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In Southern states that expanded their Medicaid programs under the Affordable Care Act, adults experienced lower rates of decline in both physical and mental health, according to research published this month in the journal Health Affairs.

This new research conducted by faculty at the Department of Health Policy at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine (VUSM) and Harvard Medical School draws on data on 15,536 low-income individuals recruited predominantly at community health centers in 12 Southern states as part of the Southern Community Cohort Study. Its findings add substance to state-level debates over the merits of expansion, including the question of whether access to safety net programs can serve as an adequate substitute for health insurance coverage.

"Our study is the first to consider the pathways through which, and populations for whom, expanded access to Medicaid affects the health trajectory of low-income adults," said lead author John Graves, PhD, associate professor of Health Policy at VUSM. "It fills an important gap between research that has found little evidence of health effects and other research demonstrating that expanded Medicaid saved lives."

Previous research has found modest changes in self-reported health and reductions in mortality associated with Medicaid expansion, but a review of 77 studies published in 2018 in Health Affairs found that 60% of assessments of health status did not find evidence of beneficial impacts from the ACA's expansion. This muddled evidence has fueled the debate over whether accepting expansion funds could improve population health.

The study, co-authored with Harvard researchers J. Michael McWilliams, MD, PhD; Laura Hatfield, PhD; Nancy Keating, MD, PhD; and VUMC research professor of Medicine William Blot, PhD, found that expansion reduced the likelihood of low-income adults experiencing a self-reported health status decline, particularly for adults with severe mental and physical limitations.

"The effect is sizable and would amount to the worst-ranked Southern state rising about halfway up the rankings in state population health if it expanded Medicaid," said McWilliams, senior author and Harvard Medical School Professor of Health Care Policy. "Unlike many other studies, we were able to focus on some of the most vulnerable populations who stand to gain the most from insurance coverage."

Of the 14 states that have not yet expanded Medicaid, nine are in the South and two border the region.

"Our research demonstrates that access to the safety net is an inadequate substitute for coverage, and that non-expanding Southern states could materially improve population health if they accept expansion funds," Graves said. "Health care policy experts and physicians have suspected this for a while but with our study, we now have the actual evidence showing that non-expanding Southern states could materially improve population health if they accept expansion funds."

An international team of astronomers funded in part by NASA has found the farthest galaxy group identified to date. Called EGS77, the trio of galaxies dates to a time when the universe was only 680 million years old, or less than 5% of its current age of 13.8 billion years.

More significantly, observations show the galaxies are participants in a sweeping cosmic makeover called reionization. The era began when light from the first stars changed the nature of hydrogen throughout the universe in a manner akin to a frozen lake melting in the spring. This transformed the dark, light-quenching early cosmos into the one we see around us today.

"The young universe was filled with hydrogen atoms, which so attenuate ultraviolet light that they block our view of early galaxies," said James Rhoads at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who presented the findings on Jan. 5 at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu. "EGS77 is the first galaxy group caught in the act of clearing out this cosmic fog."

While more distant individual galaxies have been observed, EGS77 is the farthest galaxy group to date showing the specific wavelengths of far-ultraviolet light revealed by reionization. This emission, called Lyman alpha light, is prominent in all members of EGS77.

In its earliest phase, the universe was a glowing plasma of particles, including electrons, protons, atomic nuclei, and light. Atoms could not yet exist. The universe was in an ionized state, similar to the gas inside a lighted neon sign or fluorescent tube.

After the universe expanded and cooled for about 380,000 years, electrons and protons combined into the first atoms -- more than 90% of them hydrogen. Hundreds of millions of years later, this gas formed the first stars and galaxies. But the very presence of this abundant gas poses challenges for spotting galaxies in the early universe.

Hydrogen atoms readily absorb and quickly re-emit far-ultraviolet light known as Lyman alpha emission, which has a wavelength of 121.6 nanometers. When the first stars formed, some of the light they produced matched this wavelength. Because Lyman alpha light easily interacted with hydrogen atoms, it couldn't travel far before the gas scattered it in random directions.

"Intense light from galaxies can ionize the surrounding hydrogen gas, forming bubbles that allow starlight to travel freely," said team member Vithal Tilvi, a researcher at Arizona State University in Tempe. "EGS77 has formed a large bubble that allows its light to travel to Earth without much attenuation. Eventually, bubbles like these grew around all galaxies and filled intergalactic space, reionizing the universe and clearing the way for light to travel across the cosmos."

EGS77 was discovered as part of the Cosmic Deep And Wide Narrowband (Cosmic DAWN) survey, for which Rhoads serves as principal investigator. The team imaged a small area in the constellation Boötes using a custom-built filter on the National Optical Astronomy Observatory's Extremely Wide-Field InfraRed Imager (NEWFIRM), which was attached to the 4-meter Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona.

Because the universe is expanding, Lyman alpha light from EGS77 has been stretched out during its travels, so astronomers actually detect it at near-infrared wavelengths. We can't see these galaxies in visible light now because that light started out at shorter wavelengths than Lyman alpha and was scattered by the fog of hydrogen atoms.

To help select distant candidates, the researchers compared their images with publicly available data of the same region taken by NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes. Galaxies appearing brightly in near-infrared images were tagged as possibilities, while those appearing in visible light were rejected as being too close.

The team confirmed the distances to EGS77's galaxies by using the Multi-Object Spectrometer for Infra-Red Exploration (MOSFIRE) on the Keck I telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii. The three galaxies all show Lyman alpha emission lines at slightly different wavelengths, reflecting slightly different distances. The separation between adjacent galaxies is about 2.3 million light-years, or slightly closer than the distance between the Andromeda galaxy and our own Milky Way.

A paper describing the findings, led by Tilvi, has been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.

"While this is the first galaxy group identified as being responsible for cosmic reionization, future NASA missions will tell us much more," said co-author Sangeeta Malhotra at Goddard. "The upcoming James Webb Space Telescope is sensitive to Lyman alpha emission from even fainter galaxies at these distances and may find more galaxies within EGS77."

Astronomers expect that similar reionization bubbles from this era will be rare and hard to find. NASA's planned Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) may be able to uncover additional examples, further illuminating this important transition in cosmic history.

JUUL delivers substantially more nicotine to the blood per puff than cigarettes or previous-generation e-cigarettes (e-cigs) and impairs blood vessel function comparable to cigarette smoke, according to a new study by researchers at UC San Francisco.

The study, which appears online Jan. 4, 2020, in Tobacco Regulatory Science, found that nicotine concentrations were five to eight times higher in rodents that were exposed to JUUL versus other tobacco products. The work also supports an earlier finding by the same researchers of harm to blood vessels from brief exposures to both direct and secondhand smoke from cigarettes, little cigars and combustible marijuana, and to aerosol from IQOS "heat-not-burn" tobacco products.

JUUL and earlier generation e-cigs are promoted as being less hazardous than cigarettes. Since 2016, there has been a dramatic increase in youth e-cig use, with JUUL devices particularly effective at recruiting teenagers to begin nicotine usage. A recent study found 27.5 percent of high school students and 10.5 percent of eighth graders currently use e-cigs, with more than half of both groups using JUUL as their preferred choice.

A caveat of this study is that it measured the impact of equal numbers of puffs of all products, whereas adult former cigarette smokers may stop their vaping session when they reach the level of nicotine they normally ingest, said senior author Matthew Springer, PhD, professor of cardiology at UCSF and member of the UCSF Center for Tobacco Research and Education.

"However, adolescent non-smokers who are not familiar with the effects of nicotine may be more likely to chase higher levels of the drug's effects," Springer said. "The ease of over-consuming nicotine with JUUL makes this likely, especially in light of reports of teenagers binging on JUUL to the point of rapid addiction and behavioral consequences."

As with earlier-generation e-cigs, the liquid in JUUL pods is composed of vegetable glycerin and propylene glycol, along with flavors and nicotine. But while the freebase nicotine used in earlier generations limits the amount comfortably inhaled, JUUL has introduced acidified nicotine salts, which are easier to inhale and deliver nicotine at substantially higher concentrations.

In the Tobacco Regulatory Science study, eight rats were exposed to 10 cycles of two-second inhalation over a five-minute period, with one of four different substances: JUUL, an e-cigarette with freebase nicotine e-liquid, cigarettes or clean air. The researchers collected blood samples 20 minutes after exposure and measured blood vessel impact through a process known as flow mediated dilation. This approach, which is a validated measurement of human cardiovascular health, has been shown in rodents to yield pharmacological and biophysical effects similar to humans, Springer said.

The research found that blood nicotine concentrations in the JUUL group (136.4 ng/ml) were eight times higher than e-cigs group (17.1 ng/ml) and 5.2 times higher than cigarettes (26.1 ng/ml).

However, while Springer and his colleagues found that aerosol or smoke from JUUL caused greater blood vessel impairment than either of the other nicotine sources, the differences in the extent of impairment between the sources themselves was deemed statistically insignificant.

"The comparison of cardiovascular health effects of JUUL use with those of previous generation e-cigs and of combusted cigarettes is an important issue for policymakers, including the FDA and comparable bodies outside the United States," Springer said. "Our findings show that the adverse effect of cigarettes on vascular endothelial function, which has been a known consequence of cigarette smoking since the 1990s, is not prevented by using JUUL."

CINCINNATI -- A new study provides hope that the number of children dying on the transplantation list while waiting for a new heart could potentially be reduced dramatically.

The study, published online in the Annals of Thoracic Surgery, demonstrates that many of the donor hearts deemed "high-risk" can be transplanted with the same survival rates as "low-risk" donor hearts.

"One in five children die awaiting a suitable donor heart, and some of these potential recipients missed their opportunity because they were offered donor hearts that transplant programs refused because they were thought to be of poor quality," says David Morales, MD, director of congenital heart surgery and Clark-Helmsworth Chair of cardiovascular surgery at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. Dr. Morales is senior author of the study.

"However, these hearts were often transplanted into other donors with good results, and some of those potential recipients never got the opportunity to be transplanted. Our study demonstrates that traditionally perceived high-risk donors may have been associated with worst post-transplant survival because of the recipients they were transplanted into and not because of the donor hearts. While it's important to carefully consider potential donor hearts for transplantation, transplant programs should consider accepting hearts from certain donors traditionally considered poor quality."

For the study, the Cincinnati Children's researchers reviewed the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) database for thoracic organ transplants between Jan. 2006 and Dec. 2015 in children up to 18 years old. They identified "high-risk" transplant donors as those above a certain age, those who needed cardiopulmonary resuscitation and those who died due to stroke. They matched low- and high-risk donors on characteristics of the recipient and then analyzed one-year survival outcomes.

The study found that transplant recipients considered "high-risk" by utilization and survival-based criteria led to similar survival as transplant recipients from "low-risk" donors.

"Currently, there is not a universal system by which transplant institutions list patients for transplant," says Dr. Morales. "In other words, hospitals accept organs and list patients for transplant under different criteria, often based not on the latest clinical data nor nationally accepted clinical standards but on a program's or provider's past experiences.

"A risk-based matching system that couples the optimal donor for a given transplant recipient to result in the best predicted outcome for each transplant, and achieving the highest survival years post-transplant for the entire community, are what we are striving for," he says. "Getting to transplantation is NOT the goal. Having the most children healthy and alive post-transplantation for the most years is the goal."

Based on their previous research in this area, Dr. Morales and several colleagues at Cincinnati Children's have received a grant from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) to investigate creating a standardized risk-stratification model for children using machine learning to realize best pairings of donor and recipients to maximize survival.

Because organ utilization decisions for hearts and lungs vary significantly across programs and providers, the NHLBI designated grant money to help Cincinnati Children's investigate the potential to reduce wastage of pediatric thoracic organs and potentially create a better system or model. This would be a model in which local practices and emotions are not driving forces to listing and accepting organs, but a data driven algorithm that optimizes transplant matches and benefits the entire pediatric heart and lung transplant communities, says Dr. Morales.

Currently, a range of donor sizes (either weight or height) is used to determine which organs a certain recipient may be offered. This range is based on a program's experience, not national or well-defined standards, according to Dr. Morales. However, technology now exists that can allow scientists to use 3-dimensional modeling, virtual surgery and artificial intelligence to develop novel methods of precise size-matching of donor organs in hopes of increasing donor organ utilization for pediatric heart and lung transplantation.

Understanding the complete range of donor hearts or lungs that can fit into a recipient's chest cavity is crucial because it increases the potential donors a child can be offered. The existing colloquial approach to pediatric transplantation is one of the reasons children with end-stage heart failure face the highest waiting list mortality in all of transplant medicine, according to Dr. Morales.

"If novel virtual transplantation techniques are used, the number of acceptable donor hearts for each patient will increase because ranges will be individualized to that specific patient's heart size and not by a less precise estimation, such as age or weight," says Ryan Moore, MD, director of the Heart Institute Digital Media and 3D Modeling Program.

The decommissioning of coal-fired power plants in the continental United States has reduced nearby pollution and its negative impacts on human health and crop yields, according to a new University of California San Diego study.

The findings published this week in Nature Sustainability use the U.S. transition in recent years from coal towards natural gas for electric power generation to study the local impacts of coal-fired unit shutdowns. While the shift from coal to natural gas has reduced carbon dioxide emissions overall, it has also changed local pollution levels at hundreds of areas around the country. In particular, the burning of coal creates particulate matter and ozone in the lower atmosphere--often experienced as "smog" --which can affect humans, plants and regional climate. These pollutants (aerosols, ozone and other compounds) from coal burning can wreak havoc on human health when inhaled, and also have damaging effects on plant life. They also alter local climate by blocking incoming sunlight.

The author, Jennifer Burney, associate professor of environmental science at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy, combined data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on electric power generation with satellite and surface measurements from the EPA as well as NASA to gauge changes in local pollution before and after coal-fired unit shut-downs. She also studied changes in county-level mortality rates and crop yields using data from the Centers for Disease Control and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Burney found that between 2005 and 2016, the shutdown of coal-fired units saved an estimated 26,610 lives and 570 million bushels of corn, soybeans and wheat in their immediate vicinities. The inverse calculation, estimating the damages caused by coal plants left in operation over that same time period, suggests they contributed to 329,417 premature deaths and the loss of 10.2 billion bushels of crops, roughly equivalent to half of year's typical production in the U.S.

"The unique contribution of this study is its scope and the ability to connect discrete technology changes--like an electric power unit being shut down--to local health, agriculture and regional climate impacts," Burney said. "We hear a lot about the overall greenhouse gas and economic impacts of the transition the U.S. has undergone in shifting from coal towards natural gas, but the smaller-scale decisions that make up this larger trend have really important local consequences. The analysis provides a framework for communities to more thoroughly and accurately assess the costs and benefits of local investments in energy infrastructure."

Burney added that although there are considerable benefits of decommissioning older coal-fired units, the newer natural gas units are not entirely benign. Natural gas units are associated with increased pollution levels; although different than the pollutant mix from coal-fired units, and more research is required to fully understand their impacts.

Burney concludes that "policymakers often think about greenhouse gas emissions as a separate problem from air pollution, but the same processes that cause climate change also produce these aerosols, ozone, and other compounds that cause important damages. This study provides a more robust accounting for the full suite of emissions associated with electric power production. If we understand the real costs of things like coal better, and who is bearing those costs, it could potentially lead to more effective mitigation and formation of new coalitions of beneficiaries across sectors."

Evaporation ponds, which are commonly used in many industries to manage wastewater, can span acres, occupying a large footprint and often posing risks to birds and other wildlife. Yet they're an economical way to deal with contaminated water because they take advantage of natural evaporation under sunlight to reduce large volumes of dirty water to much smaller volumes of solid waste.

Now researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have demonstrated a way to double the rate of evaporation by using solar energy and taking advantage of water's inherent properties. The study, led by Berkeley Lab scientists Akanksha Menon and Ravi Prasher, is reported today in the journal Nature Sustainability.

Evaporation ponds are used at power plants, desalination plants, in the oil and gas industry, and also for lithium extraction, in which lithium-rich brine is pumped into vast, man-made salt ponds. They're common in China, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and parts of the United States where the climate is suitable (arid or semi-arid with a lot of sunshine), and these ponds can be the size of hundreds of football fields, with many of them sitting side by side.

"This is a big societal problem we're trying to solve. To either dispose of the wastewater or to extract a valuable salt like lithium, you would like to increase the evaporation rate dramatically and in a scalable manner," said Prasher, an expert in thermal energy who also serves as Berkeley Lab's associate director for the Energy Technologies Area (https://eta.lbl.gov/). "If we could do so, that could reduce their environmental impact by reducing the amount of land required."

To maximize water recovery from industrial wastewater and desalination brine, there has been a push to achieve "zero liquid discharge" so that the final waste is a solid. The process involves a series of treatment steps, and the last step is frequently an evaporation pond. Menon, a Berkeley Lab postdoctoral fellow, notes that many ideas have been proposed to use solar energy to speed up the rate of evaporation.

"There have been several papers published in the last five years," she said. "Most involve sunlight-absorbing structures that float on the water's surface, like a black sponge, to localize the heat, since evaporation is a surface phenomenon."

Unfortunately such porous structures tend to get clogged up with the very contaminants that they're trying to separate. "So over time, the performance of the floating absorbers drops dramatically," Menon said. "Sometimes the salts will get stuck on the surface and will reflect sunlight rather than absorbing it."

Transforming the wavelength of sunlight

The Berkeley Lab researchers looked for a solution that could avoid such issues. "We realized if you look at the properties of water, it has very strong absorption in the mid-infrared wavelength range," Menon said. "If you shine mid-infrared light on water, it'll absorb it so strongly it retains all of that heat in a very thin layer."

The team decided to build a device they liken to a "radiation transformer," which takes energy from sunlight in the range of 400 to 1,500 nanometers and converts it to 3,000 nanometers or greater, which is in the mid-infrared range.

The Berkeley Lab scientists demonstrated the concept in the lab using a saturated solution of table salt. In their experiment, their prototype device enhanced the evaporation rate by more than 100% over natural evaporation. They add that there is the potential to increase evaporation by 160% by optimizing the thermal design.

Their photo-thermal device - a flat sheet that selectively absorbs solar energy on one side and emits mid-infrared energy on the other - sits above the water in an evaporation pond like an umbrella. "A site may have an array of these solar umbrellas, likely sitting on tent posts, about a foot or so above the water," said Menon.

The researchers noted that such solar umbrellas could also play a role in desalination plants, which are emerging as a solution for growing water demand around the world, but disposal of the by-product - concentrated brine - remains a problem. Berkeley Lab leads the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI), which was awarded the $100-million Energy-Water Desalination Hub by DOE earlier this year.

"If you're going to do large-scale desalination, one of the biggest challenges is how to come up with scalable technologies," Prasher said. "This is potentially is a highly scalable zero-liquid discharge technology, which doesn't require any energy because it's based on solar energy."

Prasher said the team next wants to pursue two directions. The first is to do a techno-economic analysis for both lithium extraction and zero-liquid discharge for desalination plants to better understand the costs. The second is to look at making the device out of a polymer or other material to further reduce the cost.

LOS ANGELES (Jan. 6, 2020) -- A new Cedars-Sinai study reveals how memory and abnormal brain activity are linked in patients with epilepsy who often report problems with memory. The data show that abnormal electrical pulses from specific brain cells in these patients are associated with a temporary kind of memory disruption called transient cognitive impairment.

Understanding this process has the potential to lead to improvements in treating epilepsy patients, as well as contribute to knowledge of how memory works.

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder characterized by abnormal brain activity that can cause seizures. It affects about 3.4 million Americans, or 1% of the population, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"To our knowledge, our study is the first to investigate the actual mechanism of transient cognitive impairment in epilepsy," said Ueli Rutishauser, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai. He was senior author of the study, published online in the journal JNeurosci.

To perform their study, Rutishauser and his team investigated electrical activity in the hippocampus, an area of the brain known to be important for memory. Using electrodes implanted in the brains of 11 adult epilepsy patients as part of their treatment, the team recorded activity of individual cells in the hippocampus during a recognition memory task.

Patients were first shown 100 new images. Later, a subset of 50 of these images were repeated a second time randomly intermixed with other new images. After each image, patients were asked whether they had seen the image before and how sure they were about their answer.

Results showed that abnormal electrical pulses in the brain, known as interictal epileptiform discharges (IEDs), temporarily changed the firing of individual cells in the hippocampus. This change in the activity of the cells in turn disrupted the patients' ability to recall whether they previously had seen a presented image. Epilepsy patients commonly experience IEDs between seizures and report transitive cognitive impairment. However, it has so far remained unknown why IEDs cause such impairment.

During the task, the extent of memory disruption was related to exactly when an IED occurred, with the most severe impairment caused by IEDs that appeared within two seconds of the patient trying to recall an image, Rutishauser said. He added that the effect was specific to recall and that the presence of IEDs did not disrupt the encoding of new memories.

The study's first author, Chrystal Reed, MD, PhD, assistant professor of Neurology at Cedars-Sinai, said the findings are important because understanding how and why memory impairments occur can help develop treatment options to improve the quality of life for epilepsy patients.

"The unpredictability of seizures and memory impairment is a major stressor in people who have epilepsy," Reed said.

It's no secret that many insects are struggling worldwide. But we could fix these insects' problems, according to more than 70 scientists from 21 countries. Their road map to insect conservation and recovery is published in Nature Ecology & Evolution this week. From urgent 'no-regret' solutions to long-term global comparisons.

The goal is to start insect recovery soon, says initiator Prof. Jeff Harvey from the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Evidence is growing that all over the world, insect species are suffering from multiple human-induced stress factors: habitat loss and fragmentation, pollution, invasive species, climate change and overharvesting. "As scientists, we want to gather all available knowledge and put it to action together with land managers, policy makers and everyone else involved."

Predators to pollinators

The roadmap is based on achieving targets over different timescales. More than 70 experts from all continents joined the effort, including book author Dave Goulson and leading scientist Hans de Kroon whose study on insect biomass decline is well-known. "Essentially, we are thinking strategically and this is novel," explains Harvey. "Now and down the road, all to reverse insect declines."

Insect abundance, diversity and biomass are frequently under pressure. It affects all functional groups: from predators to pollinators. The scientists state that "insects are vitally important in a wide range of ecosystem services of which some are indispensible for food production and security, as in pest control."

Call to action

The steps to be taken are divided into immediate, mid- and long-term actions. First of all, there are a number of actions coined as 'no-regret solutions' that can be taken immediately and regardless of new knowledge still to come - as they will not just benefit single insect species. Secondly, there is the urgent need to prioritise: which species, areas and issues need our attention the most.

For the mid-term, new experiments should be planned to clarify which stress factors cause what effects. And to gain knowledge in understudied areas. A parallel action here would be to dig through existing insect collections, in museums for instance. "This can fill in gaps in our diversity data of the past, as an essential base of reference."

Finally, more long-term actions would include the formation of public-private partnerships and sustainable financing initiatives to restore and create places to live for the insects. Combined with a global monitoring programme where people all use the exact same methods and sites, over longer timescales. "In that way, we can definitely compare the well-being of insects worldwide, and rule out possibly disruptive inconsistencies."

True recovery

The extensive group of scientific experts involved in the road map stresses that insect declines are a serious threat, one that society cannot postpone addressing any longer. Harvey: "Most importantly, we hope that end-users and land managers now can use this road map in for instance farming, habitat management and urban development as a template for true insect recovery."

With more than 300 staff members and students, the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) is one of the largest research institutes of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). The institute specialises in water and land ecology. As of 2011, the institute is located in an innovative and sustainable research building in Wageningen, the Netherlands. NIOO has an impressive research history that stretches back 60 years and spans the entire country, and beyond.

Wearable electronics could be perpetually powered by stretchy, self-mending materials that use body heat to generate electricity. Three carefully curated organic compounds have been combined to develop a prototype thermoelectric material that is both stretchy and self-healing, can generate its own electricity, and is robust enough to withstand the stresses and strains of daily life.

Sensors worn on the skin or as implants are an increasingly popular way to gather biological data for personal and medical purposes. They can monitor valuable markers of human health, such as heart rate, blood pressure, brain activity, muscle motion, calories burned and the release of certain chemicals. The ultimate goal is self-powered wearable technologies, but these will require a reliable and durable electricity source.

Thermoelectric materials use temperature gradients to generate electricity. They have the potential to power wearable technologies using body heat, eliminating the need for batteries, but current materials lack the flexibility, strength and resilience to avoid being permanently damaged.

A team led by Derya Baran and Seyoung Kee at KAUST have blended the highly conductive thermoelectric polymer PETOT:PSS (poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) doped with polystyrene sulfonate), with dimethyl sulfoxide, an organic compound that boosts the performance of PETOT:PSS, and Triton X-100, a sticky, gel-like agent that encourages hydrogen bonding with PETOT:PSS. "This final ingredient was essential for providing the stretchy and self-healing properties we needed," says Kee.

The researchers used a 3D printer to deposit their mixture into thick layers and then tested the thermoelectric performance of these films under duress. First, they found that a temperature difference of 32 degrees Celsius between the two sides of the film generated the maximum power output of 12.2 nanowatts.

The team then tested the self-healing behavior of the films by cutting them in half with a razor blade while they powered an LED light. "Amazingly, the light did not go out during or after cutting," says Kee. "I repeated the cut ten times, but it continued to self-heal in less than one second and retained 85 percent of its power output." Additionally, when they stretched the film to around a third longer than its original size, it still provided a stable power supply.

"Wearable electronics are under continuous strain, and their power supply is prone to breaking," says Kee. "Our material can provide constant and reliable power because it can deform, stretch, and most importantly, heal itself."

Twelve nanowatts is not enough to power many devices, except perhaps highly efficient biosensors and transmitters, but it is a promising start. "We have shown that such materials can be made easily using 3D printing, which is a very popular and practical technology" says Kee. "Next, we must find materials with even better thermoelectric properties so that we can generate greater power in the near future."

Northern China, a hotspot of air pollution, has always been an area of great interest to study owing to the significant impacts on human health, the climate and ecosystems.

"However, most studies have focused on the sources and the formation mechanisms, which cannot provide us with knowledge on the fate of various species like reactive nitrogen, i.e., nitrogen deposition," says Masters student Zhen Wang, from the Institute of International Earth System Science, Nanjing University. "Therefore, in our study we estimated the nitrogen deposition in northern China through a combination of remote sensing data and atmospheric chemical transport model simulations."

Wang and his coauthors interpreted the spatial and seasonal patterns of inorganic nitrogen deposition using NO2 and NH3 column measurements from satellites and the Model for Ozone and Related Chemical Tracers, version 4 (MOZART-4). The result was a unique "top-down" estimation of nitrogen deposition in northern China, and the findings have been published in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters.

According to this study, the average nitrogen deposition flux in northern China was 54.5 kg N per hectare (ranging from 16.3 to 106.5 kg N per hectare). That is equal to 10% of the annual nitrogen application for the rotation of winter wheat-summer maize in this region. Of the total nitrogen deposition, 36% was deposited via precipitation and 64% was deposited through dry deposition.

According to Wang, this estimated nitrogen deposition flux will be helpful in determining the magnitude and pollution status in northern China without ground measurements, supporting the construction plan for environmental monitoring in the future. In addition, the generated spatial and seasonal patterns of nitrogen deposition in northern China provide basic information for evaluating the influence of nitrogen enrichment on regional biogeochemical cycles, such as forests, grasslands, and farmland ecosystems.

"Although the method of remote sensing can provide us with general knowledge regarding the spatial pattern of nitrogen deposition, the current resolution still has difficulty in identifying hotspots," adds Dr. Xiuying Zhang, the corresponding author of the study. "Therefore, further research from our group will focus on atmospheric nitrogen deposition inversion with high spatial and temporal resolution."

Physicist have shown that the motion of domain walls can be detected by monitoring voltage generated in superconducting devices. This finding can facilitate magnetic racetrack memory applications. The result was published in Physical Review Letters -publication. The international research group included researcher from the University of Jyväskylä.

Recently many research groups have aimed at developing magnetic memories which are based on writing and reading magnetic information with the help of electric current. Such systems typically require so large currents to switch the magnetization that it can affect thermal stability of the memory element. In order to reduce heating effects, the superconducting materials which can sustain dissipationless electric current would be quite useful.

Superconducting current is a flow of electrons bound in Cooper pairs and therefore is fundamentally different from the usual current in normal metals which is carried by the single electrons. Therefore, in order to develop the superconductor/ferromagnet memory element it has been necessary to understand how the superconducting current can affect the magnetic state.

In their paper the research group has found answers to the two fundamental questions: whether supercurrent can change magnetic states and whether it is possible to avoid electric losses during this process.

"We have developed the theory which describes how the superconductor can lose its fundamental property of having zero resistance in typical superconductor/ferromagnet device. This happens because of the induced magnetization dynamics in the attached ferromagnet. Although the force which drives the magnetization comes from the superconducting current, the system becomes inherently dissipative and in principle cannot sustain any amount of the superconducting current because of the voltage generated by the magnetization dynamics", explains Academy Research Fellow Mihail Silaev.

"We find the low-current resistance associated with the domain wall motion driven by the superconducting current. We suggest the finite slope of Shapiro steps as the characteristic feature of the regime with domain wall oscillations driven by the ac external current flowing through the junction", Silaev continues.

WASHINGTON (Jan. 6, 2020) -- As food consumed in the U.S. becomes more and more processed, obesity may become more prevalent. Through reviewing overall trends in food, George Washington University (GW) researcher Leigh A. Frame, PhD, MHS, concluded that detailed recommendations to improve diet quality and overall nutrition are needed for consumers, who are prioritizing food that is cheaper and more convenient, but also highly processed. Her conclusions are published in a review article in Current Treatment Options in Gastroenterology.

"When comparing the U.S. diet to the diet of those who live in "blue zones" - areas with populations living to age 100 without chronic disease - the differences are stark," said Frame, co-author of the article, program director for the Integrative Medicine Programs, executive director of the Office of Integrative Medicine and Health, and assistant professor of clinical research and leadership at the GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences. "Many of the food trends we reviewed are tied directly to a fast-paced U.S. lifestyle that contributes to the obesity epidemic we are now facing."

The rising obesity epidemic in the U.S., as well as related chronic diseases, are correlated with a rise in ultra-processed food consumption. The foods most associated with weight gain include potato chips, sugar sweetened beverages, sweets and desserts, refined grains, red meats, and processed meats, while lower weight gain or even weight loss is associated with whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. Other food trends outlined in the report include insufficient dietary fiber intake, a dramatic increase in food additives like emulsifiers and gums, and a higher prevalence of obesity, particularly in women.

In mice and in vitro trials, emulsifiers, found in processed foods, have been found to alter microbiome compositions, elevate fasting blood glucose, cause hyperphagia, increase weight gain and adiposity, and induce hepatic steatosis. Recent human trials have linked ultra-processed foods to decreased satiety (fullness), increased meal eating rates (speed), worsening biochemical markers, including inflammation and cholesterol, and more weight gain. In contrast, populations with low meat, high fiber, and minimally processed foods -- the "blue zones" -- have far less chronic diseases, obesity rates, and live longer disease-free.

"Rather than solely treating the symptoms of obesity and related diseases with medication, we need to include efforts to use food as medicine," said Frame. "Chronic disease in later years is not predestined, but heavily influenced by lifestyle and diet. Decreasing obesity and chronic disease in the U.S. will require limiting processed foods and increasing intake of whole vegetables, legumes, nuts, fruits, and water. Health care providers must also emphasize lifestyle medicine, moving beyond 'a pill for an ill.' "

West Texas cotton growers face many environmental challenges, including rising temperatures, higher temperature extremes, less rainfall, and a decline in groundwater supplies. While generations of growers have accumulated considerable knowledge about addressing these and other challenges, they can benefit from learning the scientific perspective. Natasja van Gestel provides that perspective through the Grower Citizen Science Project. The primary goal of the project to identify practices that increase soil health.

The Grower Citizen Science Project is a collaboration between soil scientists and growers in the southern High Plains of Texas. Growers have collected soil samples, measured carbon dioxide fluxes, and shared yield data with scientists. Scientists have installed soil moisture and temperature sensors and analyzed nutrients, soil microbial communities, and other data and then shared their findings with growers.

Over the course of this collaboration, scientists have determined that practices such as rotating crops, planting cover crops, and keeping residue on top of the soil surface all benefit soil health. Adding residue to the soil increases organic matter and moisture levels, reduces wind and water erosion, returns nutrients to the soil, helps control weeds, and minimizes heat stress for roots and microbes. Scientists also demonstrated the benefits of no-till systems, which include higher levels of soil moisture, organic matter, and microbial biomass, as well as increased numbers of beneficial microbes, such as arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi.

By implementing these practices, which van Gestel outlines in the webcast "Grower Citizen Science Project," growers are able to increase soil resiliency to climate extremes. This presentation will help consultants, county agents, growers, and other practitioners in the southern High Plains understand these regenerative practices.

This 27-minute presentation is available through the "Focus on Cotton" resource on the Plant Management Network. This resource contains more than 75 webcasts, along with presentations from six conferences, on a broad range of aspects of cotton crop management: agronomic practices, diseases, harvest and ginning, insects, irrigation, nematodes, precision agriculture, soil health and crop fertility, and weeds. These webcasts are available to readers open access (without a subscription).

New York, NY--January 6, 2020--Spinal cord injuries (SCI) can cause devastating damage, including loss of mobility and sensation. Every year, there are an estimated 17,000 new SCIs in the US alone, a rate higher than in most regions of the world. In addition, the rate of SCIs in people 65-years or older is expected to rise in the US, from 13.0% in 2010 to 16.1% by 2020. Data also shows a high survival rate for these patients, who need to function in everyday life but find sitting to be a major challenge.

A Columbia Engineering team has invented a robotic device--the Trunk-Support Trainer (TruST)--that can be used to assist and train people with SCIs to sit more stably by improving their trunk control, and thus gain an expanded active sitting workspace without falling over or using their hands to balance. The study, published today in Spinal Cord Series and Cases, is the first to measure and define the sitting workspace of patients with SCI based on their active trunk control.

"We designed TruST for people with SCIs who are typically wheelchair users," says Sunil Agrawal, the project's PI and professor of mechanical engineering and of rehabilitation and regenerative medicine. "We found that TruST not only prevents patients from falling, but also maximizes trunk movements beyond patients' postural control, or balance limits."

TruST is a motorized-cable driven belt placed on the user's torso to determine the postural control limits and sitting workspace area in people with SCI. It delivers forces on the torso when the user performs upper body movements beyond the postural stability limits while sitting.

The five subjects with SCI who participated in the pilot study were examined with the Postural Star-Sitting Test, a customized postural test that required them to follow a ball with their head and move their trunk as far as possible, without using their hands. The test was repeated in eight directions, and the researchers used the results to compute the sitting workspace of each individual.

The team then tailored the TruST for each subject to apply personalized assistive force fields on the torso while the subjects performed the same movements again. With the TruST, the subjects were able to reach further during the trunk excursions in all eight directions and significantly expand the sitting workspace around their bodies, on an average of about 25% more.

"The capacity of TruST to deliver continuous force-feedback personalized for the user's postural limits opens new frontiers to implement motor learning-based paradigms to retrain functional sitting in people with SCI," says Victor Santamaria, a physical therapist, postdoctoral researcher in Agrawal's Robotics and Rehabilitation Laboratory, and first author of the paper. "We think TruST is a very promising SCI rehab tool."

Agrawal's team is now exploring the use of TruST within a training paradigm to improve the trunk control of adults and children with spinal cord injury. "The robotic platform will be used to train participants with SCI by challenging them to move their trunk over a larger workspace, with TruST providing assist-as-needed force fields to safely bring the subjects back to their neutral sitting posture," says Agrawal. "This force field will be adjusted to the needs of the participants over time as they improve their workspace and posture control."

A new study shows that China's inland surface water quality improved significantly from 2003-2017, coinciding with major efforts beginning in 2001 to reduce water pollution in the country.

The research was conducted by a team led by Profs. MA Ting and ZHOU Chenghu from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Their findings were published in Science Advances.

The researchers analyzed the nationwide variability of inland surface water quality across China during this 15-year period and the response to anthropogenic pollution. They found that annual mean concentrations of two important water quality parameters - chemical oxygen demand and ammonium nitrogen - declined at the national level by 63% and 78%, respectively, during the period.

At the regional level, northern river basins showed relatively fast rates of decline in both of these parameters, while water quality in most southern river basins maintained favorable levels.

Improved inland surface water quality across the country is mainly attributable to reduced pollution emissions in the industrial, rural, and urban residential sectors.

A cross-regional comparison conducted as part of this investigation showed conspicuous interregional variations in water pollution. In general, northern regions showed relatively poor water quality due to intense human pressure on local environments. In contrast, most southern river basins showed better water quality due to relatively low levels of human disturbance.

The study confirms the effectiveness of massive environmental protection efforts aimed at controlling pollution discharge and improving water quality in China over the past nearly two decades, notwithstanding growing pressure from human activity.

The researchers believe China's inland surface waters will achieve good ecological status in the near future if current trends hold.

They also suggested that water quality dynamics and the forces propelling such dynamics should determine strategies used to control water pollution, while taking regional variations into account.