Tech

Learning from each other and benefiting from each other: This is the basic idea behind the European Network for Health Technology Assessment (EUnetHTA). The aim of the collaboration is to promote scientific and technical collaboration between European health technology assessment (HTA) agencies across borders. A second aim is to avoid unnecessary duplication of work - not every diagnostic or therapeutic intervention requires a separate HTA report in every country. HTA reports prepared by European countries or assessments prepared jointly by individual HTA agencies may potentially also be used in other countries as a basis for reimbursement decisions. The EU Commission is striving to create a legal basis for this in the near future.

For the first time, researchers from the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) were in charge of preparing a EUnetHTA report. According to the conclusion, the benefit of screening for osteoporosis in the general population has not yet been proven. The eight studies available do not prove that screening prevents fractures. Researchers from the Swiss Network for HTA (SNHTA) co-authored the report, which was reviewed by further researchers from Barcelona (Spain), Vienna (Austria) and Bucharest (Romania) before it was published.

Professor Dr. Stefan Sauerland, Head of IQWiG's Department of Non-Drug Interventions and one of the main authors of the report notes: "The collaboration with our European colleagues in preparing the report worked well. The assessment was conducted by consensus. The prerequisite for this was that everyone involved applied the same standards for scientific assessments to this project."

Within Europe there are still major differences as to when, how and by whom benefit assessments are conducted. IQWiG therefore remains sceptical about the EU Commission's plans for Pan-European, uniform and nationally binding HTA projects. This particularly applies to the area of drug interventions.

The EUnetHTA activities and the report on osteoporosis screening are funded as part of a research project of the EU Commission. The current report therefore has no influence on decisions for the German health care system.

Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas and ozone depleting substance.

The ability to exploit this gas as a chemical reagent is an attractive prospect, both as an abundant feedstock and means to remediate the detrimental impact it has on the environment.

Researchers at the University of Warwick have prepared transition metal compounds of nitrous oxide that provide a conceptional foundation for its application in new value-added chemical processes.

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a potent atmospheric pollutant. Although naturally occurring, anthropogenic N2O emissions from intensive agricultural fertilisation, industrial processes, and combustion of fossil fuels and biomass are a major cause for concern. Researchers at the University of Warwick have isolated elusive transition metal compounds of N2O that provide clues into how it could be used in sustainable chemical technologies.

N2O is a powerful greenhouse gas, with a half life of 114 years in the atmosphere and global warming potential 300 times greater than carbon dioxide. It is also the dominant ozone depleting substance emitted in the 21st century.

As an abundant chemical feedstock, the use of N2O as a sustainable oxidant in synthetic organic chemistry is an attractive prospect, liberating environmentally benign dinitrogen (N2). Such reactions are encumbered by the robust triatomic formulation of this gas, typically requiring forcing reaction conditions that are energy intensive and undesirable from a remediation perspective. The development of mild and selective alternatives is a longstanding ambition of research scientists, but has been met with little success.

In their paper 'Rhodium(I) Pincer Complexes of Nitrous Oxide' published in the journal Angewandte Chemie, researchers from the University of Warwick's Department of Chemistry have reported well-defined compounds of nitrous oxide that provide valuable insights into how this gas interacts with one of the most widely employed transition metals in organic synthesis.

The associated experimental data is the most comprehensive collected to date for any transition metal adduct, for which there are very few precedents. This work provides a fundamental reference point in the field and is likely to stimulate and guide future catalyst developments.

Dr Adrian Chaplin from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick comments:

"Nitrous oxide is commonly known as laughing gas, but it's environmental impact is certainly nothing to laugh about and often overlooked altogether. As a chemical reagent its potential has yet to be fully harnessed, and to do so a sustainable manner is formidable challenge for the scientific community."

"In my team, we are trying to tackle this problem using a fundamental, bottom up, approach. The compounds that we have prepared represent the starting point of our journey, but the associated experimental data seems to be guiding us in the right direction and we are looking forward to where it takes us."

Hurricane Kiko continued to track west through the Eastern Pacific Ocean when NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite passed overhead and provided a view of the storm. Satellite imagery revealed an elongated shape, which indicated wind shear was still affecting Kiko.

The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard Suomi NPP provided an infrared image of the storm on Sept. 16 at 6:12 p.m. EDT (2212 UTC). The VIIRS image and microwave satellite imagery indicates that the northeasterly wind shear that was still affecting Kiko.

In general, wind shear is a measure of how the speed and direction of winds change with altitude. Tropical cyclones are like rotating cylinders of winds. Each level needs to be stacked on top each other vertically in order for the storm to maintain strength or intensify. Wind shear occurs when winds at different levels of the atmosphere push against the rotating cylinder of winds, weakening the rotation by pushing it apart at different levels.

The National Hurricane Center noted that satellite imagery shows an irregular shaped central dense overcast with the anvil clouds being forced to the southwest of center. Anvil clouds form in the upper parts of thunderstorms and the anvils are mostly composed of ice (because they are so high in the atmosphere). They get their anvil shape because rising air in thunderstorms expands and spreads out as the air flattens against the bottom of the stratosphere.

At 5 a.m. EDT (0900 UTC) on Sept. 17, the center of Hurricane Kiko was located near latitude 17.2 degrees north and longitude 124.7 degrees west. That is about 1,035 miles (1,670 km) west-southwest of the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico. Kiko is moving toward the west near 5 mph (7 km/h). A turn to the west-southwest is expected today, followed by a turn to the west to west-northwest by Wednesday.

Maximum sustained winds are near 80 mph (130 kph) with higher gusts. Hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 15 miles (30 km) from the center and tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 60 miles (95 km). The estimated minimum central pressure is 985 millibars.

The National Hurricane Center said, "Additional weakening is expected through this evening and Kiko is forecast to become a tropical storm later today. Some slight re-strengthening is possible Wednesday and Thursday."

For updated forecasts. visit: http://www.nhc.noaa.gov

A new study led by researchers at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in collaboration with that National Institute of Public Health, Mexico, that accounts for folic acid (FA) fortification in staple foods made from wheat and corn, such as bakery bread and tortillas, found that large proportion of women of childbearing age have FA intake below levels recommended by the World Health Organization, potentially raising the risk for neural tube defects in their offspring. The study is one of a few to investigate FA intake after fortification, and the first such report for Mexico. Results are published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

In Mexico, wheat and corn flour fortification with FA was implemented in 2001 and mandated in 2008, but without direct enforcement. Current Mexican nutrient content tables do not account for FA in bakery bread and corn masa-based foods which are dietary staples in Mexico.

Researchers measured FA and folate content in bakery bread and tortillas collected from geographically diverse areas in Mexico. They then extrapolated these data to the larger population, adjusting FA intake tables from a 2012 national health and nutrition survey--Mexico's equivalent of U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. They found that overall folate intake improved, but between 9 and 32 percent of girls ages 14-18 and between 9 and 28 percent of women ages 19-39 continue to have intakes that are below the WHO recommended levels. They also found that between 5 and 12 percent of children 1-8 years (up to 1.9 million children) are at risk of ingesting FA at levels above the WHO age-specific tolerable upper intake limit. In children, the effects of high exposure are unknown, but in adults, high exposure has been associated with risk for cancer.

Even though flour fortification has been mandatory in Mexico for the last 10 years, the researchers found a great variability in the use of fortified flours. These differences correspond with geography, with exposure to fortified flower increasing with population size. In rural areas, women are more likely to eat tortillas and corn masa-based foods made by small manufacturers with unfortified flour, putting them at greater risk for insufficient FA intake.

"Our findings suggest that more regulation and oversight related to monitoring and evaluation of fortification of corn and wheat flour may avoid health risks from overexposure of vulnerable segments of the population, as well as insufficient intake in the population initially targeted by the fortification program," says first author Manuela Orjuela -Grimm, MD, assistant professor of Epidemiology and Pediatrics at the Columbia Mailman School at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

Physicists from the University of Groningen constructed a two-dimensional spin transistor, in which spin currents were generated by an electric current through graphene. A monolayer of a transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) was placed on top of graphene to induce charge-to-spin conversion in the graphene. This experimental observation was described in the issue of the journal Nano Letters published on 11 September 2019.

Spintronics is an attractive alternative way of creating low-power electronic devices. It is not based on a charge current but on a current of electron spins. Spin is a quantum mechanical property of an electron, a magnetic moment that could be used to transfer or store information.

Heterostructure

Graphene, a 2D form of carbon, is an excellent spin transporter. However, in order to create or manipulate spins, interaction of its electrons with the atomic nuclei is needed: spin-orbit coupling. This interaction is very weak in carbon, making it difficult to generate or manipulate spin currents in graphene. However, it has been shown that spin-orbit coupling in graphene will increase when a monolayer of a material with heavier atoms (such as a TMD) is placed on top, creating a Van der Waals heterostructure.

In the Physics of Nanodevices group, led by Professor Bart van Wees at the University of Groningen, Ph.D. student Talieh Ghiasi and postdoctoral researcher Alexey Kaverzin created such a heterostructure. Using gold electrodes, they were able to send a pure charge current through the graphene and generate a spin current, referred to as the Rashba-Edelstein effect. This happens due to the interaction with the heavy atoms of the TMD monolayer (in this case, tungsten disulfide). This well-known effect was observed for the first time in graphene that was in proximity to other 2D materials.

Symmetries

'The charge current induces a spin current in the graphene, which we could measure with spin-selective ferromagnetic cobalt electrodes,' says Ghiasi. This charge-to-spin conversion makes it possible to build all-electrical spin circuits with graphene. Previously, the spins had to be injected through a ferromagnet. 'We have also shown that the efficiency of the generation of the spin accumulation can be tuned by the application of an electric field,' adds Ghiasi. This means that they have built a spin transistor in which the spin current can be switched on and off.

The Rashba-Edelstein effect is not the only effect that produces a spin current. The study shows that the Spin-Hall effect does the same, but that these spins are oriented differently. 'When we apply a magnetic field, we make the spins rotate in the field. Different symmetries of the spin signals generated by the two effects in interaction with the magnetic field help us to disentangle the contribution of each effect in one system,' explains Ghiasi. It was also the first time that both types of charge-to-spin conversion mechanisms were observed in the same system. 'This will help us to gain more fundamental insights into the nature of spin-orbit coupling in these heterostructures.'

Graphene Flagship

Apart from the fundamental insights that the study can provide, building an all-electrical 2D spin transistor (without ferromagnets) has considerable significance for spintronic applications, which is also a goal of the EU Graphene Flagship. 'This is especially true because we were able to see the effect at room temperature. The spin signal decreased with increasing temperature but was still very much present under ambient conditions.'

NASA's Terra Satellite provided a visible image of Hurricane Humberto when it was off the coast of the Carolinas and slowly moving north. The satellite image revealed that Humberto is a very large storm.

On Sept. 16, the Moderate Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Terra satellite provided a visible image of Hurricane Humberto. The storm appears quite large in the imagery as it stretches from Florida to North Carolina, and has a tail extending to the northeast for hundreds of miles into the western Atlantic Ocean north of Bermuda. In the image, powerful thunderstorms circled the eye, which was also visible.

Humberto appears to have grown in size, and although it is located off the U.S. East coast, its extent is reaching Bermuda. The National Hurricane Center or NHC issued a Tropical Storm Warning for Bermuda on Sept. 17. Humberto may bring periods of heavy rain to Bermuda beginning Tuesday, with rainfall accumulations of 1 to 3 inches expected. Large swells generated by Humberto will increase along the coast of Bermuda by Wednesday.

NHC said at 8 a.m. EDT (1200 UTC), the large and ragged eye of Hurricane Humberto was located near latitude 30.6 degrees north and longitude 74.0 degrees west. Humberto is moving toward the east-northeast near 8 mph (13 kph).

Data from the Hurricane Hunters aircraft indicate that maximum sustained winds have increased to near 100 mph (160 kph) with higher gusts. Hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 30 miles (45 km) from the center and tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 150 miles (240 km).The minimum central pressure recently measured by the reconnaissance aircraft was 961 millibars.

On the forecast track, NHC said the center of Humberto is forecast to approach Bermuda Wednesday night, Sept. 18. NHC forecasters said that strengthening is expected during the next 24 hours, and Humberto could become a major hurricane by late on Sept. 17 or 18.

ITHACA, N.Y. - Researchers are using ultrasonic waves to manipulate the viscosity of shear-thickening materials, turning solids to slush - and back again.

The study, "Using Acoustic Perturbations to Dynamically Tune Shear Thickening in Colloidal Suspensions," was published Sept. 17 in Physical Review Letters.

Shear-thickening fluids are a class of materials that flow like liquid but solidify when squeezed or sheared quickly, such as quicksand and Oobleck, the children's play slime. Technical applications for the material range from soft body armor and astronaut suits to 3D printing metals and ceramics.

But the shear-thickening process can be uncooperative: The more you manipulate the material, the more it solidifies, which in the case of 3D printing and the manufacture of concrete can lead to gunked-up nozzles and jammed hoppers.

Itai Cohen, professor of and the paper's co-senior author, previously found a way to manipulate - or "tune" - the material by breaking apart the rigid structures or force chains formed by the particles in these suspensions through perpendicular oscillation. But that method proved to be impractical. It isn't easy, after all, to shake and twist a factory pipe.

Cohen and Ph.D. student Meera Ramaswamy partnered with Brian Kirby, professor of engineering, and Ph.D. student Prateek Sehgal, who have been using acoustic transducers to manipulate micro- and nanoscale particles in Kirby's lab.

Sehgal developed a simple but effective device that consists of a bottom plate with an acoustic transducer - called a piezo - that generates ultrasonic waves.

"When you excite that piezo at a specific frequency and a specific voltage, it emanates the acoustic waves through the bottom plate to the suspension. These acoustic disturbances break the force chains responsible for shear-thickening," said Sehgal, co-lead author of the paper with Ramaswamy.

"The disturbances you're inducing are actually really, really tiny, so it doesn't take much to break the contact forces between the micro-particles," Cohen said. "This is the key insight that allowed us to think about applying these kinds of perturbations and getting it to work. Basically, any geometry where you have a flow that's thickened, you can now just slap a piezo on and de-thicken that region. This strategy just opens up the applicability to a much broader range of applications."

The researchers developed the approach by manipulating particles in substances up to 1.3 mm thick, but because ultrasound waves can propagate long distances in material, Kirby anticipates it being used on pipes as wide as a foot. Potential applications include food processing, particularly for materials that have particulate suspensions like pastes, the manufacture of concrete, as well as the 3D printing of ceramics and metals.

The use of acoustic energy is also a valuable scientific tool for researchers who are studying a material's thickening behavior and system dynamics. Typically, to study thickening, one needs to start with a relaxed suspension and ramp up the flows. This process, however, can take a long time.

AURORA, Colo. (Sept. 17, 2019) - A research team led by scientists from the Consortium for Fibrosis Research & Translation (CFReT) at the University of Colorado School of Medicine has identified a potential target for treating heart failure related to fibrosis.

Fibrosis is a wound-healing response after tissue injury or stress. Cardiac fibrosis can cause abnormal stiffening of the heart, contributing to the pathogenesis of heart failure, a condition that afflicts millions of people worldwide. Fibrosis is driven by cells called fibroblasts, which produce excess amounts of extracellular matrix proteins such as collagen, and thereby disrupt operation of the heart.

The CU-led team's study looked at an epigenetic 'reader' protein known as BRD4, showing that it serves a central role in regulating the activation of cardiac fibroblasts. They also found that chemical inhibitors of BRD4 potently block cardiac fibroblast activation, providing a foundation for developing BRD4-targeted small molecule therapies for the treatment of heart failure.

The study was published online last week and appears in the current issue of Circulation Research, the official journal of the American Heart Association and its Council on Basic Cardiovascular Sciences. The cover image for this issue of the journal was chosen from the article. The first authors are Matthew S. Stratton, PhD, and Rushita A. Bagchi, PhD, and the senior author is Timothy A. McKinsey, PhD.

"Our study enhances the understanding of the molecular mechanisms by which BRD4 controls pathogenic gene expression in fibroblasts," said Bagchi, who is a postdoctoral fellow in the McKinsey laboratory. "Together with forthcoming findings, this knowledge should yield a cumulative framework that guides the development of more selective BRD4 inhibitors and offers the potential to provide a therapeutic window for treatment of chronic fibrotic diseases."

Approximately 8.3 million adults in the United States reported thinking about suicide last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While thoughts and deeds are clearly different, University of Houston professor of psychology Rheeda Walker has examined both and finds that current approaches to suicide prevention are troubling, because they usually consist of a "one-size-fits- all approach."

"It's important to realize that in the United States twice as many people die by suicide as by homicide, and as we talk more about suicide I want us to resist assuming that suicide risk is the same for everybody," said Walker, who reported her findings on sociodemographic and mental health predictors of suicide thoughts and attempts in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease

Walker and colleagues analyzed data collected for 336,482 adults who participated in the 2008-to-2013 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, dividing the list along ethnic lines to include whites, blacks, Latinos, Asian or Pacific Islanders (A/PI), American Indian or Alaska Native (AI/AN) and those who identify as multiracial.

Among the highlights from Walker's findings:

* 12-month depression was associated with suicide attempts in that time period for A/PI, AI/AN, Latinos, and whites, but not for black or multiracial adults

* Alcohol abuse and dependence were associated with suicide attempt for AI/AN, black, and white respondents, but not for other racial/ethnic groups

* Marijuana usage showed up as a factor in suicide attempts in both white and multiracial adult groups, but not for other groups

* Low income A/PIs were three times more likely to attempt suicide compared to A/PIs who reported more income

"Risk factors are not universal among ethnic groups," said Walker, who admits it is very common for mental health professionals to point to depression as the immediate reason for a death by suicide. "Depression was not a meaningful predictor of suicide attempts or thoughts for all of the groups." Walker's previous work identified protective factors among black adults as the reason depression may not rise as a precursor.

"Consistently across studies we see that African Americans are very religious compared to other groups and that may buffer the impact of depression in those groups," said Walker.

Walker also reports that the predictors for suicide attempts and suicide ideation, or thinking of the act, are different.

"Overall, only psychological distress was consistently associated with suicide ideation and attempts. Other predictors were associated with suicide ideation or attempts and for some racial or ethnic groups, but not others," said Walker.

Her research provides a window into new suicide risk profiles needed for a rapidly changing America, she said. The U.S. Census Bureau projections reflect a racial and ethnic composition that is rapidly changing. These projections suggest that the majority of the American population will be composed of "minority" individuals by 2044.

"When we ask people if they've thought about suicide in the past, but we don't note their race, or overemphasize depression and underplay their marijuana use, for example, we miss important opportunities to generate a risk profile that can lead to better prediction."

Although peatlands make up only 3% of the Earth's surface, they store one third of the soil carbon trapped in soils globally. Preserving peatlands is therefore of paramount importance for mitigating climate change, provided that these vulnerable environments are not themselves threatened by global warming.

To better determine this risk, two French scientists, including Vincent Jassey, a CNRS researcher at the Laboratoire Ecologie Fontionnelle et Environnement (CNRS/Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier/INP Toulouse), studied carbon uptake by the two main species of moss that make up the Le Forbonnet peatland in Frasne (Jura). They discovered that when temperatures were high and also during droughts, the two Sphagnum species behaved in opposite ways: Sphagnum medium resists drought, whereas the photosynthesis of Sphagnum fallax is negatively impacted; conversely, in very hot but humid weather, photosynthesis, and thus carbon uptake, in Sphagnum fallax increases, whereas there is a negligible effect on photosynthesis in Sphagnum medium. In both cases, then, the peatland survives.

These results show that peatlands can withstand future climate change, provided they are not disturbed. Making peatland conservation a priority would therefore help to limit the impacts of climate change in the future. The study was published on September 9, 2019 in Global Change Biology.

While perhaps not as iconic as the paper crane, the hypar origami with its sweeping opposing arcs and saddle shape has long been popular for artists working in the paper folding tradition.

Now researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Tokyo are looking at the shape with an eye toward leveraging its structural properties, hoping to find ways to harness its bistability to build multifunctional devices or metamaterials.

For a study reported September 17 in the journal Nature Communications and supported by the National Science Foundation, the researchers examined first whether the popular origami pattern that resembles the geometric hyperbolic paraboloid - or hypar - had the same physical characteristics as its geometric counterpart and tried to understand how its folds contribute to the formation of the pattern.

"The hyperbolic paraboloid is a striking pattern that has been used in architectural designs the world over," said Glaucio Paulino, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. "As an origami pattern, it has structural bistability which could be harnessed for metamaterials used in energy trapping or other microelectronic devices."

Structural bistability refers to the origami pattern's ability to find a resting equilibrium in two different states - when the saddle shape reverses on itself. That capability could enable devices based on the origami's structure to reconfigure to point the arcs in opposite directions on the fly.

Like any other origami, the pattern starts with a flat sheet of paper, which is then folded along concentric squares. Those folds combine to pull the tips of the paper in opposite directions, forming the opposing arcs of a hyperbolic paraboloid.

To understand more about the mechanisms that creates the saddle shapes, the researchers created a theoretical model that could serve to predict the behavior of the origami, and their analysis reinforced the idea that the structure exhibited the same characteristics of its geometric counterpart.

"One of the really interesting things we found was that the folds of concentric squares did not have to be uniform in their offsets in order to form the hypar origami," said Ke Liu, a former graduate student at Georgia Tech and now a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology. "So some squares could be quite close together and others farther apart and still the overall shape would be a hyperbolic paraboloid."

However, the researchers noted that lack of uniformity in the folds would alter other aspects of the structure, such as how much energy would be needed to push it into its hypar shape.

"You could theoretically tune each individual hypar origami structure by changing the scale of these folds, and it would change how that structure responds to pressures pushing against it," Liu said. "Future designs for robotics or other electronics could utilize this sort of snapping behavior."

The researchers also folded the origami into an array of squares so that four hypar origami patterns were formed on the same sheet of materia.. A physical model showed that the structure has as many as 32 different stable configurations.

"The hypar tessellation with multiple stable states has promising applications as stimulus responsive metasurfaces and switches," said Tomohiro Tachi, who is an Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo, Japan.

"These types of configurations could lay the groundwork for future metasurfaces with reconfigurable properties and a high level of tunability," said Paulino, who is also the Raymond Allen Jones Chair of Engineering in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Irvine, Calif., Sept. 17, 2019 - An interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of California, Irvine has developed a new technique for predicting the final size of a wildfire from the moment of ignition.

Built around a machine learning algorithm, the model can help in forecasting whether a blaze is going to be small, medium or large by the time it has run its course - knowledge useful to those in charge of allocating scarce firefighting resources. The researchers' work is highlighted in a study published today in the International Journal of Wildland Fire.

"A useful analogy is to consider what makes something go viral in social media," said lead author Shane Coffield, a UCI doctoral student in Earth system science. "We can think about what properties of a specific tweet or post might make it blow up and become really popular - and how you might predict that at the moment it's posted or right before it's posted."

He and his colleagues applied that thinking to a hypothetical situation in which dozens of fires break out simultaneously. It sounds extreme, but this scenario has become all too common in recent years in parts of the western United States as climate change has resulted in hot and dry conditions on the ground that can put a region at high risk of ignition.

"Only a few of those fires are going to get really big and account for most of the burned area, so we have this new approach that's focused on identifying specific ignitions that pose the greatest risk of getting out of control," Coffield said.

The team used Alaska as a study area for the project because the state has been plagued over the past decade by a rash of concurrent fires in its boreal forests, threatening human health and vulnerable ecosystems.

At the core of the UCI scientists' model is a "decision tree" algorithm. By feeding it climate data and crucial details about atmospheric conditions and the types of vegetation present around the starting point of a fire, the researchers could predict the final size of a blaze 50 percent of the time. A key variable is the vapor pressure deficit - just how little moisture there is in the area - during the first six days of a fire's existence. A second major consideration for Alaskan forests is the percentage of trees of the black spruce variety.

"Black spruce, which are dominant in Alaska, have these long, droopy branches that are designed - from an evolutionary perspective - to wick up fire," said co-author James Randerson, professor and Ralph J. & Carol M. Cicerone Chair in Earth System Science at UCI. "Their seeds are adapted to do well in a post-fire environment, so their strategy is to kill off everything else around them during a fire to reduce competition for their offspring."

He said Coffield was able to show that the fraction of black spruce within a 2.5-mile radius of the ignition site is an important factor in judging how big a fire will grow.

One advantage of this new method is speed, Coffield said. The algorithm "learns" with each new data point and can quickly figure out the critical thresholds for identifying large fires. It's possible for people to do this manually or by running simulations on each different ignition, he said, but the machine learning system's statistical approach is "really much faster and more efficient, especially for considering multiple fires simultaneously."

Faced with a climate change-induced jump in the number of wildfires expected each season, state, county and local firefighting authorities could benefit from some updated tools and techniques, Randerson noted. In addition to potentially saving lives and protecting property and crucial infrastructure, fire suppression efforts will also become increasingly important in preserving the natural world.

"In places like Alaska, there's a need to limit the area affected by fire, because if we keep having these unusual, high-fire years, more carbon will be lost from the landscape, exacerbating warming," Randerson said. "If we let the fires run away, we could be in a situation where there's a lot of significant damage to both the climate system and ecosystems."

MISSOULA - Animals around the globe face rising extinction rates, but there is often a lack of data about the causes of population declines, as well as ecological and biological considerations for conservation.

For example, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) provides a catalog of the conservation status for species around the globe, but many species are listed as "data deficient" because of this lack of information.

A new collaborative study between students from University of Montana and the Universidad de Concepcion in Chile seeks to understand the type and magnitude of gaps in scientific information as a way to improve conservation planning.

The authors used Chile - a biodiversity hot-spot where 55 percent of plants and nearly 15 percent of mammals are endemic - as a case study to assess trends in available ecological and biological information relevant to conservation planning for threatened and endangered terrestrial mammals. Specifically, the team read and assessed scientific literature for 22 IUCN red-listed species in Chile and categorized it by topic and species.

Although the number of published articles increased over the past 19 years, they found that seven species (31 percent), including the one critically endangered species, had little available research and over 25 percent of species were missing critical information regarding basic biological and life history characteristics. Their finding of substantial gaps in information for at-risk Chilean mammals highlights the importance of developing strategic research agendas for at-risk species in Chile, as well as across the globe.

"This study is important because it highlights knowledge gaps in the literature and research for specific at-risk species," said first author Sarah Gaulke, who graduated from UM in 2017 with a major in wildlife biology and a minor in ecological restoration. "To effectively conserve species, there is certain essential knowledge about the habitat and ecology of the species. Without that knowledge, efforts to save a species may be misguided. With this study, researchers and managers are better able to target areas for research and funding to gather necessary information.

"I think it's important for the public to understand that there is still a lot of unknown information about some at-risk species," Gaulke said. "We may not have the information and research currently to properly conserve these species, which is a time sensitive issue. While this review focuses on Chile, it can be used as a case study for other countries to emphasize where research gaps may be."

"The research has important implications for mammal conservation but also demonstrates the importance of study abroad experiences," said Cara Nelson, a UM professor of restoration ecology who mentored the research team.

Nelson spent a sabbatical year in Chile, teaching at the Universidad de Concepcion and conducting research on forest restoration. In addition, she taught a UM study abroad course on Patagonian ecosystems, in which Gaulke participated as a Franke Sustainability Fellow. The Franke Sustainability Fellowship supports undergraduate students in UM's W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation studying or practicing sustainability projects off-campus.

Co-author Luke Johnson, also a Franke Fellow, spent a semester at the Universidad de Concepcion in 2017, took the Patagonia course in 2018 and graduated with a degree in wildlife biology in 2019.

"I got involved with this study while studying abroad at the University of Concepcion in Chile," Johnson said. "Sarah and Cara had done some preliminary research on the topic but excluded articles written in Spanish. I was initially brought on board to help review Spanish articles and then proceeded to assist in the drafting and editing process."

Two students from the University de Concepcion, Enzo Martelli and Carlos Letelier, were also instrumental to the research team. Martelli spent a semester working in Nelson's lab at UM in 2016 and served as a teaching assistant in the Patagonia course in 2018; he is now a master's student in UM's Restoration Ecology Lab.

"The opportunity to participate in the study abroad program was fundamental to my development as a scientist," he said. "It helped me to develop critical thinking skills by exposing me to different perspectives about science and conservation, as well as to build an international collaborative network."

September 17, 2019

Research Triangle Park, NC--Landscape patterns matter. The size, shape, and arrangement of fields, forests, wetlands, and human populations, and the ways these and other features interact and change across landscapes, have a multitude of implications for resource sustainability, ecosystem health, habitat connectivity, and other societal values. To fully understand the effects of these landscape patterns, we first need to know how to measure them.

A new special issue of the journal Landscape Ecology organized by scientists at the USDA Forest Service and North Carolina State University assesses the state of the science of landscape pattern analysis. "The special issue demonstrates that research on landscape patterns remains an essential and vibrant topic in the field," said Jennifer Costanza, lead editor of the issue and faculty at NCSU.

Appearing three decades after the first scientific papers on landscape patterns were published, the special issue includes 14 articles by scientists tackling current problems in the field, introducing new approaches, and suggesting promising research directions and applications.

The introductory article by Costanza and co-authors laying out the mission and scope of the special issue is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-019-00889-6.

"The inclusion of research reviews and editorials along with reports of cutting-edge developments puts the new research into perspective," says Kurt Riitters, a Forest Service scientist with the Southern Research Station who co-edited the special issue.

The issue reflects two parallel, complementary approaches in the development of landscape pattern measurement: the search for general methods that can be applied to a wide range of studies, and the search for specific methods tailored to a certain place or type of landscape change.

For example, a study by Southern Research Station scientists Bjorn-Gustaf Brooks and Danny Lee applies a new metric for rapidly scanning large areas using remote sensing to detect patterns that suggest important forms of disturbance in natural landscapes. In contrast, a simulation study by Robert Corry of the University of Guelph focuses on the patterns created by agricultural crop rotations in southern Ontario.

"Both of these approaches in tandem will be important for comprehensive monitoring of landscape change and assessing the consequences for sustainability" says Costanza. "Today, scientists and land managers have faster access to more maps of the earth's resources than ever before. Developing the best methods for analyzing them and monitoring change is a key role for landscape ecologists to play in ensuring that information can be understood and used to improve the sustainability of those resources into the future."

Accelerating global change has increased the complexity of managing and planning for resilient, sustainable landscapes. It is critical to leverage evolving techniques and technologies to understand the patterns of natural and built environments and how they are related to ecological processes and human activities. The variety of perspectives presented in this special issue demonstrates a wide range of research efforts by landscape ecologists to meet this challenge.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., September 17, 2019 - A cross-disciplinary team of MIT researchers have published details of an artificial intelligence (AI) guided robotic platform for flow synthesis of small molecule organic compounds. The paper appeared in the August 9, 2019 issue of Science.

While small organic molecules are essential for many disciplines including drug discovery, the identification and development of synthetic routes creates a bottleneck due to the need for time-consuming manual tasks and lengthy design-synthesize-test iterations. Despite the availability of laboratory automation, experimental synthesis platforms still require manual configuration by expert chemists.

In this publication, the authors describe the development and use of a platform that combines artificial intelligence-driven synthesis planning, flow chemistry and a robotically controlled experimental platform to minimize the need for human intervention in the synthesis process from ideation through to manufacturing. Synthetic routes are proposed through generalization of millions of published chemical reactions and validated in silico to maximize the likelihood of success. Additional implementation details are determined by expert chemists and recorded in recipe files, which are executed by a modular continuous-flow platform that is automatically reconfigured by a robotic arm to set up the required unit operations and carry out the reaction.

"One of the major challenges in automating small molecule synthesis is the diversity of organic reactions and the difficulty in finding compatible reaction conditions to support multistep synthesis. Additionally, creating a system capable of supporting the range of reaction conditions in terms of temperatures, pressures and chemical compatibilities poses a serious engineering challenge," said Justin Lummiss, PhD, a co-first author on the Science publication who conducted research as a Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT.

Lummiss and Dale Thomas, PhD (another co-first author of the Science paper) are leveraging an AI-guided approach to address similar, longstanding challenges with custom peptide synthesis and purification at Mytide Therapeutics. Mytide is using AI to enable end-to-end peptide manufacturing in a truly autonomous fashion, including optimized reaction planning, real-time process optimization for in-sequence process modifications and robotics.

"Similar challenges exist in the automation of small molecule and peptide synthesis," noted Dr. Lummiss, who is now a Senior Scientist at Mytide. "We have made important strides in addressing significant engineering obstacles for small molecules and are now focused on new challenges with peptide synthesis and manufacturing".

Thomas and Lummiss' current work at Mytide Therapeutics focuses on the development of an integrated platform for peptide manufacturing and discovery of novel peptide therapeutics. The AI-guided, automated platform is designed to address challenges not only in synthesis but also in purification of custom peptides.

"The fully automated platform we are developing at Mytide simplifies the challenges of peptide synthesis through mastery of a single reaction - amide bond formation," noted Dr. Thomas, a Co-Founder of Mytide. "By reducing the synthetic diversity of conventional approaches to peptide synthesis, we have been able to address longstanding challenges in synthesis and purification, as well as reducing barriers of purity bottlenecks that presently limit current large-scale peptide manufacturing for drug products".

Thomas and Lummiss are excited about the future applications of their current work at Mytide and its ability to have a meaningful impact. Their advances in AI-guided automation and technology are driving Mytide's ultimate goal of accelerating the discovery and development of peptide therapeutics targeting a wide range of diseases, including cancer therapy, infectious disease, and inflammatory disorders.