Tech

DALLAS, Aug. 6, 2019 - Blood pressure monitoring might one day become as easy as taking a video selfie, according to new research in Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging, an American Heart Association journal.

Transdermal optical imaging measures blood pressure by detecting blood flow changes in smartphone-captured facial videos. Ambient light penetrates the skin's outer layer allowing digital optical sensors in smartphones to visualize and extract blood flow patterns, which transdermal optical imaging models can use to predict blood pressure.

Finding an accessible, easy way to monitor blood pressure is important given that nearly half of American adults have high blood pressure and many don't even know they have it, according to the American Heart Association.

"High blood pressure is a major contributor to cardiovascular disease -- a leading cause of death and disability. To manage and prevent it, regular monitoring of one's blood pressure is essential," said study lead author Kang Lee, Ph.D., professor and research chair in developmental neuroscience at the University of Toronto in Canada. "Cuff-based blood pressure measuring devices, while highly accurate, are inconvenient and uncomfortable. Users tend not to follow American Heart Association guidelines and device manufacturers' suggestion to take multiple measurements each time."

Lee and his colleagues measured the blood flow of 1,328 Canadian and Chinese adults by capturing two-minute videos using an iPhone equipped with transdermal optical imaging software.

The researchers compared systolic, diastolic and pulse pressure measurements captured from smartphone videos to blood pressure readings using a traditional cuff-based continuous blood pressure measurement device.

The researchers used the data they gathered to teach the technology how to accurately determine blood pressure and pulse from facial blood flow patterns. They found that on average, transdermal optical imaging predicted systolic blood pressure with nearly 95% accuracy and diastolic blood pressure with pulse pressure at nearly 96% accuracy.

The technology's high accuracy is within international standards for devices used to measure blood pressure, according to Lee.

Researchers videoed faces in a well-controlled environment with fixed lighting, so it's unclear whether the technology can accurately measure blood pressure in less controlled environments, including homes. Also, while the study's participants had a variety of skin tones, the sample lacked subjects with either extremely dark or fair skin tones. Lee and colleagues are also looking into reducing the needed video length from 2 minutes to 30 seconds, in order to make the technology more user-friendly.

People in the study all had normal blood pressure. "If future studies confirm our results and show this method can be used to measure blood pressures that are clinically high or low, we will have the option of a contactless and non-invasive method to monitor blood pressures conveniently - perhaps anytime and anywhere - for health management purposes," Lee said.

"This study shows that facial video can contain some information about systolic blood pressure," said Ramakrishna Mukkamala, Ph.D., Circulation Imaging editorial author and professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Michigan State University in East Lansing. "If future studies could confirm this exciting result in hypertensive patients and with video camera measurements made during daily life, then obtaining blood pressure information with a click of a camera may become reality."

Scientists at the University of Leeds have created a new form of gold which is just two atoms thick - the thinnest unsupported gold ever created.

The researchers measured the thickness of the gold to be 0.47 nanometres - that is one million times thinner than a human finger nail. The material is regarded as 2D because it comprises just two layers of atoms sitting on top of one another. All atoms are surface atoms - there are no 'bulk' atoms hidden beneath the surface.

The material could have wide-scale applications in the medical device and electronics industries - and also as a catalyst to speed up chemical reactions in a range of industrial processes.

Laboratory tests show that the ultra-thin gold is 10 times more efficient as a catalytic substrate than the currently used gold nanoparticles, which are 3D materials with the majority of atoms residing in the bulk rather than at the surface.

Scientists believe the new material could also form the basis of artificial enzymes that could be applied in rapid, point-of-care medical diagnostic tests and in water purification systems.

The announcement that the ultra-thin metal had been successfully synthesised was made in the journal Advanced Science.

The lead author of the paper, Dr Sunjie Ye, from Leeds' Molecular and Nanoscale Physics Group and the Leeds Institute of Medical Research, said: "This work amounts to a landmark achievement.

"Not only does it open up the possibility that gold can be used more efficiently in existing technologies, it is providing a route which would allow material scientists to develop other 2D metals.

"This method could innovate nanomaterial manufacturing."

The research team are looking to work with industry on ways of scaling-up the process.

Synthesising the gold nanosheet takes place in an aqueous solution and starts with chloroauric acid, an inorganic substance that contains gold. It is reduced to its metallic form in the presence of a 'confinement agent' - a chemical that encourages the gold to form as a sheet, just two atoms thick.

Because of the gold's nanoscale dimensions, it appears green in water - and given its shape, the researchers describe it as gold nanoseaweed.

Images taken from an electron microscope reveal the way the gold atoms have formed into a highly organised lattice. Other images show gold nanoseaweed that has been artificially coloured. The images are available for download: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-jxr7KW_RW4vF4-zReh9rnfOQMesb6MI?usp=sharing

Professor Stephen Evans, head of the Leeds' Molecular and Nanoscale Research Group who supervised the research, said the considerable gains that could be achieved from using these ultra-thin gold sheets are down to their high surface-area to volume ratio.

He said: "Gold is a highly effective catalyst. Because the nanosheets are so thin, just about every gold atom plays a part in the catalysis. It means the process is highly efficient."

Standard benchmark tests revealed that gold nanoscale sheets were ten times more efficient than the gold nanoparticles conventionally used in industry.

Professor Evans said: "Our data suggests that industry could get the same effect from using a smaller amount of gold, and this has economic advantages when you are talking about a precious metal."

Similar benchmark tests revealed that the gold sheets could act as highly effective artificial enzymes.

The flakes are also flexible, meaning they could form the basis of electronic components for bendable screens, electronic inks and transparent conducting displays.

Professor Evans thinks there will inevitably be comparisons made between the 2D gold and the very first 2D material ever created - graphene, which was fabricated at the University of Manchester in 2004.

He said: "The translation of any new material into working products can take a long time and you can't force it to do everything you might like to. With graphene, people have thought that it could be good for electronics or for transparent coatings - or as carbon nanotubes that could make an elevator to take us into space because of its super strength.

"I think with 2D gold we have got some very definite ideas about where it could be used, particularly in catalytic reactions and enzymatic reactions. We know it will be more effective than existing technologies - so we have something that we believe people will be interested in developing with us."

AMES, Iowa - A new study from Iowa State University scientists could flip the established framework for how scientists believe geography influences sex determination in painted turtles on its shell.

The study, published Tuesday in the academic journal Functional Ecology, analyzed decades of data concerning painted turtles, a species widely distributed across North America that undergoes temperature-dependent sex determination. That means the temperatures experienced by an incubating painted turtle egg influence whether an embryo develops the physical characteristics biologists describe as male or female. Warmer temperatures tend to produce females, and cooler temperatures tend to produce males.

The study's findings defied theoretical expectations for how painted turtle populations respond to environmental variation, which could lead scientists to rethink how they look at the topic, said Anna Carter, a postdoctoral research associate in ecology, evolution and organismal biology and lead author.

Painted turtles cover a vast geographical range, from New Mexico to Canada. That means populations experience wide variation in temperatures and environmental conditions. For years, scientists emphasized "pivotal temperature," or the temperature that produces an equal number of males and females in a given population, when studying how the turtles respond to environmental variation. This framework would expect populations that live in warmer regions to have a higher pivotal temperature as well.

Previous studies found patterns related to latitude, Carter said. The closer a population was to the equator, the higher its pivotal temperature. But using a massive dataset on painted turtle populations allowed the scientists to take an unprecedented look at the relationship between latitude and pivotal temperature, and the new analysis didn't find a convincing pattern.

Instead, the researchers found wide variation in pivotal temperature within local populations, as much as 5 degrees Celsius. The finding suggests temperature sensitivity of embryonic development can vary significantly from one turtle nest to another within a single population.

"The implication of our study is that our understanding of local adaptation in this species isn't as good as we thought it was," Carter said. "It might be useful to move away from pivotal temperature as a model."

The study, however, did find patterns connecting geography to the transitional range, or the range of temperatures that produce a mix of males and females. Transitional ranges tended to be wider at lower latitudes, Carter said.

The unexpectedly wide variation in pivotal temperature within populations could suggest painted turtles are more resilient to changes in temperature than previously thought. It's possible female painted turtles can nest successfully in a multitude of environments, they said.

The study drew on a huge dataset collected over the span of decades by Fred Janzen, a professor of ecology, evolution and organismal biology, and his colleagues. Janzen said his lab has collected data on painted turtle populations on the Mississippi River near Clinton for 32 years. The data includes nesting and temperature measurements.

"I've been truly fortunate to meet folks willing to put in the time and effort to do this work," Janzen said. "It's a big ask. We're talking about year after year of each group putting together their own field crew to follow a turtle population."

For the study, the researchers modeled temperature dependent sex determination in 12 geographically distinct painted turtle populations using both field data and lab incubation experiments.

Canada's new national dementia strategy can be successful with sustained political will, adequate funding, measurable targets and a commitment from all Canadians to achieve its goals, argues an editorial in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

The 5-year, $50-million strategy is aligned with international strategies and comes at a critical time.

"The effect of dementia on Canadians is staggering," writes Dr. Nathan Stall, Associate Editor, CMAJ, with coauthors. "While there are currently more than 564 000 Canadians living with dementia with estimated annual total health care system and out-of-pocket costs of $10.4 billion, these figures are projected to at least double by 2031 as Canadians continue to age."

Canada needs to learn from its provinces and other countries to overcome challenges to success. Political will beyond the initial announcement is essential, as is adequate funding -- especially for research, where there is a substantial gap.

It is also important to deflate the stigma of ageism and dementia-related discrimination, which particularly affect women, who make up two-thirds of all those with dementia and most caregivers.

Fire is a natural part of western forests, but the changing nature of fire in many parts of North America may pose challenges for birds. One bird in particular, the Black-backed Woodpecker, specializes in using recently-burned forests in western North America, but like humans looking for a new family home, it's picky about exactly where it settles. New research published in The Condor: Ornithological Applications suggests that these birds actually prefer to nest near the edges of burned patches -- and these edges are getting harder to find as wildfires have become bigger and more severe.

Andrew Stillman, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Connecticut, along with colleagues from The Institute for Bird Populations and the U.S. Forest Service, looked at nest site selection and nest success of Black-backed Woodpeckers in burned forests of northern California. Over a period of eight years, the researchers located and monitored more than one hundred nests while measuring nest site characteristics across multiple spatial scales. The birds in the study strongly preferred to nest in severely burned stands that had lots of dead trees. But the birds chose to place their nests near the edges of these high-severity burned patches, typically within 500 meters of a patch with live trees.

"We didn't expect to find these woodpeckers nesting so close to edges," says Stillman. Previous studies had shown that woodpecker nests closer to living forest patches were more likely to be predated by animals such as squirrels. However, another recent study by Stillman and others showed that Black-backed Woodpecker fledglings often move into living patches with good cover quickly after leaving their nest. By placing nests closer to edges, adults may be providing their offspring easier access to this "nursery" habitat.

Stillman notes that "pyrodiversity," or a diversity in the age, size and severity of burned patches, appears to be important for this post-fire specialist woodpecker because it provides more edges between different burn severities. But climate change is fostering larger, more homogeneous fires with reduced pyrodiversity.

"The thing about pyrodiversity is that we expect it to decrease," says Dr. Morgan Tingley of the University of Connecticut and co-author of the paper. "Every year we see more 'mega-fires,' and these fires are quite homogenous in their structure, leading to low pyrodiversity. So even though the future is expected to hold more fire in western forests, the outlook may not even be good for fire-loving species."

Stillman anticipates that understanding the importance of habitat edges to Black-backed Woodpeckers, as well as other findings of this study, will assist forest managers. "We hope that these results provide some of the missing information necessary to balance post-fire logging activities with the habitat needs of woodpeckers," he says. Dr. Rodney Siegel, Executive Director of The Institute for Bird Populations and a co-author of the study, agrees. "A central goal of our multi-year partnership with the Forest Service is to better understand the specific habitat needs of Black-backed Woodpeckers and other species that use burned forests. This information allows forest managers to design management activities that are more compatible with the needs of wildlife."

ITHACA, N.Y. - With New York state's $20 million berry industry entering peak season, an invasive fruit fly is thriving.

But little has been known about how the pests survive before and after the growing season.

A Cornell University study, published in Ecological Entomology, investigates for the first time what spotted-wing drosophila adults and larvae eat, and where they lay their eggs, when these short-lived fruits are not in season.

Female spotted-wing drosophila (Drosophila suzukii Matsumura) have a special ovipositor (a tube through which a female insect deposits eggs) with a saw-like end that allows them to cut into soft fruits and insert their eggs. The larvae and adults feed on the fruits, causing billions of dollars in damage across Asia, North and South America, and Europe.

"They will lay eggs and successfully develop on less preferred resources and not the typical fruit that we think they prefer," said Greg Loeb, professor of entomology at Cornell AgriTech and a co-author of the paper. Dara Stockton, a postdoctoral associate in Loeb's lab, is the paper's first author.

In lab experiments, the researchers found that out of 11 alternate dietary choices that included bird manure, the spotted-wing drosophila did best on diets of mushroom and mushroom-apple mixtures.

In the early spring, mushrooms are one of the only resources available. Similarly, in late fall, apples that fall to the ground and rot can provide a food source. And the experiments showed that more complex bird manures, such as from geese, proved more sustaining than simple chicken manure, for example.

The results may help curb pest populations by encouraging growers to limit access to certain non-fruit food sources during times when drosophila populations are low and berries are not in season.

"It's always important for us, when we're developing integrated pest management control strategies, to think about the landscape surrounding the crop and consider things happening in the periphery that we can control," Stockton said. For example, controlling geese in a pond next to a crop could help limit fruit fly populations at a time when their numbers are low before berries ripen, she said.

"The more we learn about the flies, the better we can control their populations," Stockton said.

Other experiments revealed that if an individual was reared on a certain food, such as goose manure, that fly is more likely to accept it later in its life than a fly that had never encountered it.

Another experiment looked at survival over eight weeks when flies were limited to a single diet.

"We found that complex diets, including mushroom and apple, were superior to simpler diets in terms of survival long term," Stockton said. Along with varying diets, tests included lowering temperatures to simulate spring and fall and understanding nutritional components.

Based on numbers of flies captured in traps, spotted-wing drosophila become detectable in May, with numbers peaking in July and August, and staying consistent into December when temperatures drop below freezing. The flies can live for a full year, with a female laying up to 400 eggs over a month in non-fruit food sources in early spring.

Tropical Storm Krosa had recently developed into a tropical storm when the GPM satellite passed overhead and found heavy rainfall. Fortunately, the storm was over open waters.

Krosa formed on August 5 as the eleventh tropical depression of the Northwestern Pacific Ocean typhoon season. On August 6 by 5 a.m. EDT (0900 UTC) it had become a tropical storm and was re-named Krosa.

The Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core satellite passed over Tropical Storm Krosa at 10:21 a.m. EDT (1421 UTC) on August 6, 2019. GPM found the heaviest rainfall was east of the center of circulation falling at a rate of 50 mm (about 2 inches) per hour, over open ocean GPM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA.

At 11 a.m. EDT (1500 UTC) Tropical storm Krosa was located near19.0 degrees north latitude and 142.3 east longitude, about 352 miles south of Iwo To Island, Japan. Krosa was moving to the northwest and had maximum sustained winds near 40 knots (46 mph/74 kph).

The Joint Typhoon Warning Center noted that Krosa will move northwest, then later north and strengthen to a typhoon with maximum sustained winds near 75 knots (86 mph/139 kph).

Krosa is expected to pass very near the island of Iwo To on August 9 and move north.

Under the watchful eyes of five high-speed cameras, a small, pale-blue bird named Gary waits for the signal to fly. Diana Chin, a graduate student at Stanford University and Gary's trainer, points her finger to a perch about 20 inches away. The catch here is that the perch is covered in Teflon, making it seemingly impossible to stably grasp.

Gary's successful touchdown on the Teflon - and on other perches of varying materials - is teaching researchers how they might create machines that land like a bird.

"Modern aerial robots usually need either a runway or a flat surface for easy takeoff and landing. For a bird, almost everywhere is a potential landing spot, even in cities," said Chin, who is part of the lab of David Lentink, assistant professor of mechanical engineering. "We really wanted to understand how they accomplish that and the dynamics and forces that are involved."

Even the most advanced robots come nowhere near the grasping ability of animals when dealing with objects of varying shapes, sizes and textures. So, the researchers gathered data about how Gary and two other birds land on different kinds of surfaces, including a variety of natural perches and artificial perches covered in foam, sandpaper and Teflon.

"This is not unlike asking an Olympic gymnast to land on Teflon-covered high bars without chalking their hands," said Lentink, who is senior author of the paper. Yet, the parrotlets made what seems almost impossible for a human look effortless.

The group's research, published Aug. 6 in eLife, also included detailed studies of the friction produced by the birds' claws and feet. From this work, the researchers found that the secret to the parrotlet's perching versatility is in the grip.

"When we look at a person running, a squirrel jumping or a bird flying, it is clear that we have a long way to go before our technology can reach the complex potential of these animals, both in terms of efficiency and controlled athleticism," said William Roderick, a graduate student in mechanical engineering in the Lentink lab and lab of Mark Cutkosky, the Fletcher Jones Chair in the School of Engineering. "Through studying natural systems that have evolved over millions of years, we can make tremendous strides toward constructing systems with unprecedented capabilities."

(Non)sticking the landing

The perches in this research weren't your average pet store stock. The researchers split them in two, lengthwise, at the point that approximately aligned with the center of a parrotlet's foot. As far as the bird was concerned, the perches felt like a single branch but each half sat atop its own 6-axis force/torque sensor. This meant the researchers could capture the total forces the bird put on the perch in many directions and how those forces differed between the halves - which indicated how hard the birds were squeezing.

After the birds flapped to all nine force-sensing perches of assorted size, softness and slipperiness, the group began analyzing the first stages of landing. Comparing different perch surfaces, they expected to see differences in how the birds approached the perch and the force with which they landed, but that's not what they found.

"When we first processed all of our data on approach speed and the forces when the bird was landing, we didn't see any obvious differences," Chin recalled. "But then we started to look into kinematics of the feet and claws - the details of how they moved those - and discovered they adapt them to stick the landing."

The extent to which the birds wrapped their toes and curled their claws varied depending on what they encountered upon landing. On rough or squishy surfaces - such as the medium-size foam, sandpaper and rough wood perches - their feet could generate high squeeze forces with little help from their claws. On perches that were hardest to grasp - the floss-silk wood, Teflon and large birch - the birds curled their claws more, dragging them along the perch surface until they had secure footing.

This variable grip suggests that, when building robots to land on a variety of surfaces, researchers could separate the control of approaching landing from the actions required for a successful touchdown.

Their measurements also showed that the birds are capable of repositioning their claws from one graspable bump or pit to another in a mere 1 to 2 milliseconds. (For comparison, it takes a human about 100 to 400 milliseconds to blink.)

Birds and bots

The Cutkosky and Lentink labs have already begun characterizing how parrotlets take off from the different surfaces. Combined with their previous work exploring how parrotlets navigate their environment, the group hopes the findings can lead to more nimble flying robots.

"If we can apply all that we learn, we can develop bimodal robots that can transition to and from the air in a wide range of different environments and increase the versatility of aerial robots that we have today," Chin said.

Toward that end, Roderick is working on designing the mechanisms that would mimic the birds' gripping form and physics.

"One application of this work that I'm interested in is having perching robots that can act as a team of tiny little scientists that make recordings, autonomously, for field research in forests or jungles," Roderick said. "I really enjoy drawing from the fundamentals of engineering and applying them to new fields to push the limits of what has been previously achieved and what is known."

In recent years, efforts to understand the workings of the mind have taken on new-found urgency. Not only are psychological and neurological disorders -- from Alzheimer's disease and strokes to autism and anxiety -- becoming more widespread, new tools and methods have emerged that allow scientists to explore the structure of, and activity within, the brain with greater granularity.

The White House launched the BRAIN Initiative on April 2, 2013, with the goal of supporting the development and application of innovative technologies that can create a dynamic understanding of brain function. The initiative has supported more than $1 billion in research and has led to new insights, new drugs, and new technologies to help individuals with brain disorders.

But this wealth of research comes with challenges, according to Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor with a computing bent at Stanford University. Psychology and neuroscience struggle to build on the knowledge of its disparate researchers.

"Science is meant to be cumulative, but both methodological and conceptual problems have impeded cumulative progress in psychological science," Poldrack and collaborators from Stanford, Dartmouth College and Arizona State University wrote in a Nature Communications paper out in May 2019.

DATA ARCHIVIST

Part of the problem is practical. With hundreds of research groups undertaking original research, a central repository is needed to host and share data, compare and combine studies, and encourage data reuse. To address this curatorial challenge, in 2010 Poldrack launched a platform called OpenFMRI for sharing fMRI studies.

"I'd thought for a long time that data sharing was important for a number of reasons," explained Poldrack, "for transparency and reproducibility and also to help us aggregate across lots of small studies to improve our power to answer questions."

OpenFMRI grew to nearly a hundred datasets, and in 2016 was subsumed into OpenNeuro, a more general platform for hosting brain imaging studies. That platform today has more than 220 datasets, including some like "The Stockholm Sleepy Brain Study" and "Neural Processing of Emotional Musical and Nonmusical Stimuli in Depression," that have been downloaded hundreds of times.

Brain imaging datasets are relatively large and require a large repository to house them. When he was developing OpenFMRI, Poldrack turned to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin to host and serve up the data.

A grant from the Arnold Foundation allowed him to host OpenNeuro on Amazon Web Services for a few years, but recently Poldrack turned again to TACC and to other systems that are part of the NSF-funded Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) to serve as the cyberinfrastructure for the database.

Part of the success of the project is due to the development of a common standard, BIDS -- Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) -- that allows researchers to compare and combine studies in an apples-to-apples way. Introduced by Poldrack and others in 2016, it earned near-immediate acceptance and has grown into the lingua franca for neuroimaging data.

As part of the standard creation, Poldrack and his collaborators built a web-based validator to make it easy to determine whether one's data meets the standard.

"Researchers convert their data into BIDS format, upload their data and it gets validated on upload," Poldrack said. "Once it passes the validator and gets uploaded, with a click of a button it can be shared."

Data sharing alone is not the end goal of these efforts. Ultimately, Poldrack would like to develop pipelines for computation that can rapidly analyze brain imaging datasets in a variety of way. He is working with the CBrain project, based at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, to create containerized workflows that researchers can use to perform these analyses without requiring a lot of advanced computing expertise, and independent of what system they are using.

He is also working with another project called BrainLife.io based at Indiana University, which uses XSEDE resources, including those at TACC, to process data, including data from OpenNeuro.

Many of the datasets from OpenNeuro are now available on BrainLife, and there is a button on those datasets that takes one directly to the relevant page at BrainLife, where they can be processed and analyzed using a variety of scientist-developed apps.

"In addition to sharing data, one of the things that having this common data standard affords us is the ability to automatically analyze data and do the kind of pre-processing and quality control that we often do on imaging data," he explained. "You just point the container at the data set, and it just runs it."

RETHINK DISCIPLINE-WIDE ASSUMPTIONS

Things would be simple if formatting, storage, and sharing were the only problems the field faced. But what if the common methods researchers used for analyzing studies introduced biases and errors, leading to a lack of reproducibility? Moreover, what if the underlying assumptions about the way the mind worked were fundamentally flawed?

A study published in 2018 in Nature Human Behaviour that sought to replicate 21 social and behavioral science papers from Nature and Science found that only 13 could be successfully replicated. Another meta-study under the auspices of the Center for Open Science, re-ran 28 classic and contemporary studies in psychology and found that 14 failed to replicate. This has led to retroactive suspicions about decades worth of results.

Poldrack and his collaborators addressed both the methodological and assumption problems in their recent Nature Communications paper by applying more rigorous statistical methods to try to uncover the underlying structures of the mind, a process they call 'data-driven ontology discovery.'

Applying the approach to studies of self-regulation, the researchers tested the ability of survey questionnaires and task-based studies to predict an individual's likelihood of being at risk for alcoholism, obesity, drug abuse, or other self-regulation-related issues.

In their study, 522 participants took 23 self-report studies and performed 37 behavioral tasks. From each of these 60 measures, the team derived multiple dependent variables thought to capture psychological constructs. Using the dependent variables, the team first tried to create "a psychological space" -- a way of quantifying the distance between dependent variables to determine how various types of behavior that are often seen as separate cluster or correlate to each other. They used these "ontological fingerprints" to determine the contribution of various psychological constructs to the final predictive model.

The statistical approach used in the study, and enabled by supercomputers at TACC, goes far beyond the standard methods used in typical psychological studies.

"We're bringing to bear serious machine learning methods to determine what's correlated with what, and what has generalizable predictive accuracy, using methods that are still fairly new to this area of research," Poldrack said.

They found that some predicted targets, like mental health and obesity, had simple ontological fingerprints, such as "emotional control" and "problematic eating," but that other fingerprints were more complicated. They also found that task-based studies -- common in psychological research -- had almost no predictive ability.

"I'm always leery of saying our research will be useful for diagnosis, but it almost certainly will be useful for a better understanding of how to do diagnosis and the underlying functions that relate to certain outcomes, like smoking or problem drinking or obesity," Poldrack said.

Motivating the effort is a re-examination of the way that we talk about mental illness.

"Breaking these disorders into diagnostic categories like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or depression, is just not biologically realistic," he said. "Both genetics and neuroscience show that those disorders have way more overlap in terms of their genetics and their neurobiology, than differences. So, I think that there are new paradigms that might emerge that would be helped by a better understanding of the brain."

High performance computing allows researchers to apply much more sophisticated methods to determine knowledge distributions and figure out how significant results are.

"We can use sampling techniques to randomize the data 5,000 times and re-run big models many times," Poldrack said. "That's not realistically possible without supercomputers."

It used to be the case that the progress of science was dependent on the ability to create a molecule or synthesize a chemical. But increasingly progress in science depends on the ability to ask the right question about a big data set, and then to be able to actually feasibly get an answer to that question.

"And," said Poldrack, "there's a lot of questions that, without high performance computing, you can't feasibly get an answer to."

Despite the crises of faith that has struck the field in recent years, Poldrack believes psychological science has a lot to say that is very reliable about why humans do what they do, and that neuroscience gives us ways to understand where that comes from.

"We're trying to understand really complex things," he said. "It has to be realized that everything we say is probably wrong, but the hope is that it can get us a little bit closer to what's right."

The prostates of older mice contain more luminal progenitor cells -- cells capable of generating new prostate tissue -- than the prostates of younger mice, UCLA researchers have discovered.

The observation, published in Cell Reports, helps explain why, as people age, the prostate tends to grow, leading to an increased risk for prostate cancer and other conditions.

"Understanding what's causing the prostate to grow with age helps us to consider strategies to prevent the expansion of these cells and possibly reduce a person's risk for prostate growth or disease," said Andrew Goldstein, member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA and a UCLA assistant professor of urology and of molecular, cell, and developmental biology.

Most organs in the body -- including the kidneys, liver and spleen -- lose mass as people age, and bone and muscle mass tend to decrease over time.

The prostate, however, typically grows with age, which is why more than half of men over age 60 have benign prostatic hyperplasia, or BPH, in which the enlarged prostate impinges on the urethra, the organ that carries urine out of the bladder.

Research had previously shown that the numbers of progenitor cells are also diminished in organs that shrink with age. Like stem cells, progenitor cells can differentiate into new cells, but they are more constrained in what type of cells they can become. For instance, prostate progenitor cells can only form prostate tissue.

Whether levels of stem cells or progenitor cells in the prostate changed with age was not previously known.

In the new work, Goldstein and his colleagues compared the prostates of two groups of mice: 3-month-olds (an age comparable to human young adults) and 24-month-olds (roughly equivalent to 80 human years). The prostates of the older mice were larger and heavier, and had more cells than those of younger mice.

The researchers then isolated luminal cells -- one subset of prostate cells -- from the mice and grew them to form prostate organoids, or smaller, simplified versions of the prostates. They discovered that luminal cells from older animals formed prostate organoids just as effectively as cells from younger animals. In fact, the organoids formed from older cells tended to be larger.

"We thought it was a real possibility that older cells would have a reduced capacity to generate prostate tissue when we took them out of the prostate," said Goldstein, who is also a member of the UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. "So it was a surprising and important finding that there's really no difference between old cells and young cells in their ability to form prostate tissue."

When the team looked more closely at the luminal cells, they discovered that older prostates contained more luminal progenitor cells. While only 6% of luminal prostate cells were progenitors in the younger mice, 21% of luminal cells in older mice were prostate progenitors.

The higher concentration of luminal progenitors, coupled with their maintained ability to form new tissue, helps explain why the prostate grows with age and why the risk of prostate cancer and benign prostatic hyperplasia increase: Both are associated with the growth of cells.

"One of the biggest questions we have now is what is causing this age-related increase in the number of luminal progenitor cells," Goldstein said. "We have a few hypotheses but it remains to be seen what's really happening."

Answering that question, he said, could help identify a way to curb the growth of luminal progenitor cells and, in turn, prevent or treat prostate cancer or benign prostatic hyperplasia. It also could inform scientists better about why other organs lose mass with age.

It may be possible to reach new levels of miniaturization, speed, and data processing with optical quantum computers, which use light to carry information. For this, we need materials that can absorb and transmit photons. In the journal Angewandte Chemie, Chinese scientists have introduced a new strategy for constructing photonic heterostructure crystals with tunable properties. Using a crystalline rod with stripes that fluoresce in different colors, they have developed a prototype of a logic gate.

The team led by Ze Chang and Xian-He Bu achieved success by using specially constructed metal-organic frameworks (MOFs)--lattice-like structures made of metallic "nodes" bridged by organic ligands. These structures contain cage-like cavities that can hold other molecules as "guests". In this case, the guests and a part of the ligands integrated into the lattice are matched so that the guests can transfer electrons to the ligand molecule (charge transfer). Such systems tend to fluoresce. The color of the fluorescence for a given MOF depends on the type of guest.

A further advantage of MOF structures is that their crystallization occurs through the growth of layers onto a crystallization nucleus in one preferred direction. The researchers from Nankai University, Tianjin, the Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemical Science and Engineering, Tianjin and Institute of Chemistry Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing (China) were thus able to produce rod-shaped crystals. During the crystallization, they varied the types of guest molecule incorporated. This resulted in "striped" rods with separate domains that fluoresce differently. For example, they produced rods whose ends absorb UV light and fluoresce blue-green, while the center absorbs visible green light and emits red light. Because they are in direct contact, energy can be transferred between the domains, and some of the blue-green photons can be transmitted to the center portion, thereby causing it to fluoresce red. Most importantly, these rods behave as light conductors, meaning that no matter which spot is irradiated, part of the fluorescence light is transported through the entire rod to its ends.

Based on this type of crystal, the researchers developed a prototype for a logic circuit with two "entrances" and two "exits"; that is, locations where light can be stored or registered and red and/or blue-green signals generated, respectively. The researchers envision potential applications for their MOF crystals in components with integrated optical circuits, such as photonic diodes, on-chip signal processors, and optical logic gates.

GALVESTON, Texas -Researchers from The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have discovered a new potential medication that works with an HIV-infected person's own body to further suppress the ever present but silent virus that available HIV treatments are unable to combat.

Although the potential new drug could complement the current HIV anti-retroviral therapy (ART) medications, it may also be possible that it could lead to HIV remission without a lifetime of taking ART medications. The findings are published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

The HIV virus gets integrated into the infected person's genetic coding and establishes a constant dormant infection, creating a big treatment challenge. Because of this, current ART medications fail to cure the virus and when someone stops the drug, the virus almost always begins to multiply and wreak havoc. Drug resistance is also a public health issue with the ART medications. Being able to induce a sustained HIV remission free of ART is an important goal for HIV treatment.

"We are the first to show that human BRD4 protein and its associated machinery can be harnessed to suppress dormant HIV," said senior author Haitao Hu, UTMB assistant professor in the department of microbiology and immunology. "Our findings are exciting because they not only improve our understanding of the biology of HIV epigenetic regulation, they also present a promising approach for the development of probes and/or therapeutic agents for HIV silencing, hopefully leading to cure of the virus eventually."

In the laboratory study, the researchers found that the protein BRD4 plays an important role in regulating the production of new copies of the HIV gene. The team successfully designed, synthesized and evaluated a series of small molecules to selectively program BRD4 to suppress HIV and identified a lead compound called ZL0580. They tested the lead molecule in HIV infection models and found that it significantly delayed dormant HIV reactivation after ART cessation in blood cells of ART-treated, HIV infected people.

"We will continue to optimize the chemical structure and effectiveness of this class of molecules and conduct safety testing in cellular and animal studies," said co-senior author Jia Zhou, UTMB professor in the department of pharmacology and toxicology. "We look forward to the time when we can begin clinical trials so that this approach can begin to help HIV-infected individuals."

The incidence of thyroid cancer among first responders who volunteered or were employed as firefighters, rescue personnel and cleanup workers at Ground Zero in New York on or after September 11, 2001, is three times higher than that in the general population.

This difference has been confirmed by a method involving a panel of four biomarkers that distinguish benign from malignant thyroid cancer cases on the basis of gene expression. The tests were developed by researchers at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP) in Brazil in collaboration with colleagues at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the United States. The study was supported by São Paulo Research Foundation - FAPESP as part of the Thematic Project.

The reasons for the increase in thyroid cancer incidence, revealed by previous research, are unclear. On 9/11 and for a long period thereafter, WTC responders searched for survivors in the debris and gave victims first aid after the deadliest foreign attack ever on US soil. Two hijacked passenger airliners crashed into the World Trade Center (WTC) in Manhattan, causing the collapse of the Twin Towers. A third plane crashed into the Pentagon in Washington DC. A fourth plane fell in a field in Pennsylvania after its passengers thwarted the hijackers.

For years, it was believed that the higher incidence of thyroid cancer in this cohort could reflect overdiagnosis and large numbers of false positive results in the post-9/11 screening program. However, an article recently published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health examines the results of a four-biomarker panel used to analyze thyroid tumors in 37 responders monitored by the WTC Health Program and compares these individuals with non-WTC-exposed individuals matched for age, gender and histology.

The researchers concluded that none of the assessments of WTC thyroid cancer tumors generated false positives and that all samples tested using the antibody-based cancer panel were malignant.

"To confirm the cancer cases, we used a panel comprising four biomarkers capable of indicating whether a thyroid tumor was malignant or benign. This panel was developed by our team and was initially designed to serve as a presurgical test for thyroid nodules labeled indeterminate because they could not be definitively classified as benign or malignant. The markers we used are genes whose function in thyroid cancer is unknown and is being explored by our group," said Janete Cerutti, Professor of Genetics at UNIFESP's School of Medicine, and principal investigator for the Thematic Project.

The biomarkers were developed by the team of Cerutti's team between 2004 and 2011. These tests reflect the increased or decreased expression of genes associated with thyroid cancer.

After the seven-year development period, the group created a biomarker panel that is simpler than conventional tests because it is based on the expression of only four genes: DDIT3, ITM1, C1orf24 and PVALB.

The test distinguishes between malignant tumors - follicular thyroid carcinoma, Hürthle cell carcinoma and papillary thyroid carcinoma - and benign lesions, such as follicular thyroid adenoma and Hürthle cell adenoma, by analyzing the combinations of gene expression markers.

"By puncturing the tumors and analyzing the cells we were able to observed the protein levels [produced by the expression of the four genes] present or absent in the cancer and thereby determine whether the tumors were malignant. The test will help physicians prescribe appropriate treatments," Cerutti told.

The method is simpler and hence cheaper than commercially available tests, she added. "It's a relatively simple test based on the combination of only four markers. Thyroid cancer marker panels already exist but they are much more complex than ours, with many more markers to detect possible genetic alterations in tumors."

The cost of the new method is estimated to be less than a tenth that of the diagnostic kits available commercially in Brazil, which can cost as much as BRL 12,000 (now approximately USD 3,200) per use.

Avoiding unnecessary surgery

The study that confirmed the increase in thyroid cancer among WTC responders was based on data donated by participants in the Mount Sinai Hospital WTC Health Program, which monitors over 27,000 responders with yearly examinations, laboratory testing and treatments for cancer, inflammatory diseases and mental illness.

"The program was concerned about the high level of thyroid cancer incidence, fearing it might be due to overdiagnosis or false positive results, but we demonstrated that this is not the case. Annual screening and monitoring can genuinely detect thyroid cancer at an early stage, increasing the likelihood of a favorable prognosis," Cerutti said.

The study also confirmed the accuracy of the technique developed by Cerutti and her research group. "It was very important to gain recognition from the WTC Health Program, validating our method with a population different from the Brazilian group that we have been testing since 2011," she said.

According to Brazil's National Cancer Institute (INCA), thyroid cancer is the fifth most common type of cancer among Brazilian women. The possibility of excessive numbers of false positives is also a concern in Brazil.

"High-resolution ultrasound imaging, capable of locating nodules as small as 2 mm, has greatly increased the detection of [cancerous and noncancerous] thyroid tumors," Cerutti said.

Genetic analysis of the tumors would avoid unnecessary surgery, she noted. Thyroid nodules cannot be correctly classified in 30% of cases, as the characteristics of malignant cells closely resemble those of benign cells, and diagnosis requires surgical biopsy.

The study of WTC responders will continue on two fronts, according to Cerutti. The dust and debris from the collapse of the towers will be investigated for components that may have influenced the rise in thyroid cancer incidence, and the team will also analyze the aggressiveness of these tumors.

"The analysis of tumor aggressiveness is being performed here in our lab at UNIFESP. We wanted to determine which kinds of genetic alterations that tumors display and to identify the more aggressive kinds. We are analyzing the mutations associated with a poor prognosis at the molecular level," she said.

The team is also studying the role of these molecular markers in the development of the disease. "We know that they play a role in its development. Our focus is now to discover why they increase or decrease in thyroid cancer. This knowledge will make an important contribution to the prescription of treatment, especially in cases for which the conventional treatment [surgery and radiation therapy] does not lead to a cure," Cerutti said.

ATLANTA--Blocking the ability of the bacterial pathogen that causes gonorrhea to uptake the mineral zinc can stop infection by this widespread sexually transmitted infection, according to a study by the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University.

The findings, published in the journal PLoS Pathogens, could be used to move gonorrhea vaccine development forward because they provide insight into how to block growth of this pathogen. No vaccine has been developed to prevent this serious infection.

There are more than 820,000 new cases of gonorrhea each year in the United States, and more than half of these cases are estimated to be among young people 15 to 24 years old, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the pathogen that causes gonorrhea, is considered to be an urgent threat because it has developed resistance to nearly every drug used for treatment, making it difficult to cure.

Untreated gonorrhea can cause severe and permanent health problems in women and men, and most women don't have symptoms. In women, untreated gonorrhea can cause pelvic inflammatory disease, which leads to infertility and ectopic pregnancies, life-threatening pregnancies that occur when a fertilized egg implants outside the womb.

"Our results are significant because N. gonorrhoeae will die if it can't get enough zinc," said Dr. Cynthia Nau Cornelissen, senior author of the study and director of the Center for Translational Immunology in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences, professor in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences and a Distinguished University Professor at Georgia State. "The study suggests a way to halt the growth of this sexually transmitted infection in the host's body."

N. gonorrhoeae is challenging to prevent and treat because it has an arsenal of conserved outer membrane proteins that allow the pathogen to overcome nutritional immunity, the host's strategy for sequestering essential nutrients away from invading bacteria and handicapping their infectious ability.

The bacterial pathogen produces eight known outer membrane transporters. Four are used for the acquisition of iron or iron chelates. Two of the remaining transporters, TdfH and TdfJ, facilitate zinc uptake. In previous work, Cornelissen's group has shown that TdfH binds to Calprotectin (a member of the S100 protein family) and extracts its zinc, which is then internalized by N. gonorrhoeae.

This study sought to evaluate whether other proteins in the S100 family have the ability to support gonococcal growth by zinc acquisition. Cornelissen's group found that TdfJ binds directly to S100A7, from which it internalizes zinc. This interaction is only detected with the human version of S100A7, which is significant because gonorrhea infection only occurs in humans, and thus the ability to use only human S100A7 contributes to the species specificity of the pathogen.

This study shows that N. gonorrhoeae overpowers human nutritional immunity through the interaction between TdfJ and human S100A7, allowing the pathogen to overcome the host's zinc restriction and continue to grow.

With Cornelissen's new $9.25 million grant from the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, she will use the findings from this study and previous studies on zinc uptake in N. gonorrhoeae to develop a vaccine to protect against the pathogen. Using an approach called "starve and kill," she will attempt to starve N. gonorrhoeae of the necessary nutrients (zinc and iron) to prevent it from growing and potentially even infecting the host.

Cornelissen aims to eventually develop a vaccine that blocks uptake of both iron and zinc by N. gonorrhoeae and fully protects the host against this bacterial pathogen.

Tropical Storm Gil was a two day tropical cyclone in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. It formed on Saturday, August 3, and by the end of the day on August 4, it was already a remnant low pressure area. On August 5, though, NASA's Terra satellite found a couple of small areas of strong storms left in the remnants of Gil.

Tropical Depression 8E formed on Aug. 3 around 11 a.m. EDT, about 930 miles (1,495 km) southwest of the southernmost tip of Baja California, Mexico. By 5 p.m. EDT, it strengthened into a tropical storm and was re-named Gil. Gil peaked 6 hours later when maximum sustained winds reached 40 mph (65 kph). It weakened quickly after that time.

It was just the next day, that NOAA's National Hurricane Center (NHC) noted that Gil had degenerated into a remnant low pressure area. At that time, Gil was located about 1,255 miles (2,020 km) southwest of the southern tip of Baja California.

NASA's Terra satellite uses infrared light to analyze the strength of storms by providing temperature information about the system's clouds. The strongest thunderstorms that reach high into the atmosphere have the coldest cloud top temperatures.

On Aug. 5 at 2:20 a.m. EDT (0620 UTC), the Moderate Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Terra satellite gathered infrared data on Gil's remnants. There were a couple of small areas of strong storms  where thunderstorms had cloud top temperatures as cold as minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 45.5 Celsius), but Gil is not expected to regenerate.