Tech

Organizations endorsing a win-at-all-costs environment may find this management style good for the bottom-line, but it could come a price. Teamwork and civility between co-workers are severely compromised which can lead to major issues down the road (remember Enron?).

So says Dr. Gabi Eissa, management professor at the Fowler College of Business at San Diego State University, who's recently published his research in Human Resources Management Journal. Eissa found that employees with Machiavellian personalities (defined as those who prioritize their personal goals above all else) tend be successful in these environments even if it means sabotaging the work of their colleagues. "Employees with Machiavellian personalities tend to not trust others; show a willingness to engage in amoral behavior; and exhibit a desire to maintain interpersonal control," noted Eissa. "They tend to believe that a coworker's success is risky, so they become motivated to see others lose. Often times, they feel that when co-workers lose, they win."

Eissa points to the Enron meltdown and subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 as examples of workplace cultures where management and employees neglected ethics and focused on the bottom-line, resulting in disastrous consequences. "In fact," said Eissa "previous research indicated that Enron's employee environment had been described as 'aggressive'."

To test his hypotheses, Eissa and researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and the T.A. Pai Management Institute sampled 500 English-speaking full-time employees and their supervisors in India, as well as 196 employees in a number of organizations in the United States. Specifically, the team of researchers assessed participants' responses for perceived bottom-line mentality in their organizations, workplace behaviors and job satisfaction.

The results of two studies indicated that Machiavellian employees tend to develop a bottom-line mentality more strongly when they perceive their management endorses bottom-line outcomes. In addition, the researchers found Machiavellian employees who developed a bottom-line mentality were found to be less willing to cooperate with their co-workers and were more likely to deviate from organizational norms, rules and practices.

"Overall, we found that employees focused on the bottom-line are more likely driven to see others lose and less likely to engage in behaviors that may help others succeed," said Eissa. "Clearly, when bottom-line outcomes are valued over everything else, employees may be encouraged to act in their own self-interest, even if it means engaging in unethical behaviors. If the examples set by Enron and the mortgage industry are considered, this behavior can have dire consequences in the long-term if left unchecked."

To process information, photons must interact. However, these tiny packets of light want nothing to do with each other, each passing by without altering the other. Now, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have coaxed photons into interacting with one another with unprecedented efficiency -- a key advance toward realizing long-awaited quantum optics technologies for computing, communication and remote sensing.

The team, led by Yuping Huang, an associate professor of physics and director of the Center for Quantum Science and Engineering, brings us closer to that goal with a nano-scale chip that facilitates photon interactions with much higher efficiency than any previous system. The new method, reported as a memorandum in the Sept. 18 issue of Optica, works at very low energy levels, suggesting that it could be optimized to work at the level of individual photons -- the holy grail for room-temperature quantum computing and secure quantum communication.

"We're pushing the boundaries of physics and optical engineering in order to bring quantum and all-optical signal processing closer to reality," said Huang.

To achieve this advance, Huang's team fired a laser beam into a racetrack-shaped microcavity carved into a sliver of crystal. As the laser light bounces around the racetrack, its confined photons interact with one another, producing a harmonic resonance that causes some of the circulating light to change wavelength.

That isn't an entirely new trick, but Huang and colleagues, including graduate student Jiayang Chen and senior research scientist Yong Meng Sua, dramatically boosted its efficiency by using a chip made from lithium niobate on insulator, a material that has a unique way of interacting with light. Unlike silicon, lithium niobate is difficult to chemically etch with common reactive gases. So, the Stevens' team used an ion-milling tool, essentially a nanosandblaster, to etch a tiny racetrack about one-hundredth the width of a human hair.

Before defining the racetrack structure, the team needed to apply high-voltage electrical pulses to create carefully calibrated areas of alternating polarity, or periodic poling, that tailor the way photons move around the racetrack, increasing their probability of interacting with eachother.

Chen explained that to both etch the racetrack on the chip and tailor the way photons move around it, requires dozens of delicate nanofabrication steps, each requiring nanometer precision. "To the best of our knowledge, we're among the first groups to master all of these nanofabrication steps to build this system -- that's the reason we could get this result first."

Moving forward, Huang and his team aim to boost the crystal racetrack's ability to confine and recirculate light, known as its Q-factor. The team has already identified ways to increase their Q-factor by a factor of at least 10, but each level up makes the system more sensitive to imperceptible temperature fluctuations - a few thousands of a degree - and requires careful fine-tuning.

Still, the Stevens team say they're closing in on a system capable of generating interactions at the single-photon level reliably, a breakthrough that would allow the creation of many powerful quantum computing components such as photonics logic gates and entanglement sources, which along a circuit, can canvass multiple solutions to the same problem simultaneously, conceivably allowing calculations that could take years to be solved in seconds.

We could still be a while from that point, Chen said, but for quantum scientists the journey will be thrilling. "It's the holy grail," said Chen, the paper's lead author. "And on the way to the holy grail, we're realizing a lot of physics that nobody's done before."

Films of platinum only two atoms thick supported by graphene could enable fuel cell catalysts with unprecedented catalytic activity and longevity, according to a study published recently by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Platinum is one of the most commonly used catalysts for fuel cells because of how effectively it enables the oxidation reduction reaction at the center of the technology. But its high cost has spurred research efforts to find ways to use smaller amounts of it while maintaining the same catalytic activity.

"There's always going to be an initial cost for producing a fuel cell with platinum catalysts, and it's important to keep that cost as low as possible," said Faisal Alamgir, an associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Materials Science and Engineering. "But the real cost of a fuel cell system is calculated by how long that system lasts, and this is a question of durability.

"Recently there's been a push to use catalytic systems without platinum, but the problem is that there hasn't been a system proposed so far that simultaneously matches the catalytic activity and the durability of platinum," Alamgir said.

The Georgia Tech researchers tried a different strategy. In the study, which was published on September 18 in the journal Advanced Functional Materials and supported by the National Science Foundation, they describe creating several systems that used atomically-thin films of platinum supported by a layer of graphene - effectively maximizing the total surface area of the platinum available for catalytic reactions and using a much smaller amount of the precious metal.

Most platinum-based catalytic systems use nanoparticles of the metal chemically bonded to a support surface, where surface atoms of the particles do most of the catalytic work, and the catalytic potential of the atoms beneath the surface is never utilized as fully as the surface atoms, if at all.

Additionally, the researchers showed that the new platinum films that are at least two atoms thick outperformed nanoparticle platinum in the dissociation energy, which is a measure of the energy cost of dislodging a surface platinum atom. That measurement suggests those films could make potentially longer-lasting catalytic systems.

To prepare the atomically-thin films, the researchers used a process called electrochemical atomic layer deposition to grow platinum monolayers on a layer of graphene, creating samples that had one, two or three atomic layers of atoms. The researchers then tested the samples for dissociation energy and compared the results to the energy of a single atom of platinum on graphene as well as the energy from a common configurations of platinum nanoparticles used in catalysts.

"The fundamental question at the heart of this work was whether it was possible that a combination of metallic and covalent bonding can render the platinum atoms in a platinum-graphene combination more stable than their counterparts in bulk platinum used commonly in catalysts that are supported by metallic bonding," said Seung Soon Jang, an associate professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering.

The researchers found that the bond between neighboring platinum atoms in the film essentially combines forces with the bond between the film and the graphene layer to provide reinforcement across the system. That was especially true in the platinum film that was two atoms thick.

"Typically metallic films below a certain thickness are not stable because the bonds between them are not directional, and they tend to roll over each other and conglomerate to form a particle," Alamgir said. "But that's not true with graphene, which is stable in a two-dimensional form, even one atom thick, because it has very strong covalent directional bonds between its neighboring atoms. So this new catalytic system could leverage the directional bonding of the graphene to support an atomically-thin film of platinum."

Future research will involve further testing of how the films behave in a catalytic environment. The researchers found in earlier research on graphene-platinum films that the material behaves similarly in catalytic reactions regardless of which side - graphene or platinum - is the exposed active surface.

"In this configuration, the graphene is not acting as a separate entity from the platinum," Alamgir said. "They're working together as one. So we believe that if you're exposing the graphene side, you get the same catalytic activity and you could further protect the platinum, potentially further enhancing durability."

A University of Wyoming researcher and his team discovered that weathering of subsurface rock in the Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains of California occurs due more to rocks expanding than from chemical decomposition, as previously thought.

Porosity, the void space in rock, was conventionally thought to be produced when water flows through the rock, thus resulting in minerals chemically dissolving. Because mountain watershed provides large reservoirs of water, the new findings are relevant to water resource management throughout the U.S.

"It's important to understand what is going on in the subsurface layer. It has enormous capacity to store water. In mountain landscapes, the saprolite may be the only thing keeping forests alive during times of drought," says Cliff Riebe, an associate professor in UW's Department of Geology and Geophysics. "This has been known for a while. What we don't know is 'How does the storage space get produced?' Saprolite is difficult to access. You have to dig down under the soil. It's rarely been studied. Understanding this layer between the soil and rock is important."

Saprolite, which Riebe refers to as "rotten rock," is the zone of weathered rock that retains the relative positions of mineral grains of the parent bedrock and lies between the layer of soil and harder rock underneath.

Riebe was corresponding author of a paper, titled "Porosity Production in Weathered Rock: Where Volumetric Strain Dominates over Chemical Mass Loss," which was published today (Sept. 18) in Science Advances, an offspring publication of Science. The online journal publishes significant, innovative original research that advances the frontiers of science and extends the standards of excellence established by Science.

Jorden Hayes, a former Ph.D. graduate from UW and now an assistant professor of earth sciences at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., was the paper's lead author. Contributing writers included Steve Holbrook, a former UW professor of geology and geophysics and now a professor and department head at Virginia Tech University; Brady Flinchum, who was a Ph.D. student at UW at the time the research was conducted; and Peter Hartsough, an assistant project scientist in the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources at the University of California-Davis.

Volumetric strain is defined as the expansion material undergoes during the weathering process. Rock that is all solid has no porosity. Understanding how porosity is produced by volumetric strain and mass loss is important across a broad range of problems in hydrology, biogeochemistry, ecology and geomorphology, Riebe says.

What scientists have commonly assumed, Riebe says, is that expansion of rocks is not that important. What was discovered by Riebe and his team is that expansion in rocks dominates the actual weathering process in the region of study.

"Expansion is hard to measure, so it has been ignored in previous work," Riebe explains.

"The rock there is actually expanding to more than double the initial volume as it weathers," Hayes says. "This is surprising because we don't usually think about rock expanding to such a degree, and scientists conventionally think about rock weathering being dominated by chemical dissolution as rainwater flows from the subsurface."

Tree roots, for example, can cause expansion of rock by wedging open the saprolite material. Ice cracking during winter would cause the same effect.

"We think part of the story is the vegetation is doing this at higher elevations," Riebe says. "We think it will be less important at the lower elevations. We expect not as much rooting, so less volumetric expansion and more chemical mass loss. This leads to new potential discoveries."

The research, which has been ongoing since 2011, builds on existing information about weathering and surface processes at the Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory.

"Our finding is especially exciting as we think about other landscapes that also may be subjected to these physical mechanisms and have the ability to store large volumes of water," Hayes says.

"Saprolite in the Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains is a source of water for ecosystems and humans. Understanding it is important," Riebe says. "Climate is changing. It helps us understand an important reservoir for water in the U.S. West."

DURHAM, N.C. -- Reducing fossil fuel emissions steadily over coming years will prevent millions of premature deaths and help avoid the worst of climate change without causing the large spike in short-term warming that some studies have predicted, new analysis by researchers at Duke University and the University of Leeds finds.

"We analyzed 42 scenarios presenting different timescales for a very rapid worldwide transition from fossil fuels to clean energy," said Drew Shindell, Nicholas Professor of Earth Science at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment. "Under all of these scenarios there is no significant spike in warming, no climate penalty, and we actually see a decrease in warming rates within two decades of the start of the phase-out."

"The only scenarios that result in a significant warming spike are implausible ones in which worldwide emissions are halted instantaneously or over a very short timescale. But in the real world, that's not going to happen. It will take decades to transition to clean energy," Shindell said.

Climate negotiations have been clouded in recent years by the view that cleaning up fossil-fuel air pollution rapidly will unintentionally lead to a near-term rise in atmospheric warming of about a half-degree Celsius, which might take up to a century to reverse. The idea is that the sun-obscuring aerosols fossil fuel consumption puts into the atmosphere would clear relatively quickly, but long-lived greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide would persist and create a net warming.

"Our finding shows these fears are unfounded," said Christopher J. Smith, research fellow at the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds.

"Under a realistic rate of fossil-fuel phase-out, we do clean up the air, unmasking historically suppressed cooling," Smith said. "But we would also reduce the rate of further greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere, slowing down future warming. These competing effects will approximately balance out, and any increase in the rate or level of near-term warming will be quite small compared to what we would see if we allowed emissions to remain at current levels," he said.

The new finding is good news on the public health front, too, Shindell noted, because aerosol particulates are highly toxic when inhaled and cause millions of premature deaths each year, "so taking these steps to reduce emissions and slow climate change will also save lives," he said.

"We know there are enormous risks associated with continuing to burn fossil fuels," Shindell said. "What this work shows is that it's mistaken to think that the transition to clean energy also has large environmental risks. Instead, it provides huge public health benefits while also mitigating climate change."

Shindell and Smith published their peer-reviewed study Sept. 18 in Nature.

By showing an alignment between climate and public health policy goals, Shindell and Smith hope their finding will spur progress in climate negotiations and add momentum to the discussions and presentations taking place at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City on Sept. 23.

"This research dispels the misconception that the air-quality and climate benefits of transitioning to clean energy play out at different timescales," Smith emphasized. "Climate change mitigation does not come at the expense of air pollution reductions."

"As the world moves to decarbonize and transition away from fossil fuels, we must ensure that our actions benefit both climate and human well-being," said Helena Molin Valdéz, head of the Climate and Clean Air Coalition Secretariat at the UN Environment office in Paris. This new study will help do just that, she noted.

"It is important to see clearly that transitioning away from fossil fuels does not lead to environmental trade-offs, but produces benefits for both combatting climate change and improving air quality," said Maria Neira, director of the World Health Organization's Department of Public Health, Environmental and Social Determinants of Health.

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. - Mechanical engineers at the University of Virginia School of Engineering, leading a collaboration with biologists from Harvard University, have created the first robotic fish proven to mimic the speed and movements of live yellowfin tuna.

Their peer-reviewed paper, "Tuna robotics: a high-frequency experimental platform exploring the performance space of swimming fishes," was published Sept. 18, 2019, in Science Robotics, an offshoot of Science magazine devoted to technological advancements in robotic science and engineering.

Led by Hilary Bart-Smith, professor in UVA Engineering's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, the robotic tuna project was born out of a five-year, $7.2 million Multi-disciplinary University Research Initiative the U.S. Office of Naval Research awarded Bart-Smith to study fast, efficient swimming of different fishes. The aim of Bart-Smith's project is to better understand the physics of fish propulsion, research that could eventually inform development of the next generation of underwater vehicles, driven by fish-like systems better than propellers.

Underwater robots also are useful in a range of applications, such as defense, marine resources exploration, infrastructure inspection and recreation.

Well before bio-inspired propulsion systems can become viable for public and commercial use in manned and unmanned vehicles, however, researchers must be able to reliably understand how fish and other creatures move through water.

"Our goal wasn't just to build a robot. We really wanted to understand the science of biological swimming," Bart-Smith said. "Our aim was to build something that we could test hypotheses on in terms of what makes biological swimmers so fast and efficient."

The team first needed to study the biological mechanics of high-performance swimmers. Harvard biology professor George V. Lauder and his team of researchers precisely measured the swimming dynamics of yellowfin tuna and mackerel. Using that data, Bart-Smith and her team, research scientist Jianzhong "Joe" Zhu and Ph.D. student Carl White, constructed a robot that not only moved like a fish underwater but beat its tail fast enough to reach nearly equivalent speeds.

They then compared the robot they named "Tunabot" with live specimens.

"There are lot of papers on fish robots, but most of them don't have much biological data in them. So I think this paper is unique in the quality of both the robotic work and the biological data married together into one paper," Lauder said.

"What is so fantastic with the results we are presenting in the paper are the similarities between biology and the robotic platform, not just in terms of the swimming kinematics, but also in terms of the relationship between speed and tail-beat frequency and energy performance," Bart-Smith said. "These comparisons give us confidence in our platform and its ability to help us understand more about the physics of biological swimming."

The team's work builds on UVA Engineering's strengths in autonomous systems. The Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering is a participant in UVA Engineering's Link Lab for cyber-physical systems, which focuses on smart cities, smart health and autonomous systems, including autonomous vehicles.

The Tunabot project is an outgrowth of Bart-Smith's second, highly competitive Multi-disciplinary University Research Initiative from the Office of Naval Research; in 2008, Bart-Smith received a $6.5 million award to develop an underwater robot modeled on a manta ray.

The tests of Tunabot take place in a large lab in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Building at UVA Engineering, in a flow tank that takes up about a quarter of the room, and at Harvard University in a similar facility. The eyeless, finless replica fish is roughly 10 inches long; the biological equivalent can get up to seven feet long. A fishing line tether keeps the robot steady, while a green laser light cuts across the midline of the plastic fish. The laser measures the fluid motion shed by the robot with each sweep of its fabricated tail. As the current of water in the flow tank speeds up, the Tunabot's tail and whole body move in a rapid bending pattern, similar to the way a live yellowfin tuna swims.

"We see in the fish robotics literature so far that there are really great systems others have made, but the data is often inconsistent in terms of measurement selection and presentation. It's just the current state of the robotics field at the moment. Our paper about the Tunabot is significant because our comprehensive performance data sets the bar very high," White said.

The relationship between biology and robotics is circular, Lauder said. "One reason I think we have a successful research program in this area is because of the great interaction between biologists and roboticists." Each discovery in one branch informs the other, a type of educational feedback loop that is constantly advancing both the science and the engineering.

"We don't assume that biology has evolved to the best solution," Bart-Smith said. "These fishes have had a long time to evolve to a solution that enables them to survive, specifically, to eat, reproduce and not be eaten. Unconstrained by these requirements, we can focus solely on mechanisms and features that promote higher performance, higher speed, higher efficiency. Our ultimate goal is to surpass biology. How can we build something that looks like biology but swims faster than anything you see out there in the ocean?"

When the Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core satellite passed over the Eastern Pacific Ocean, it flew over the eastern side of Tropical Storm Mario and measured rainfall.

The GPM's core satellite passed over Mario on Sept. 18 at 3:46 a.m. EDT (0746 UTC). GPM found the heaviest rainfall in the southeastern side of the storm falling at a rate of over 36 mm (about 1.4 inch) per hour. Lighter rainfall rated were measured throughout the rest of the east and southern quadrants and band of thunderstorms south of center. Forecasters at NOAA's National Hurricane Center or NHC incorporate the rainfall data into their forecasts

Mario formed on Sept. 17 as Tropical Depression 14E and six hours later at 6 p.m. EDT, it became a tropical storm.

At 11 a.m. EDT (1500 UTC), NHC forecasters said the center of Tropical Storm Mario was located near latitude 14.5 degrees north and longitude 111.0 degrees west. Mario is far from land, so there are no coastal warnings or watches in effect. Mario is centered about 585 miles (940 km) south of the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico.

Mario is moving toward the northwest near 12 mph (19 kph). This motion is expected to continue through tonight, with a decrease in forward speed beginning on Thursday. Mario is expected to become nearly stationary from early Friday through early Saturday.

Maximum sustained winds have increased to near 65 mph (100 kph) with higher gusts. The estimated minimum central pressure is 996 millibars.

Mario is forecast to become a hurricane by Thursday, Sept. 19.

Hurricanes are the most powerful weather event on Earth. NASA's expertise in space and scientific exploration contributes to essential services provided to the American people by other federal agencies, such as hurricane weather forecasting.

In the future, you could be your very own fountain of youth - or at least your own skin repair reservoir. In a proof-of-concept study, researchers from North Carolina State University have shown that exosomes harvested from human skin cells are more effective at repairing sun-damaged skin cells in mice than popular retinol or stem cell-based treatments currently in use. Additionally, the nanometer-sized exosomes can be delivered to the target cells via needle-free injections.

Exosomes are tiny sacs (30 - 150 nanometers across) that are excreted and taken up by cells. They can transfer DNA, RNA or proteins from cell to cell, affecting the function of the recipient cell. In the regenerative medicine field, exosomes are being tested as carriers of stem cell-based treatments for diseases ranging from heart disease to respiratory disorders.

"Think of an exosome as an envelope with instructions inside - like one cell mailing a letter to another cell and telling it what to do," says Ke Cheng, professor of molecular biomedical sciences at NC State, professor in the NC State/UNC-Chapel Hill Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering and corresponding author of a paper describing the work. "In this case, the envelope contains microRNA, non-coding RNA that instructs the recipient cell to produce more collagen."

To test whether exosomes could be effective for skin repair, Cheng and his team first grew and harvested exosomes from skin cells. They used commercially available human dermal fibroblast cells, expanding them in a suspension culture that allowed the cells to adhere to one another, forming spheroids. The spheroids then excreted exosomes into the media.

"These 3D structures generate more procollagen - more potent exosomes - than you get with 2D cell expansion," says Cheng.

In a photoaged, nude mouse model, Cheng tested the 3D spheroid-grown exosomes against three other treatments: retinoid cream; 2D-grown exosomes; and bone marrow derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) exosomes, a popular stem cell-based anti-aging treatment currently in use. The team compared improvements in skin thickness and collagen production after treatment. They found that skin thickness in 3D exosome treated mice was 20% better than in the untreated and 5% better than in the MSC-treated mouse. Additionally, they found 30% more collagen production in skin treated with the 3D exosomes than in the MSC treated skin, which was the second most effective treatment.

"I think this study shows the potential for 3D exosomes to be used in anti-aging skin treatments," says Cheng. "There are two major benefits to exosome treatments over conventional treatments: one, you can use donor skin cells from anyone to grow and harvest these exosomes - they aren't cells, so you don't run the risk of rejection. And two, the treatment can be administered without needles - exosomes are small enough to be able to penetrate the skin via pressure, or jet injection methods.

"Our hope is that eventually people may be able to 'bank' skin samples and come back to them, or use donor exosome treatments that they can administer themselves. We believe that this work is an important step toward potentiating future human clinical trials in the prevention and treatment of cutaneous aging."

Tatum Fettig remembers when her family's lives changed forever. In 2016, her daughter Teagan began vomiting and struggling with balance. At Seattle Children's, Teagan, then 2, was diagnosed with a pediatric brain tumor, medulloblastoma. Through the grueling process of chemotherapy treatment and radiation, Fettig and her husband were by Teagan's side, trying to cope with the uncertainty of whether they would see their youngest child grow up. They mourned the loss of their former life.

"Having a child with cancer is traumatizing," Fettig said. "It doesn't mean you're broken, but it affects the whole family. People tell parents to take care of themselves, but when your kid is sick, you can't think of anything else."

Fettig's experience is not uncommon. Research shows that parents of children with cancer experience psychological stress during the child's treatment. After treatment is complete, parents report higher anxiety, depression and posttraumatic stress than the average population. However, formal mental, emotional and social support for parents is not typical after a child's cancer diagnosis.

In a study published in JAMA Network Open, Seattle Children's researchers addressed this need, adapting an intervention previously used for teens and young adults with cancer. They found that one-on-one sessions teaching skills through a tool called Promoting Resilience in Stress Management for Parents (PRISM-P) improved resilience and benefit finding, or personal growth, among parents of children with cancer.

"This tells me we are doing what is perhaps most important for parents: helping them to know they can come back again tomorrow and that they can find some good in the bad. These two things will help both them and their families," said Dr. Abby Rosenberg, a researcher at Seattle Children's Research Institute and lead author of the study. "We know that parent well-being transfers to kid well-being and vice versa, so it is important to help parents to help their kids. In fact, that is what we heard a lot in the PRISM-P trial: 'This helps me take better care of my kid.'"

The need for more support

Parents of children undergoing cancer treatment face unique demands and challenges that significantly impact their lives. This can include changes in employment status, possibly leading to new financial stressors, or changes to the family dynamic and structure if treatment is sought out far from home.

Parents must also learn various caregiving roles, which can be overwhelming.

"Being a parent of a child with cancer is necessarily hard," Rosenberg said. "Caregivers might experience sadness, anger, angst, terror, and stress, as well as profound love, patience, and sacrifice."

Each family in Seattle Children's Cancer Care Unit has an assigned social worker who assists with diverse needs ranging from concrete, including assistance with insurance and transportation, to psychosocial, such as counseling and friendly, compassionate support. However, Rosenberg says nearly every family says they would like more help.

"The child's needs come first and parent needs, especially when it comes to dedicated time to bolster coping skills, are often unmet," Rosenberg said.

Promoting resilience to help parents cope

PRISM-P - which can be taught by volunteers - aims to help caregivers cope with life changes and stresses.

"The program is easy to learn, with simple skills we learned from other families were necessary for coping at its foundation," Rosenberg said. "It also says: 'we see you.' In other words, it acknowledges that there is more to cancer than biology."

To help build resilience, the ability to use resources to sustain psychological or physical well-being in the face of stress, PRISM teaches four skills. These include stress management and relaxation, setting measurable goals with clear steps, cognitive restructuring (recognizing negative self-talk and reframing experiences) and meaning making (finding purpose and identifying gratitude despite adversity). Each skill has been associated with positive emotional outcomes and better coping, and people can pick the ones that work for them, Rosenberg said.

"While we identified the resources by listening to patients and families, we also know they have been used in human experiences as diverse as natural disaster, poverty, war, and illness," Rosenberg said. "What we are really doing is targeting the resources people either figure out or don't, and deliberately providing them so people don't have to learn on their own."

The study included 94 parents whose children recently received a cancer diagnosis at Seattle

Children's from December 2016 through December 2018. The randomized clinical trial explored whether PRISM-P delivered in either four one-on-one sessions or one-day group sessions improved parent-reported resilience compared with usual care.

In between sessions, worksheets and the PRISM digital app provided parents opportunities to put what they learned into practice. For example, parents had access to deep breathing guidance and journals that helped set goals, stop negative self-talk and record moments of gratitude.

While one-on-one sessions were effective in building parent-reported resilience, the group setting sessions did not lead to any significant improvement. This was likely because they were difficult for parents to get to, with few parents participating in each group.

All study participants reported that the program was valuable.

Helping both parents and children

Fettig participated in the study's one-on-one PRISM-P sessions while her daughter received cancer treatment. Before becoming Teagan's caretaker, Fettig was a high school counselor. Despite knowing the importance of resilience skills, Fettig remembers feeling overwhelmed and unable to relax during Teagan's treatment, until she began using tools taught through PRISM.

"When you're under such acute stress and in fight-or-flight mode, all you can think about is your kid surviving," Fettig said. "PRISM is simple, useful and accessible. It helped me organize time for my mental health and reminded me of the resources I knew already existed but was not tapping into. I feel lucky that I got access to PRISM."

Fettig specifically used the stress management tool of mindfulness, which involves taking a breath, quieting the mind and identifying emotions and stressors without judgment. After participating in the PRISM sessions, Fettig began using meditation phone apps in the hospital room each day while Teagan was inpatient.

"It's a real challenge to calm yourself when your kid's undergoing chemotherapy," Fettig said. "I learned that if I could calm my body down, I could sometimes calm my mind down. Nothing could fix our problems at the time, but I realized that if mindfulness helped me be calmer just for a moment, I was grateful for that one moment that I got."

Fettig discovered that mindfulness helped her be more present with her daughter.

"PRISM helped me start thinking about being calm - whether that's through meditating or playing music in the hospital room," Fettig said. "Making this connection that the more present I was, the more available I was to help Teagan motivated me - the idea that if I calmed down, she would enjoy the days she got more."

Expanding PRISM

After proton radiation treatment, Teagan suffered from a side effect that prevented her from walking, talking and sitting up, requiring several additional treatments. Today, Teagan is a happy, social 4-year-old who loves her older brother, horse therapy, dancing, singing and art projects. She is walking more and more in her walker, progressing in therapies and recently began her second year of preschool. Fettig said she continues to rely on the mindfulness skills she learned in PRISM.

"For us, post-treatment is a much bigger part of our journey. It's a full-time job to manage the side effects from cancer treatment and Teagan's different therapies," Fettig said. "You realize when you have a kid with cancer that you have very little control over anything. The one thing I can put my energy into is getting her the best care to make the best out of this situation that no parent wants to be in."

Rosenberg and her colleagues are working to expand PRISM beyond the Cancer Care Unit through a pilot program in various Seattle Children's clinics. They are hoping to find out whether the tool will help patients, families and staff.

"This next phase is so important because it will tell us how to get PRISM into as many hands as possible, and that is my goal," Rosenberg said.

About 466 million years ago, long before the age of the dinosaurs, the Earth froze. The seas began to ice over at the Earth's poles, and the new range of temperatures around the planet set the stage for a boom of new species evolving. The cause of this ice age was a mystery, until now: a new study in Science Advances argues that the ice age was caused by global cooling, triggered by extra dust in the atmosphere from a giant asteroid collision in outer space.

There's always a lot of dust from outer space floating down to Earth, little bits of asteroids and comets, but this dust is normally only a tiny fraction of the other dust in our atmosphere such as volcanic ash, dust from deserts and sea salt. But when a 93-mile-wide asteroid between Mars and Jupiter broke apart 466 million years ago, it created way more dust than usual. "Normally, Earth gains about 40,000 tons of extraterrestrial material every year," says Philipp Heck, a curator at the Field Museum, associate professor at the University of Chicago, and one of the paper's authors. "Imagine multiplying that by a factor of a thousand or ten thousand." To contextualize that, in a typical year, one thousand semi trucks' worth of interplanetary dust fall to Earth. In the couple million years following the collision, it'd be more like ten million semis.

"Our hypothesis is that the large amounts of extraterrestrial dust over a timeframe of at least two million years played an important role in changing the climate on Earth, contributing to cooling," says Heck.

"Our results show for the first time that such dust, at times, has cooled Earth dramatically," says Birger Schmitz of Sweden's Lund University, the study's lead author and a research associate at the Field Museum. "Our studies can give a more detailed, empirical-based understanding of how this works, and this in turn can be used to evaluate if model simulations are realistic."

To figure it out, researchers looked for traces of space dust in 466-million-year-old rocks, and compared it to tiny micrometeorites from Antarctica as a reference. "We studied extraterrestrial matter, meteorites and micrometeorites, in the sedimentary record of Earth, meaning rocks that were once sea floor," says Heck. "And then we extracted the extraterrestrial matter to discover what it was and where it came from."

Extracting the extraterrestrial matter--the tiny meteorites and bits of dust from outer space--involves taking the ancient rock and treating it with acid that eats away the stone and leaves the space stuff. The team then analyzed the chemical makeup of the remaining dust. The team also analyzed rocks from the ancient seafloor and looked for elements that rarely appear in Earth rocks and for isotopes--different forms of atoms--that show hallmarks of coming from outer space. For instance, helium atoms normally have two protons, two neutrons, and two electrons, but some that are shot out of the Sun and into space are missing a neutron. The presence of these special helium isotopes, along with rare metals often found in asteroids, proves that the dust originated from space.

Other scientists had already established that our planet was undergoing an ice age around this time. The amount of water in the Earth's oceans influences the way that rocks on the seabed form, and the rocks from this time period show signs of shallower oceans--a hint that some of the Earth's water was trapped in glaciers and sea ice. Schmitz and his colleagues are the first to show that this ice age syncs up with the extra dust in the atmosphere. "The timing appears to be perfect," he says. The extra dust in the atmosphere helps explain the ice age--by filtering out sunlight, the dust would have caused global cooling.

Since the dust floated down to Earth over at least two million years, the cooling was gradual enough for life to adapt and even benefit from the changes. An explosion of new species evolved as creatures adapted for survival in regions with different temperatures.

Heck notes that while this period of global cooling proved beneficial to life on Earth, fast-paced climate change can be catastrophic. "In the global cooling we studied, we're talking about timescales of millions of years. It's very different from the climate change caused by the meteorite 65 million years ago that killed the dinosaurs, and it's different from the global warming today--this global cooling was a gentle nudge. There was less stress."

It's tempting to think that today's global warming could be solved by replicating the dust shower that triggered global cooling 466 million years ago. But Heck says he would be cautious: "Geoengineering proposals should be evaluated very critically and very carefully, because if something goes wrong, things could become worse than before."

While Heck isn't convinced that we've found the solution to climate change, he says it's a good idea for us to be thinking along these lines.

"We're experiencing global warming, it's undeniable," says Heck. "And we need to think about how we can prevent catastrophic consequences, or minimize them. Any idea that's reasonable should be explored."

Redesigning molecules originally developed to treat the skin disease psoriasis could lead to an effective new drug against malaria, according to an international team of researchers. The team modified a class of molecules called pantothenamides to increase their stability in humans. The new compounds stop the malaria parasite from replicating in infected humans and from being transmitted to mosquitos, and are effective against malaria parasites resistant to currently available drugs. A paper describing this new class of modified pantothenamides appears online September 18, 2019, in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Malaria is a major global health concern, with around 216 million cases and 400,000 deaths annually. The deadliest form of the disease is caused by the parasite Plasmodium falciparum, which is transmitted to humans from the bite of an infected Anopheles mosquito. Because many Plasmodium parasites have developed resistance to the most common drugs used against them, there is a pressing need for effective new treatment options.

"We have known for a long time that pantothenamides are extremely potent against the malaria parasite, but they become unstable within biological fluids because an enzyme clips them apart before they can act," said Manuel Llinás, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and of chemistry at Penn State and an author of the paper. "Our team of collaborators, led by Koen Dechering at TropIQ Health Sciences and Joost Schalkwijk at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands, found that changing a chemical bond in a pantothenamide molecule prevents this clipping, making it viable for use as a new antimalarial drug."

The team found that the modified pantothenamide molecules not only interfere with the development of the malaria parasite during its asexual growth phase in the blood but also prevent transmission of the sexual form of the parasite from human blood to mosquitos.

"By also preventing the transmission of malaria parasites from infected people into mosquitos, these pantothenamides can reduce the chances that mosquitos will be infectious to others," said Llinás. "It is currently widely accepted that next-generation antimalarial drugs must target the parasite at multiple stages to both cure the disease in an infected individual and prevent its spread to others."

Llinás and Erik Allman, postdoctoral scholar at Penn State at the time of the research, investigated exactly how the four most potent molecules in the compound class kill the malaria parasite. Specifically, they examined how these compounds affect the parasite's metabolism while growing in human blood.

The team discovered that, because the pantothenamide molecule closely resembles the essential vitamin B5, it is mistakenly taken in and metabolized by the parasite. This leads to the formation of molecular analogues, or antimetabolites, which decrease the parasite's production of acetyl-CoA, a compound critical for its survival.

"The molecule has a mechanism of action that hasn't been used before," said Dechering. "This means that there's no resistance to the drug as yet, and it is effective against many forms of malaria. Because parasite resistance to malaria drugs is a major problem worldwide, we are very close to a breakthrough."

"Pantothenamides have a simple chemistry, so they are easy and inexpensive to make," said Llinás, "And we now know their mode of action, which we don't always know before moving into drug development. This makes pantothenamides excellent candidates for further development and eventual clinical trials."

Thick, impenetrable ice slabs are expanding rapidly on the interior of Greenland's ice sheet, where the ice is normally porous and able to reabsorb meltwater. These slabs are instead sending meltwater spilling into the ocean, according to a new CIRES-led assessment, threatening to increase the country's contribution to sea level rise by as much as 2.9 inches by 2100.

Although runoff from ice slabs has added less than a millimeter to global sea levels so far, this contribution will grow substantially as ice slabs continue to expand in a warming climate, said Mike MacFerrin, a CIRES and University of Colorado Boulder researcher who led the new study, published today in Nature.

"Even under moderate climate projections, ice slabs could double the size of the runoff zone by 2100," MacFerrin said. "Under higher emissions scenarios, the runoff zone nearly triples in size."

In 2000, Greenland's runoff zone--the region of the ice sheet where runoff contributes to sea level rise--was roughly the size of New Mexico. Between 2001 and 2013, ice slabs expanded the runoff zone by about 65,000 km2--that's an average pace of two American football fields a minute. By 2100, as Earth's temperatures continue to climb and ice slabs continue to grow, the runoff zone could expand by the size of Colorado under a moderate emissions scenario, the team found. That would raise seas by an extra quarter inch to just over an inch (7-33 mm).

Under a higher emissions scenario, with greater release of greenhouse gases, the runoff zone could increase by the size of Texas, according to the new paper, contributing an extra half inch to nearly three inches (17-74 mm) of sea-level rise. The runoff estimates from ice slabs are in addition to other sources of sea-level rise from Greenland, such as calving icebergs.

Greenland's ice sheet is a complex quilt of frozen textures: melt lakes dot the surface, snow falls each winter, and old compacted snow slowly compresses into glacial ice. Over most of Greenland, the snow only partially melts each summer and later refreezes into thin ice disks or "lenses" just an inch or two thick, nestled within the compacted snow. Normally, meltwater can percolate downward and around ice lenses, refreezing in place without running off to sea.

But as extreme Arctic melting events become more frequent, those delicate ice layers expand and solidify into mammoth, 1- to 16-meter (3- to 50-foot) thick "slabs," creating an impermeable shell just beneath the surface. Meltwater can no longer percolate down into the ice sheet and instead flows downhill along the ice slabs, eventually into the ocean.

Such melt episodes are increasingly common in Greenland: In July of 2012, snow and ice melted from 97 percent of Greenland's ice sheet surface, an event not seen in the 33-year satellite record, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), part of CIRES and CU Boulder. This spring, which was particularly warm and sunny in Greenland, a record-setting 80 billion tons of Greenland ice melted.

MacFerrin and his colleagues accidentally discovered ice slabs in 2012, when they found large sections of solid ice in ice core samples, instead of the thin ice lenses they expected. They'd never seen anything like it before, MacFerrin said. Since the initial discovery, the team has investigated the ice slabs by driving snowmobiles across southwest Greenland, dragging ground-penetrating radars behind to map the extent of slabs. The scientists also harnessed NASA Icebridge data and climate models to understand how the slabs have expanded in recent decades, and to predict how they may continue to grow.

"As the climate continues to warm, these ice slabs will continue to grow and enhance other meltwater feedbacks," said Mahsa Moussavi, NSIDC researcher and a coauthor on the paper. "It's a snowball effect: more melting creates more ice slabs, which create more melting, which, creates again more ice slabs."

This process fundamentally alters the ice sheet's present and future hydrology. Arctic feedbacks like this are critical to understand because they show just how much, and how quickly, a warming climate can change Earth's most vulnerable regions.

"Interestingly, decades ago scientists hypothesized what meltwater in a warming climate could do to Greenland's snow layers, based on measurements and theory." said Horst Machguth, a researcher at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and second author on the paper. "Our results show that their hypotheses were close to what is playing out in Greenland today."

The climate mitigation path the world follows will determine how much the ice slabs will contribute to sea level in decades to come--from a couple millimeters to a few inches. "Humans have a choice about which way this goes," MacFerrin said.

Scientists say bolder actions to protect coral reefs from the effects of global warming will benefit all ecosystems, including those on land.

In an article published in Nature today two researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University (Coral CoE at JCU) say the world's reefs will disappear by 2070 if climate change continues on its current path. Even well-protected World Heritage-listed coral reefs have been increasingly damaged by regional and global bleaching since 1980.

Prof Tiffany Morrison and Prof Terry Hughes suggest a new, holistic approach to safeguarding coral reefs by focussing on land as well as the ocean.

"We must take a new, bolder approach to tackle the underlying causes of coral reef decline," lead author Prof Morrison said. "This means fixing the causes on a global, as well as local, scale--both in the sea and on land."

As an example, to protect the Great Barrier Reef, Prof Morrison suggests policymakers in Australia should replace coal-fired power with renewable energy sources, develop land-based aquaculture, and restore or rehabilitate terrestrial vegetation and wetlands in the 425,000-square-kilometre catchment of the Great Barrier Reef.

"Done strategically, these actions can reduce global emissions, capture carbon, curb agricultural runoff onto coastal reefs while also enhancing people's livelihoods and food security," she said.

The Nature article argues that current approaches to coral reef conservation are failing as protecting local biodiversity on reefs and trying to restore damaged corals are the main focus.

"Current approaches to protect coral reefs are not enough to stem the ongoing decline," Prof Hughes said.

"Attempts to grow corals in aquaria or underwater nurseries are futile unless we address the major threats," he said.

"Reefs won't disappear if we tackle the root cause of their decline; global carbon emissions need to be slashed to 45% of 2010 levels by 2030."

The authors suggest that a bolder, scaled-up approach to the stewardship of land and sea--focused initially on coral reefs--could itself help society meet this goal.

Coral reefs cover only 0.5% of the ocean floor, but they support almost 30% of the world's marine fish species. 400 million people depend on reefs for work, food and protection from waves, storms and floods.

"What we're suggesting is not impossible," the authors said. "Countries such as Costa Rica, states such as California and cities such as Copenhagen have all taken up initiatives to curb greenhouse gas emissions and provide alternative economic opportunities that set powerful examples for the rest of the world."

The article urges scientists, policymakers, non-governmental organisations and philanthropists to develop similarly bold strategies to protect reefs, other ecosystems and people in a warming world.

Sea urchins have five teeth, each held by a separate jaw in a circular arrangement at the center of their spiked, spherical bodies. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Matter on September 18 have discovered how the teeth of the pink sea urchin are specially equipped to sharpen themselves.

Rather than simply resisting wear, their teeth are actually built to chip in a way that helps them to maintain a sharp edge. The researchers liken it to the sharpening of a knife by selectively removing material from the cutting edge. The findings may lead to new kinds of synthetic materials for use in various applications, the researchers say.

"The material on the outer layer of the tooth exhibits a complex behavior of plasticity and damage that regulates 'controlled' chipping of the tooth to maintain its sharpness," said Horacio Espinosa of Northwestern University. To make up for the loss of material, he explains, an urchin's teeth continue to grow throughout life.

Researchers had suggested previously that sea urchins might have such a self-sharpening tooth mechanism. But it wasn't clear how they could selectively cleave portions of their teeth, which consist of apparently brittle ceramic constituents, to stay sharp.

In the new study, Espinosa and colleagues combined sophisticated mechanical testing and electron microscopy to capture 3D movies showing how the urchin's teeth wear. Their studies show that the teeth consist of ceramic composites arranged in a precise way. On the convex side of the tooth, calcite fibers provide structural integrity. This fibrous composite transitions to another composite made of inclined calcite plates on the convex side of the tooth. As the tooth wears, those calcite plates chip away to maintain sharpness.

While the findings provide intriguing insight into the urchins, Espinosa's primary interest is in understanding the behavior of natural and synthetic nanomaterials across different scales. He says the new findings should help to guide the design of microstructure and the selection of material constituents for the design of tools for a range of cutting, grinding, and boring applications.

"I am exploring ways to do additive manufacturing of materials that can exhibit the performance of natural materials," he says, including those that make up the teeth of pink sea urchins.

As the global demand for tissue and organ transplants significantly outstrips supply, tissue engineering might provide a potential solution. But one of the significant challenges in tissue engineering is growing tissue in 3D, and the scaffolds used to position cells to develop tissue-specific functions are often challenging or prohibitively expensive to develop.

But in a review publishing September 18, 2019 in the journal Trends in Biotechnology, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Lowell explore recent efforts to use everyday materials like ice, paper, and spinach as tissue scaffolds. These unconventional materials, they argue, are more functional, more sustainable, and less expensive, as well as being available around the globe and applicable to many areas of biomedical research.

"Some of the recent tissue engineering techniques might be quite expensive, and some of them might require long and tedious optimization procedures to generate those three-dimensional scaffolds," says corresponding author Gulden Camci-Unal. "We're actually turning to nature and trying to see what exists and how can we utilize them for tissue regeneration."

The scaffolds used in tissue engineering help position cells in a particular pattern, which in turn allows them to become functional in a tissue-specific manner. However, finding the perfect scaffold that is porous and biocompatible with mechanical strength is not easy. For that reason, scientists are now borrowing ready-made natural materials for a cost-efficient and sustainable approach.

"We're essentially trying to simplify the process and trying to use readily available materials that can fit in the tissue during the application," says Camci-Unal.

For example, a research team at Worcester Polytechnic Institute is now hacking into different plants' unique vein systems, such as spinach. Spinach's dense network of veins resembles the vasculature network of the human heart. By washing out the plant cells and leaving the plant wall matrix behind, the researchers can grow cardiac tissue on spinach skeletons.

Other researchers have explored a variety of other materials. Tofu is being utilized as a protein-rich scaffold to help wound healing through the promotion of cell adhesion. Incorporating calcium-rich eggshells to reinforce scaffolding materials can boost bone healing and nerve tissue regeneration. Some studies have drawn inspiration from origami to construct 3D paper scaffolds to grow bone tissue.

"People have been using paper for so many different applications for thousands of years," says Camci-Unal. "But it wasn't until 10 years ago that we started using them as tissue-engineering scaffolds for cell culture platforms. I think sometimes simple things are just overlooked."

Scientists' recent ventures into unconventional biomaterials show promising results but also need further investigation in vivo. While these biomaterials improve the functionality, scalability, and sustainability of current tissue engineering and potentially provide a novel approach to serve a broad spectrum of diseases, there is still more work that needs to be done.

Before clinical translation is possible, Camci-Unal says, standard protocols, biomaterial efficacy, and patient safety need to be established. This is particularly true because the field often overlooks and understudies many of these biomaterials. "We're not familiar to some of the materials because it hasn't been studied extensively yet," she says. "We're not aware of what the disadvantages may be, or there are other great advantages that we're not aware of yet."

One other benefit of these unconventional and naturally derived materials is that they can simplify tissue-engineering processes and lower the cost of study and environmental impacts, making this kind of research more globally accessible. "We want to make science available to anybody in the world, not just to highly equipped and highly resourced facilities," says Camci-Unal. "We're trying to develop biomaterials for all."