisis.

"For some years now, we have known that -- in contrast to the marine mass extinction -- the pulses of disturbance of life on land continued deep into the Triassic Period. But that the start of the terrestrial turnover happened so long before the marine extinction was a surprise."

In their paper, Looy and an international team of colleagues concluded "that greater consideration should be given to a more gradual, complex, and nuanced transition of terrestrial ecosystems during the Changhsingian (the last part of the Permian) and, possibly, the early Triassic."

Looy and colleagues published their findings March 19 in the open access journal Nature Communications. Her co-authors are Robert Gastaldo of Colby College in Maine; Sandra Kamo of the University of Toronto in Ontario; Johann Neveling of the Council for Geosciences in Pretoria, South Africa; John Geissman of the University of Texas in Dallas and Anna Martini of Amherst College in Massachusetts. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

New Rochelle, NY, March 26, 2020--Gene therapy investigators can greatly benefit from the resources and services provided by the National Gene Vector Biorepository (NGVB), housed at the Indiana University School of Medicine. These include 93 unique reagents, a searchable database of animal safety studies, and Replication Competent Virus Testing, as detailed in an article published in Human Gene Therapy, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. Click here to read the full-text article free on the Human Gene Therapy website through April, 26 2020.

"The National Gene Biorepository: Eleven Years of Providing Resources to the Gene Therapy Community" was coauthored by Kenneth Cornetta, Lorraine Matheson, Ryan Long, and Lisa Duffy, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis.

The Reagent Repository has distributed more than 1,000 reagents to nearly 400 investigators. Included in the repository are reagents such as plasmids for adeno-associated virus (AAV) gene transfer and cell lines used to manufacture retroviral, lentiviral, adenoviral, and AAV gene therapies. Also included in the NGVB's resources and services is the Pharmacology and Toxicology (Pharm/Tox studies) Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) archive for storing samples from pharm/tox studies.

The authors describe three main rationale for offering NGVB services: decreasing the risk of non-compliance with FDA requirements; addressing the disconnect between clinical trial grant funding periods and extended post-trial monitoring requirements; and reducing costs.

"The NGVB resource is one of the key elements in the NIH strategy to enable academic researchers to pursue early phase clinical trials of their gene therapies with or without industry involvement," says Editor-in-Chief Terence R. Flotte, MD, Celia and Isaac Haidak Professor of Medical Education and Dean, Provost, and Executive Deputy Chancellor, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, MA. "Without such resources, the cost of these services would otherwise be prohibitive for academic scientists, and their work would perish in the proverbial 'valley of death'

The coronavirus outbreak has companies from Apple to Amazon warning consumers, shareholders and governments about how factory shutdowns in China and across the globe have disrupted global supply chains. Many goods, including cars, mobile phones and medicines, have parts or components that are imported and exported several times before they are finally made into the finished product.

But beyond their vulnerability to a global health crisis, it turns out that these complex global supply chains also have a hidden climate secret.

When a piece of a product in a global supply chain moves across borders, it travels with the carbon emissions needed to make it. Not surprisingly, researchers call these emissions "carbon-in-transit." A new publication shows that these travelling emissions account for a whopping 10 per cent of all global carbon emissions, and have tripled between 1995 and 2012.

"We have always been interested in the greenhouse gas emissions associated with what we consume, with little concern for the intricate ways in which the global economy provides us with the goods we consume," said Edgar Hertwich, a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Industrial Ecology Programme. "It turns out that many countries participate in producing those goods."

This matters as nations try to cut carbon emissions overall, whether by imposing carbon taxes in the countries where goods are produced or consumed, or by another measure called a border carbon adjustment, according to a paper that Hertwich recently published.

For example, Hertwich says, a carbon tax on imports would affect exports, because 10 per cent of global GHG emissions are exported more than once and enter complex global value chains. A border carbon adjustment could advance a further unravelling of global supply chains.

And that may not be a good thing, he says, because products that enter the global supply chain are more energy intensive than average products -- but are, on average, with less emissions-intensive energy than other products.

"Global supply chains, overall, may contribute to reducing emissions associated with the production of individual products," Hertwich said.

The European Union has made it clear that cutting carbon emissions are a top priority. On 4 March, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that the commission had adopted a proposal for the first-ever European Climate Law, with the objective for the EU to be climate neutral by 2050.

"The science is very clear. Climate is part of the natural world that sustains us," she said in a press briefing about the proposal. "And this natural world is severely endangered. It is high time to act and this Climate Law is part of the European contribution to this action."

And earlier this year, at the Davos 2020 economic summit, von der Leyen warned China that it either needs to put a price on carbon emissions at home or face the possibility of a CO2 tax on imports.

"There is no point in only reducing greenhouse gas emissions at home, if we increase the import of CO2 from abroad," von der Leyen told delegates at Davos, as reported by the Financial Times. "It is not only a climate issue; it is also an issue of fairness towards our businesses and our workers. We will protect them from unfair competition."

But choosing the right way to force those cuts can be tricky, Hertwich said.

Like a dieter who wants to lose weight by tracking his daily calories, countries that want to cut their carbon emissions need to know the source of their emissions.

The challenge comes with products that are made in one country, such as China, but then are purchased and used in another country, like Norway or the United States. If the carbon emissions from these products are going to be taxed, for example, where should the taxes be levied -- on the producer country or the consumer country?

Carbon-in-transit complicates this question immensely.

For example, China, the US and South Korea export the highest amount of carbon that was previously embodied in imports -- this is carbon-in-transit, Hertwich said.

"For China and the US, 20 per cent of the exported carbon was previously imported, while for Korea, that number is 40 per cent," he said.

So if a country -- or the EU -- decides to impose border taxes on carbon, carbon-in-transit will also be taxed, he pointed out. Given the amount of carbon in transit, estimated to be five billion tons, and if the tax were to be set at US$ 30 per ton, taxes on the carbon-in-transit alone would amount to more than US$100 billion a year.

"This would surely become a cause for contention" for countries and businesses, he said. "If border tax adjustments do not include a tax refund for exports at the border, companies will argue against an import duty for products used for export production to ensure competitiveness on the global market. If they do, the question is how to assess the emissions associated with imported intermediates or document previously paid import duties."

Another approach is to tax carbon emissions where the products themselves are consumed -- so even though your mobile phone was made in China, you as the owner would pay the carbon tax on the emissions from its production.

From a pure economic standpoint, taxing carbon emissions at the consumer level is effective, Hertwich said, but there are still potential pitfalls in structuring such a tax.

"For a consumption tax, the challenge is how to assess the level of emissions which depends on the respective technologies of the many countries participating in complex global value chains," Hertwich said.

Another approach is to look at how components in the global supply chain are produced, and tax their major inputs, Hertwich said. Technology exists, however, to track the origin of components.

For example, chemicals are the most involved in complex global value chains, followed by cars, machinery and ICT.

The most emitting foreign inputs to the production of these products are crude petroleum, steel, chemicals and fabricated metal products. Companies can also be compelled to report the carbon intensity of these products.

"Taxing these inputs would do the most to clean up supply," he said. "Global supply chains have driven economic development over the past two decades and have contributed more than any development policy to lift one billion out of abject poverty. Their benefit provides a rationale for countries to work together in implementing a global carbon price regime."

The modules that the major space agencies plan to erect on the Moon could incorporate an element contributed by the human colonizers themselves: the urea in their pee. European researchers have found that it could be used as a plasticizer in the concrete of the structures.

NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and its Chinese counterpart plan to build moon bases in the coming decades, as part of a broader space exploration plan that will take humans to more distant destinations, such as Mars.

However, the colonization of the Moon poses problems such as high levels of radiation, extreme temperatures, meteorite bombardment and a logistical issue: how to get construction materials there, although it may not be necessary.

Transporting about 0.45 kg from the Earth to space costs about $10,000, which means that building a complete module on our satellite in this way would be very expensive. This is the reason why space agencies are thinking of using raw materials from the moon's surface, or even those that astronauts themselves can provide, such as their urine.

Scientists from Norway, Spain, the Netherlands and Italy, in cooperation with ESA, have conducted several experiments to verify the potential of urine urea as a plasticizer, an additive that can be incorporated into concrete to soften the initial mixture and make it more pliable before it hardens. Details are published in the Journal of Cleaner Production.

"To make the geopolymer concrete that will be used on the moon, the idea is to use what is there: regolith (loose material from the moon's surface) and the water from the ice present in some areas," explains one of the authors, Ramón Pamies, a professor at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena (Murcia), where various analyses of the samples have been carried out using X-ray diffraction.

"But moreover," he adds, "with this study we have seen that a waste product, such as the urine of the personnel who occupy the moon bases, could also be used. The two main components of this body fluid are water and urea, a molecule that allows the hydrogen bonds to be broken and, therefore, reduces the viscosities of many aqueous mixtures."

Using a material developed by ESA, which is similar to moon regolith, together with urea and various plasticizers, the researchers, using a 3D printer, have manufactured various 'mud' cylinders and compared the results.

The experiments, carried out at Østfold University College (Norway), revealed that the samples carrying urea supported heavy weights and remained almost stable in shape. Once heated to 80°C, their resistance was also tested and even increased after eight freeze-thaw cycles like those on the Moon.

"We have not yet investigated how the urea would be extracted from the urine, as we are assessing whether this would really be necessary, because perhaps its other components could also be used to form the geopolymer concrete," says one of the researchers from the Norwegian university, Anna-Lena Kjøniksen, who adds: "The actual water in the urine could be used for the mixture, together with that which can be obtained on the Moon, or a combination of both."

The scientists stress the need for further testing to find the best building material for the moon bases, where it can be mass-produced using 3D printers.

A quantum computer works based on qubits. By manipulating quantum states to realize specific logical operation, quantum computing can solve some important computing problems that cannot be effectively completed by classical computers, which may have a decisive role in future information technology and, thus, has attracted widespread attention worldwide. The fascinating prospect for quantum computing in application has inspired international high-tech companies, e.g. Google, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and many start-ups, to invest heavily in related research. Meanwhile, the European Union has launched a €1 billion quantum flagship, and U.S., Britain, Germany, Japan, etc., have also made important strategic layouts in the field of quantum information science. The world has entered the times of so-called quantum supremacy. The main problem for classical quantum computing is the decoherence of qubits, and the derived low fidelity as increasing qubits number, which requires more qubits for error correction. Therefore, exploring fault-tolerant quantum computing, or equivalently, topological quantum computing that is insensitive to environmental noises, has become an important route towards large-scale quantum computing.

Majorana fermion is distinctive with antiparticle being itself, and has never been captured in particle physics. The 'counterpart' in condensed matter, Majorana quasiparticle, behaves as Majorana zero-energy bound state (ZEBS) or Majorana zero mode (MZM), in zero-dimension. MZM obeys non-Abelian statistics, and is immune to local perturbation with high fault tolerance, which has been intensively investigated as a potential building block for topological qubit. Based on resonant Andreev reflections, the typical signal of MZM in tunneling experiments is zero-bias conductance peak (ZBCP). Theoretically, MZM is predicted to exist in the ends/topological defects (e.g. magnetic vortex) of strong Rashaba spin-orbit coupled nanowires, topological insulators, and spin-textured Fe atomic chains in proximity to s-wave superconductors. Based on these proposals, the ZEBSs consistent with theoretical expectations have been experimentally detected. Although the reported evidence for MZM is not fully accepted by all experts, the relevant experimental progress always attracts widespread attention from the international academic and industrial communities. However, the nano fabrication technology, the ultralow temperature, and the necessity of external magnetic fields required for MZM implementations make the possible application of MZM highly challenging. Recently, iron-based superconductor, bulk Fe(Te,Se), has been demonstrated with superconducting topological surface states, probably providing alternative directions for addressing the above issues. However, its relatively low superconducting transition temperature Tc (~15 K) and the difficult-to-control character of magnetic vortices therein require optimized MZM physical settings in this direction to explore the possibility of MZM in high-temperature superconductors.

Recently, Wang Jian group at Peking University, in collaboration with Professor Wang Ziqiang at Boston College and Professor Hu Jiangping at Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, detected novel ZEBSs resembling the characteristics of MZMs in interstitial Fe adatoms deposited on the high-temperature superconducting thin films at two-dimensional limit.

By ultrahigh vacuum molecular beam epitaxy, Wang Jian group successfully prepared the macro-scale, single-layer-thick (thickness 0.5Se0.5 single crystal thin films on SrTiO3 substrates, showing transition temperature Tc of about 60 K. Previously, by using in situ scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy, Wang Jian group has studied their superconducting pairing mechanisms [PRL 123, 036801 (2019); Nano Letters 19, 3464 (2019); Nano Letters 20, 2056 (2020)]. On this basis, Wang Jian group deposited Fe adatoms on the surface of single-layer FeSe and FeTe0.5Se0.5 films by molecular beam epitaxy (substrate temperature: ~143-155 K; adatom coverage: ~0.002-0.003 layer). In situ scanning tunneling microscopy observations show that the deposited Fe adatoms are located at the interstitial hollow site of four adjacent Te/Se atoms in the upper sub-layers of the films. Due to the ultralow adatom deposition density, the Fe adatoms exist as isolated individual adsorbed atoms without neighboring Fe adatom clusters nearby. Systematic experiment of in situ ultrahigh vacuum (~10-10 mbar) scanning tunneling spectroscopy reveals that, for specific coupling strength between adatoms [amounting to ~13% (~15%)] and single-layer FeSe (FeTe0.5Se0.5), sharp ZBCPs can be observed on the Fe adatoms (Figure 1). The ZBCP is closely distributed near the adatom site with decay length of ~3 Å, and unsplit when moving away from the adatom center. Temperature-dependent experiments show that the ZBCP disappears far below the superconducting transition temperature, which can preliminarily exclude the interpretations based on Kondo effect and conventional impurity scattering states (Figure 2A and Figure 2B). Further control experiments and analyses indicate that, the ZBCP: a) shows the full-width at half maximum strictly limited by temperature and instrumental broadenings, b) does not split in Fe adatom dimer, and c) obeys the Majorana scaling equation. All these characteristics resemble the phenomenological signatures of MZM (Figures 2C-2G). Basically, the Fe adatoms deposited on single-layer FeSe and FeTe0.5Se0.5 films share nearly the same spectroscopic results. The statistical results suggest that, compared with the case in single-layer FeSe, the Fe adatoms on single-layer FeTe0.5Se0.5 show higher ZEBS probability and stronger ZEBS signal.

Professor Wang Ziqiang and collaborators have theoretically proposed that, in the absence of an external magnetic field, the interstitial magnetic impurities in strong spin-orbit coupling s-wave superconductors can generate quantum anomalous vortices. In theory, if single-layer FeSe and FeTe0.5Se0.5 have strong Rashba spin-orbit coupling due to inversion symmetry breaking, and the magnetic moments of Fe atoms locally break the time-reversal symmetry, the quantum anomalous vortices can support MZMs. Some theories also predict the existence of topologically nontrivial phases in single-layer FeSe and FeTe0.5Se0.5. In a two-dimensional topological superconductor, the MZM can also arise in a quantum anomalous vortex nucleated at an Fe adatom. Therefore, the ZBCP observed in our experiment can be attributed to the emergence of quantum anomalous vortices at the Fe adatoms. A deeper and more detailed understanding would need further experimental and theoretical explorations. This work extends the superconducting materials for MZM explorations from three-dimension to two-dimension, and from low-temperature to Tc > 40 K high-temperature superconductors. Additionally, no external magnetic field is needed for inducing the ZEBS, and the ZEBS can be manipulated in principle, and the 'surviving' temperature is also significantly increased, which provide possible solutions for the realization of applicable topological qubits in the future.

Solar cells convert light into energy, but they can be inefficient and vulnerable to the environment, degrading with, ironically, too much light or other factors, including moisture and low temperature. An international research team has developed a new type of solar cell that can both withstand environmental hazards and is 26.7% efficient in power conversion.

They published their results on March 26 in Science.

The researchers, led by Byungha Shin, a professor from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at KAIST, focused on developing a new class of light-absorbing material, called a wide bandgap perovskite. The material has a highly effective crystal structure that can process the power needs, but it can become problematic when exposed to environmental hazards, such as moisture. Researchers have made some progress increasing the efficiency of solar cells based on perovskite, but the material has greater potential than what was previously achieved.

To achieve better performance, Shin and his team built a double layer solar cell, called tandem, in which two or more light absorbers are stacked together to better utilize solar energy. To use perovskite in these tandem devices, the scientists modified the material's optical property, which allows it to absorb a wider range of solar energy. Without the adjustment, the material is not as useful in achieving high performing tandem solar cells. The modification of the optical property of perovskite, however, comes with a penalty -- the material becomes hugely vulnerable to the environment, in particular, to light.

To counteract the wide bandgap perovskite's delicate nature, the researchers engineered combinations of molecules composing a two-dimensional layer in the perovskite, stabilizing the solar cells.

"We developed a high-quality wide bandgap perovskite material and, in combination with silicon solar cells, achieved world-class perovskite-silicon tandem cells," Shin said.

The development was only possible due to the engineering method, in which the mixing ratio of the molecules building the two-dimensional layer are carefully controlled. In this case, the perovskite material not only improved efficiency of the resulting solar cell but also gained durability, retaining 80% of its initial power conversion capability even after 1,000 hours of continuous illumination. This is the first time such a high efficiency has been achieved with a wide bandgap perovskite single layer alone, according to Shin.

"Such high-efficiency wide bandgap perovskite is an essential technology for achieving ultra-high efficiency of perovskite-silicon tandem (double layer) solar cells," Shin said. "The results also show the importance of bandgap matching of upper and lower cells in these tandem solar cells."

The researchers, having stabilized the wide bandgap perovskite material, are now focused on developing even more efficient tandem solar cells that are expected to have more than 30% of power conversion efficiency, something that no one has achieved yet,

"Our ultimate goal is to develop ultra-high-efficiency tandem solar cells that contribute to the increase of shared solar energy among all energy sources," Shin said. "We want to contribute to making the planet healthier."

A new research led by MPhil student Miss Yu Yan Yau and supervised by Dr Benoit Thibodeau from the Department of Earth Sciences and the Swire Institute of Marine Science, the University of Hong Kong (HKU), highlighted the importance of reducing fossil fuel combustion not only to curb the trend of global warming, but also to improve the quality of China's coastal waters. The findings were recently published in the prestigious journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Fossil fuel burning is strongly associated with global warming. However, atmospheric and marine pollution linked to energy production, transportation and industrial activity are often overlooked. Production of nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions via fossil fuel burning and the manufacturing of fertilizer pollutes the atmosphere and leads to the formation of ground-level ozone, smog, acid rain and contributes to global warming through the greenhouse effect. Moreover, nitrogen is a natural fertilizer and thus when atmospheric nitrogen oxides deposit in the water, it can also have a fertilizing effect. This fertilizing effect can lead to 'eutrophication'; a chain reaction starting with the addition of nutrients (here nitrogen oxides), which enhance the production of algae, which, in turn, die and sink to the bottom of the ocean and decompose. During the decomposition of this organic material, oxygen is consumed from the water, lowering the dissolved oxygen content at the bottom of the ocean. Constant reductions of dissolved oxygen scan lead to hypoxia, a level of oxygenation that is too low for most organisms to sustain their normal activities.

The study used Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - projected trends in atmospheric emissions of NOx coupled with a biogeochemical model to estimate the impact of the deposition of nitrogen oxides in four major Chinese coastal seas: The South China Sea, the East China Sea, the Yellow Sea and the Bohai Sea. The researchers found that although atmospheric deposition is not as important as riverine nitrogen input, it can still fuel up to 15% of the total amount of organic matter found at the bottom of the ocean, increasing significantly (up to 5%) the area of hypoxia. The good news is that it also found that a reduction of emissions can lead to a significant decrease of hypoxic zones, and that the South China Sea is the most sensitive area to nitrogen input.

"I hope our study brings more attention to the potential benefit of reducing fossil fuel burning on human and ecosystem health but also on local economic activities like fisheries, which are severely affected by hypoxia," said Miss Yau.

"Low levels of oxygen are observed in many coastal seas around the world and it is important to find better ways to tackle this problem. While we understand that sewage and nutrient input from the Pearl River drive most of the hypoxia in the Greater Bay Area, we observe low levels of oxygen in regions that are not directly under the influence of these sources. Thus, it is important to investigate the impact of atmospheric deposition more locally," Dr Thibodeau remarked.

A team of scientists at Cardiff University has, for the first time, developed a way of predicting the size of plastics different animals are likely to ingest.

The researchers, from the University's Water Research Institute, looked at the gut contents of more than 2,000 animals to create a simple equation to predict the size of a plastic item an animal can eat, based on the length of its body.

In the study, published today in Nature Communications, they report that the length of an animal can be used to estimate the biggest piece of plastic it can eat - and this was about 5% (a twentieth) of the size of the animal.

The researchers say that as the plastic pollution problem escalates, it is vital to be able to quickly assess the risk of plastics to different species around the world.

This work could also help scientists measure the risk of plastic pollution to ecosystems and food supplies - and ultimately the risk to human health.

By trawling through published data, the team found plastics ingested by marine and freshwater mammals, reptiles, fishes and invertebrates, from 9mm-long fish larvae to a 10m-long humpback whale.

During their research they found some shocking examples of the extent of plastic pollution, including hosepipes and flower pots in a sperm whale, plastic banana bags inside green turtles and a shotgun cartridge in a True's beaked whale.

Co-lead author of the study Dr Ifan Jâms said: "We still know very little about the way most animals feed in the wild, so it's difficult to figure out how much plastic they could be eating.

"This information gives us a way to start measuring the extent of the plastic pollution problem.

"We hope this study lays a foundation for including the 'ingestibility' of plastics into global risk assessments.

"We also hope this work will encourage more sophisticated assessments of the amount of plastic that may be moving into global ecosystems and food supplies."

Project leader Professor Isabelle Durance said: "All of us will have seen distressing, often heart-breaking, images of animals affected by plastic, but a great many more interactions between animals and plastic are never witnessed. This study gives us a new way of visualising those many, many unseen events.

"While we understand increasingly where concentrations of plastic in the world's aquatic ecosystems are greatest, it's only through work like this that we can know which animals are likely to be in danger from ingesting it.

"Through this work, we can also begin to understand how much plastic is entering global food webs or human foods, for example, because we know the general sizes of plastic likely to be taken in by zooplankton or fishes.

"We recognise that our research is part of wider efforts and there is still more work to do to quantify the risks from smaller plastic fragments or to understand the damage caused by plastic ingestion, but we hope this work helps the world to address its growing plastic problem."

The researchers said further work was needed to look at how and where terrestrial animals eat plastic to predict wider risks.

A variety of sea animals can take up virus particles while filtering seawater for oxygen and food. Sponges are particularly efficient. That was written by marine ecologist Jennifer Welsh from NIOZ this week, in a publication in Nature Scientific Reports. This Monday, Welsh will defend her thesis at the Free University of Amsterdam, through an online connection.

"When a virus infects a cell", says Jennifer Welsh of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), "it uses its host to make new viruses. After those are released, they can, in turn, infect many more, new cells." However, Welsh discovered that the many virus particles in the sea - over 150 million in a glass of sea water - can also end up for, a large part, as the lunch of a diverse group of sea animals.

Filtering viruses

The Japanese oyster, for example, filters seawater to extract oxygen or food such as algae and bacteria. While doing this, it ingests virus particles. Welsh: "In our experiments, during which we did not offer the oysters any food and hence they only filtered the water for oxygen uptake, Japanese oysters removed 12 per cent of the virus particles from the water."

That number puts the oyster in the fourth place of all species that Welsh looked at in the NIOZ Virus Ecology Lab on Texel. "Of all non-host organisms that we tested, sponges, crabs and cockles made it to the podium. In our experiments, the sponges reduced the presence of viruses by up to 94 per cent within three hours. Another experiment showed that the uptake of viruses happens indeed very quickly and effectively, even if we offered new viruses to the water every 20 minutes, the sponges remained tremendously effective in removing viruses."

An entirely new factor in virus ecology

Until now, it was unknown that several species of sea animals can have such a significant influence on virus populations. "The influence of non-host organisms in the ambient environment, really is a factor that has been overlooked in virus ecology", Welsh says.

However, Welsh does not assume that the results of her lab experiments will be so clear cut when applied to the natural habitat. "The situation there is much more complex, as many other animal species are present and influence one another. For example, if an oyster is filtering and a crab comes along, it closes its valve and stops filtering. In addition, there are factors such as tidal currents, temperature and UV light to consider. But also in nature, predation by non-host should definitely be taken into account."

Useful in aquaculture

Nevertheless, the new insights might in time be useful in aquaculture. In this sector, fish or shellfish that are meant for consumption, are kept in enclosures, such as sea cages or basins, whereby there is a direct connection to the sea. Aquaculture is becoming larger as a sustainable alternative to fishing at sea, but is much criticised, mostly by nature conservationists.

Welsh explains why: "In salt water farms, tremendous amounts of specimens of one single species live together in monoculture. If a contagious disease breaks out, the risks are high that the pathogen spreads to the wild populations living in the sea. With the addition of enough sponges, the danger of a virus outbreak would possibly be nipped in the bud. The results of this research show that this would be good follow up research project."

Online defence

On Monday 30 March, Jennifer Welsh will be the first NIOZ-researcher to defend her dissertation through the internet. "I will be defending my degree in the middle of a crisis caused by COVID-19, a corona virus that, by now, we all know and have been affected by. Due to the imposed restrictions, I will answer the questions of the committee online. Just my boyfriend, who happens to be one of my paranymfs, will be there with me. My apartment is very small, so I may end up defending my thesis on my bed with my laptop."

The concept of McDonaldization was developed by sociologist George Ritzer and is used to explain rationalization processes happening in a person's life. The author describes his concept this way: "the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of recent". McDonaldization as a form of rationality has a spectre of advantages. By using it a person may become more disciplined and learn how to set goals and achieve them. However, rationalization turns a person into a resource, incorporated into various systems with the sole goal of making profit. It dehumanizes a person and makes him lose his or her personal treats, locking him into "Iron cage" of rationality. It affects such spheres as faith and religion, love and family, as well as relations with other people.

Such spheres of human relations as healthcare, education, voluntary work, family and socialization have been studied within the framework of McDonaldization.

Alexander Schekoturov, Head of the Social Analysis, Modeling and Risk Forecasting Laboratory explained:

"McDonaldylized agent is highly effective, its functionality is predictable and fully controlled by technology. However, as the aggregate gain of each component increases, the reverse reaction also increases - negative consequences, the main of which is the displacement of a person from the structure of barter relations".

The scientist's study showed that Russian social media is fully consistent with all signs of McDonaldization.

"It is important for the theory-based research to view a phenomenon in two notions: a global-local and "nothing" (pattern) - "something" (original). Depending on a position of a studied phenomenon within the notions, its properties, impact and scale of the McDonaldizating influence change".

Alexander Schekoturov has analyzed to social networks: Facebook and Vkontakte (?????????). He found out that Facebook may be viewed as "Growbalized" (a portmanteau of "to grow"+ "globalized") form of "nothing" and is the driving force behind globalization, while "VKontakte" is a glocal form of "nothing" which makes it have unique forms of both local and global level. Translator's note: Glocalization (a portmanteau of globalization and localization) is the "simultaneous occurrence of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies in contemporary social, political, and economic systems".

The researcher emphasized:

"The main practical purpose of my study is to comprehend the hidden sense and values that many digital-era phenomena have. For instance, it remains unclear to us that when trying to express our individuality, we still follow a certain behavioural pattern.This limits our creativity and only casts an illusion of individuality. The hidden idea here is that the more we are involved in the Mc-systems like social networks the more content it absorbed by form and quality by quantity. In other words, it's more interesting for such people to pretend to be working instead of doing real work, to get more likes instead of writing a difficult post. Also, it is dangerous to get turned into a "burger" in the McDonaldyzed environment. Among the threats are cyber fraud, cyberbullying, hating, trolling due to the fact that social networks encourage us to talk more about ourselves, and any private information exposed helps those who seek to harm us. A simple advice to avoid them is to ask yourself a question before posting anything: what do I want to get and could this information cause any harm to anyone?

For the first time, researchers who explore the physical and chemical properties of electrical energy storage have found a new way to improve lithium-ion batteries. They successfully increased not only the voltage delivery of a lithium-ion battery but also its ability to suppress dangerous conditions that affect the current range of batteries. This improved lithium-ion battery could make longer journeys in electric vehicles possible and lead to the creation of a new generation of home energy storage, both with improved fire safety.

Let's take a moment to think about batteries. They power pretty much every device that isn't plugged into the wall, maybe even your car. However, despite their usefulness, most people only pay attention to them when they run out of power. But there are safety issues with current lithium-ion batteries that can damage equipment and have been known to start fires. Researchers at the Graduate School of Engineering and Graduate School of Science at the University of Tokyo came up with a way to improve safety and provide more charge.

"A battery's voltage is limited by its electrolyte material. The electrolyte solvent in lithium-ion batteries is the same now as it was when the batteries were commercialized in the early 1990s," said Professor Atsuo Yamada. "We thought there was room for improvement, and we found it. Our new fluorinated cyclic phosphate solvent (TFEP) electrolyte greatly improves upon existing ethylene carbonate (EC), which is widely used in batteries today."

EC is notoriously flammable and is unstable above 4.3 volts; TFEP, on the other hand, is nonflammable and can tolerate greater voltages of up to 4.9 volts. This extra voltage in an otherwise identically sized package can mean the batteries can last longer before they need another charge. As lithium ion-powered electric vehicles proliferate, this extra range and safety would no doubt prove extremely useful.

"We're proud of this development and its effectiveness came as a bit of a surprise. This is because the way we came up with TFEP was novel in itself, thanks in part to our collaboration with organic chemist Professor Eiichi Nakamura," continued Yamada. "Most research on electrolytes is a bit trial and error, with slight alterations to the basic chemistry rarely offering any advantage. Our approach came from a theoretical understanding of the underlying molecular structures. We predicted the safe, high-voltage properties before we experimentally verified them. So it was a very pleasant surprise indeed."