Tech

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital scientists have discovered a pathway that functions like a car wash to prevent the buildup of a toxic protein associated with Alzheimer's disease. The report appeared online today in the journal Cell.

The findings in a mouse model of Alzheimer's offer a possible new approach to treatment of the chronic neurodegenerative disorder, which is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. The newly identified pathway also helps regulate inflammation, so the discovery could yield strategies for unleashing the immune response against malignant brain tumors.

Researchers called the pathway LC3-associated endocytosis or LANDO. They found the pathway in microglial cells, the primary immune cells of the brain and central nervous system. However, preliminary evidence suggests LANDO is a fundamental process that functions in cells throughout the body.

Investigators showed that LANDO protected against deposits of neurotoxic β-amyloid protein in mice. Activation of the pathway also guarded against toxic neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration, including memory problems.

"In the context of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, activating LANDO in microglial cells could prove to be therapeutically beneficial through increased clearance of β-amyloid and mitigation of neuroinflammation," said corresponding author Douglas Green, Ph.D., chair of the St. Jude Department of Immunology.

While activation of LANDO appears to protect against neurodegenerative disease, first author Bradlee Heckmann, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in Green's laboratory, said inhibiting the pathway might boost the effectiveness of cancer immunotherapy. "Although in its infancy, preliminary data using a primary brain tumor model suggests that inhibition of LANDO might provide a mechanism to activate inflammation within the tumor microenvironment to generate an anti-tumor response," Heckmann said.

Car wash

β-amyloid protein accumulation in neurons is a hallmark of Alzheimer's. Scientists knew microglial cells take up β-amyloid proteins. Discovery of the LANDO pathway answers questions about what comes next.

Heckmann compared LANDO to the operator of an automatic carwash. In this case, the cars are the receptors on the microglial cells that bind to neurotoxic β-amyloid proteins and bring the protein into the car wash. And, just as cars return to the streets after the dirt is gone, when the β-amyloid is disposed of, the receptor returns to the microglial surface where it can pick up additional β-amyloid.

An automatic car wash depends on hardware to attach the car to a track that moves it through the machine. Similarly, several proteins are required for LANDO functioning. The proteins--Rubicon, Beclin 1, ATG5 and ATG7--are better known for their roles in a related cell pathway used to recycle unneeded and unwanted cell components. These proteins decline with age as their expression decreases.

Follow the data

"You never know where science will lead," Green said. "This project started because we were studying immune responses against cancer. Brad recognized the findings had relevance to a disease not of children but of older people.

"That's how science works. When you follow the data, you never know where it will lead."

The laboratory study by RMIT, published in the British Journal of Nutrition, analysed two types of commercial goat milk formula.

The research looked at oligosaccharides, a type of prebiotic that can boost the growth of beneficial bacteria and protect against harmful bacteria in the gut.

Researchers found 14 naturally-occurring prebiotic oligosaccharides in the goat milk formula. Five of these are also found in human breast milk.

Lead investigator, Professor Harsharn Gill, said the study was believed to be the first to reveal the diversity of oligosaccharides in goat’s milk-based infant formula and their similarity to human milk.

“Our results show goat milk formula may have strong prebiotic and anti-infection properties, that could protect infants against gastrointestinal infections,” Gill said.

“The study indicates the prebiotic oligosaccharides in goat milk formula are effective at selectively promoting the growth of healthy bacteria in the gut.

“While these laboratory results are promising, further research including clinical trials will help us to confirm these benefits for infants.”

Human milk contains an abundant supply and diverse array of oligosaccharides that are known to offer significant health benefits to babies, including the establishment and maintenance of a healthy gut microflora, immune development and protection against gastrointestinal infections.

When breastfeeding is not possible or insufficient, infant formulas are commonly used as an alternative but there is limited information available about the oligosaccharides they may contain or their likely health benefits.

The new study examined the presence of naturally occurring oligosaccharides in two goat milk formulas (Oli6 Stage 1 for babies aged 0-6 months and Oli6 Stage 2 for babies aged 6-12 months) and their prebiotic and anti-infection properties.

While cow milk formula is the most widely used alternative to breastfeeding, goat milk is considered to be closer to human milk in some respects, especially oligosaccharides.

The study found the natural prebiotic oligosaccharides in the goat milk formula were effective in promoting the growth of beneficial bacteria (bifidobacteria) and inhibiting the ability of harmful bacteria such as pathogenic E. coli to attach to human intestinal cells.

Almost one third of all cases of diarrhoea in children are attributed to pathogenic E. coli bacteria.

The researchers found two types of oligosaccharides - fucosylated and sialylated - were most heavily present in the goat milk formula.

“Fucosylated are the most abundant oligosaccharides in human milk and are the focus of significant commercial and regulatory interest,” Gill said.

“These oligosaccharides have been shown to play a significant role in anti-infection properties of breast milk.”

Researchers in RMIT's School of Science are now planning to undertake clinical trials to confirm the results of the study.

For cancer to be successful -- from its point of view, anyway -- the disease has to find a way to break out beyond its initial foothold and spread throughout the body. Newly published research from The University of Toledo could bring fresh insight into one of the first ways cancers proliferate.

Dr. Rafael Garcia-Mata, an associate professor of biological sciences, recently identified a protein complex that regulates how epithelial cells bond together in such tight connections.

There are more than 150 different types of epithelial cells that carry out essential functions in a wide variety of tissues. Those jobs include making our skin resilient, producing the mucus that lines and guards our airways, and helping with the absorption of nutrients in our digestive system.

The discovery, which builds on Garcia-Mata's research focus of how cancer cells spread throughout the body, is intriguing because it explains the behavior of cells that are by far the most common starting place for cancer.

"Eighty percent of cancers originate from epithelial cells and most cancers will have to disassemble the adhesion system to grow and spread," Garcia-Mata said. "If we understand how these adhesive structures are built, we can also try to understand what happens when cancer cells disassemble them."

His research was published June 27 in the Journal of Cell Biology.

Epithelial tissues line the outer surfaces of organs and blood vessels throughout the body, as well as the inner surfaces of cavities in many internal organs. Their ability to form nearly impermeable junctions enables them to establish boundaries that separate the inside of organs and other tissues from the outside environment.

The way epithelial cells link together is unique in biology and involves a large number of components that work in synchrony to control their assembly. However, the science behind how they manage to form such perfect bonds has up to now been elusive.

"The way these cells organize is very important. What we've identified is a new molecular mechanism that controls a lot of the properties that make the 'right' epithelial tissues," Garcia-Mata said. "Understanding how they normally function allows you to understand what happens when things go wrong."

The implications of these findings go well beyond cancer. Garcia-Mata's research also helps explain how cells coordinate to generate organ cavities, which may broaden our knowledge of early development and organ formation. It could add significant new pathways for explaining conditions such as asthma and inflammatory bowel disease.

"A lot of diseases are essentially leaky epithelia. Understanding how these structures are modulated may help us learn why we get some of these diseases," he said.

Garcia-Mata's research into epithelial cells grew out of prior National Institutes of Health grant-funded work investigating how cancer cells spread away from the primary tumor.

"My lab studies basic, hardcore cell biology. This is where we make discoveries that lead to our ability to understand and target particular diseases, and the initial event in most cancers is the disassembly of these epithelial structures," he said.

Superconductivity is one of the most mysterious phenomena in nature in that the materials can conduct electrical current without any resistance. The cuprates hold the record high superconducting temperature at ambient pressure so far, but understanding their superconducting mechanism remains one of big challenges of physical sciences listed as one of 125 big quests announced by Science.

The recent discovery by Prof. JIN Changqing's team at Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IOPCAS) on a new high Tc superconductor Ba2CuO4-δ shows two unique features: an exceptionally compressed local octahedron and heavily over-doped hole carriers.

These two features are in sharp contrast to the favorable criteria for all previously known cuprate superconductors.

The compressed local octahedron results into a reversed orbital order with 3z2 lifted above 3dx2-y2 leading to strong multiband scenario, while the overdoped state violates the previous mot holding for superconducting phase.

Impressively, the new material demonstrates superconducting transition temperature with Tc above 73K, 30 K higher than that for the isostructural classical "conventional" superconductor based on La2CuO4.

Thus, the discovery of high Tc superconductivity in Ba2CuO4-δ calls into question the widely accepted scenario of superconductivity in the cuprates.

This discovery provides a totally new direction to search for further high Tc superconductors.

Osaka, Japan - Researchers at Osaka University have been able to enhance the power factor of a promising thermoelectric material by more than 100% by varying the pressure, paving the way for new materials with improved thermoelectric properties. Thermoelectric materials have the unique ability to generate electricity from temperature differences and therefore could potentially be used to convert otherwise wasted heat (such as heat from hot laptops or servers) into usable electricity.

In addition to improving the thermoelectric properties of a material, the researchers revealed that the material's thermoelectric properties originate from a transition in the topology of the electronic band structure, which is referred to as the Lifshitz transition. This transition differs from the conventional Landau-type phase transition, because it occurs without any symmetry breaking. Researchers have long had reason to believe that the Lifshitz transition plays a crucial role in many quantum phenomena, such as superconductivity, complex magnetism, and thermoelectric properties, but they lacked direct proof.

In this new study, Osaka University researchers have shown a direct link between the Lifshitz transition and physical properties in a thermoelectric material. "We were able to keep track of the Lifshitz transition by applying pressure and measuring the quantum oscillations as the pressure was increased," corresponding author Hideaki Sakai says.

The researchers studied tin selenide (SnSe), a thermoelectric material that is also a semiconductor with a small amount of conducting carriers. In semiconductors the lower energy valence band is filled with electrons whereas the higher energy conduction band is empty of them; once some impurities and/or chemical defects are introduced, conducting carriers are introduced as electrons and holes in the conduction and valence bands, respectively, and the semiconductor will behave like a conductor. Apart from having an effect on the material's electrical conduction properties, the band structure also has an effect on quantum phenomena, such as their thermoelectric abilities. The valence bands of tin selenide are not completely flat, but normally have two valleys in them.

"When we increased the pressure on the material, we observed a change from two to four valleys in the material when the Lifshitz transition occurred," Hideaki Sakai says. The researchers were able to show both experimentally and theoretically that this change in the number of valleys was directly responsible for significantly improving tin selenide's thermoelectric properties.

The results of the study may help prepare improved thermoelectric materials in the future and could also help clarify the effect of the Lifshitz transition on various transport properties, leading to potential applications such as novel electronics utilizing valley degrees of freedom in the band structure.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- In many situations, engineers want to minimize the contact of droplets of water or other liquids with surfaces they fall onto. Whether the goal is keeping ice from building up on an airplane wing or a wind turbine blade, or preventing heat loss from a surface during rainfall, or preventing salt buildup on surfaces exposed to ocean spray, making droplets bounce away as fast as possible and minimizing the amount of contact with the surface can be key to keeping systems functioning properly.

Now, a study by researchers at MIT demonstrates a new approach to minimizing the contact between droplets and surfaces. While previous attempts, including by members of the same team, have focused on minimizing the amount of time the droplet spends in contact with the surface, the new method instead focuses on the spatial extent of the contact, trying to minimize how far a droplet spreads out before bouncing away.

The new findings are described in the journal ACS Nano in a paper by MIT graduate student Henri-Louis Girard, postdoc Dan Soto, and professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi. The key to the process, they explain, is creating a series of raised ring shapes on the material's surface, which cause the falling droplet to splash upward in a bowl-shaped pattern instead of flowing out flat across the surface.

The work is a follow up on an earlier project by Varanasi and his team, in which they were able to reduce the contact time of droplets on a surface by creating raised ridges on the surface, which disrupted the spreading pattern of impacting droplets. But the new work takes this farther, achieving a much greater reduction in the combination of contact time and contact area of a droplet.

In order to prevent icing on an airplane wing, for example, it is essential to get the droplets of impacting water to bounce away in less time than it takes for the water to freeze. The earlier ridged surface did succeed in reducing the contact time, but Varanasi says "since then, we found there's another thing at play here," which is how far the drop spreads out before rebounding and bouncing off. "Reducing the contact area of the impacting droplet should also have a dramatic impact on transfer properties of the interaction," Varanasi says.

The team initiated a series of experiments that demonstrated that raised rings of just the right size, covering the surface, would cause the water spreading out from an impacting droplet to splash upward instead, forming a bowl-shaped splash, and that the angle of that upward splash could be controlled by adjusting the height and profile of those rings. If the rings are too large or too small compared to the size of the droplets, the system becomes less effective or doesn't work at all, but when the size is right, the effect is dramatic.

It turns out that reducing the contact time alone is not sufficient to achieve the greatest reduction in contact; it's the combination of the time and area of contact that's critical. In a graph of the time of contact on one axis, and the area of contact on the other axis, what really matters is the total area under the curve -- that is, the product of the time and the extent of contact. The area of the spreading was "was another axis that no one has touched" in previous research, Girard says. "When we started doing so, we saw a drastic reaction," reducing the total time-and-area contact of the droplet by 90 percent. "The idea of reducing contact area by forming 'waterbowls' has far greater effect on reducing the overall interaction than by reducing contact time alone," Varanasi says.

As the droplet starts to spread out within the raised circle, as soon as it hits the circle's edge it begins to deflect. "Its momentum is redirected upward," Girard says, and although it ends up spreading outward about as far as it would have otherwise, it is no longer on the surface, and therefore not cooling the surface off, or leading to icing, or blocking the pores on a "waterproof" fabric.

The rings themselves can be made in different ways and from different materials, the researchers say -- it's just the size and spacing that matters. For some tests, they used rings 3-D printed on a substrate, and for others they used a surface with a pattern created through an etching process similar to that used in microchip manufacturing. Other rings were made through computer-controlled milling of plastic.

While higher-velocity droplet impacts generally can be more damaging to a surface, with this system the higher velocities actually improve the effectiveness of the redirection, clearing even more of the liquid than at slower speeds. That's good news for practical applications, for example in dealing with rain, which has relatively high velocity, Girard says. "It actually works better the faster you go," he says.

In addition to keeping ice off airplane wings, the new system could have a wide variety of applications, the researchers say. For example, "waterproof" fabrics can become saturated and begin to leak when water fills up the spaces between the fibers, but when treated with the surface rings, fabrics kept their ability to shed water for longer, and performed better overall, Girard says. "There was a 50 percent improvement by using the ring structures," he says.

In the right conditions, airplane contrails can linger in the sky as contrail cirrus - ice clouds that can trap heat inside the Earth's atmosphere. Their climate impact has been largely neglected in global schemes to offset aviation emissions, even though contrail cirrus have contributed more to warming the atmosphere than all CO2 emitted by aircraft since the start of aviation. A new study published in the European Geosciences Union (EGU) journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics has found that, due to air traffic activity, the climate impact of contrail cirrus will be even more significant in the future, tripling by 2050.

Contrail cirrus change global cloudiness, which creates an imbalance in the Earth's radiation budget - called 'radiative forcing' - that results in warming of the planet. The larger this radiative forcing, the more significant the climate impact. In 2005, air traffic made up about 5% of all anthropogenic radiative forcing, with contrail cirrus being the largest contributor to aviation's climate impact.

"It is important to recognise the significant impact of non-CO2 emissions, such as contrail cirrus, on climate and to take those effects into consideration when setting up emission trading systems or schemes like the Corsia agreement," says Lisa Bock, a researcher at DLR, the German Aerospace Center, and lead-author of the new study. Corsia, the UN's scheme to offset air traffic carbon emissions from 2020, ignores the non-CO2 climate impacts of aviation.

But the new Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics study shows these non-CO2 climate impacts cannot be neglected. Bock and her colleague Ulrike Burkhardt estimate that contrail cirrus radiative forcing will be 3 times larger in 2050 than in 2006. This increase is predicted to be faster than the rise in CO2 radiative forcing since expected fuel efficiency measures will reduce CO2 emissions.

The increase in contrail cirrus radiative forcing is due to air traffic growth, expected to be 4 times larger in 2050 compared to 2006 levels, and a slight shift of flight routes to higher altitudes, which favours the formation of contrails in the tropics. The impact on climate due to contrail cirrus will be stronger over Northern America and Europe, the busiest air traffic areas on the globe, but will also significantly increase in Asia.

"Contrail cirrus' main impact is that of warming the higher atmosphere at air traffic levels and changing natural cloudiness. How large their impact is on surface temperature and possibly on precipitation due to the cloud modifications is unclear," says Burkhardt. Bock adds: "There are still some uncertainties regarding the overall climate impact of contrail cirrus and in particular their impact on surface temperatures because contrail cirrus themselves and their effects on the surface are ongoing topics of research. But it's clear they warm the atmosphere."

Cleaner aircraft emissions would solve part of the problem highlighted in the study. Reducing the number of soot particles emitted by aircraft engines decreases the number of ice crystals in contrails, which in turn reduces the climate impact of contrail cirrus. However, "larger reductions than the projected 50% decrease in soot number emissions are needed," says Burkhardt. She adds that even 90% reductions would likely not be enough to limit the climate impact of contrail cirrus to 2006 levels.

Another often discussed mitigation method is rerouting flights to avoid regions particularly sensitive to the effects of contrail formation. But Bock and Burkhardt caution about applying measures to reduce the climate impact of short-lived contrail cirrus that could result in increases in long-lived CO2 emissions, in particular given the uncertainties in estimating the climate impact of contrail cirrus. They say that measures to reduce soot emissions would be preferable to minimise the overall radiative forcing of future air traffic since they do not involve an increase of CO2 emissions.

"This would enable international aviation to effectively support measures to achieve the Paris climate goals," Burkhardt concludes.

Researchers at the University of Toronto have found a consistent cholesterol-lowering effect for soy protein, with pooled data from dozens of clinical trials that span the last two decades.

The study calls into question the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's current proposal to revoke the health claim for soy protein and heart disease.

"At no time since the original claim for soy as a reducer of serum cholesterol has its ability been in question," says David Jenkins, professor of nutritional sciences and of medicine at U of T. "It's been consistent since 1999. The data have not changed."

The researchers showed a reduction from soy in both total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, which can damage the heart. The effect is steady across all 46 trials that the FDA cited in 2017, when it first proposed to revoke the health claim for soy based on recent trials that showed variable results.

The Journal of the American Heart Association published the findings today.

"Sometimes you see a regression to the mean, where analyses with small studies produce big effects that diminish over time as sample sizes increase and results get more precise," says John Sievenpiper, a professor of nutritional sciences at U of T and clinician-scientist at St. Michael's Hospital who co-authored the study. "We saw that with fish oil, for example. But in this case nothing has changed."

The researchers performed a cumulative meta-analysis, which let them look at the effect of soy in all the trials combined, but at different points in time with the addition of data from each new trial. The FDA will likely make a decision on the health claim for soy this summer; options include a full retraction and retention of a qualified health claim.

"These data strongly support the rationale behind the original FDA heart health claim for soy," says Jenkins, who is also a researcher in the Joannah & Brian Lawson Centre for Child Nutrition at U of T and a clinician-scientist at St. Michael's Hospital. "And it's important to note that while the reduction in cholesterol was less than five percent, if you put that together with other plant-based foods in a portfolio you get a much stronger effect."

Jenkins and his colleagues in the 1980s pioneered the glycemic index, which shows the effect of various foods on blood sugar levels. More recently, he helped develop a dietary portfolio that includes nuts, plant-based protein, viscous fibre and plant sterols, which together can lower risk factors for heart disease by up to 30 per cent.

This portfolio of foods has been incorporated into dietary guidelines by Heart UK and the European Atherosclerosis Society, among others. Health Canada released a national food guide that encourages plant-based eating this year, and the FDA maintains health claims for several other plant foods in the dietary portfolio.

"It's disheartening that the FDA has focused on soy," says Jenkins. "We see similar data for other foods in the portfolio. If you knock out one leg of that stool then the others could be up for grabs, right when concerns about health and the environment are bringing plant-based eating into the mainstream."

Companies such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have seen huge growth this year with plant-based alternatives to meat. Burger King plans to offer its soy-based burger nation-wide in the U.S. by the end of 2019.

"We're moving into an age of plant-based protein, and it would be a shame to see that shift undermined," says Jenkins. "Plant-based food producers, industry and retailers need all the help they can get, to make their products accessible."

Professors Jenkins and Sievenpiper have received support from government, non-profit and industry funding sources, some of which include companies and industry groups that produce or promote soy and other plant-based foods. See the Disclosures section at the end of the study for a full list of their funding sources and industry connections.

The fastest-growing racial group in the United States -- Asian Americans -- is also one that is consistently perceived as "foreign."

But for Asian Americans who are gay or lesbian, their sexual orientation may make them seem more "American" than those who are presumed straight. A new University of Washington study, the latest in research to examine stereotypes, identity and ideas about who is "American," focuses on how sexual orientation and race come together to influence others' perceptions.

"Research on race is often separate from research on sexual orientation. Here we bring the two together to understand how they interact to influence judgments of how American someone is considered," said Sapna Cheryan, a UW associate professor of psychology.

Cheryan in 2017 authored a related study, which showed how stereotypically American traits, such as being overweight, made Asian Americans seem more "American." The new research by Cheryan and her students, a collection of four studies, was published June 27 in Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Research has shown that Asian Americans, and people of color in general, are seen as less American than white Americans, and face prejudice and discrimination throughout various aspects of life. Regarding sexual orientation, studies have found that, relative to countries such as Japan and South Korea, the United States has implemented more civil rights and anti-discrimination legislation, and is seen as more LGBTQ-friendly.

The new UW research involved four separate, diverse groups of participants drawn from the UW student population, all of whom were asked to answer questions related to brief, written descriptions of hypothetical people or scenarios.

In the first study, participants were randomly assigned to read a brief descriptive phrase of a person named John, identified either as "an Asian American man" or "a gay Asian American man." They were then asked to rate, using a seven-point scale, how American they considered him through questions such as "How fluently do you think this person speaks English?" and "How integrated is this person in American culture?"

Researchers found that the hypothetical "gay Asian American man" was perceived as significantly more American than the hypothetical "Asian American man," whose sexual orientation wasn't specified.

The second study used similar questions, but included a greater variety of hypothetical people: men, women, whites and Asian Americans. Sexual orientation was noted as "gay" or wasn't listed. Researchers assigned "American" names to the fictional people -- names that were popular in the United States in the 1980s: Matt, Chris, Michael, Jessica, Jennifer and Ashley. The same results emerged: Asian Americans identified as gay were perceived to be more American than Asian Americans whose sexual orientation was not identified.

Whites were perceived as American no matter their sexual orientation.

"These studies demonstrate once again the widely-held assumption that whites are the most American. Though being gay increased perceptions of Asian Americans' 'Americanness,' it was still not nearly enough to close the gap in perceptions between Asian Americans and whites," said Linda Zou, a UW graduate student and study co-author.

The other two studies focused on perceived differences between "American culture" and "Asian culture," and how LGBTQ-friendly the cultures appear to be. In one study, researchers wrote descriptions of fake countries that were either presented as less welcoming and accepting of gay people than the U.S. or equally welcoming and accepting.

Participants rated Asian culture as less LGBTQ-friendly, and a gay person as more American if they were associated with a country of origin that was less LGBTQ-friendly. "American culture is perceived as more accepting of gay people compared to Asian culture. As a result, gay Asian Americans are perceived as more likely to be American than their straight counterparts," the authors wrote.

But that doesn't mean LGBTQ Asian Americans face less discrimination, Cheryan said. While sexual orientation may affect a person's perceived "foreignness," it doesn't protect against other forms of discrimination and harassment, she added.

"One possible extension of this work is that gay Asian Americans may be less likely to have their American identities questioned than straight Asian Americans," said Cheryan. "At the same time, being gay puts people more at risk for other forms of prejudice based on sexual orientation."

The research lends itself to comparisons with other races, ethnicities and countries, the authors wrote, such as exploring the intersection of sexual orientation and race in the context of cultures that are believed to be more or less LGBTQ-friendly.

Other co-authors on the study were Mika Semrow and Shuyang Liu of the UW.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Run, hide, fight. It has become a mantra for how to act during an active shooter situation. The idea is to escape the situation or protect oneself, and counter the gunman as a last resort.

A Purdue University researcher and his students have come up with a novel way to test how well "run, hide, fight" works in an active shooter situation. They created a computer model, based on the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School, which looks at what happens to victims caught in shooter situations to provide better training for schools and other organizations. A video about the technology is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=117&v=ODU4wdoqvKw.

"We obviously hope these tragedies are avoided, but we want to provide information that those caught in active shooter situations can use to survive and potentially help others make it out alive," said Eric Dietz, director of the Purdue Homeland Security Institute and a professor of computer and information technology in the Purdue Polytechnic Institute.

Dietz and his students worked with the AnyLogic Co., a group based in Chicago that creates simulation tools, to develop their computer model. The Purdue team presented its model at the AnyLogic Conference in April in Austin, Texas.

The Purdue team used its computer model to focus on what happened inside the library at Columbine on the day of the shooting. The researchers have run multiple scenarios to determine the likely number of victims and survivors based on various actions taken by those caught in the library when the massacre began.

"We find that the number of casualties is higher in situations like Columbine when more people try to hide instead of run," said Dietz, who previously served as the founding executive director of Indiana's Department of Homeland Security. "That's not to say it is the best action every single time, but rather we want to use our model and some of our research to better inform schools on active shooter training and survival information. Running from the situation is often linked to the best outcomes."

Dietz and his team at the Purdue Homeland Security Institute are working on a number of projects related to public safety. They have worked with the Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization on patenting some of their technology.

A new study demonstrates, for the first time, that "social robots" used in support sessions held in pediatric units at hospitals can lead to more positive emotions in sick children.

Many hospitals host interventions in pediatric units, where child life specialists will provide clinical interventions to hospitalized children for developmental and coping support. This involves play, preparation, education, and behavioral distraction for both routine medical care, as well as before, during, and after difficult procedures. Traditional interventions include therapeutic medical play and normalizing the environment through activities such as arts and crafts, games, and celebrations.

For the study, published in the journal Pediatrics, researchers from the MIT Media Lab, Boston Children's Hospital, and Northeastern University deployed a robotic teddy bear, "Huggable," across several pediatric units at Boston Children's Hospital. More than 50 hospitalized children were randomly split into three groups of interventions that involved Huggable, a tablet-based virtual Huggable, or a traditional plush teddy bear. In general, Huggable improved various patient outcomes over those other two options.

The study primarily demonstrated the feasibility of integrating Huggable into the interventions. But results also indicated that children playing with Huggable experienced more positive emotions overall. They also got out of bed and moved around more, and emotionally connected with the robot, asking it personal questions and inviting it to come back later to meet their families. "Such improved emotional, physical, and verbal outcomes are all positive factors that could contribute to better and faster recovery in hospitalized children," the researchers write in their study.

Although it is a small study, it is the first to explore social robotics in a real-world inpatient pediatric setting with ill children, the researchers say. Other studies have been conducted in labs, have studied very few children, or were conducted in public settings without any patient identification.

But Huggable is designed only to assist health care specialists -- not replace them, the researchers stress. "It's a companion," says co-author Cynthia Breazeal, an associate professor of media arts and sciences and founding director of the Personal Robots group. "Our group designs technologies with the mindset that they're teammates. We don't just look at the child-robot interaction. It's about [helping] specialists and parents, because we want technology to support everyone who's invested in the quality care of a child."

"Child life staff provide a lot of human interaction to help normalize the hospital experience, but they can't be with every kid, all the time. Social robots create a more consistent presence throughout the day," adds first author Deirdre Logan, a pediatric psychologist at Boston Children's Hospital. "There may also be kids who don't always want to talk to people, and respond better to having a robotic stuffed animal with them. It's exciting knowing what types of support we can provide kids who may feel isolated or scared about what they're going through."

Joining Breazeal and Logan on the paper are: Sooyeon Jeong, a PhD student in the Personal Robots group; Brianna O'Connell, Duncan Smith-Freedman, and Peter Weinstock, all of Boston Children's Hospital; and Matthew Goodwin and James Heathers, both of Northeastern University.

Boosting mood

First prototyped in 2006, Huggable is a plush teddy bear with a screen depicting animated eyes. While the eventual goal is to make the robot fully autonomous, it is currently operated remotely by a specialist in the hall outside a child's room. Through custom software, a specialist can control the robot's facial expressions and body actions, and direct its gaze. The specialists could also talk through a speaker -- with their voice automatically shifted to a higher pitch to sound more childlike -- and monitor the participants via camera feed. The tablet-based avatar of the bear had identical gestures and was also remotely operated.

During the interventions involving Huggable -- involving kids ages 3 to 10 years -- a specialist would sing nursery rhymes to younger children through robot and move the arms during the song. Older kids would play the I Spy game, where they have to guess an object in the room described by the specialist through Huggable.

Through self-reports and questionnaires, the researchers recorded how much the patients and families liked interacting with Huggable. Additional questionnaires assessed patient's positive moods, as well as anxiety and perceived pain levels. The researchers also used cameras mounted in the child's room to capture and analyze speech patterns, characterizing them as joyful or sad, using software.

A greater percentage of children and their parents reported that the children enjoyed playing with Huggable more than with the avatar or traditional teddy bear. Speech analysis backed up that result, detecting significantly more joyful expressions among the children during robotic interventions. Additionally, parents noted lower levels of perceived pain among their children.

The researchers noted that 93 percent of patients completed the Huggable-based interventions, and found few barriers to practical implementation, as determined by comments from the specialists.

A previous paper based on the same study found that the robot also seemed to facilitate greater family involvement in the interventions, compared to the other two methods, which improved the intervention overall. "Those are findings we didn't necessarily expect in the beginning," says Jeong, also a co-author on the previous paper. "We didn't tell family to join any of the play sessions -- it just happened naturally. When the robot came in, the child and robot and parents all interacted more, playing games or in introducing the robot."

An automated, take-home bot

The study also generated valuable insights for developing a fully autonomous Huggable robot, which is the researchers' ultimate goal. They were able to determine which physical gestures are used most and least often, and which features specialists may want for future iterations. Huggable, for instance, could introduce doctors before they enter a child's room or learn a child's interests and share that information with specialists. The researchers may also equip the robot with computer vision, so it can detect certain objects in a room to talk about those with children.

"In these early studies, we capture data ... to wrap our heads around an authentic use-case scenario where, if the bear was automated, what does it need to do to provide high-quality standard of care," Breazeal says.

In the future, that automated robot could be used to improve continuity of care. A child would take home a robot after a hospital visit to further support engagement, adherence to care regimens, and monitoring well-being.

"We want to continue thinking about how robots can become part of the whole clinical team and help everyone," Jeong says. "When the robot goes home, we want to see the robot monitor a child's progress. ... If there's something clinicians need to know earlier, the robot can let the clinicians know, so [they're not] surprised at the next appointment that the child hasn't been doing well."

Next, the researchers are hoping to zero in on which specific patient populations may benefit the most from the Huggable interventions. "We want to find the sweet spot for the children who need this type of extra support," Logan says.

Each day, more than 2 billion cups of coffee are consumed worldwide.

Developing countries produce about 90% of the beans used to make all those lattes, espressos and mochas. That makes coffee a key source of revenue and livelihood for millions of people worldwide.

But coffee plants have up-and-down yield patterns. Years with high yields are often followed by years with low yields and vice-versa. This alternating pattern of high and low yields is called the "biennial effect".

"It's like physiological recovery," says Indalécio Cunha Vieira Júnior. "Coffee plants need to 'vegetate' for a year to produce well the following year." Cunha is a researcher at the Federal University of Lavras in Brazil.

The biennial effect makes it challenging for coffee breeders to compare yields from different varieties of coffee. Without accurate measures of yield, breeders cannot know which varieties of coffee would be most useful for farmers to grow.

In a new study, Cunha and colleagues outline a computational model that compensates for the biennial effect in coffee. This model reduces experimental error. It also increases the usefulness of data obtained from field trials. In turn, the model directly impacts the quality of coffee varieties supplied to farmers.

"Ultimately, our findings could reduce the cost and time to launch a new coffee variety into the market by half," says Cunha.

The new model could also help farmers improve yields. "The model generates data on biennial growth at the level of individual coffee plants," says Cunha. Using information from the model, farmers could tailor cultivation strategies to individual plants. Effective management of growing conditions directly impacts harvest quality and yields.

The study also yielded some unexpected results. Researchers discovered that the biennial effect in coffee doesn't follow a well-defined pattern, as previously thought.

"Many researchers assumed that all coffee plants in an area would have similar yield patterns," says Cunha. But, researchers found that some coffee plants can have reasonably stable yields across years. Other plants may have high yields for two years and reduced yields in the third.

"These findings will change how coffee breeding experiments are analyzed," says Cunha.

The new model also allows researchers to determine why individual coffee plants may have high or low yields each year.

Some coffee plants with high yields may belong to high-yielding varieties. However, the plants of high-yielding varieties may produce low yields during recovery years.

"Our model enables us to delve deeper into the biennial effect," says Cunha. "This could allow us to recommend the most productive varieties for farmers with higher accuracy and lower costs."

Cunha and colleagues used a computer simulation to test the effectiveness of their model. "The simulation allowed us to confirm our findings on real data," says Cunha. It also helped researchers test conditions in which the model performed well and when it ran into difficulties.

In general, "simulation results showed the model could effectively determine individual biennial stages," says Cunha. The new model was shown to be an improvement over older models.

Cunha is now trying to incorporate more genetic information into the current model. This would allow researchers to study genetic control of the biennial effect. Understanding the genetic basis of the biennial effect could be very useful. For example, it might allow breeders to identify coffee varieties with more uniform yields across multiple years.

Coffee isn't the only crop to show biennial effects. Apple trees, for example, also exhibit biennial effects. Findings from Cunha's work could also apply to these other crop varieties.

PHILADELPHIA - A simple set of decision-support tools combined with institutional buy-in can help increase the number of cancer patients who engage in treatment to help them quit tobacco, data from researchers in the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania show. The study is based on researchers' clinical experience with Penn's Tobacco Use Treatment Service (TUTS), which combines technology tied to electronic health records with tried and true treatment methods to support patients in their efforts to kick their habit for good. The Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network published the findings this month.

More than 50 percent of cancer patients who smoked before their diagnosis continue to smoke - even after their treatment is over - according to a report from the Surgeon General. That same report also concluded that quitting smoking improves the prognosis of cancer patients, leading to calls across the field of oncology to implement tobacco cessation treatments within cancer care.

TUTS was designed as a response to that call to action. Supported by the Cancer Moonshot and embedded in Penn Medicine's Radiation Oncology Department, the program systematically identifies smokers through electronic health records, provides personalized and persuasive advice to quit smoking, and facilitates referrals to evidence-based smoking cessation treatments, including counseling and FDA-approved medication for tobacco dependence. The program is co-led by Robert A. Schnoll, PhD, a professor of Psychiatry, and Frank T. Leone, MD, MS, an associate professor of Medicine both in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

In TUTS' first 12 months, the rate of cancer patients engaging in tobacco cessation treatments at Penn went from 0 percent to 36 percent, with 85 different oncologists using the tool. While TUTS launched in Radiation Oncology, 57 of the clinicians who used it were Hematology-Oncology physicians. The researchers point to the TUTS team's commitment to engaging with cancer center leadership and involving a multi-disciplinary team as a reason for the high level of buy-in.

"Seeing a high number of clinicians from two different specialities use this tool indicates a level of institutional support that has proven critical to the successful launch of our program," said lead author Brian Jenssen, MD, an assistant professor of Pediatrics and a primary care pediatrician at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

The continuous dialogue that has resulted has informed the program even as it takes off. Feedback from oncologists flagged several barriers for TUTS, including low patient willingness to engage in treatment and a perception that the treatments themselves wouldn't work. That communication allowed the TUTS team to provide additional support in these areas. As a result, the rate of cancelled orders for tobacco intervention dropped 18 percent in the year after the program launched.

The researchers say their data have limitations and specifically note that 12 months of data is not enough to fully understand the program's impact. However, they note that the lessons learned so far can help other oncology practices looking to implement similar programs. They also note the importance of the Moonshot funding, which came through the National Cancer Institute's Cancer Center Cessation Initiative (C3I).

"That support has allowed us to establish a sustainable, low-cost program that expands our efforts to help cancer patients quit tobacco, and it can continue to have an impact for years to come," said Schnoll, who is the study's senior author.

Increasingly, shoppers are choosing nutraceuticals, cosmetics and herbal remedies with natural ingredients, and these products are readily available in many drug stores and supermarkets. But some consumers, health professionals and policy makers have raised concerns about the safety, quality and effectiveness of some of these health products. Now, researchers in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry have developed a method to authenticate botanical ingredients by giving them each a unique "chemical barcode."

In the U.S., natural health products are considered neither food nor drugs, but dietary supplements, which are not routinely tested for safety and quality. Previously, scientists have used a technique called DNA barcoding to authenticate natural ingredients. This method uses genetic markers to identify botanicals, but it cannot distinguish among different parts, such as roots, flowers and leaves, of the same plant. Moreover, DNA barcoding can't detect chemical contaminants, fillers or pharmaceuticals. Therefore, Fabrice Berrue and colleagues at the National Research Council of Canada and Dalhousie University wanted to develop a method that would create a unique chemical -- rather than DNA -- barcode for each natural ingredient that is easy to interpret.

To develop their method, the researchers analyzed the substances in 20 natural ingredient samples, including Korean ginseng, boysenberry liquid, milled organic cherry and others, with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The researchers then converted these chemical fingerprints into barcodes by assigning a 1 or a 0 to substances with NMR signals above or below a set threshold, respectively. A statistical analysis procedure correctly grouped the same and similar samples together, and could also distinguish products with inactive ingredients or fillers from pure materials. The new method could someday be used to authenticate natural health products, once a library of reference chemical barcodes from verified ingredients and products is built, the researchers say.

Composers string notes of different pitch and duration together to create music. Similarly, cells join amino acids with different characteristics together to make proteins. Now, researchers have bridged these two seemingly disparate processes by translating protein sequences into musical compositions and then using artificial intelligence to convert the sounds into brand-new proteins. They report their results in ACS Nano. Watch how they did it here.

To make proteins, cellular structures called ribosomes add one of 20 different amino acids to a growing chain in combinations specified by the genetic blueprint. The properties of the amino acids and the complex shapes into which the resulting proteins fold determine how the molecule will work in the body. To better understand a protein's architecture, and possibly design new ones with desired features, Markus Buehler and colleagues wanted to find a way to translate a protein's amino acid sequence into music.

The researchers transposed the unique natural vibrational frequencies of each amino acid into sound frequencies that humans can hear. In this way, they generated a scale consisting of 20 unique tones. Unlike musical notes, however, each amino acid tone consisted of the overlay of many different frequencies -- similar to a chord. Buehler and colleagues then translated several proteins into audio compositions, with the duration of each tone specified by the different 3D structures that make up the molecule. Finally, the researchers used artificial intelligence to recognize specific musical patterns that corresponded to certain protein architectures. The computer then generated scores and translated them into new-to-nature proteins. In addition to being a tool for protein design and for investigating disease mutations, the method could be helpful for explaining protein structure to broad audiences, the researchers say. They even developed an Android app to allow people to create their own bio-based musical compositions.