Tech

By combining one of the world's most powerful digital cameras and a telescope capable of capturing a wider shot of the night sky compared to other big telescopes, a team of researchers from Japan have been able to identify about 1800 new supernovae, including 58 Type Ia supernovae 8 billion light years away, reports a new study released online on 30 May.

A supernova is the name given to an exploding star that has reached the end of its life. The star often becomes as bright as its host galaxy, shining one billion times brighter than the Sun for anytime between a month to six months before dimming down. Supernova classed as Type Ia are useful because their constant maximum brightness allows researchers to calculate how far the star is from Earth. This is particularly useful for researchers who want to measure the expansion of the Universe.

In recent years, researchers began reporting a new type of supernovae five to ten times brighter than Type Ia supernovae. Named Super Luminous Supernovae, many have been trying to learn more about these stars. Their unusual brightness enables researchers to spot stars in the farthest parts of the Universe usually too faint to observe. Since distant Universe means the early Universe, studying this kind of star could reveal characteristics about the first, massive stars created after the Big Bang.

But supernovae are rare events, and there are only a handful of telescopes in the world capable of capturing sharp images of distant stars. In order to maximize the chances of observing a supernova, a team led by Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) Professor Naoki Yasuda, and researchers from Tohoku University, Konan University, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, School of Science, the University of Tokyo, and Kyoto University, used the Subaru Telescope.

This telescope is capable of generating shape stellar images, and the Hyper Suprime-Cam, an 870 mega-pixel digital camera attached at its top, captures a very wide area of the night sky in one shot.

By taking repeated images of the same area of night sky over a six month period, the researchers could identify new supernovae by looking for stars that suddenly appeared brighter before gradually fading out.

As a result, the team identified 5 super luminous supernovae, and about 400 Type Ia supernovae. Fifty-eight of these Type Ia supernovae were located more than 8 billion light years away from Earth. In comparison, it took researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope about 10 years to discover a total of 50 supernovae located more than 8 billion light years away from Earth.

"The Subaru Telescope and Hyper Suprime-Cam have already helped researchers create a 3D map of dark matter, and observation of primordial black holes, but now this result proves that this instrument has a very high capability finding supernovae very, very far away from Earth. I want to thank all of my collaborators for their time and effort, and look forward to analyzing our data to see what kind of picture of the Universe it holds," said Yasuda.

The next step will be to use the data to calculate a more accurate expansion of the Universe, and to study how dark energy has changed over time.

Details of the study were published by the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan.

Catastrophic rearrangements in the genome occurring as early as childhood and adolescence can lead to the development of lung cancer in later years in non-smokers. This finding, published in Cell, helps explain how some non-smoking-related lung cancers develop.

Researchers at KAIST, Seoul National University and their collaborators confirmed that gene fusions in non-smokers mostly occur early on, sometimes as early as childhood or adolescence, and on average about three decades before cancer is diagnosed. The study showed that these mutant lung cells, harboring oncogenic seeds, remain dormant for several decades until a number of further mutations accumulate sufficiently for progression into cancer. This is the first study to reveal the landscape of genome structural variations in lung adenocarcinoma.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide, and lung adenocarcinoma is its most common type. Most lung adenocarcinomas are associated with chronic smoking, but about a fourth develop in non-smokers. Precisely what happens in non-smokers for this cancer to develop is not clearly understood.

Researchers analyzed the genomes of 138 lung adenocarcinoma patients, including smokers and non-smokers, with whole-genome sequencing technologies. They explored DNA damage that induced neoplastic transformation.

Lung adenocarcinomas that originated from chronic smoking, referred to as signature 4-high (S4-high) cancers in the study, showed several distinguishing features compared to smoking-unrelated cancers (S4-low).

People in the S4-high group were largely older, men and had more frequent mutations in a cancer-related gene called KRAS. Cancer genomes in the S4-high group were hypermutated with simple mutational classes, such as the substitution, insertion, or deletion of a single base, the building block of DNA.

But the story was very different in the S4-low group. Generally, mutational profiles in this group were much more silent than the S4-high group. However, all cancer-related gene fusions, which are abnormally activated from the merging of two originally separate genes, were exclusively observed in the S4-low group.

The patterns of genomic structural changes underlying gene fusions suggest that about three in four cases of gene fusions emerged from a single cellular crisis causing massive genomic fragmentation and subsequent imprecise repair in normal lung epithelium.

Most strikingly, these major genomic rearrangements, which led to the development of lung adenocarcinoma, are very likely to be acquired decades before cancer diagnosis. The researchers used genomic archaeology techniques to trace the timing of when the catastrophes took place.

Researchers started this study seven years ago when they discovered the expression of the KIF5B-RET gene fusion in lung adenocarcinoma for the first time. Professor Young-Seok Ju, co-lead author from the Graduate School of Medical Science and Engineering at KAIST says, "It is remarkable that oncogenesis can begin by a massive shattering of chromosomes early in life. Our study immediately raises a new question: What induces the mutational catastrophe in our normal lung epithelium."

Professor Young Tae Kim, co-lead author from Seoul National University says, "We hope this work will help us get one step closer to precision medicine for lung cancer patients."

The research team plans to further focus on the molecular mechanisms that stimulate complex rearrangements in the body, through screening the genomic structures of fusion genes in other cancer types.

New research confirms that an algorithm, called CTS5, can accurately identify patients who are at a significantly low risk of their breast cancer returning at a later stage. In doing so it means some patients may need to take hormone therapy for five years, rather than 10, something that researchers say could have a huge impact both psychologically and physically.

The large majority of breast cancer patients will be prescribed at least five years of hormone therapy after having standard treatment (surgery, chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy) to lower the risk of cancer returning.

After five years, oncologists along with patients have to decide whether extending this type of therapy is worthwhile and appropriate. Hormone therapy can have significant side effects for some patients, including weakness of bone, blood clots, exacerbation of menopausal symptoms and the psychological burden of continuous treatment.

CTS5 was published in 2018, in a study that confirmed its prognostic value. However it had yet to be tested in a 'real world' setting, i.e. not on selected clinical trial patients, and on both pre-and postmenopausal women. The CTS5 test is the only available clinical prognostic tool for determining late distance recurrence.

In this new study researchers at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and Queen Mary University London used the CTS5 to analyse data from 2428 non-trial patients at The Royal Marsden. The results will be presented at this weekend's American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting in Chicago.

The study confirmed that CTS5 was effective at predicting relapse of breast cancer after 5 years. The CTS5 test was able categorise a group of 2428 female breast cancer patients into three clear risk groups: high, medium and low. Importantly 41% of the postmenopausal women - 700 patients - were found to be at a significantly low risk of their breast cancer returning five to 10 years after their initial five year hormone therapy treatment. This risk is so low, researchers concluded; it would not warrant extending endocrine therapy to ten years. In contrast to the previously published tests on CTS5, this new analysis took into account pre-menopausal female patients as well as post.

Lead author Dr Juliet Richman, Clinical Research Fellow at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust said: "Our analysis demonstrates that this tool works well in a varied population of breast cancer patients. This is crucial; in order for it to be useful in a clinical setting we need to know that CTS5 will be accurate for a variety of women.

"We can establish those who are at a very low risk of their breast cancer recurring, and say they would be extremely unlikely to benefit from extending hormone therapy past five years. In doing so they can avoid the possible side effects - both physically and psychologically - of continuing treatment."

Senior author Dr Ivana Sestak, Queen Mary University of London said: "It is incredibly important to determine which women are at high risk of late recurrence, so that they can continue hormonal treatment. In addition to predicting late recurrence in postmenopausal women, for the first time we were able to show that CTS5 also predicts late recurrence in premenopausal women. And by testing the model on actual hospital data of women treated for their early stage breast cancer, we were able to demonstrate that the use of our calculator is feasible in the real world.

"Our online calculator is freely available for oncologists around the world to use to determine their patients' risk of late recurrence. It is very easy to use and only requires information that is readily available to clinicians. We are now investigating further whether the tool could be used by research nurses, helping to free up clinicians' time."

Further research is needed to confirm that female patients who continue on hormone therapy after having a high CTS5 score, then benefit from this extension.

How did some marine fish manage to make their way from the salty sea to the newly available freshwater niches after the last ice age and eventually differentiate from their marine brethren?

It comes down genetics -- and diet, according to a team of scientists at the Research Organization of Information and Systems (ROIS) in Japan. The study is published on May 30 in the journal Science.

"One of the underappreciated constraints for freshwater colonization by marine animals is the poor nutritional quality of food in freshwater ecosystems," said Jun Kitano, the study's author and professor in the Ecological Genetics Laboratory at the National Institute of Genetics, part of ROIS, "Generally, the food chain in marine environments is rich in the omega-3 fatty acid DHA, which is essential for animal development and health. However, freshwater ecosystems contain very little DHA."

Kitano, along with lead author Asano Ishikawa, and his team compared the genomes of freshwater stickleback to marine stickleback, a small fish with three spines on the back.

They found that freshwater Three-Spined Stickleback has multiple copies of a gene called Fads2, which helps synthesize DHA. With more copies of the gene, the fish can synthesize more DHA, compared to their marine cousins who have an abundance of DHA available in their diet.

To further test this theory, the researchers developed a genetic mutant of the marine stickleback that over-expresses Fads2. It synthesized more DHA and demonstrated a longer lifespan than control marine stickleback, providing further evidence that the genetic ability to make use of available DHA dictates where fish colonize.

"It's unclear when the genetic advantage appeared," Kitano said. "It may be that ancient extinct freshwater species possessed additional Fads2 copies somewhere in the genome or adapted to DHA-deprived diets through other mutations."

According to Kitano, it could also be that multiple copies of the gene allowed some versions to acquire new functions, such as a way to better synthesize DHA.

The Fads2 gene may allow certain selections in species beyond the stickleback, as it also appears at higher rates in fishes that colonized freshwater. A previous study also showed signatures of natural selection in humans that colonize polar regions.

"It certainly appears to be an important gene beyond fish, in a wide variety of organisms, including humans," Kitano said.

An observational study conducted in a French hospital showed that human contact was responsible for 90 percent of the spread of one species of antibiotic-resistant bacteria to new patients, but less than 60 percent of the spread of a different species. Audrey Duval of the Versailles Saint Quentin University and Institut Pasteur in Paris, France, and colleagues present these findings in PLOS Computational Biology.

People treated in hospitals and other health care settings are increasingly at risk of infection with multidrug-resistant bacteria. Many of these microbes produce enzymes called extended-spectrum β-lactamases (ESBLs), which make them resistant to antibiotics. Understanding how ESBL bacteria spread from person to person is key to developing effective prevention strategies.

In the new study, Duval and colleagues distributed wearable sensors to hundreds of patients and health care workers in a French hospital. Equipped with RFID tags, the sensors allowed the researchers to track patterns of human contact between patients over an eight-week period. Meanwhile, they systematically screened patients for ESBL-producing Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumonia.

The scientists found that 90 percent of the spread of ESBL K. pneumonia to new patients could be explained by direct or indirect contact with patients who had the same bacteria within the previous eight weeks; this figure was less than 60 percent for ESBL E. Coli. The findings suggest that contact-prevention strategies--primarily hand hygiene--can be very efficient in limiting transmission of ESBL K. pneumonia. However, additional measures, such as environmental decontamination or using antibiotics more appropriately, may be necessary to prevent spread of ESBL E. Coli.

The researchers suggest that the same kind of wearable-sensor analysis could be extended to other multidrug-resistant species. Investigation of more detailed genomic data could further illuminate how ESBL-producing bacteria spread.

"By combining digital epidemiology and rapid microbiological diagnostic tools, we may be entering a new era to understand and control the risk of hospital-acquired infection with multidrug-resistant bacteria," Duval says.

DALLAS - May 30, 2019 - An international collaboration led by scientists at UT Southwestern Medical Center has identified a potential new therapeutic target for sepsis, a life-threatening disease that can quickly spread through the body damaging organs.

UT Southwestern researchers and collaborators in China, France, and Sweden, as well as New York and Pennsylvania in the U.S., made a key discovery regarding cellular processes that block pathways in immune cells that lead to sepsis. At a fundamental level, sepsis is an out-of-control inflammatory response that damages organs and critical cellular functions leading to tissue damage.

"If not recognized early and managed promptly, sepsis can lead to septic shock, multiple organ failure, and even death," said study author Dr. Rui Kang, Associate Professor of Surgery at UT Southwestern who studies sepsis. "Our study provides novel insight into immune regulation related to sepsis and represents a proof of concept that immunometabolism constitutes a potential therapeutic target in sepsis."

Immunometabolism is the interaction of the body's natural or innate immune response - how cells detect and react to threats ­- and metabolism - how cells convert food to energy and building blocks the body needs to function. Immunometabolism is an emerging field of study combining the two traditionally independent disciplines.

Sepsis occurs when an initial infection spreads through the bloodstream to other parts of the body. Early detection and treatment of sepsis is critical, but it can be difficult to detect and to stop before damage to organs and tissue occurs. Treatments can involve antibiotics, fluids, oxygen, dialysis to ensure blood flow to affected organs, and surgery to remove damaged tissue.

"The challenges in diagnosing and treating sepsis are why it is so important to find new therapeutic targets that could potentially shut down the inflammatory response," Dr. Kang noted.

In this study in mice, researchers targeted Lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a molecule that is part of the outer membrane of gram-negative bacteria, one of the leading pathogens responsible for sepsis and septic shock. Researchers uncovered a pathway involving LPS that could suppress the sepsis response once activated, providing a potentially valuable therapeutic target. The study demonstrates that a neurotransmitter (L-adrenaline) can act on a receptor (ADRA2B) to suppress activation of the pathway (Cytosolic LPS-caspase-11) and the subsequent lethal inflammation.

A new study by Brazilian biologists suggests that the effect of pesticides on bees could be worse than previously thought. Even when used at a level considered nonlethal, an insecticide curtailed the lives of bees by up to 50%. The researchers also found that a fungicide deemed safe for bees altered the behavior of workers and made them lethargic, potentially jeopardizing the survival of the entire colony.

The results of the study are published in Scientific Reports, an online journal owned by Springer Nature. The principal investigator was Elaine Cristina Mathias da Silva Zacarin, a professor at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) in Sorocaba, São Paulo State, Brazil. Researchers affiliated with São Paulo State University (UNESP) and the University of São Paulo's Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture (ESALQ-USP) also took part in the study.

The São Paulo Research Foundation - FAPESP supported the research under the aegis of the Thematic Project "Bee-agriculture interactions: perspectives on sustainable use", for which the principal investigator is Osmar Malaspina, a professor at UNESP in Rio Claro campus. Funding was also provided by the Brazilian government via CAPES, the higher education research council, and by the Sorocaba Beekeepers' Cooperative (COAPIS).

It is a well-known fact that several bee species are disappearing worldwide. The phenomenon has been observed since 2000 in Europe and the United States and since at least 2005 in Brazil.

In Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil's southernmost state, the loss of some 5,000 colonies, corresponding to 400 million bees, was reported between December 2018 and January 2019.

One of the most widely affected species is Apis mellifera, the Western honeybee, which is of European origin and the source of most commercially available honey.

Hundreds of wild native Brazilian species may also be affected in the natural environment. The economic impact is estimated to be huge, as most agricultural crops depend on pollination by bees. All kinds of edible fruit are just one clear example.

The reason for this sudden mass disappearance is also well known: it is the indiscriminate and improper application of agrochemicals, such as insecticides, fungicides, herbicides and acaricides. Bees are contaminated when out of the hive and bring the toxic chemicals back with them on their return. Inside the nest, the chemicals are ingested by larvae, shortening their lives and impairing the functioning of the entire colony.

"Soybean, corn and sugarcane monocultures in Brazil depend on the intensive use of insecticide. Bee colonies are contaminated, for example, if farmers fail to comply with the recommended minimum safety margin of 250 m between a crop and the surrounding forest when spraying their fields. There are people who spray right up to the edge of the forest," Malaspina said.

"In Europe and the US, bee colonies die off gradually. Between one and five months may elapse between the first report of bee mortality and the destruction of the colony. It's different in Brazil. Colonies vanish here in just 24 or 48 hours. No disease can kill a whole colony in 24 hours. Only insecticide can do that."

Malaspina recalled that the insecticides, fungicides, herbicides and acaricides used in Brazil contain hundreds of active ingredients. "It's impossible to test the action of each one in the laboratory. The money isn't available," he said.

A study was conducted between 2014 and 2017 by Colmeia Viva, an initiative of the agrochemical industry association (SINDIVEG), to identify active ingredients that might be associated with bee mortality in the 44 products most widely sprayed on crops in São Paulo State.

The researchers collected material in 40 municipalities across the state. Working with beekeepers, farmers and the agrochemical industry, they came up with a set of recommended actions to protect apiaries and enforce best practices in agriculture, as well as the minimum safety margin when applying agrochemicals already mentioned.

Risks of combined exposure

According to the scientists, the beneficial effects of Colmeia Viva may begin to appear. While 5,000 colonies disappeared in Rio Grande do Sul, losses were lower in Santa Catarina and Paraná, the other two states in the southern region, and lower still in São Paulo State.

"However, that doesn't mean São Paulo's bees are no longer at risk from agrochemicals," Zacarin said. "We're beginning to carry out tests to measure the effects on honeybees of combined exposure to insecticide and fungicide. We've already discovered that a specific fungicide doesn't harm bee colonies when sprayed on its own but becomes toxic to bees when associated with a certain insecticide. It doesn't kill them as insecticide does, but it alters their behavior and puts colonies at risk."

The active ingredients investigated were clothianidin, an insecticide used to control pests that attack cotton, dry beans, corn and soybeans, and pyraclostrobin, a fungicide applied to the leaves of most grain and fruit crops, as well as legumes and vegetables.

"We tested agrochemicals for toxicity in bee larvae and the environment, using relevant criteria in the sense that we were looking for realistic levels such as those found residually in flower pollen," Zacarin said.

This is an important point. Any heavily sprayed agrochemical decimates bee colonies almost immediately. The researchers are studying the subtle effects of spraying over the medium to long term. "What we want to find out is how the residual action of agrochemicals applied even at very low levels affects bees," Zacarin explained.

Change in behavior

The tests were conducted in a laboratory to avoid environmental contamination. Larvae of A. mellifera were taken from healthy colonies, separated into groups, placed in grafting cells, and fed between the third and sixth day after transfer on a diet of royal jelly and sugar blended with a tiny dose of one or the other agrochemical. The dose was a few nanograms (billionths of a gram).

The control group's diet contained no agrochemicals. The second and third groups' diets were contaminated either with the insecticide clothianidin or with the fungicide pyraclostrobin. The insecticide and fungicide were both added to the diet of the fourth group of larvae.

"When larvae are six days old, they become pupae and begin metamorphosis, emerging as adult workers," Zacarin said. "In the wild, the life of a worker bee lasts 45 days on average. When they're confined to the lab, these bees' lives are shorter, but the lives of the specimens we fed a diet contaminated with very small amounts of the insecticide clothianidin were drastically curtailed, by as much as 50%."

No effect was observed on the life span of the workers that emerged from larvae fed a diet contaminated solely by the fungicide pyraclostrobin.

"Based on this result alone, we might assume that a very small dose of the fungicide is harmless. Unfortunately, that's not the case," Zacarin said.

No bees died in the larval or pupal stage, but the behavior of the adult workers changed. They were sluggish compared with the control group.

"Young workers make daily inspections of the hive and so they have to travel a certain distance and move about a lot in the colony. We found that bees contaminated with the fungicide alone, or with both the fungicide and insecticide combined, covered a much smaller distance and moved much more slowly," Zacarin said.

If a substantial proportion of worker bees in an actual hive were affected to the same extent, this alteration in behavior would impair the functioning of the entire colony and could be one of the reasons for the mass extinctions observed.

The researchers do not yet know exactly how the fungicide acts to change the bees' behavior. "Our hypothesis is that when pyraclostrobin is associated with an insecticide, it diminishes the bee's energy metabolism. Further studies are in progress to elucidate this mechanism," Zacarin said.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A recent study of the forensic evidence in 563 sexual assault cases in Massachusetts found "striking similarities" in the types of injuries and violence experienced by adult and adolescent victims.

The similarities suggest that teens are at greater risk of violence and injury during sexual assaults than previously thought, according to the study's authors, University of Illinois senior research specialist in social work Theodore P. Cross and University of Illinois College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign alumnus Dr. Thaddeus Schmitt.

The majority of the victims were assaulted by a person they knew, such as a friend or acquaintance. Sexual assaults by strangers were less common, occurring in 18% of cases involving 12 to 15-year-old victims and nearly 31% of cases with adult victims age 18 and older, according to the study.

Likewise, adolescent victims experienced penetration and were assaulted using force, a weapon or bodily restraint at rates comparable to adult victims, the researchers found.

In examining police records, the researchers found that arrests were about twice as likely when victims were under the age of consent, occurring in 52% of all cases involving victims under age 12.

However, arrests were made in just 25% of the cases involving 16 to 17-year-old victims and in 24% of the cases involving adult victims, the researchers found.

While prior studies found greater differences in the rates of violence experienced by adults and adolescents, Cross said "our study may be more generalizable to cases as a whole because the sample was derived from a statewide array of hospitals rather than from a single hospital or specialized center."

Cross and Schmitt compared forensic medical results and law enforcement actions in sexual assault cases that occurred in Massachusetts from 2008-10.

They pulled a random sample of cases from a statewide database of medical reports on sexual assault examinations conducted in hospital emergency departments, looking at data from crime laboratory reports, police records and sexual assault evidence collection kit forms.

The final sample in the study included 33 cases in which the victims were under age 12. There were 66 cases with victims in the 12-15 age group, 48 cases involving 16 to 17-year-old victims, and 416 cases with adult victims.

Biological evidence such as sperm/semen, blood and saliva, and DNA was found at similar rates among adults and adolescents but was significantly less likely to be found on children under age 12. Across all age groups, obtaining a DNA match to the alleged suspect, to a suspect in another case or to a convicted offender was uncommon, the researchers found.

"Although previous studies suggested that obtaining biological evidence that could be matched to DNA profiles is greatest among adult victims, less common with adolescents and substantially less likely among children, we found no meaningful differences, nor was the rate of DNA matches to the suspect different," Cross said.

"It is surprising that the rate of DNA profiles and matches was not substantially less for children than older victims, given that finding biological products was less likely among child victims," he said.

The researchers also found that use of force and choking the victim significantly increased with the age of the victim.

About half of the adults received nongenital injuries, compared with 27% of children under age 12. Likewise, adolescents received nongenital and anogenital injuries at similar rates to adults, a finding that conflicted with most prior studies, according to the researchers.

"Almost half of younger adolescents were reported to have a nongenital injury and over one third had an anogenital injury," Schmitt said. "These results should heighten concern about the trauma that even young adolescent victims experience."

Schmitt said little research has focused on sexual abuse and sexual assault among adolescents; therefore, the needs of these survivors have been largely overlooked in policy and practice development.

More research is needed on the best methods of responding to adolescents who are sexually assaulted and on coordinating needed services across adult and child agencies, Cross said.

In this image, numerous sweeping arcs seem to congregate at various bright regions. You may wonder: What is being shown? Air traffic routes? Information moving around the global internet? Magnetic fields looping across active areas on the Sun?

In fact, this is a map of the entire sky in X-rays recorded by NASA's Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), a payload on the International Space Station. NICER's primary science goals require that it target and track cosmic sources as the station orbits Earth every 93 minutes. But when the Sun sets and night falls on the orbital outpost, the NICER team keeps its detectors active while the payload slews from one target to another, which can occur up to eight times each orbit.

The map includes data from the first 22 months of NICER's science operations. Each arc traces X-rays, as well as occasional strikes from energetic particles, captured during NICER's night moves. The brightness of each point in the image is a result of these contributions as well as the time NICER has spent looking in that direction. A diffuse glow permeates the X-ray sky even far from bright sources.

The prominent arcs form because NICER often follows the same paths between targets. The arcs converge on bright spots representing NICER's most popular destinations -- the locations of important X-ray sources the mission regularly monitors.

"Even with minimal processing, this image reveals the Cygnus Loop, a supernova remnant about 90 light-years across and thought to be 5,000 to 8,000 years old," said Keith Gendreau, the mission's principal investigator at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "We're gradually building up a new X-ray image of the whole sky, and it's possible NICER's nighttime sweeps will uncover previously unknown sources."

NICER's primary mission is to determine the size of dense remains of dead stars called neutron stars -- some of which we see as pulsars -- to a precision of 5%. These measurements will finally allow physicists to solve the mystery of what form of matter exists in their incredibly compressed cores. Pulsars, rapidly spinning neutron stars that appear to "pulse" bright light, are ideally suited to this "mass-radius" research and are some of NICER's regular targets.

Other frequently visited pulsars are studied as part of NICER's Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology (SEXTANT) experiment, which uses the precise timing of pulsar X-ray pulses to autonomously determine NICER's position and speed in space. It's essentially a galactic GPS system. When mature, this technology will enable spacecraft to navigate themselves throughout the solar system -- and beyond.

People working in the fishing industry have among the poorest health of all workers in England and Wales, new research suggests.

University of Exeter researchers studied census data and found 2.8% of fishermen and women reported "bad" or "very bad" health, and 10.3% said their activities were limited "a lot" or "a little" by long-term illness.

When adjusted to take account of other factors like age, health outcomes among fishers were statistically only better than workers in two other industries - coal mining and a small number of people who engage in "subsistence" activities.

The researchers say their findings demonstrate the need for specific occupational health services to support UK fishing communities.

"Poor health outcomes among fishers extend beyond the risk of fatal accidents," said Dr Rachel Turner, of the Environment and Sustainability Institute on the University of Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall.

"We found evidence of poorer general health and higher rates of illnesses or disabilities that can impede everyday life.

"Action to improve ?shers' health could help support productive fisheries in coastal communities that are facing social, environmental and political change."

The census relies on people reporting information about themselves, and the data do not reveal the specific causes of the health issues highlighted in the new study.

"Further research is needed to understand the causes of poor self-reported health among UK fishers, in order to target interventions to improve health," said Nigel Sainsbury, also of the University of Exeter.

"A growing number of initiatives are emerging to support fishers, including specialised physiotherapy, quayside health checks and mobile dental services. Our findings strengthen the case for more widespread provision of these services."

The study examined people working in the census category "fishing and aquaculture". It was not possible to separate the two, but the relative size of those industries in England and Wales means this group is likely to be mostly fishers.

UPTON, NY--Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have designed a new, organic cathode material for lithium batteries. With sulfur at its core, the material is more energy-dense, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly than traditional cathode materials in lithium batteries. The research was published in Advanced Energy Materials on April 10, 2019.

Optimizing cathode materials

From smartphones to electric vehicles, the technologies that have become central to everyday life run on lithium batteries. And as the demand for these products continues to rise, scientists are investigating how to optimize cathode materials to improve the overall performance of lithium battery systems.

"Commercialized lithium-ion batteries are used in small electronic devices; however, to accommodate long driving ranges for electric vehicles, their energy density needs to be higher," said Zulipiya Shadike, a research associate in Brookhaven's Chemistry Division and the lead author of the research. "We are trying to develop new battery systems with a high energy density and stable performance."

In addition to solving the energy challenges of battery systems, researchers at Brookhaven are looking into more sustainable battery material designs. In search of a sustainable cathode material that could also provide a high energy density, the researchers chose sulfur, a safe and abundant element.

"Sulfur can form a lot of bonds, which means it can hold on to more lithium and therefore have a greater energy density," said co-author Adrian Hunt, a scientist at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven. "Sulfur is also lighter than traditional elements in cathode materials, so if you make a battery out of sulfur, the battery itself would be lighter and the car it runs on could drive further on the same charge."

When designing the new cathode material, the researchers chose an organodisulfide compound that is only made up of elements like carbon, hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen--not the heavy metals found in typical lithium batteries, which are less environmentally friendly. But while sulfur batteries can be safer and more energy dense, they present other challenges.

"When a battery is charging or discharging, sulfur can form an undesirable compound that dissolves in the electrolyte and diffuses throughout the battery, causing an adverse reaction," Shadike said. "We attempted to stabilize sulfur by designing a cathode material in which sulfur atoms were attached to an organic backbone."

X-rays reveal the details

Once the scientists in Brookhaven's Chemistry Division designed and synthesized the new material, they then brought it to NSLS-II to better understand its charge-discharge mechanism. Using NSLS-II's ultrabright x-rays at two different experimental stations, the X-ray Powder Diffraction (XPD) beamline and the In situ and Operando Soft X-ray Spectroscopy (IOS) beamline, the scientists were able to determine how specific elements in the cathode material contributed to its performance.

"It can be difficult to study organic battery materials using synchrotron light sources because, compared to heavy metals, organic compounds are lighter and their atoms are less ordered, so they produce weak data," said Sanjit Ghose, lead scientist at XPD and a co-author on the paper. "Fortunately, we have very high flux and high energy x-ray beams at NSLS-II that enable us to 'see' the abundance and activity of each element in a material, including lighter, less-ordered organic elements."

Ghose added, "Our colleagues in the chemistry department designed and synthesized the cathode material as per the theoretically predicted structure. To our surprise, our experimental observations matched the theoretically driven structure exactly."

Iradwikanari Waluyo, lead scientist at IOS and a co-author on the paper, said, "We used soft x-rays at IOS to directly probe the oxygen atom in the backbone and study its electronic structure, before and after the battery charged and discharged. We confirmed the carbonyl group--having a double bond between a carbon atom and an oxygen atom--not only plays a big role in improving the fast charge-discharge capability of the battery but also provides extra capacity."

The results from NSLS-II and additional experiments at the Canadian Light Source enabled the scientists to successfully confirm the battery's charge-discharge capacity provided by the sulfur atoms. The researchers say this study provides a new strategy for improving the performance of sulfur-based cathodes for high performance lithium batteries.

Russian and Taiwanese scientists have discovered a connection between the two signalling systems that help plants survive stress situations, demonstrating that they can remember dangerous conditions that they have experienced and adapt to them. This memory mechanism will help improve agricultural plants, making them more resistant to drought, flooding high humidity and extreme temperatures.

When a plant is exposed to extreme temperatures or a lack or overabundance of water, it experiences stress. This negatively affects the growth of the plant, which leads to losses of up to one half of the crop worldwide. As a means of self-protection, plants use the stress hormone abscisic acid (ABA) mediated signalling, which produces stress resistance to extreme situations. Signalling system plays an important role in organisms, acquiring information from the environment and adjusting internal processes to external conditions.

Scientists suggest that the ABA system is linked with the heat shock protein/chaperone system, and these two systems work together in different stressful situations.

Biologists still do not fully understand the coordination and sequence of events in these signalling systems. There have been no studies that would connect these two defence mechanisms, although it is clear that they must work in a coordinated manner in nature. It is believed that these discoveries will lead to breakthrough technologies in crop bioengineering. More specifically, they may help overcome the main problem of agriculture - growth retardation and development anomalies in stress-resistant crops.

The study was carried out by researchers from the Federal Scientific Center of the East Asia Terrestrial Biodiversity of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in collaboration with colleagues from Taiwan. The research team set out to identify the relationship between ABA and heat-shock protein signalling. The popular model plant Arabidopsis was used for the purpose, as it goes through the full development cycle in six weeks, which made it possible to speed up the experiments.

"In our earlier work, we obtained a map of protein-protein interactions in Arabidopsis. Now we have analysed this map and discovered that the only factors linking the two systems are the SWI/SNF chromatin-remodelling proteins, which are involved in the formation of the 'stress memory' effect," explained the project leader, Dr. Victor Bulgakov, a Head of Bioengineering Laboratory at the Federal Scientific Center of the East Asia Terrestrial Biodiversity of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and one of the authors of the article.

The "stress memory" effect is one of the main mechanisms of plant defence: it "remember" extreme conditions that plants have experienced. Stress signals sensed through the ABA and heat-shock protein signalling systems are perceived and then stored via the SWI/SNF chromatin-remodelling proteins, changing the structure of the chromatin (the DNA-protein complex). As a result, plants acquire a stress resistance to conditions that they have already experienced. The mechanism studied has become a reference point for new bioengineering technologies that the researchers have termed "bioengineering memory'."

In the course of the study, the researchers also systemized a large array of information and found that when correcting the ABA and heat-shock protein/chaperone pathways, the state and changes of the plants' memory to the previous stress must be taken into account.

In the future, the researchers plan to move away from Arabidopsis to agricultural crops.

They note that the work on "improving" plants will be different for each country.

"The most popular crops in the Russian Far East are rice, soybeans and corn. It is important to increase their resistance to cold and water deficit. In Taiwan, work needs to be done to increase the resistance of plants to heat and drought. In fact, this is the most pressing issue in the world as a whole right now. New approaches in 'memory bioengineering' may help solve both problems," Dr. Bulgakov concluded.

An international team of researchers just published in Advanced Energy Materials the widest study on what happens during battery failure, focusing on the different parts of a battery at the same time. The role of the ESRF, the European Synchrotron, in France, was crucial for its success.

We have all experienced it: you have charged your mobile phone and after a short period using it, the battery goes down unusually quickly. Consumer electronics seem to lose power at uneven rates and this is due to the heterogeneity in batteries. When the phone is charging, the top layer charges first and the bottom layer charges later. The mobile phone may indicate it's complete when the top surface level is finished charging, but the bottom will be undercharged. If you use the bottom layer as your fingerprint, the top layer will be overcharged and will have safety problems.

The truth is, batteries are composed of many different parts that behave differently. Solid polymer helps hold particles together, carbon additives provide electrical connection, and then there are the active battery particles storing and releasing the energy.

An international team of scientists from the ESRF, SLAC, Virginia Tech and Purdue University wanted to understand and quantitatively define what leads to the failure of lithium-ion batteries. Until then, studies had either zoomed in on individual areas or particles in the cathode during failure or zoomed out to look at cell level behavior without offering sufficient microscopic details. Now this study provides the first global view with unprecedented amount of microscopic structural details to complement the existing studies in the battery literature.

If you have a perfect electrode, every single particle should behave in the same fashion. However, electrodes are very heterogeneous and contain millions of particles. There's no way to ensure each particle behaves the same way at the same time.

To overcome this challenge, the research team relied heavily on the synchrotron X-ray methods and used two synchrotron facilities to study electrodes in batteries, the ESRF, the European synchrotron in Grenoble, France and Stanford's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, in US. "The ESRF allowed us to study larger quantities of battery particles at higher resolution" says Feng Lin, assistant professor at Virginia Tech. Complementary experiments, in particular nano-resolution X-ray spectro-microscopy, took place at SLAC.

"Hard X-ray phase contrast nano-tomography showed us each particle at remarkable resolution across the full electrode thickness. This allowed us to track the level of damage in each of them after using the battery. Around half of the data from the paper came from the ESRF", explains Yang Yang, scientist at ESRF and first author of the paper.

"Before the experiments we didn't know we could study these many particles at once. Imaging individual active battery particles has been the focus of this field. To make a better battery, you need to maximize the contribution from each individual particle", says Yijin Liu, scientist at SLAC.

Virginia Tech lab manufactured the materials and batteries, which were then tested for their charging and degradation behaviors at the ESRF and SLAC. Kejie Zhao, assistant professor at Purdue University, led the computational modelling effort in this project.

The findings from this publication offer a diagnostic method for the particles utilization and fading in batteries. "This could improve how industry designs electrodes for fast-charging batteries", concludes Yang.

Although there is ample evidence that air pollution--specifically airborne particulate matter--is associated with an increased risk of premature death, it is still not known which specific particles are responsible for this effect. The Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a research centre supported by "la Caixa", participated in a study that used wild moss samples to estimate human exposure to airborne metal particles in order to analyse the relationship between atmospheric metal pollution and risk of mortality.

This unique study, based on an innovative approach, has been published in the journal Environment International. It included data from 11,382 participants belonging to the Gazel cohort who were living in rural areas throughout France, a cohort that had been followed up for 20 years. The data on mosses came from the BRAMM biovigilance programme, which collects and analyses moss samples from areas all over France situated at a distance from the country's largest industrial and population centres. These samples are analysed in the laboratory to measure the presence of 13 elements: aluminium, arsenic, calcium, cadmium, chromium, copper, iron, mercury, sodium, nickel, lead, vanadium and zinc.

"There have been very few studies on the health effects of airborne metal pollutants, partly because of technical limitations, such as the lack of stations measuring air pollution. We thought that moss, because of its capacity to retain these metals, would be a useful tool for estimating the atmospheric metal exposure of people living in rural areas," explains Bénédicte Jacquemin, ISGlobal and INSERM researcher and last author of the study.

The scientists constructed a mathematical model based on the geolocation data for each moss sample and the results of the BRAMM laboratory analysis. This model was then used to map the exposure of each participant to the metals under study. The metals were classified into two groups, according to whether their origin was considered natural or anthropogenic. The final analysis showed that participants exposed to higher atmospheric concentrations of metals of anthropogenic origin had an increased risk of death.

The metals deemed to be of anthropogenic origin were cadmium, copper, mercury, lead and zinc. While all of these metals are naturally present in the earth's crust, their presence in the atmosphere is due to human activities, such as industry, traffic and heating.

"Our results indicate that the metals present in the airborne particulate matter could be a key component in the effects of air pollution on mortality", explains Jacquemin. "It is important to bear in mind that the people we included in this study live in rural areas far from major urban and industrial centres and road networks. This means that they are very likely to be exposed to lower levels of air pollution than people living in urban environments, which gives us an idea of the seriousness of the health effects of air pollution, even at relatively low levels of exposure," she stresses.

"These findings support our hypothesis that moss bio-monitoring can be a good complementary technique for identifying the toxic components in suspended particulate matter," the researcher adds.

Livestock farming is destroying our planet. It is a major cause of land and water degradation, biodiversity loss, acid rain, coral reef degeneration, deforestation - and of course, climate change. Plant-based diets, insect farming, lab-grown meat and genetically modified animals have all been proposed as potential solutions. Which is best?

All of these combined, say researchers at Tufts University.

Writing in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, they explain why lab-grown insect meat - fed on plants, and genetically modified for maximum growth, nutrition and flavor - could be a superior green alternative for high volume, nutritious food production.

Alternatives to conventional meat farming

"Due to the environmental, public health and animal welfare concerns associated with our current livestock system, it is vital to develop more sustainable food production methods," says lead author Natalie Rubio.

Genetically modified livestock, for example that produce less methane or resist disease, can do little to relieve issues like land and water degradation, deforestation and biodiversity loss.

But for meat-lovers, soy- or mushroom-based substitutes just don't hit the spot - and some plant crops are as thirsty as livestock.

Insect farming has a much lower water and space requirement - think vertical farming - and twice as much of a cricket is edible than of a big-boned, big-bellied cow. Unsurprisingly though, creepy crawlies are proving even harder for consumers to swallow.

Finally, lab-grown meat could squeeze water and space savings furthest of all, without compromising on taste. Culturing beef, pork or chicken cells might require even more energy and resources than livestock farming, however - leaving us trading farts for fossil fuels. (Or is that burps?)

Lab-grown insect meat

A better solution, says Rubio, may lie at the intersection of all these options: lab-grown insect meat - fed on plants, and genetically modified for maximum growth, nutrition and flavor.

"Compared to cultured mammalian, avian and other vertebrate cells, insect cell cultures require fewer resources and less energy-intensive environmental control, as they have lower glucose requirements and can thrive in a wider range of temperature, pH, oxygen and osmolarity conditions," reports Rubio.

"Alterations necessary for large-scale production are also simpler to achieve with insect cells, which are currently used for biomanufacture of insecticides, drugs and vaccines."

Research for these applications has led already to inexpensive, animal-free growth media for insect cells - including soy- and yeast-based formulas - as well as successful 'suspension culture'.

"In most mammalian muscle cell culture systems, the cells have to be fixed in a single layer to a growth surface - which is complex to scale up for mass food production. Many insect cells, however, can be grown free-floating in a suspension of growth media to allow cost-e?ective, high-density cell generation," Rubio explains.

Technology developed to stimulate movement of insect tissue for bio-robotics could also be applied to food production, since regular contraction may be required for cultured insect muscle to develop a 'meaty' texture. A particularly efficient method is optogenetic engineering, whereby cells are made to contract in response to light by introducing a new gene - another advantage of insect cells, which more readily accept genetic modifications than do other animal cells.

How will it taste?

So, future food production could be a sight to behold: silent discos of insect muscles, flexing to the pulse of lasers in vast pools of soy juice. But how will it taste?

The short answer, says Rubio, is that nobody knows.

"Despite this immense potential, cultured insect meat isn't ready for consumption. Research is ongoing to master two key processes: controlling development of insect cells into muscle and fat, and combining these in 3D cultures with a meat-like texture. For the latter, sponges made from chitosan - a mushroom-derived fiber that is also present in the invertebrate exoskeleton - are a promising option."

Eventually, insect labriculture could turn up some altogether more familiar flavors.

"Advances in insect cell culture and tissue engineering can potentially be translated to lobster, crab and shrimp, due to the evolutionary proximity of insects and crustaceans," suggests Rubio.