Tech

CATONSVILLE, MD, February 7, 2019 - Consumer brands have long used old-fashioned focus groups, interviews and surveys to best gauge consumer wants, desires and needs as part of processes that range from product development, to marketing and sales. As machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have emerged, there is an increasing interest in the ability to harness these solutions to save time and money, and to yield more reliable consumer insights.

Machine learning can help to analyze user-generated content (UGC), which involves the collection of data from online reviews, social media, and blogs, that provide insights on consumer needs, preferences and attitudes.

Despite the potential for better information, marketers have raised concerns over the value of UGC data because the sheer scale and quality of UGC makes it difficult to process. While the data is accessible, identifying consumer insights requires human beings to analyze the data, which is hard to do at scale.

Two researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) decided to tackle this problem through research designed to examine the challenge of how to most efficiently use UGC to identify customer needs in ways that are more cost-efficient and accurate.

The study to be published in the February edition of the INFORMS journal Marketing Science is titled "Identifying Customer Needs from User-Generated Content," and is authored by Artem Timoshenko and John R. Hauser of MIT.

They find that machine learning can improve the process for identifying customer needs, while reducing research time substantially, helping consumer marketing brands avoid delays in bringing products to market.

"As more and more people turn to the digital marketplace to research products, share their opinions, and exchange product experiences, large amounts of UGC data is available quickly and at a low incremental cost to companies," said Timoshenko. "In many brand categories, UGC is extensive.

For example, there are more than 300,000 reviews on health and personal care products on Amazon alone. If UGC can be mined for customer needs, it has the potential to identify customer needs better than direct customer interviews."

Other advantages of UGC data are that it is updated continuously, which enables companies to stay current with their understandings of customer needs. And unlike customer interviews, UGC data is available for research to return to further explore new insights.

To conduct their research, the study authors constructed and analyzed a custom data set which compares the customer needs for the oral-care category identified from direct interviews to the customer needs from Amazon reviews. The data set was constructed in a partnership with a marketing consulting firm to ensure the industry-standard quality of the interviews and insights.

The authors developed and evaluated a machine-learning hybrid approach to identify customer needs from UGC. First, they use machine learning to identify relevant content and remove redundancies. The processed data is then analyzed by human beings to formulate customer needs from selected content.

"In the end, we found that UGC does at least as well as traditional methods based on a representative set of customers," said Hauser. "We were able to process large amounts of data and narrow it to manageable samples for manual review. The manual review remains an important final part of the process, since professional analysts are best able to judge the context-dependent nature of customer needs."

No one knows just how many species live in the Amazon rainforest--scientists estimate that it's home to one-third of the world's animal and plant species. There are still thousands out there waiting to be discovered--like these six new catfish with faces covered in tentacles.

"We discovered six new species of really cool catfish from the Amazon and Orinoco River basins. They have tentacles on their snouts, they have spines that stick out from their heads, almost like claws, to protect themselves and their nests, and their body is covered with bony plates like armor," says Lesley de Souza, a conservation scientist and ichthyologist at Chicago's Field Museum and lead author of a paper in Zootaxa describing the new species. "They're warriors, they're fish superheroes."

The new catfish are all members of the genus Ancistrus, also known as bristlenose catfish. If you've ever had an aquarium, you might know them as the sucker-mouthed "algae-eaters" that help keep tanks clean. These river-dwelling fish are between three and six inches long, and the males have tentacles erupting from their snouts. They're there to persuade females that their owners would make good dads. Ancistrus catfish fathers look after their young, guarding nests of eggs and warding off predators. And the tentacles make potential fish dads look like they know what they're doing. "The idea is that when a female fish sees a male with these tentacles, to her, they look like eggs. That signifies to her that he's a good father who's able to produce offspring and protect them," says de Souza. It's an evolutionary move that takes "catfishing" to a whole new, kind of sweet level.

Some of the new species' names hint at the animals' traits or the story of their discovery. For instance, Ancistrus patronus's name means "protector," a reference to how Ancistrus fathers care for their young. The species-defining "type specimen" for A. yutajae is named for two star-crossed lovers in an Indigenous Amazonian legend; it was discovered on Valentine's Day in 1981. Some of the other new species' names have a personal connection for de Souza--A. kellerae for Connie Keller, a major supporter of conservation science at the Field Museum, A. leoni after a deceased colleague, A. saudades for the Portuguese word for melancholy, for de Souza's nostalgia for her Brazilian homeland.

The catfish are found in northeastern South America, in an area of Venezuela, Colombia, and Guyana known as the Guiana Shield. The fish live in clear, fast-moving rivers and streams. "If you're in the right habitat, you're going to find a lot of them," says de Souza, who co-authored the Zootaxa paper with her former PhD advisor Jonathan Armbruster of the Auburn University Museum of Natural History, a leading expert in South American sucker-mouth catfishes, and long-time colleague and mentor Donald Taphorn, also a renowned Neotropical ichthyologist. "But they are sensitive to subtle changes in the environment, we have seen this at sites where they were plentiful and now scarce, this is due to habitat destruction."

Threats to the fishes' habitat include large-scale agriculture, deforestation and gold mining. "Miners dredge up the river bottom causing increased sediment load, this changes the habitat structure of the river system, thus impacting the fishes ability to survive," says de Souza. "Another effect from gold mining is the use of mercury to extract the gold in the river. This impacts all wildlife and principally local people that consume these fishes and other species in the watershed."

And problems affecting the catfish don't stop with the tentacle-faced Romeos. "The whole ecosystem is interconnected--you can't separate the species in it. Giant river otters love to eat these catfish, and jaguars have been observed to have higher mercury levels from eating contaminated fish or other species that feed on fish. This can have dire impacts on the whole ecosystem," says de Souza. "All the layers of the Amazon basin are interconnected from the rivers to the forest canopy."

According to de Souza, the process of saving the Amazon starts with things like discovering new species and putting names on them. "Everything begins with naming a species and determining how many species you have. Once you have done the taxonomy then you can study the ecology, behavior, and do conservation action," says de Souza. "For example, Ancistrus kellerae, is a species only known from the highlands in Guyana. There are current threats to its ecosystem by gold mining, but now that is has a name we can try to push for conservation protection of the area with this endemic fish species.

The importance of these catfish to the bigger picture of Amazonian conservation inspired de Souza to name one of the new species after Connie Keller, the former chair of the Field Museum's Board of Trustees. "When I met Connie, I was immediately inspired by her contributions to our Science Action Center," says de Souza. "It might just be that the fish I named after her could help us protect this river system. Even as a fish, she'd be supporting conservation."

With untold unknown species remaining in the Amazon, the work is far from over. "I have this undying curiosity--what's around that bend, that corner, what's in that creek, what can I find? And this project was all about discovery, whether we were finding new species in rivers in Guyana or in jars in museum collections. This study included more than 500 specimens, but this is just a drop in the bucket--there's still so much more to learn about Ancistrus and other Neotropical fish."

Although elk typically adapt to forest disturbances such as forest fires and logging, a new Journal of Wildlife Management study found that during the summer, elk avoided areas with extensive tree mortality that has occurred due to the bark-beetle epidemic in the northern portions of the Rocky Mountains in the United States.

Avoidance of beetle-killed forest by elk during the summer has led to a decline in preferred habitat for elk that will be of importance to many wildlife and land managers responsible for managing elk populations in areas impacted by the bark-beetle epidemic.

"Although it is common following forest disturbances for elk to seek out and capitalize on the resulting increases in highly palatable and nutritious forage, during the summer months, elk in our study area fairly consistently avoided beetle-kill. This result is somewhat counter to how we typically think elk respond to forest disturbances," said lead author Bryan G. Lamont, of the University of Wyoming. "It appears there are some subtle, but real differences between disturbances such as forest fires and the bark-beetle epidemic."

Lamont noted that for elk in the study, the increases in the number of downed trees and loss of canopy cover seemed to outweigh the meager increases in understory in bark-beetle affected areas. "Ultimately this means that if elk are avoiding beetle-kill areas, this translates to much less forest habitat that elk typically would utilize during the summer," he said.

CHAPEL HILL, NC - Results from a study published in the journal Cancer Medicine show that a pragmatic system-based intervention within cancer treatment centers can eliminate existing disparities in treatment and outcomes for black patients with early-stage lung cancer across the U.S. The treatment rates before this three-part intervention were 78 percent for white patients versus 69 percent for black patients. With the intervention in place, treatment rates climbed to 95 percent for white patients and 96.5 percent for black patients.

"These results show promise for all cancer treatment centers," said Samuel Cykert, MD, professor of medicine at the UNC School of Medicine and co-principal investigator of the trial. "One of our participating institutions, Cone Health in Greensboro, NC, is now working towards permanently implementing this intervention into its breast and lung cancer care, and we would like to do further testing with all cancer patient populations."

Cykert and his colleagues previously conducted studies in 2005 and 2009 to find out why race disparities in cancer treatment exist. They found multiple reasons that contribute to the overall reduction in treatment.

"We found there was an implicit bias with many clinicians that made them less willing to take the same risks with patients that were different from them," Cykert said. "A black and a white patient of the same age could require the same surgery, have the same comorbidities, have the same income and insurance, yet white patients were more likely to receive the surgery and get their cancer treated."

Cykert says they additionally found that black cancer patients who did not have a regular source of care might have trust issues or miscommunications with physicians, leading them to drop out of treatment altogether. They also found that denial of their diagnosis played a role in patients seeking treatment.

"With that knowledge, we wanted to build a system that pointed out these lapses in care or communication in real time to help us keep track of patients who would otherwise drop off the grid," said Cykert.

The intervention consisted of three parts: a real-time warning system derived from electronic health records, race-specific feedback to clinical teams on treatment completion rates, and a nurse navigator to engage with patients throughout treatment.

The real-time warning system notified nurse navigators when a patient missed an appointment or treatment milestone. The navigator then reached out to the patient to reengage and bring them back in for treatment. The nurse navigators were encouraged to become familiar with patients and build trust in case of a missed appointment, miscommunication between doctor and patient, or other circumstance that created a potential barrier to care.

Cykert, who is a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, says he and colleagues came up with the intervention model with help from the Greensboro Health Disparities Collaborative, an academic-community partnership experienced in community-based participatory research. Their goals were to create elements of real-time transparency, race-specific accountability, and enhanced patient-centered communication.

Cykert's team recruited patients aged 18-85 from two multi-institutional prospective trials using identical interventions. Nearly 240 patients were enrolled in an American Cancer Society sponsored study, and around 120 lung cancer patients enrolled in a study sponsored by the National Cancer Institute. Cykert was the principal investigator in the first trial, and co-principal investigator in the second trial along with Geni Eng, DrPH, in UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, and a national expert in community participatory research.

Along with the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Care Center and Cone Health Cancer Center, East Carolina University's Leo Jenkins Cancer Center, University of South Carolina School of Medicine, and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Hillman Cancer Center participated in the trial.

Researchers are in the process of submitting a grant proposal with the National Cancer Institute to implement this intervention to cover whole cancer center populations rather than study patients alone.

Sophia Antipolis, 5 February 2019: Anti-inflammatory biologic* drugs used to treat severe psoriasis have the potential to prevent heart disease in patients with the skin condition, according to research published today in Cardiovascular Research, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC). During one year of treatment, biologic therapy improved coronary artery plaque similar to the effect of a low-dose statin.

"Psoriasis severity is related to the burden of coronary disease - our findings suggest treating the psoriasis may potentially benefit coronary heart disease," said study author Dr Nehal Mehta, Chief of Inflammation and Cardiometabolic Diseases at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, Maryland, US.

Psoriasis causes scaly skin patches, often on the elbows, knees, scalp, and lower back. Patients with the skin condition have an elevated risk of heart disease - young patients with severe psoriasis are at twice the risk of having a first heart attack at 40-50 years of age.

Psoriasis patients often have inflammation throughout the body and may be treated with anti-inflammatory biologic therapy when their skin condition is severe and topical treatments or phototherapy have failed. This study investigated whether treating severe psoriasis with a biologic could improve the health of the coronary arteries.

The study found that patients with severe psoriasis who took biologic therapy for one year had an 8% reduction in total and non-calcified coronary plaque burden, a frequent cause of heart attacks (see figure) - similar to the effect of a low dose statin. The make-up of coronary plaques also improved in those taking biologics, making them less risky. Coronary plaque burden increased by 2% in patients who did not take a biologic.

Dr Mehta said: "We found that these anti-inflammatory drugs commonly used to treat severe psoriasis also improve plaque in the coronary artery making them more stable and less likely to cause a heart attack. This occurred in the absence of changes in traditional cardiovascular risk factors including blood pressure and blood lipids."

During the one-year study, systemic inflammation assessed by blood markers reduced only in the group taking biologic therapy. Dr Mehta said it is too early to say whether biologics exert their effects on coronary plaques directly or by reducing systemic inflammation.

He said: "This preliminary study provides the first evidence that biologic therapy is associated with coronary plaque reduction and stabilisation,and provides strong rationale for conduct of a randomised trial testing the impact of biologic therapy on the progression of coronary disease in patients with psoriasis."

Dr Mehta noted that some patients with severe psoriasis opt not to take a biologic medicine because they suppress the immune system and may increase the chance of infection. In addition, they must be injected.

Previous research has shown that in heart attack patients, anti-inflammatory biologic therapy reduces the risk of another cardiovascular event.2 "With the results of that study and our current one, my message to patients with psoriasis is to take untreated inflammation seriously," said Dr Mehta. "When someone has severe psoriasis, they are at higher risk of heart attack and treating the psoriasis may reduce that risk."

The observational study included 121 patients with severe psoriasis who qualified for biologic treatment. Of those, 89 took biological therapy (one of three types) and 32 used topical treatment. All patients underwent imaging of their coronary arteries with computed tomography angiography at baseline and one year later to assess the amount and characteristics of plaques such as the necrotic core which causes plaque rupture.

Medical marijuana has gained attention in recent years for its potential to relieve pain and short-term anxiety and depression. Now, Penn State College of Medicine researchers say some cannabinoid compounds may actually inhibit the growth of colon cancer cells in the lab.

The researchers tested the effects of synthetic cannabinoid compounds on colon cancer cells in an experiment in test tubes. While the compounds most commonly associated with cannabis -- THC and CBD -- showed little to no effect, 10 other compounds were effective at inhibiting cancer cell growth.

Kent Vrana, chair of the Department of Pharmacology at Penn State College of Medicine, said the study -- recently published in Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research -- helped identify compounds that could be tested further to understand their anti-cancer properties.

"Now that we've identified the compounds that we think have this activity, we can take these compounds and start trying to alter them to make them more potent against cancer cells," Vrana said. "And then eventually, we can explore the potential for using these compounds to develop drugs for treating cancer."

Colorectal cancer is one of the most common cancers diagnosed in the United States, according to the National Cancer Institute, with an estimated 140,250 newly diagnosed cases and 50,630 deaths in 2018. While medical cannabis has largely been used in recent years for palliative care, the researchers said some previous studies suggested that certain cannabinoid compounds may have the potential to inhibit or prevent the growth of tumors.

To explore how effective cannabinoids were at reducing the viability of colon cancer cells specifically, the researchers tested how 370 different synthetic cannabinoid compounds affected seven types of human colon cancer cells.

"There are many different ways cells can become cancerous," Vrana said. "Each of the seven cells we tested had a different cause or mutation that led to the cancer, even though they were all colon cells. We didn't want to test these compounds on just one mutation or pathway to cancer."

The researchers incubated the cancer cells in a lab for eight hours before treating them with the cannabinoid compounds for 48 hours. Any compounds that showed signs of reducing the viability of one kind of cancer cell was then used to treat all seven kinds of cells.

After further screening and analysis, the researchers identified 10 compounds that inhibited the growth of almost all seven types of colon cancer types tested. But while the researchers were able to identify these compounds, Vrana said they are still unsure about how exactly the compounds worked to reduce the viability of the cancer cells.

"The 10 compounds we found to be effective fall into three classes, so they're similar to each other but with small changes," Vrana said. "We know how one of them works, which is by inhibiting the division of cells in general. We also found that the most potent and effective compounds don't seem to work through traditional marijuana receptors, although we're not sure of the exact mechanism yet."

Vrana said certain types of cells, like skin and colon cells, are more susceptible to cancers because they divide very frequently

"Every time a cell divides, there's the chance that it will mutate and keep dividing when it shouldn't, which is how cancers can start. So if we block that signal that's telling cancer cells to continue to divide, that could be a way to stop that cancer."

Vrana said that because the other compounds did not seem to be working through traditional cannabinoid signaling pathways, future research will focus on better understanding how the compounds interact with cancer cells and whether researchers can make the compounds more potent and effective.

A Rutgers study has uncovered a new threat in the opiate epidemic: Overdoses of loperamide, an over-the-counter diarrhea medication, have been steadily increasing in number and severity nationwide over five years.

Misuse of the drug is particularly alarming because non-prescription drugs like loperamide are inexpensive, readily available online and in retail stores, undetectable on routine drug tests and can be bought in large quantities at one time.

"When used appropriately, loperamide is a safe and effective treatment for diarrhea - but when misused in large doses, it is more toxic to the heart than other opioids which are classified under federal policy as controlled dangerous substances," said senior author Diane Calello, executive and medical director of the New Jersey Poison Control Center at Rutgers University Medical School. "Overdose deaths occur not because patients stop breathing, as with other opioids, but due to irregular heartbeat and cardiac arrest."

The study, published in the journal Clinical Toxicology, found increasing instances in which patients with opioid use disorder misused loperamide to prevent or self-treat withdrawal symptoms. To a lesser extent, some took massive doses to get a high similar to heroin, fentanyl or oxycodone.

The researchers reviewed cases of patients with loperamide exposure reported by medical toxicologists to a national registry, the Toxicology Investigators' Consortium, from January 2010 to December 2016, reporting a growing number of cases over that time frame. The Poison Control Center database (National Poison Data System) also reported a 91 percent increase during that time period, which in 2015 included 916 exposures and two deaths.

The patients reporting misuse in the Rutgers study were predominantly young Caucasian men and women. The majority used extremely high doses of loperamide, the equivalent of 50 to 100 two-milligram pills per day.

Calello noted that New Jersey Poison Control has reported several fatalities or near-fatalities from loperamide in the past 12 months.

"Possible ways of restricting loperamide misuse include limiting the daily or monthly amount an individual could purchase, requiring retailers to keep personal information about customers, requiring photo identification for purchase and placing medication behind the counter," she said. "Most importantly, consumers need to understand the very real danger of taking this medication in excessive doses."

WASHINGTON -- For the first time, researchers have shown that the non-conventional imaging method known as ghost imaging can be performed using a low-cost, chip-based light-illuminating device. This important step toward chip-based ghost imaging could make the imaging method practical for applications such as chip-scale biomedical imaging, light detection and ranging (LIDAR), and internet-of-things sensing devices.

There is a great deal of interest in ghost imaging because it can be performed with a low-cost single-pixel detector instead of a complex, and typically expensive, camera. When combined with the compressed sensing computational approach, ghost imaging can also achieve higher sensitivity and faster imaging than traditional methods, especially in non-visible wavelength ranges.

In The Optical Society (OSA) journal Optics Express, researchers from the University of Tokyo describe how they replaced a bulky optical component typically used for ghost imaging with a newly developed chip-based optical phased array (OPA) that measures only 4 by 4 millimeters.

"If low-cost, single-chip imaging devices were commercialized it would enable low-cost LIDAR, which is the technology self-driving cars, drones and autonomous robots use to see their environment," said Takuo Tanemura, who led the research team. "Also, small imaging devices could be embedded into smartphones to allow improved 3D imaging and healthcare monitoring."

Faster, lower-cost imaging

Ghost imaging works by illuminating an object with random speckle patterns that change over time. Correlating the transmitted (or reflected) optical power that travels through the object with the intensity distribution of the speckle patterns allows an image of the object to be obtained.

Although this imaging approach was proposed more than 10 years ago, the bulky and slow spatial light modulators used to generate the speckle illumination patterns have kept ghost imaging mostly constrained to the laboratory.

In the new work, the researchers overcame an inherent challenge to applying large-scale OPAs, which use an array of adjustable integrated waveguide elements to control the phase of light. Instead of trying to align all the optical phases precisely, which is challenging in practice, they designed an OPA in which the phase-controlling elements operate randomly. This allowed them to generate randomly changing speckle patterns that were perfect for ghost imaging.

"Compared with previous implementations of ghost imaging using spatial lightwave modulators that were large and slow (typically operating in the kilohertz range), using an integrated phased array is much more compact and offers lower cost," said Tanemura. "Our approach also has the potential to reach greater than gigahertz operational speeds, or six orders of magnitude faster than SLM-based approaches."

To create the random speckle pattern, the researchers applied rapidly changing random electrical signals to 128 integrated phase shifter elements on the OPA. They demonstrated 2D imaging with more than 90 resolvable points in the X direction (determined by the number of phase shifters) and 14 pixels in the Y direction (determined by the number of wavelengths tested). The results agreed well with theoretical predictions.

Smaller, cheaper LIDAR

"This type of imaging device could be particularly useful for LIDAR, which currently produces 3D images using a bulky mechanical mirror to steer a laser beam," said Tanemura. "It is estimated that the cost, size and response time of LIDAR needs to be reduced by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude to be widely deployed in non-luxury mass-market cars. A chip-scale ghost imaging device could accomplish this."

The researchers will continue working to make the new technology even more practical. They are experimenting with electro-optic phase shifters that could increase OPA operation to speeds beyond gigahertz. They also plan to further increase the scan rate and would like to integrate all the optical components on the same chip as the OPA to accomplish 2D and 3D imaging without any off-chip components.

"If we're able to integrate all the necessary components, including the light source and detector, on a chip, then a single-chip ghost imaging device would be possible," said Tanemura.

Mechanical systems, such as engines and motors, rely on two principal types of motions of stiff components: linear motion, which involves an object moving from one point to another in a straight line; and rotational motion, which involves an object rotating on an axis.

Nature has developed far more sophisticated forms of movement -- or actuation--that can perform complex functions more directly and with soft components. For example, our eyes can change focal point by simply contracting soft muscles to change the shape of the cornea. In contrast, cameras focus by moving solid lenses along a line, either manually or by an autofocus.

But what if we could mimic shape changes and movements found in nature?

Now, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a method to change the shape of a flat sheet of elastomer, using actuation that is fast, reversible, controllable by an applied voltage, and reconfigurable to different shapes.

The research was published in Nature Communications.

"We see this work as the first step in the development of a soft, shape shifting material that changes shape according to electrical control signals from a computer," said David Clarke, the Extended Tarr Family Professor of Materials at SEAS and senior author of the paper. "This is akin to the very first steps taken in the 1950's to create integrated circuits from silicon, replacing circuits made of discrete, individual components. Just as those integrated circuits were primitive compared to the capabilities of today's electronics, our devices have a simple but integrated three-dimensional architecture of electrical conductors and dielectrics, and demonstrate the elements of programmable reconfiguration, to create large and reversible shape changes."

The reconfigurable elastomer sheet is made up of multiple layers. Carbon nanotube-based electrodes of different shapes are incorporated between each layer. When a voltage is applied to these electrodes, a spatially varying electric field is created inside the elastomer sheet that produces uneven changes in the material geometry, allowing it to morph into a controllable three-dimensional shape.

Different sets of electrodes can be switched on independently, enabling different shapes based on which sets of electrodes are on and which ones are off.

"In addition to being reconfigurable and reversible, these shape-morphing actuations have a power density similar to that of natural muscles," said Ehsan Hajiesmaili, first author of the paper and graduate student at SEAS. "This functionality could transform the way that mechanical devices work. There are examples of current devices that could make use of more sophisticated deformations to function more efficiently, such as optical mirrors and lenses. More importantly, this actuation method opens the door to novel devices that deemed too complicated to pursue due to the complex deformations required, such as a shape-morphing airfoil."

In this research, the team also predicted the actuation shapes, given the design of the electrode arrangement and applied voltage. Next, the researchers aim to tackle the inverse problem: given a desired actuation shape, what is the design of the electrodes and the required voltage that will cause it?

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- For men older than about 60, an enlarged prostate means feeling the urge to make a pit stop way too often throughout the day.

But a new study shows that if these men also happen to have prostate cancer, the larger prostate actually impedes tumor growth.

The findings suggest that it might be a bad idea to downsize an enlarged prostate through surgery or drugs, because doing so could lead to faster growth of prostate cancer. While the five-year survival rate for prostate cancer is generally very high, it is still one of the leading causes of death among men in the U.S., according to the Prostate Cancer Foundation.

Computer simulations of patient data offer a possible explanation of why an enlarged prostate might be a life saver: because a prostate can only grow so much within a confined space, force accumulates and puts pressure on the tumor, effectively keeping it small.

"It's already known that forces and stresses have an impact on tumor growth, and that patients with enlarged prostates tend to have slower cancer growth, but it wasn't known why," said Hector Gomez, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, who builds models and simulations for understanding tumor growth, cellular migration and blood flow.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to simulate the possible effects of benign prostatic hyperplasia, a disease that causes the prostate to enlarge progressively, on the tumors of prostate cancer.

Guillermo Lorenzo, a former doctoral student of Gomez who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pavia in Italy, performed most of the research and ran the simulations. Alessandro Reali and Pablo Dominguez-Frojan also participated in the study and are coauthors of the paper.

Gomez and Thomas Hughes, a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin, began the project as part of their work on using computer simulations to improve the diagnosis and prognosis of prostate cancer.

"Current diagnosis and prognosis methods have had a hard time differentiating between patients who are under serious risk of prostate cancer and those who aren't," Gomez said. "This has led to people getting overtreated or undertreated."

Looking at the relationship between prostate enlargement and prostate cancer could bring new insights.

The study looked at data from patients in medical studies who had a history of both an enlarged prostate and prostate cancer. To perform the simulations, Lorenzo extracted a three-dimensional anatomy of the prostate and locations of the tumors from MRI images.

At the end of a one-year period, the simulations showed that the tumor of a patient with history of an enlarged prostate barely grew at all. When the researchers removed history of an enlarged prostate in the program, the tumor had grown to be over six times larger at the end of the same time period.

"But now we know that the mechanical stresses that originate as prostates enlarge impede tumor growth," Hughes said.

Realistically, these findings would need to be clinically validated in humans through a long-term observational study before doctors take action. In the meantime, the researchers plan to extend their model to incorporating the effects of drugs that downsize the prostate, as well as use the model's information on the deformation of the prostate to help detect cancer.

Many countries have passed environmental laws to preserve natural ecosystems. Although the regulations seem to have improved preservation efforts, they may have had unintended consequences in energy production, leading to more greenhouse gas emissions.

That's the conclusion of a new study by a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University that appears in the journal PLOS ONE.

"This study is the first to suggest that environmental regulations focused only on preserving ecosystems appear to have encouraged electric utilities to substitute dirtier fuels for hydropower in electricity generation," explains Edson Severnini, assistant professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College, the study's author.

"According to our estimates, on average, each megawatt of fossil fuel power-generating capacity added to the grid because of environmental constraints on hydropower development led to an increase in annual carbon dioxide emissions of about 1,400 tons."

Severnini examined the tradeoff in the United States from 1998 to 2014 between efforts to preserve ecosystems and greenhouse gas emissions. In his work, he used a simple general equilibrium model for the electric industry. According to the model, consumers value electricity, preservation of the ecosystem, and climate stability, but generating electricity damages the environment, through either construction of hydroelectric dams or greenhouse gas emissions, which contributes to climate change.

The study used two sources of data. The first is a 1990s report prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy to determine the undeveloped potential hydropower resources in the United States. The report contains information on locations and potential capacity of all such resources, which allowed the author to compute the potential hydropower that cannot be developed due to regulations intended to preserve the wilderness and wildlife.

The second source of data is the Environmental Protection Agency's Emissions and Generation Resource Integrated Database, which features environmental characteristics for most electric power produced in the United States.

In all, Severnini's sample included 110 counties in 33 states.

The study suggests that while environmental constraints on hydropower may have preserved the wilderness and wildlife by restricting the development of hydroelectric projects, the restrictions led to more greenhouse gas emissions. In many cases, environmental regulations replaced hydropower (a renewable, relatively low-emitting source of energy) with conventional fossil-fuel power (which is highly polluting).

"Do environmental regulations aimed at preserving natural ecosystems protect the environment?" Severnini asks. "The answer seems to be not necessarily. The findings of my study highlight the pernicious incentives of environmental regulations that are focused on only one type of power plant--in this case, hydroelectric dams--and points to the importance of an integrated regulatory framework that considers both ecosystem preservation and greenhouse gas emissions."

People who inherit a faulty copy of the so-called "breast cancer genes" BRCA1 and BRCA2 are at high risk of cancer. About 10 percent of breast cancer cases and 15 percent of ovarian cancers can be traced back to a flaw in one of these genes.

A class of drugs known as PARP inhibitors was designed to target tumors with defective BRCA genes. Sold under brand names such as Lynparza, Rubraca and Talzenna, the drugs offered new hope to people with ovarian or breast cancer. But in the five years since the first one was approved, PARP inhibitors haven't lived up to their promise. Tumors typically shrink when first hit with a PARP inhibitor, but they soon become resistant, and the cancer returns.

Now, researchers may have found a path toward improving the effectiveness of chemotherapy in people with breast or ovarian cancer that is caused by BRCA defects. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis identified a pair of genes that operate in parallel to BRCA. Knocking down the genes increases tumor cells' susceptibility to a toxic chemical - and potentially to chemotherapy drugs as well.

"Women treated with PARP inhibitors typically go into remission relatively quickly, but a lot of these cancers then become resistant partly because there are other proteins in the cell that can compensate for the lack of BRCA," said Andrea Byrum, a graduate student and the study's co-first author. "If we target these other factors, we might be able to make the tumor sensitive to these drugs again."

The findings are available online in the Journal of Cell Biology.

BRCA helps repair damaged DNA, fending off the errors that threaten to transform normal cells into cancer cells. When a person has a BRCA gene that isn't working properly, his or her cells struggle to heal injuries to their DNA. PARP inhibitors knock out another arm of the cell's DNA repair system. Together, a flawed BRCA gene and a PARP inhibitor leave tumor cells with a fatal inability to fix DNA damage, and the cells die.

But the DNA repair system is complex and redundant, and some tumor cells with nonfunctioning BRCA genes are able to effectively restore BRCA function by boosting another aspect of the system. That's where this latest study comes in. The researchers found a way to make tumor cells that have BRCA act like they don't so they can be more easily killed. Their findings point the way toward making resistant tumor cells susceptible to PARP inhibitors once again.

Nima Mosammaparast, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of pathology and immunology, Byrum, and colleagues found that a complex of the proteins TPX2 and Aurora A could mimic the effects of the BRCA proteins.

"If you lose this complex, it's like you lose BRCA," said Mosammaparast, the study's senior author. "The nice thing is that there are inhibitors to Aurora A already in clinical trials for other types of cancer such as lymphoma and melanoma. We could combine an Aurora inhibitor and a PARP inhibitor to more effectively target these cancers. I am working on getting funding to do such a study."

Moreover, the researchers found that cells needed both the complex and BRCA proteins to optimally protect their DNA as the cells are dividing. Co-senior author Alessandro Vindigni, PhD, and co-first author Denisse Carvajal-Maldonado, PhD, both of Saint Louis University, treated human cells with a DNA-damaging chemical and measured the lengths of replicating DNA strands. The strands were short if either the complex or BRCA was missing, and much shorter if both were, indicating that the cell was failing to protect its DNA.

"If you don't have BRCA and you inhibit this complex, it could be potentially catastrophic for the tumor," Mosammaparast said.

Defective BRCA genes raise the risk of not just breast and ovarian cancer, but prostate and pancreatic cancers as well. Finding a way to prevent resistance or restore sensitivity to PARP inhibitors could improve therapy options for many people.

"We weren't looking for a drug when we started this study," Mosammaparast said. "We were just asking a very basic question about how other genes regulate BRCA, and we stumbled across a potential drug target. My own personal take on it is that sometimes asking very basic questions leads you to discoveries that you weren't even thinking about."

During the Zika virus outbreak of 2015-16, public health officials scrambled to contain the epidemic and curb the pathogen's devastating effects on pregnant women. At the same time, scientists around the globe tried to understand the genetics of this mysterious virus.

The problem was, there just aren't many Zika virus particles in the blood of a sick patient. Looking for it in clinical samples can be like fishing for a minnow in an ocean.

A new computational method developed by Broad Institute scientists helps overcome this hurdle. Built in the lab of Broad Institute researcher Pardis Sabeti, the "CATCH" method can be used to design molecular "baits" for any virus known to infect humans and all their known strains, including those that are present in low abundance in clinical samples, such as Zika. The approach can help small sequencing centers around the globe conduct disease surveillance more efficiently and cost-effectively, which can provide crucial information for controlling outbreaks.

The new study was led by MIT graduate student Hayden Metsky and postdoctoral researcher Katie Siddle, and it appears online in Nature Biotechnology.

"As genomic sequencing becomes a critical part of disease surveillance, tools like CATCH will help us and others detect outbreaks earlier and generate more data on pathogens that can be shared with the wider scientific and medical research communities," said Christian Matranga, a co-senior author of the new study who has joined a local biotech startup.

Scientists have been able to detect some low-abundance viruses by analyzing all the genetic material in a clinical sample, a technique known as "metagenomic" sequencing, but the approach often misses viral material that gets lost in the abundance of other microbes and the patient's own DNA.

Another approach is to "enrich" clinical samples for a particular virus. To do this, researchers use a kind of genetic "bait" to immobilize the target virus's genetic material, so that other genetic material can be washed away. Scientists in the Sabeti lab had successfully used baits, which are molecular probes made of short strands of RNA or DNA that pair with bits of viral DNA in the sample, to analyze the Ebola and Lassa virus genomes. However, the probes were always directed at a single microbe, meaning they had to know exactly what they were looking for, and they were not designed in a rigorous, efficient way.

What they needed was a computational method for designing probes that could provide a comprehensive view of the diverse microbial content in clinical samples, while enriching for low-abundance microbes like Zika.

"We wanted to rethink how we were actually designing the probes to do capture," said Metsky. "We realized that we could capture viruses, including their known diversity, with fewer probes than we'd used before. To make this an effective tool for surveillance, we then decided to try targeting about 20 viruses at a time, and we eventually scaled up to the 356 viral species known to infect humans."

Short for "Compact Aggregation of Targets for Comprehensive Hybridization," CATCH allows users to design custom sets of probes to capture genetic material of any combination of microbial species, including viruses or even all forms of all viruses known to infect humans.

To run CATCH truly comprehensively, users can easily input genomes from all forms of all human viruses that have been uploaded to the National Center for Biotechnology Information's GenBank sequence database. The program determines the best set of probes based on what the user wants to recover, whether that's all viruses or only a subset. The list of probe sequences can be sent to one of a few companies that synthesize probes for research. Scientists and clinical researchers looking to detect and study the microbes can then use the probes like fishing hooks to catch desired microbial DNA for sequencing, thereby enriching the samples for the microbe of interest.

Tests of probe sets designed with CATCH showed that after enrichment, viral content made up 18 times more of the sequencing data than before enrichment, allowing the team to assemble genomes that could not be generated from un-enriched samples. They validated the method by examining 30 samples with known content spanning eight viruses. The researchers also showed that samples of Lassa virus from the 2018 Lassa outbreak in Nigeria that proved difficult to sequence without enrichment could be "rescued" by using a set of CATCH-designed probes against all human viruses. In addition, the team was able to improve viral detection in samples with unknown content from patients and mosquitos.

Using CATCH, Metsky and colleagues generated a subset of viral probes directed at Zika and chikungunya, another mosquito-borne virus found in the same geographic regions. Along with Zika genomes generated with other methods, the data they generated using CATCH-designed probes helped them discover that the Zika virus had been introduced in several regions months before scientists were able to detect it, a finding that can inform efforts to control future outbreaks.

To demonstrate other potential applications of CATCH, Siddle used samples from a range of different viruses. Siddle and others have been working with scientists in West Africa, where viral outbreaks and hard-to-diagnose fevers are common, to establish laboratories and workflows for analyzing pathogen genomes on-site. "We'd like our partners in Nigeria to be able to efficiently perform metagenomic sequencing from diverse samples, and CATCH helps them boost the sensitivity for these pathogens," said Siddle.

The method is also a powerful way to investigate undiagnosed fevers with a suspected viral cause. "We're excited about the potential to use metagenomic sequencing to shed light on those cases and, in particular, the possibility of doing so locally in affected countries," said Siddle.

One advantage of the CATCH method is its adaptability. As new mutations are identified and new sequences are added to GenBank, users can quickly redesign a set of probes with up-to-date information. In addition, while most probe designs are proprietary, Metsky and Siddle have made publicly available all of the ones they designed with CATCH. Users have access to the actual probe sequences in CATCH, allowing researchers to explore and customize the probe designs before they are synthesized.

Sabeti and fellow researchers are excited about the potential for CATCH to improve large-scale high-resolution studies of microbial communities. They are also hopeful that the method could one day have utility in diagnostic applications, in which results are returned to patients to make clinical decisions. For now, they're encouraged by its potential to improve genomic surveillance of viral outbreaks like Zika and Lassa, and other applications requiring a comprehensive view of low-level microbial content.

ROCHESTER, Minn. -- Kidney stones are a common and painful condition, with many sufferers experiencing recurrent episodes. Most people who pass an initial stone want to know their chances of future episodes, but this has not always been easy to predict. Now Mayo Clinic researchers are tracking the familiar characteristics of kidney stone formers in an online prediction tool that could help sufferers anticipate if they'll experience future episodes. The study was published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

Using data obtained from the Rochester Epidemiology Project, a team of researchers explored a sampling of chronic kidney stone formers from Olmsted County between 1984 and 2017. Common features of patients who had recurrent stone events included younger age, male sex, a higher body mass index, history of pregnancy, and a family history of stones. Researchers also noted that stone recurrence tended to increase after each subsequent event, and the size and location of stones also associated with the risk of future episodes.

By using these features to develop a Recurrence of Kidney Stone online prediction tool, researchers were able to improve upon known criteria for future stone formation. By entering information such as gender, race and an individual's kidney stone history, the tool can generate an estimate of recurrence. "Each of the risk factors we identified are entered into the model, which then calculates an estimate of the risk of h0aving another kidney stone in the next five or 10 years," explains John Lieske, M.D., one of the study researchers.

Updating the Recurrence of Kidney Stone model with data collected from the study has improved the tool's ability to predict subsequent events. Since the risk of stone recurrence varies depending on individual factors, this information can be useful for patients or caregivers when deciding how aggressively they want to adopt measures to reduce risk for stone recurrence. The tool, which is available online or as an app, also can be used in research studies to identify those patients most likely to have more kidney stone attacks.

Data used in the Recurrence of Kidney Stone model were based on results from Olmsted County, Minnesota. These data will need to be validated in other parts of the country to establish whether the findings are translatable to other settings.

Having a baseline knowledge of risk factors for stone recurrence and the potential for future episodes can be an incentive for individuals to modify lifestyle behaviors. By knowing the likelihood of future kidney stone episodes, Dr. Lieske notes that this could help encourage a patient's "enthusiasm for adopting dietary measures and/or starting drug regimens to prevent future attacks."

Scientists from Russia and Uzbekistan found a unified fortification system that on the northern border of ancient Bactria. This country existed in the III century BC. The fortress found blocked the border and protected the oases of Bactria from the nomads raids. During the excavations, scientists revealed the fortress citadel, drew up a detailed architectural plan and collected rich archaeological material indicating the construction, life and death of the fortress as a result of the assault.

In the IV century BC, significant part of Central Asia territory belonged to Bactria, which, as a separate satrapy, was part of the Achaemenid Empire. In 329 BC Bactria became part of the Alexander empire and after his death joined the kingdom of Seleucid: the largest Hellenistic state in the East, created by the commander Alexander Seleucius I Nicator and his son Antiochus I Soter. Gradually, the state became weakened by numerous military campaigns and the struggle for power. As a result, once flourishing Bactria ceased to exist in the II century BC when Iranian-speaking nomads from the northern territories, the Saki and Yuadzhi, broke into the country.

Recently, Russian scientists completed excavations in this area and determined the fortress construction time: about 95-90 years of the III century BC, the time of Antiochus I reign and the very beginning of the formation of the Seleucid state. The fortress was inhabited for about 150 years.

It consisted of a diamond-shaped main quadrangle, a triangular citadel (phylacterion), surrounded by powerful double walls with an internal gallery about nine meters wide, and extension walls, which were fortified with 13 rectangular bastions-towers, three of which were also outboards. Outside the fortress there was a marketplace where local residents brought goods needed by the garrison soldiers.

The archaeologists recorded the location of each item using a total station or GPS, and then made it into a single plan tied to the terrain. As a result, the scientists managed to establish where the marketplace was, ran the road to the entrance to the fortress, and determined the place of the assault: there were more than 200 shooting arrowheads, combat darts and troops. It is curious that the proposed battlefield is located to the east of the fortress, which suggests a possible environment or the breakthrough of the enemy through a system of border fortifications.

The warriors who defended Uzundar wore armor: in the inside-wall room of the south-western fortified wall, archaeologists discovered armor-clad plates and two right-handed iron heads from helmets. So far, scientists can not exactly determine what type of helmets these patches were -- a pseudoattical or Melos group, so it is still possible that these are the same helmets that Alexander wore during Antiochus I Soter period.

"This findings are sensational: direct analogies are known from the Takhti-Sanga temple, but there they were bronze, and we found iron fragments in Uzundar. To date, there are only a few specimens and sculptures with which to compare these cheeks and determine their type. We also found fastening details, which gives important information on manufacturing technology, according to tradition, but to answer these questions requires lengthy research," says Nigora Dvurechenskaya, researcher at the Department of Classical Archeology, Head of the Bactrian detachment of the Central Asian Archaeological Expedition.

In addition to weapons, archaeologists have collected a large number of ceramics, as well as a rich numismatic collection: today around the fortress found about 200 coins of very good preservation from the coins of Antiochus I and all the rulers of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom from Diodot to Heliocles of very different denominations: from silver drachmas to copper mites. Such a variety proves that Bactria at the very beginning of Seleucid kingdom formation of the was part of developed monetary circulation system. Thus, the materials of Uzundara allow to study and reconstruct all spheres of life of the Seleucidian and Greco-Bactrian fortresses.