Tech

A wireless, wearable monitor built with stretchable electronics could allow comfortable, long-term health monitoring of adults, babies and small children without concern for skin injury or allergic reactions caused by conventional adhesive sensors with conductive gels.

The soft and conformable monitor can broadcast electrocardiogram (ECG), heart rate, respiratory rate and motion activity data as much as 15 meters to a portable recording device such as a smartphone or tablet computer. The electronics are mounted on a stretchable substrate and connected to gold, skin-like electrodes through printed connectors that can stretch with the medical film in which they are embedded.

"This health monitor has a key advantage for young children who are always moving, since the soft conformal device can accommodate that activity with a gentle integration onto the skin," said Woon-Hong Yeo, an assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "This is designed to meet the electronic health monitoring needs of people whose sensitive skin may be harmed by conventional monitors."

Details of the monitor were reported July 24 in the journal Advanced Science. The research was supported by the Imlay Innovation Fund at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, NextFlex (Flexible Hybrid Electronics Manufacturing Institute), and by a seed grant from the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology at Georgia Tech. The monitor has been studied on both animal models and humans.

Because the device conforms to the skin, it avoids signal issues that can be created by the motion of the typical metal-gel electrodes across the skin. The device can even obtain accurate signals from a person who is walking, running or climbing stairs.

"When you put a conventional electrode on the chest, movement from sitting up or walking creates motion artifacts that are challenging to separate from the signals you want to measure," he said. "Because our device is soft and conformal, it moves with the skin and provides information that cannot be seen with the motion artifacts of conventional sensors."

Continuous evaluation with a wireless health monitor could improve the assessment of children and help clinicians identify trends earlier, potentially facilitating intervention before a condition progresses, said Dr. Kevin Maher, a pediatric cardiologist at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta.

"The generation of continuous data from the respiratory and cardiovascular systems could allow for the application of advanced diagnostics to detect changes in clinical status, response to therapies and implementation of early intervention," Maher said. "A device to literally follow every breath a child takes could allow for early recognition and intervention prior to a more severe presentation of a disease."

Used in the home, a wearable monitor might detect changes that might not otherwise be apparent, he said. In clinical settings, the wireless device could allow children to feel less "tethered" to equipment. "I see this device as a significant change in pediatric health care and am excited to partner with Georgia Tech on the project," Maher added.

The monitor uses three gold electrodes embedded in the film that also contains the electronic processing equipment. The entire health monitor is just three inches in diameter, and a more advanced version under development will be half that size. The wireless monitor is now powered by a small rechargeable battery, but future versions may replace the battery with an external radio-frequency charging system.

Yeo and his collaborators, including first author and postdoctoral fellow Yun-Soung Kim, are focusing on pediatric applications because of the need for ambulatory monitoring in children. However, they envision that the health monitor could also be used for other patient groups, including older adults who may also have sensitive skin. For adults, there would be additional advantages.

"The monitor could be worn for multiple days, perhaps for as long as two weeks," Yeo said. "The membrane is waterproof, so an adult could take a shower while wearing it. After use, the electronic components can be recycled."

Two versions of the monitor have been developed. One is based on medical tape and designed for short-term use in a hospital or other care facility, while the other uses a soft elastomer medical film approved for use in wound care. The latter can remain on the skin longer.

"The devices are completely dry and do not require a gel to pick up signals from the skin," Yeo explained. "There is nothing between the skin and the ultrathin sensor, so it is comfortable to wear."

Because the monitor can be worn for long periods of time, it can provide a long-term record of ECG data helpful to understanding potential heart problems. "We use deep learning to monitor the signals while comparing them to data from a larger group of patients," Yeo said. "If an abnormality is detected, it can be reported wirelessly through a smartphone or other connected device."

Fabrication of the monitor's circuitry uses thin-film, mesh-like patterns of copper that can flex with the soft substrate. The chips are the only part not flexible, but they are mounted on the strain-isolated soft substrate instead of a traditional plastic circuit board.

As next steps, Yeo plans to reduce the size of the device and add features to measure other health-related parameters such as temperature, blood oxygen and blood pressure. A major milestone would be a clinical trial to evaluate performance against conventional health monitors.

For Yeo, who specializes in nano- and micro-engineering, the prospect of seeing the device in clinical trials - and ultimately used in children's hospitals - is a powerful incentive.

"It will be a dream come true for me to see something we have developed be helpful to someone who is suffering," he said. "We all want to see developments in science and engineering translated into improved patient care."

First observation of excitonic insulator

New exotic state was first predicted in 1960s

A University of Wollongong / Monash University collaboration has found evidence of a new phase of matter predicted in the 1960s: the excitonic insulator.

The unique signatures of an excitonic insulating phase were observed in antimony Sb(110) nanoflakes.

The findings provide a novel strategy to search for more excitonic insulators which is potentially capable of carrying exicton superfluids, and further studies will be required to fully understand the rich physics of this new phase of matter.

Background

"The discovery of new phases of matter is one of the major goals of condensed matter physics and is important for developing new technologies for low energy electronics which is the main goal of the ARC center in FLEET," says Prof Xiaolin Wang (UOW).

"In the 1960s, it was proposed that in small indirect band-gap materials, excitons can spontaneously form because the density of carriers is too low to screen the attractive Coulomb interaction between electrons and holes." said by Dr Zhi Li, the first author and currently FLEET AI and an ARC DECRA fellow co-mentored by Prof Wang and Prof Fuhrer.

The result is a novel strongly interacting insulating phase known as an excitonic insulator.

In the insulator family, the first member is the bandgap, 'or 'trivial' insulator.

Besides bandgap insulators, other insulating states may arise through the effects of electron-electron interactions or disorder coupled with quantum interference, for example:

Anderson insulators, in which electrons are localized by quantum interference

Topological insulators, which have a gap in the bulk but gapless conducting states at the surface/edge due to band inversion.

The excitonic insulator, a new phase of matter in the critical transition point between insulator and metal was proposed in 1960s by many pioneers in condensed matter physics.

In an excitonic insulator, bosonic particles rather than electrons determine the physical properties.

Excitonic insulators have been predicted to host many novel properties, including crystallized excitonium, superfluidity and excitonic high-temperature superconductivity, and breakthroughs in finding this new class of insulators have attracted keen attention amongst condensed matter physicists and two-dimensional material scientists.

The study

The research team employed scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) and spectroscopy (STS) to show that the enhanced Coulomb interaction in quantum-confined elemental antimony nanoflakes drives the system to the excitonic insulator state.

The unique feature of the excitonic insulator, a charge density wave (CDW) without periodic lattice distortion, was directly observed. Furthermore, STS shows a gap induced by the CDW near the Fermi surface.

These observations suggest that the antimony (Sb(110)) nanoflake is an excitonic insulator.

"Possible Excitonic Insulating Phase in Quantum-Confined Sb Nanoflakes" was published in Nano Letters in July 2019. (DOI 10.1021/acs.nanolett.9b01123)

As well as funding by the Australian Research Council (Centre of Excellence, Future Fellowship, Discovery Projects, DECRA and LIEF funds and Laureate Fellowship), support was provided by the University of Wollongong Vice Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Scheme.

The theory

Excitons, which are bosonic, strongly-bound pairs of electrons and holes, are formed through the attractive electron?hole Coulomb interaction, lowering the system energy by the value of the binding energy (Eb).

If such excitons could form spontaneously, then the result would be an excitonic insulator phase.

In semiconductors or insulators, the formation of an exciton requires overcoming the band-gap energy Eg needed to create an electron?hole pair. The spontaneous formation of excitons demands that Eb > Eg. However, Eg is usually much larger than Eb in semiconductors and insulators, preventing spontaneous exciton formation.

In this work, the researchers took advantage of the strong Coulomb interaction in very thin materials to promote the excitonic insulator phase in antimony.

Previous work

Up to now, many materials showing CDW have been identified as the candidate of excitonic insulators.

Unfortunately, these candidate excitonic insulators show strong periodical lattice distortion (PLD), indicating CDW was driven by electron-phonon coupling rather than by excitonic insulator states.

The new study provides solid evidence of the excitonic insulator phase in antimony nanoflakes by the observation of CDW without PLD.

Scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Leibniz-Institute for Food Systems Biology have developed a new methodology for the simultaneous analysis of odorants and tastants. It could simplify and accelerate the quality control of food in the future.

Whether a food tastes good or not is essentially determined by the interaction of odors and tastants. A few trillionths of a gram per kilogram of food is enough to perceive some odorants. Tastants, on the other hand, we only recognize at significantly higher concentrations.

In order to guarantee consistent sensory quality, it is very important for manufacturers to know and control the characteristic odor and taste profiles of their products from the raw material to the finished product. This requires a fast but precise food analysis.

Tastants and aroma substances, however, differ greatly in their chemical and physical properties. As a result, food chemists currently use very different methods to determine the exact nature and quantity of odorants and tastants in a raw material or food. Especially aroma analyses are very time-consuming and therefore expensive. This limits the high-throughput analysis of numerous samples.

One methodical approach for two different substance classes

Thomas Hofmann, Director of the Leibniz-Institute for Food Systems Biology and Professor of Food Chemistry and Molecular Sensory Science at the TUM, explains: "We have now developed a new, innovative methodical approach that will enable us to examine food simultaneously for both odorants and tastants in a time-saving high-throughput process. It is based on an ultra-high performance liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (UHPLC-MS) method typically used for taste analysis.

The new and time-saving feature of the developed approach is that volatile odorous substances can now also be analyzed by means of an upstream enrichment or substance conversion step using this method, which is otherwise not used for aromatic substances.

Apple juice as a test object

"We have tested our new methodological approach using apple juice as an example. The results are very promising," says Andreas Dunkel, Senior Scientist at the Leibniz-Institute of Food Systems Biology. Together with doctoral student Christoph Hofstetter from the TUM, he was substantially involved in the development of the new approach.

According to the scientists, the new method makes it possible for the first time to analyze a large number of samples in a very short time with regard to their taste and odor giving ingredients.

Also suitable for food profiling

The researchers hope to be able to further develop the method so that it can be used by food manufacturers in the future to quickly and easily monitor the flavor of food along the entire value chain and, if necessary, optimize it.

Last but not least, the new method could also be used to stop food fraud. "Using the identified flavor profiles, it would be possible to check the origin and quality label of the manufacturers and detect food fraud," says food profiler and food chemist Andreas Dunkel.

When two studies attempting to identify new colon cancer treatment methods found different results, a researcher at the University of Arizona Cancer Center was asked to help settle the uncertainty.

Curtis Thorne, PhD, an assistant professor, cellular and molecular medicine, accepted the challenge and called upon one of his doctoral students, Carly R. Cabel, to assist in the project.

The goal was simple: determine whether therapeutic targeting of a specific protein - LRP6 - is a suitable treatment strategy for colon cancer. If so, this would challenge the current scientific dogma and approaches to patient care.

The National Cancer Institute lists colorectal cancer (cancer in the colon or rectum) as the fourth-most common cancer diagnosed in the United States. More than 145,000 new cases are expected in 2019.

A potential breakthrough to therapeutic targeting of colon cancer starts in the biology of the cancerous cells. Previously accepted research identified a protein called adenomatous polyposis coli (APC) as a tumor suppressant in the colon. When functioning properly, the APC protein prevents cells from growing and dividing too quickly or uncontrollably.

When APC is mutated and loses its function, however, the effects can be harmful. One result is abnormal activation of signaling pathways (how cells communicate with each other) that can lead to cancer.

"In colon cancer, the Wnt ('went') pathway is used to control the proliferation of cells that line the colon," Dr. Thorne said. "This pathway gets turned on inappropriately to where it is signaling too much. That drives colon cancer."

In healthy gut cells, the Wnt pathway consists of a cell surface receptor, similar to an antenna, called LRP6 that "listens" to signals in the tissue environment to tell cells when to grow or when to stop growing. In cases where an APC mutation occurs, the Wnt pathway is turned on inside the cell instead of at the surface. When this happens, APC mutant cells are thought to completely ignore signals coming from the LRP6 receptor. Scientists generally believed there is little use in targeting LRP6 with therapeutics because of the "downstream" pathway triggering by APC.

That was the common thinking until a team of researchers led by Ethan Lee, MD, PhD, at Vanderbilt University and Yashi Ahmed, MD, PhD, at Dartmouth College discovered that Wnt receptors like LRP6 still can promote growth even when the pathway is mutated downstream at APC.

The researchers concluded targeting this protein therapeutically may be a treatment strategy to consider in blocking progression of colon cancer. Their findings were published in the March 2018 edition of Developmental Cell, a broad-interest journal covering the areas of cell biology and developmental biology.

After the report was published, researchers at Harvard Medical Center, led by Xi He, PhD, attempted to repeat the results. However, the team at Harvard, using a slightly different experimental approach, was unable to do so. This apparent conflict prompted Dr. Lee of the original study to contact Dr. Thorne at the UA Cancer Center at the end of 2018 to further explore the findings. Dr. Thorne's lab presented an opportunity for a new technique not used in the first two studies: single-cell profiling. This was done using patient-derived colon tissues, including both healthy and cancerous cells, grown in the lab.

Cabel, who holds a bachelor's degree in molecular and cellular biology from UA and was the recipient of the John and Betty Anderson Memorial Fellowship, was tasked with a majority of the project's work. The fellowship supports first-year graduate students who have elected to pursue a career in cancer research. For her experiments, Cabel relied on a high-throughput microscope called the Operetta CLS, cutting-edge technology available through UA's Functional Genomics Core, to take thousands of images of colon cancer cells. She then analyzed millions of cells captured in the images using custom software developed by Elaheh Alizadeh, PhD, a postdoctoral research associate in the Thorne lab at the UA.

"I think what we brought to the table is this resource of colon cells with specific and defined mutations," Cabel said. "I measured the activity of the Wnt pathway in every single cell individually and compared it before and after inhibition of LRP6."

When the project was completed in spring 2019, Dr. Thorne and Cabel were able to repeat the results of the initial research teams at Vanderbilt and Dartmouth. Cabel was the first-author of a June 2019 letter published in Developmental Cell detailing the findings. This was published alongside a letter from the Harvard group detailing their challenges in repeating the finding from the original study.

As the principal investigator for the study, Dr. Thorne said, "These kinds of conflicts are more common than we'd all like to believe in biomedical research. I commend the editors of Development Cell for providing a forum for openly discussing conflicting results among research groups. We need more of this open dialog in scientific publishing, not less."

Dr. Thorne believes this research has validated an important target that should be considered for therapeutic treatments of colon cancer.

"I think in colon cancer, as well as other types of cancer," Dr. Thorne said. "We should not ignore LRP6 and it should be toward the top of the list for drug targets in the Wnt pathway."

For Cabel, her first published work is a rewarding step in the journey to pursue a PhD and a career in cancer research.

"I think the biggest takeaway from this is the concept of collaboration," Cabel said. "The best groups are going to have lots of researchers working on a common goal, especially in our case with cancer. We want to get the best science and research out there for the best care, because that's what is most important."

JULY 30, 2019, NEW YORK AND LONDON - An international collaborative led by Ludwig Cancer Research and Cancer Research UK has identified key areas that are central to uncovering the complex relationship between nutrition and cancer. Advancing research on these core areas using a holistic, cross-disciplinary approach could catalyze progress urgently needed to prevent cancer and improve public health globally. Their main observations and conclusions are reported in a Forum article published online today in BMC Medicine.

"While data clearly show that obesity is a major risk factor for cancer, we still have a lot to learn about how diet, physical activity and other metabolic factors impact cancer development," said Bob Strausberg, deputy scientific director of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research. "In bringing together the most prominent experts in the field across institutions, disciplines and continents, we have worked to identify these research gaps and clarify the role of nutrition in cancer prevention."

Insights from the Forum article published today emerged from discussions during the inaugural international Cancer Prevention and Nutrition Conference held in London on December 3-4, 2018. The full list of the Cancer Research UK - Ludwig Cancer Research Nutrition and Cancer Prevention Collaborative Group is included in the manuscript here. The article includes several sections addressing main areas of concern as outlined by experts in each field who attended the conference.

Traditionally, there have been several methodological challenges with studying the impact of nutrition on cancer risk, development and treatment. Environmental exposures in early life--including diet--can influence cancer risk in the future. However, the impact of these factors has been difficult to track from childhood to adulthood. In addition, our understanding of the fundamental biologic mechanisms behind these long-term effects is limited.

"The complexity of the metabolic factors modulated by diet and physical activity may be a contributing factor for the lack of support for several prominent food and cancer hypotheses in large prospective studies," wrote section leads Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Elio Riboli, chair in cancer epidemiology and prevention at Imperial College London.

The current nutrition and cancer evidence-base is largely observational and prone to confounding, and long-term diet is difficult to assess," added section leads Richard Martin, professor of clinical epidemiology at University of Bristol, and Edward Giovannucci, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

New analytical approaches and global networks are helping researchers to move from observational associations to causal links. Recent advances in omics technologies, combined with the creation of large research groups and population biobanks, have made high-dimensional molecular datasets from human samples more accessible. These tools are a valuable resource to advance our understanding of the causal underpinnings of cancer.

"With improved mechanisms to share data, enhanced collaboration across continents and cross-pollination increasing among traditional siloes--the links between nutrition and cancer prevention research are potentially more understandable and actionable," wrote Fiona Reddington, head of population, prevention and behavioral research funding at Cancer Research UK.

To best leverage these recent advances in the fields of nutrition and oncology, scientists urgently seek institutional support and funding for cancer prevention and nutrition research. "Resources are reluctantly applied to prevention, let alone early life factors that are decades removed from cancer occurrence," added Karin Michels, professor of epidemiology at University of California and Robert Waterland, professor of pediatrics-nutrition at Baylor College of Medicine. "We hope our pressing call to action will be heard."

Translating research on nutrition and diet into cancer prevention recommendations and policies that successfully change people's eating habits is equally important, according to the authors. Working with governments and healthcare professionals to limit the proliferation of unhealthy food options will continue to be critical.

"Research to inform the development of policies and interventions to improve the food environment and prioritize cancer and other noncommunicable disease prevention requires interdisciplinary collaborations," wrote Linda Bauld, professor of public health at the University of Edinburgh and Cancer Research UK/BUPA chair in cancer prevention, and Hilary Powers, emeritus professor of nutritional biochemistry at the University of Sheffield. "Researchers need skills not only in identifying appropriate context specific methods and analysis but also in knowledge translation and in engaging policy makers and the public."

People are often much better at giving useful advice to a friend in trouble than they are in dealing with their own problems. Although we typically have continuous internal dialogue, we are trapped inside our own way of thinking with our own history and point of view, and find it difficult to take an external perspective regarding our own problems. However, with friends, especially someone we know well, it is much easier to understand the bigger picture, and help them find a way through their problems.

A research team of the University of Barcelona (UB), IDIBAPS and Virtual BodyWorks, a spin-off of both institutions and ICREA, has used immersive virtual reality to observe the effects of talking to themselves as if they were another person, using virtual reality. Study results, published in the Nature Group's journal Scientific Reports, show that conversation with oneself embodied as Dr Sigmund Freud works better to improve people's mood, compared to just talking about your problems in a virtual conversation with pre-scripted comments. Researchers claimed that the method could be used by clinicians to help people dealing with minor personal problems.

The study was led by Mel Slater and Solène Neyret, researchers at the Experimental Virtual Environments Lab for Neuroscience and Technology (Event Lab), a research group of the Faculty of Psychology of the UB. Clinical psychologist Guillem Feixas, of the UB Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology and the Institute of Neurosciences of the University of Barcelona (UBNeuro) also guided the study.

Changing perception and attitude thanks to Virtual Reality

Previous studies developed by this research team have shown that when we adopt a different body using virtual reality, we change our behaviour, attitude and perception of things. "We showed earlier that it is possible for people to talk to themselves as if they were another person, body swapping to two different avatars, and that participants' mood and happiness improved. However, we didn't know whether this was due to simply the participant talking about their problem or whether the virtual body swapping really made a difference," said Mel Slater, also a member of the UBNeuro.

In order to test the body swapping idea, researchers compared one group who talked to themselves first embodied as the participant and then body swapping to a virtual Sigmund Freud; and another (control) group who spoke to the virtual Freud, but in that case Freud responded with pre-scripted questions and comments (there was no body swapping).

Embodied as Sigmund Freud

For this technique to work out,researchers scanned the person to obtain an 'avatar' which is a 3D-likeness of the person. In virtual reality, when they look at themselves, at their body parts, or in a mirror, they will see a representation of themselves. When they move their real body, their virtual body will move in the same way and at the same time. Seated across the table is another virtual human, in the case of this experiment, a representation of Dr Sigmund Freud.

The participant can explain their personal problem to Dr Freud, and then switch to being embodied as Freud. Now, embodied as Freud, when they look down towards themselves, or in a mirror, they will see Freud's body rather than their own, and also this body will move in synchrony with their own movements. "They will see and hear their own likeness explaining the problem, and they see their virtual self as if this were another person. Now they themselves have become the 'friend' who is listening and trying to help," said Mel Slater.

While embodied as Freud, and after perceiving a strong likeness of themselves describing a problem, they can respond, as Freud, back to themselves and ask a question or help the person in front (themselves) to find a solution. After this, they are embodied once again in their own body and they can see and hear Freud's answer. Although it was really themselves who had spoken through Freud, they will hear their voice as disguised. They can keep switching back and forth between the two bodies, so having a conversation: in reality it is with themselves, but it appears as if it is between two different people.

Better results in dealing with personal problems

One week after the completion of the experiment more than 80% of participants in the body swapping group reported a change with respect to their problem, compared to less than 50% in the control group. "We found that those in the body swapping group got better knowledge, understanding, control, and new ideas about their problem compared to the control group (no body swapping)," said Mel Slater.

Participants were guided by clinical psychologist Tania Johnston about how to formulate their problem, so researchers do not know whether this method could be used without this prior clinical advice, and the extent to which the clinician could be incorporated into the virtual reality as part of the procedure.

However, researchers believe that this method could be a useful tool for clinicians. "Now that virtual reality is available as a consumer product, with high quality at less than the cost of a good Smartphone, this method could be widely used by clinicians, for example, by giving 'homework' to their clients to carry out this type of method at home,", said Mel Slater.

A team of scientists from the School of Engineering of Far Eastern Federal University, Institute of Marine Technology Issues, and Institute of Automation and Management Processes of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences developed software allowing industrial AI robots with technical vision to set out and adjust the movement trajectories of their tools in real time without reducing given precision levels.

The report of the team was recognized as the best in its session at the ICCAD'19 conference that took place in Grenoble (France) on July 2-4.

The team from FEFU developed and implemented a new principle for smart industrial robots control - the management of program signals. According to it, robots are able to set and adjust the trajectories and regimes (speeds) of tools movement on their own while processing details under uncertain conditions and in a changing working environment.

The new software allowed the team to get around 0.5 mm precision in the operation of robotic tools (including the actions that require additional force application). However, many high-accuracy operations require precision within the 0.2-0.1 mm range.

"The issue lies in the imprecise technology used to manufacture the robots themselves, and it hasn't been resolved anywhere in the world yet. We've already developed a method to eliminate this defect based on special test movements. It proved to be efficient in models, and right now we are working to implement it in practice. If we obtain positive results, it would be a breakthrough in the practical application of robots in general. And if no, we'd continue to work until we have a positive result. Generally, this is a working method," said Professor Vladimir Filaretov, a PhD in Technical Sciences, the Head of the Department for Automation and Management at the School of Engineering, FEFU, a Honored Science Worker of Russia, a Honoured Inventor of Russia, and a Honoured Engineer of Russia.

Using a technical vision system, a machine forms a virtual image of its workspace, recognizes each piece, and determines its exact position. A robot can also identify deformations in large pieces that occur in the course of their fixation. Based on the virtual image, it determines the trajectories of its working tools.

"It's important to emphasize that the methods, algorithms, and software developed by us are of universal nature. They can be used to control almost any types of robots: industrial robots, underwater devices, unmanned ground vehicles, flying, and many promising agricultural robots. They only require minor adjustments that are already included into the software and take into account their specific features. Our developments, including smart VR-based control, maximize on the capabilities of modern technologies and are able to increase the efficiency of technological processes by several times while preserving the quality of the products," added Professor Filaretov.

The new smart control method has already been implemented at the Dalpribor plant (Vladivostok) and is currently being tested and adjusted in view of the recent industrial challenges. The most recent update of the technology was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Control, Automation and Diagnosis 2019 (ICAAD'19) in Grenoble and got special recognition.

Based on the results of its work, a group of five scientists under the supervision of Professor Filaretov applied for the Russian Federation Government Prize.

A study of how dung beetles survive deforestation in Borneo suggests that species with more competition among males for matings are less likely to go extinct, according to research led by scientists from Queen Mary University of London and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

The team followed 34 different species of tunneller dung beetle in the tropical rainforest of Sabah in Malaysian Borneo. These are similar to the familiar ball-rolling dung beetles but they bury dung directly under the place where it's deposited. Some of these species have males which compete intensively for access to females and which carry horns which they use in fights with rivals, whereas other species have less competitive males which don't fight each other and which don't have horns.

In the study area, 34 of these beetle species are found in pristine "old-growth" forest, and the team tracked each of them across a gradient of increasing environmental disturbance going from the old-growth forest, to lightly logged forest, then heavily logged forest and finally oil palm plantations where the original forest has been almost completely replaced.

The results, which are published in the journal Ecology Letters, showed that species with horns were more likely to persist in the disturbed environments than were those without horns, and in the most disturbed environment, oil palm plantation, all of the 11 species that remained had horns. Furthermore, the researchers found that among the species with horns, those with relatively large horns for their body size were more likely to persist and had larger population sizes.

Dr Rob Knell from Queen Mary University of London said: "Strong sexual selection, in this case, competition between males, means that some males "win" and father a large proportion of the next generation. When a population is stressed by changes to the environment the winning males can be the ones best adapted to the new environment, and this can boost the rate by which the population adapts to the new environment, making them less likely to go extinct. This is something that has long been predicted theoretically but it is the first time that this effect has been shown in the field."

Dr Eleanor Slade from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore added "This tells us that if we want to understand how animals can adapt to changing environments then we need to think about their mating systems as well as other aspects of their biology. Understanding which species may be particularly prone to extinction after environmental change is important when evaluating species conservation status and management practices."

Sexual selection describes the process by which members of one sex compete with each other for access to members of the opposite sex. It is ubiquitous across the animal kingdom and drives the evolution of traits such as sexual ornaments and weapons, which give advantages to individuals in competitions for mating. While these traits can benefit individuals, the effect of strong sexual selection at the level of the species is less clear. There are several ways in which sexual selection might actually increase extinction risk. These include the cost of growing and carrying sexual ornaments and weapons, the energetic expense and risk of injury from contests with rivals, and the risk of predation during conspicuous sexual displays.

These traits are also, however, indicators of an individuals' condition and can reflect underlying genetic quality. Strong sexual selection can therefore enhance the spread of beneficial genetic variants by the mechanism explained above potentially reducing extinction risk.

An antimicrobial agent called Defensin kills tumour cells and shrinks tumour size in fruit flies, with help from a pathway that flags the cells for destruction.

These findings, published in eLife, provide the first evidence in live animals that antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), which help protect against infection, also defend against cancer. If confirmed in further studies in animals and humans, the discovery could one day lead to new cancer treatment strategies.

Previous studies have shown that AMPs kill cancer cells grown in the laboratory, but the findings had not been confirmed in living creatures.

"We used the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster to investigate whether the machinery that is best known for its role in the recognition and elimination of harmful microbes is also capable of recognising malignant cells in a living organism and eliminating them in a similar manner," says lead author Jean-Philppe Parvy, a postdoctoral fellow at Cancer Research UK's Beatson Institute in Glasgow.

Their experiments showed that tumour-prone fruit flies produce more Defensin than their normal counterparts. Defensin interacts with dying tumour cells in the animals. Shutting down Defensin in the tumour-prone animals leads to tumour growth, suggesting that Defensin is actively killing the cells while sparing normal cells.

Next, Parvy and his colleagues showed that Defensin recognises tumour cells in the same way it recognises harmful microbes. The fly version of a protein called Tumour Necrosis Factor helps flag the tumour cells for destruction and makes the cells more sensitive to Defensin's attack. It does this by bringing a molecule called phosphatidylserine to the surface of the tumour cells. Defensin then binds to phosphatidylserine-rich areas on the tumour cells and kills them.

"Our results reveal an anti-tumour role for Defensin in flies and provides insights on the molecular mechanisms that make tumours sensitive to the killing action of AMPs," Parvy explains.

Further research is now needed to see if these same mechanisms are at work in mammals and humans.

"Our work may have a significant translational potential for cancer research in mammalian models as it raises the possibility that human AMPs could have anti-tumour effects similar to those of Defensin in flies," says senior author Julia Cordero, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Cancer Sciences, University of Glasgow, UK. "If future work confirms this, natural AMPs or chemically designed analogues might be used in anti-cancer therapeutics."

A group of microorganisms known as kinetoplastids includes the parasites that cause devastating diseases such as African sleeping sickness, Chagas disease, and leishmaniasis. They share an ability to adhere to the insides of their insect hosts, using a specialized protein structure. But what if scientists could prevent the parasite from adhering? Would the parasites pass right through the vectors, unable to be passed on to a human?

That's the idea behind a new study led by Michael Povelones of Penn's School of Veterinary Medicine and Megan L. Povelones of Penn State Brandywine. Using a non-disease-causing kinetoplastid species called Crithidia fasciculata, this husband-wife duo and their research team identified a number of genes involved in adherence in its mosquito host.

"The parasite has to hold on so it won't pass right through," says Michael Povelones, an assistant professor of pathobiology at Penn Vet. "It needs to get retained in the gut in order to multiply and eventually get transmitted. These mechanisms of adherence seem to be [shared] across kinetoplastid species, so the hope is that our insights about Crithidia will tell us something about adherence in the medically relevant species."

The study appears in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

Scientists had long turned to Crithidia fasciculata as a biochemical model to understand features of parasitic disease, as it is easily grown in the lab. Megan Povelones, whose specialty is African trypanosomiasis, was familiar with it from her doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University, and the subject came up in conversations with her spouse.

"We talk shop at home sometimes," says Michael Povelones, whose own research has focused on ways to harness the power of the mosquito's own immune defenses to stop them from transmitting disease. "I was intrigued by the fact that Crithidia infects mosquitoes but isn't a human or animal pathogen, that little was known about its life cycle, and that there had been some electron microscope studies done that show the parasite is actually adhering to the mosquito gut with a very specific type of structure that people had described as a hemidesmosome. I felt like there was some fascinating cell biology there to explore."

Together they set out to investigate what happens to enable the parasite to "hold on" to the inside of the mosquito, a trait believed to be critical for disease transmission.

In the lab, the researchers were able to replicate what other scientists had found previously: That Crithidia parasites exist in both a swimming form, with a tail-like appendage called a flagellum, and an adhering form, that even sticks to the surface of the plastic dishes in which they were grown in the lab. The swimming form was favored when the culture dishes were placed on a shaker, while the adherent form, which divided to form rosette structures, was more likely to develop when the dishes were kept stationary. Interestingly, they observed that the adherent parasites in the rosettes would occasionally give rise to swimming versions.

To focus on the adherent parasites, the researchers would wait to see rosettes appear and would then wash away the swimming parasite. They could then focus on probing the genetics of the two types.

"One question we had was really simple," says Michael Povelones, "which was, 'What were the transcriptional differences between the swimming cells versus those allowed to grow as rosettes.'"

Remarkably, for two forms of the same species growing in the same medium, the researchers found a significant amount of variation in gene expression between the two.

"The process of adhesion transformed their transcriptome in a really dramatic way," says Michael Povelones.

When the researchers infected laboratory mosquito strains with Crithidia, they found that the parasites adhering to the mosquitoes, primarily in their hindgut region, resembled the adherent form they were culturing in the lab, giving them confidence that studying their lab strains could reveal important information about what was going on in the parasites' insect hosts.

Among the genes with enhanced expression were a group known as GP63s that have been implicated in adhesion to immune cells in the Leishmania parasite.

The team is hoping to pursue further investigations of adhesion using Crithidia as a tool, looking specifically at genes involved in the process that are known to be shared across kinetoplastid species and that could perhaps one day serve as a target for blocking transmission of vector-borne diseases.

WASHINGTON, D.C., July 30, 2019 - Nuclear power plants can withstand most inclement weather and do not emit harmful greenhouse gases. However, trafficking of the nuclear materials to furnish them with fuel remains a serious issue as security technology continues to be developed.

Two physicists working out of the University of Florida and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Paul Johns and Juan Nino, conducted research to enhance global nuclear security by improving radiation detectors. According to them, improving radiation detectors requires the identification of better sensor materials and the development of smarter algorithms to process detector signals. They discuss their work in this week's Journal of Applied Physics, from AIP Publishing.

"The end users of radiation detectors don't necessarily have a background in physics that allows them to make decisions based on the signals that come in," Johns said. "The algorithms used to energy-stabilize and identify radioactive isotopes from a gamma ray spectrum are therefore key to making detectors useful and reliable. When sensors can provide better signal resolution, algorithms are able to more accurately inform users about the radiation sources in their environment."

Currently, no single radiation detector is perfect for every application. With size, signal resolution, weight, and cost all being factors, designing the ideal detector has proved to be a major challenge.

Johns and Nino examined a list of potential compounds for room temperature semiconductor detectors, which don't need to cool a sensor down to cryogenic temperatures for them to function properly, and identified several prime candidates. When choosing between compounds, the authors considered the cost, practicality and efficiency of each.

After assessing a diverse list of more than 60 candidates for alternative semiconductor compounds, the authors concluded that hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite -- a mineral consisting mainly of calcium titanate -- has the strongest potential among emerging compounds. Hybrid perovskites can be easily synthesized and grown via solution over the course of only several hours to a couple of days as opposed to the weeks or months that it takes to produce conventional sensors. Their cost efficiency, yield and output rate lead the authors to believe that if their stability can be improved, these compounds will be at the forefront of room temperature semiconductor detector research.

"Preventing radioactive materials from being used for harmful purposes is a global nuclear security challenge. Equipping law enforcement and first responders with the best possible radiation detectors is key to detecting, identifying and, ultimately, prohibiting radioactive threats," said Johns.

To prevent nuclear terrorism and the acquisition and use of weapons of mass destruction, radiation sensors must continue to be updated. Johns and Nino look forward to enhancing global security through improvements to room temperature semiconductor compounds.

WASHINGTON, D.C., July 30, 2019 -- Advances in organic phosphorescent materials are opening new opportunities for organic light-emitting diodes for combined electronics and light applications, including solar cells, photodiodes, optical fibers and lasers.

While low-dimensional luminescent materials, like the calcium titanium oxide mineral perovskite, have promising optical properties, their performance remains insufficient compared to conventional organic LEDs. A recent study, published in this week's Applied Physics Reviews, from AIP Publishing, explores a new approach using an exciton confinement effect to optimize highly efficient perovskite LEDs.

To achieve an efficient electroluminescent device, it must have a high photoluminescence quantum yield emission layer, efficient electron hole injection and transport layers, and high light out-coupling efficiency. With each new advance in emission layer material, new functional materials are required to realize a more efficient LED. To accomplish this goal, the authors of the study explored the performance of an amorphous zinc-silica-oxide system layered with perovskite crystals to improve the diode performance.

"We think that many people [are] too focused on an emission layer," said Hideo Hosono, corresponding author on the study. "For a device, all layers are equally important since each layer has a different [but] crucial role."

The amorphous zinc silicon oxide has a shallow tunable electron affinity, capable of confining excitons, but also high electron mobility to transport electrons. By layering the perovskite crystal and the amorphous zinc silicon oxide, the team developed a way to confine excitons and inject the electrons into the 3D perovskite layers efficiently. The energy-level alignment between the layers proved an ideal material for this purpose.

To validate their findings, the team tested their creation by producing blue, red and green perovskite LEDs, called PeLEDs. The green diode operated at the lowest voltage (2.9 volts at 10,000 candela per square meter) and was the most efficient (33 lumens/watt) and brightest (500,000 candela per square meter). While the team produced the maximum luminance for red diodes to date, the illumination remained too dim for practical use.

While these results show the promise of manipulating the electron transport layer material, challenges remain, including the stability of perovskite materials and toxicity of lead in the mineral crystal matrix. Despite these limitations, the results offer new opportunities to apply this approach to realize practical applications for perovskite LEDs in optoelectronic devices.

"For practical PeLEDs, new halide emitting materials with chemically stability and lead-free elements are highly needed," said Junghwan Kim, corresponding author on the study. "If this issue is solved, the PeLEDs would be commercialized for practical electronics in the future."

WASHINGTON, D.C., July 30, 2019 -- Recent advances in solar cell technology use polycrystalline perovskite films as the active layer, with an increase to efficiency of as much as 24.2%. Hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites are especially successful, and they have been used in optoelectronic devices including solar cells, photodetectors, light-emitting diodes and lasers.

But the surface of hybrid perovskites is prone to surface defects, or surface traps, where charge carriers are trapped in the semiconducting material. To solve this problem and reduce the number of traps, the crystal surface must be passivated.

Before use, perovskites can be treated with chemical solutions, vapors and atmospheric gases to remove defects that make the material less effective. Benzylamine is one particularly successful molecule for this purpose. A detailed understanding of the physical and chemical mechanisms by which these treatments work is key to increasing the collection of charge carriers in solar cells.

In their article in this week's Applied Physics Reviews, from AIP Publishing, the authors describe their work testing hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite crystals treated with benzylamine to investigate the mechanisms by which the surface of the crystal is passivated, and traps states are reduced.

"This molecule has been used in polycrystalline fields in solar cells, and people have demonstrated that the solar cells were improved," author Maria A. Loi said. "We wanted to study, in a clean system, why the solar cells were improving and understand why adding this molecule makes the devices better."

The experiments revealed benzylamine enters into the surface of the crystal to create a new, two-dimensional material -- 2D perovskite -- on the surface of the three-dimensional crystal. Where the 2D version forms and later breaks away from the surface, a terraced etching pattern occurs.

"The main purpose was to passivate the surface to reduce defect states," Loi said. "To our surprise, we found out the surface was modified, which was not an expected mechanism. People report that this molecule can improve the quality of devices, but nobody has reported that, in reality, it was creating a two-dimensional layer and could also restructure the material."

The authors also discovered the combination of benzylamine and atmospheric gases is most effective for passivation. That could mean, Loi said, that more than one type of trap state exists. Further investigation of multiple types of trap states could enable precise tuning of the mechanisms involved in preparing crystals for efficient optoelectronic devices.

A team from the Ruhr Explores Solvation Cluster of Excellence at Ruhr-Universität Bochum has created new molecules with magnetic properties. In contrast to many earlier organic magnets, the molecules were stable in the presence of water and oxygen. Their magnetic properties were retained up to minus 110 degrees Celsius - which is relatively warm for these compounds. Together with colleagues from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Chernogolovka, the team led by Professor Wolfram Sander, Chair of Organic Chemistry II, describes the results in the journal "Angewandte Chemie" on 2 July 2019.

Organic magnets could offer many advantages over conventional metallic magnets: they would be lightweight, transparent, economical and could be flexible or even liquid. Their magnetic properties could be switched on and off using light. "However, organic magnetic molecules are often unstable," says Wolfram Sander. "They react easily with other molecules or lose their magnetic properties when exposed to light or heat."

Magnetism due to unpaired electrons

Magnetism occurs when electric charges move; the phenomenon can be found in matter of any kind, but with varying degrees of intensity. What are known as arylnitrenes have proven to be promising molecules for organic magnets. "They possess two unpaired electrons with a strong magnetic interaction and are relatively easy to produce," says Enrique Mendez-Vega, one of the authors of the publication.

The researchers hoped for even stronger magnetic properties by combining several nitrenes. In the current work, they combined three nitrenes to form a trinitrene, which thus contained six unpaired electrons. Their route of synthesis achieved high yields.

Although the trinitrene had six unpaired electrons - a property that usually makes molecules reactive - it remained stable instead of reacting with oxygen and hydrogen. The researchers had embedded it in a water matrix, which also prevented the reactive units of the molecule from joining together, which would have caused them to lose their magnetic properties.

Next goal: stable at room temperature

"The trinitrenes are promising candidates for the development of organic magnets as they are relatively easy to produce in larger quantities, are stable and strongly magnetic," says Wolfram Sander. "We are now working on making them stable under normal environmental conditions, such as at room temperature."

Many parents are reluctant to talk with their kids about sex. But a new study shows that interventions involving parents and children lead to safer sexual practices - and do not make adolescents more likely to engage in sexual activity.

"People have been studying parent-based sexual health interventions for decades, and we wanted to know how effective they are; as well as whether there are specific features of these interventions that make them more effective," says Laura Widman, first author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of psychology at North Carolina State University.

Parent-based interventions are programs aimed at working with parents, and often their children, to address issues such as communicating about sex, providing sexual health information, and encouraging safer sex behavior.

The new study was a meta-analysis of 31 randomized controlled trials, involving 12,464 adolescents between the ages of 9 and 18, with a mean age of just over 12 years. Twenty-nine of the studies were longitudinal, 16 of which had follow-up periods of more than a year.

One of the strongest effects the meta-analysis identified was an increase in condom use by adolescents whose parents took part in an intervention, compared to adolescents whose parents didn't participate in an intervention. And the study found that there were several features that increased the size of that effect.

Specifically: interventions that focused on adolescents aged 14 or younger had a stronger effect than interventions aimed at older adolescents; interventions that were targeted to Black or Hispanic youth had a stronger effect on those youth than interventions that were not culturally specific; interventions that targeted parents and adolescents equally, rather than focusing primarily on either audience, were more effective; and programs that lasted for 10 hours or more were more effective than shorter interventions.

"These are variables that make sense intuitively: reaching kids when they're younger and, often, more willing to listen; involving both parents and adolescents; spending more time on the subject matter - none of those are particularly surprising," Widman says. "However, it's good to see that the data bears this out."

Another interesting finding was that interventions did not affect the age at which adolescents became sexually active.

"In other words, the kids who were taught about sexual health did not become sexually active any earlier than kids who were not part of the interventions - but kids who were part of the interventions were more likely to use condoms when they did become sexually active," Widman says.

"This highlights the value of parent-based interventions, and makes clear that certain features are especially valuable when developing interventions," says Reina Evans, a Ph.D. student at NC State and co-author of the study.

The researchers also noted some areas that may be worth exploring for future intervention research.

"For example, we found only one intervention that targeted fathers, and it worked very well," Widman says. "Similarly, there was only one intervention aimed specifically at parents of sons, which also worked very well. This suggests that it may be worthwhile to pursue broader efforts to assess the effectiveness of gender-specific interventions for parents and adolescents.

"What's more, we found that there is a dearth of information on the effectiveness of online interventions. That's definitely an area ripe for future study."