Tech

For bees, being social is everything.

Whether it's foraging for food, caring for the young, using their bodies to generate heat or to fan the nest, or building and repairing nests, a bee colony does just about everything as a single unit.

While recent studies have suggested exposure to pesticides could have impacts on foraging behavior, a new study, led by James Crall, has shown that those effects may be just the tip of the iceberg.

A post-doctoral fellow working in the lab of Benjamin de Bivort, the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Crall is the lead author of a study that shows exposure to neonicotinoid pesticides - the most commonly-used class of pesticides in agriculture - has profound effects on a host of social behaviors.

Using an innovative robotic platform to observe bees' behavior, Crall and co-authors including de Bivort and Naomi Pierce, the Sidney A. and John H. Hessel Professor of Biology, showed that, following exposure to the pesticide, bees spent less time nursing larvae and were less social that other bees. Additional tests showed that exposure impaired bees ability to warm the nest, and to build insulating wax caps around the colony. The study is described in a November 9 paper in Science.

In addition to Crall, de Bivort and Pierce, the study was co-authored by Callin Switzer, Ph.D. '18, Stacey Combes from UC Davis, former Organismic and Evolutionary Biology research assistants Robert L. Oppenheimer and Mackay Eyster and Harvard undergraduate Andrea Brown, '19.

"These pesticides first came into use around the mid-1990s, and are now the most commonly-used class of insecticide around the globe," Crall said. "Typically, they work through seed treatment - high concentrations are dosed on seeds, and one reasons farmers and pesticide companies like these compounds is because they are taken up systemically by the plants...so the idea is they provide whole-plant resistance. But the problem is they also show up in the pollen and nectar bees are feeding on."

Over the past decade, Crall said, a number of studies have linked pesticide exposure with disruptions in foraging, "but there were reasons to suspect that wasn't the whole picture."

"Foraging is only a part of what bumblebees do," Crall said. "Those studies were picking up on the important effects these compounds were having on what's going on outside the nest, but there's a whole world of really important behaviors going on inside...and that's a black box we wanted to open up a bit."

To do it, Crall and colleagues developed a unique, benchtop system that allowed them to track the activity of bees in as many as a dozen colonies at a time.

"What we do is put a black and white tag with a simplified QR code, on the back of each bee," he said. "And there's a camera that can move over the colonies and track the behavior of each bee automatically using computer vision...so that allows us to look inside the nest."

Using the system, Crall and colleagues were able to dose specific, individual bees with the pesticide and observe the changes in their behavior - less interaction with nest-mates and spending more time on the periphery of the colony - but those experiments are limited in several important ways.

"One is physiological," Crall said. "Even though we were giving the bees realistic doses of pesticide, drinking your daily allotment of coffee in five minutes is going to be different than spreading it out over the course of the day, so giving one big dose might not be totally realistic. The other important one is that a bee colony is a functional unit. It doesn't make sense to treat individuals, because what you're losing when you do that is the natural social structure of the colony."

With the robotic system, however, researchers can treat an entire colony as a single unit.

Each of the system's 12 units, Crall said, houses a single colony where bees have access to two chambers - one to mimic the nest and the other to act as a foraging space.

"That lets us do multiple, colony-level exposure, and to do continuous monitoring," Crall said. "We think this is much closer to how their natural behavior works, and it also allows us to automate behavioral tracking across multiple colonies at the same time."

Just as in earlier studies, Crall said, exposed bees showed changes in activity levels and socialization, and spent more time on the fringes of the nest, but the tests also showed that the results were strongest overnight.

"Bees actually have a very strong circadian rhythm," Crall explained. "So what we found was that, during the day, there was no statistically-observable effect, but at night, we could see that they were crashing. We don't know yet whether (the pesticides) are disrupting circadian gene regulation or if this is just some, maybe physiological feedback...but it suggests that, just from a practical perspective, if we want to understand or study these compounds, looking at effects overnight matters a lot."

Additional experiments, in which temperature probes were placed inside outdoor hives, suggested pesticides have profound effects on bees' ability to regulate temperatures inside the nest.

"When temperatures drop, bees lock their wings down and shiver their muscles to generate heat," Crall said. "But what we found was that, in control colonies, even as the temperature fluctuated widely, they were able to keep the temperature in the colony steady to within a few degrees. But the exposed bees, they pretty dramatically lose the capacity to regulate temperature."

In addition to disrupting bees' ability to directly heat or cool the nest, the experiment also revealed that pesticide exposure impacted bees' ability to build an insulating wax cap over the colony.

"Almost all of our control colonies built that cap," Crall said. "And it seems to be totally wiped out in the pesticide-exposed colonies, so they lose this capacity to do this functional restructuring of the nest."

Going forward, Crall said, there are some additional questions raised by the study that he hopes to address.

"This work - especially on thermoregulation - opens up a new set of questions, not just about what the direct effects of pesticides are, but how those pesticides impair the ability of colonies to cope with other stressors," he said. "This work suggests that, in particularly extreme environments, we might expect the effects of pesticides to be worse, so it changes both how we go about practically testing agro-chemicals in general, but it points to specific questions about whether we might see stronger declines in certain environments."

Taken together, Crall believes the findings point to the need for tighter regulation of neonicotinoids and other pesticides that may be impacting bees.

"I think we're at a point where we should be very, very concerned about how the ways in which we're changing the environment is undercutting and decimating insect populations that are important not only for the function of every ecosystem...but that are very important for food production," he said. "Our food system is becoming more and more pollinator-dependent over time - today about a third of food crops are dependent on pollinators, and that's only rising. Up until now, we've had this abundant, natural gift of pollinators doing all this work for us, and now we're starting to realize that isn't a given, so I think we should be very worried about that."

Tens of thousands of UK patients with type 1 diabetes are being denied the potential benefits of flash glucose monitoring devices because of a postcode lottery, an investigation by The BMJ has found.

Abbott's Freestyle Libre is currently the only device available in the UK.

But the investigation shows that a year after the device became available, around a quarter of clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) in England are not recommending it for patients even if they meet NHS England criteria.

There are roughly 400,000 people in the UK with type 1 diabetes, including the UK prime minister Theresa May, who uses Freestyle Libre and recently told parliament that it is available on the NHS.

But Partha Kar, NHS England's associate national clinical director for diabetes, estimates that only around 3-5% of patients with type 1 diabetes in England currently have access to the sensor on the NHS. If CCGs were following guidance correctly, he believes this figure should be closer to 20-25% - if not higher.

He said some CCGs were merely paying "lip service" to offering access to the devices, and that variation in how the criteria were being applied had led to an unacceptable postcode lottery.

Consultant diabetologist Emma Wilmot, who treats patients who can access the device and others who can't, says some patients are considering moving to a different GP practice a few miles down the road to meet the criteria, while others were making "huge sacrifices" to fund Libre themselves.

Data disclosed by CCGs to The BMJ in response to Freedom of Information requests show that some CCGs have made the devices available to hundreds of patients via GPs and have spent thousands on prescriptions, while some say that the devices are only prescribed by secondary care clinicians.

And some CCGs are imposing stricter access criteria than those recommended by NHS England leading GPs to ignore this advice because they believe the device will help their patients.

Meanwhile, official prescribing data collated by the diabetes campaigner Nick Cahm and shared with The BMJ suggests that only 2% of patients with type 1 diabetes in England are getting Libre on GP prescription, compared to 11% in Scotland, 16% in Wales, and 35% in Northern Ireland.

As of July 2018, GP prescribing data showed that only only two out of 195 CCGs in England had prescribed Freestyle Libre to more than 20% of patients with type 1 diabetes, only 15 CCGs had prescribed it to over 10% of type 1 patients, and 25 CCGs had issued no prescriptions at all.

Cahm told The BMJ: "Lots of the variation doesn't need to be there. Being a type 1 diabetic is the same whether you're in Birmingham, London, or Northern Ireland. It doesn't seem to be logical. Decisions should be made by a specialist advisory panel."

The BMJ has also learnt that some GPs in areas where CCGs have not recommended flash monitoring are prescribing Freestyle Libre against their CCG's advice.

Nick Cahm said that some CCGs were only thinking about their short term finances rather than long term gains that could occur if patients type 1 diabetes have better control of their condition, and suffer fewer complications in years to come.

Emma Wilmot believes that Freestyle Libre is one of the biggest "life changing" advancements in type 1 diabetes care for many years, and that "by preventing people having access to the Libre you are compromising their quality of life compared to what it could be."

Julie Wood, chief executive of NHS Clinical Commissioners, said: "Unfortunately the NHS does not have unlimited resources and ensuring patients get the best possible care against a backdrop of spiralling demands, competing priorities and increasing financial pressures is one of the biggest issues CCGs face."

Filtering and treating water, both for human consumption and to clean industrial and municipal wastewater, accounts for about 13% of all electricity consumed in the US every year and releases about 290 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually - roughly equivalent to the combined weight of every human on Earth.

One of the most common methods of processing water is passing it through a membrane with pores that are sized to filter out particles that are larger than water molecules. However, these membranes are susceptible to "fouling," or clogging by the very materials they are designed to filter out, necessitating more electricity to force the water through a partially clogged membrane and frequent membrane replacement, both of which increase water treatment costs.

New research from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and collaborators at Northeastern University and the University of Waterloo demonstrates that the Wyss' liquid-gated membranes (LGMs) filter nanoclay particles out of water with twofold higher efficiency, nearly threefold longer time-to-foul, and a reduction in the pressure required for filtration over conventional membranes, offering a solution that could reduce the cost and electricity consumption of high-impact industrial processes such as oil and gas drilling. The study is reported in APL Materials.

"This is the first study to demonstrate that LGMs can achieve sustained filtration in settings similar to those found in heavy industry, and it provides insight into how LGMs resist different types of fouling, which could lead to their use in a variety of water processing settings," said first author Jack Alvarenga, a Research Scientist at the Wyss Institute.

LGMs mimic nature's use of liquid-filled pores to control the movement of liquids, gases and particles through biological filters using the lowest possible amount of energy, much like the small stomata openings in plants' leaves allow gases to pass through. Each LGM is coated with a liquid that acts as a reversible gate, filling and sealing its pores in the "closed" state. When pressure is applied to the membrane, the liquid inside the pores is pulled to the sides, creating open, liquid-lined pores that can be tuned to allow the passage of specific liquids or gases, and resist fouling due to the liquid layer's slippery surface. The use of fluid-lined pores also enables the separation of a target compound from a mixture of different substances, which is common in industrial liquid processing.

The research team decided to test their LGMs on a suspension of bentonite clay in water, as such "nanoclay" solutions mimic the wastewater produced by drilling activities in the oil and gas industry. They infused 25-mm discs of a standard filter membrane with perfluoropolyether, a type of liquid lubricant that has been used in the aerospace industry for over 30 years, to convert them into LGMs. They then placed the membranes under pressure to draw water through the pores but leave the nanoclay particles behind, and compared the performance of untreated membranes to LGMs.

The untreated membranes displayed signs of nanoclay fouling much more quickly than the LGMs, and the LGMs were able to filter water three times longer than the standard membranes before requiring a "backwash" procedure to remove particles that had accumulated on the membrane. Less frequent backwashing could translate to a reduction in the use of cleaning chemicals and energy required to pump backwash water, and improve the filtration rate in industrial water treatment settings.

While the LGMs did eventually experience fouling, they displayed a 60% reduction in the amount of nanoclay that accumulated within their structure during filtration, which is known as "irreversible fouling" because it is not removed by backwashing. This advantage gives LGMs a longer lifespan and makes more of the filtrate recoverable for alternate uses. Additionally, the LGMs required 16% less pressure to initiate the filtration process, reflecting further energy savings.

"LGMs have the potential for use in industries as diverse as food and beverage processing, biopharmaceutical manufacturing, textiles, paper, pulp, chemical, and petrochemical, and could offer improvements in energy use and efficiency across a wide swath of industrial applications," said corresponding author Joanna Aizenberg, Ph.D., who is a Founding Core Faculty member of the Wyss Institute and the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Material Sciences at Harvard's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

The team's next steps for the research include larger-scale pilot studies with industry partners, longer-term operation of the LGMs, and filtering even more complex mixtures of substances. These studies will provide insight into the commercial viability of LGMs for different applications, and how long they would last in a number of use cases.

"The concept of using a liquid to help filter other liquids, while perhaps not obvious to us, is prevalent in nature. It's wonderful to see how leveraging nature's innovation in this manner can potentially lead to huge energy savings," said Wyss Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., who is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and the Vascular Biology Program at Boston Children's Hospital, as well as Professor of Bioengineering at SEAS.

When researchers compared the stools of 40 infants who were exclusively breastfed with those of 13 who were exclusively formula fed, the average daily stool frequency was significantly higher in the breastfed than formula fed infants during the first month of life (4.9 versus 2.3) and second month of life (3.2 versus 1.6).

The Acta Paediatrica study also found that the stools were more liquid in the breastfed infants during the first three months, and infrequent stools were 3.5 times more likely in the breastfed infants (28 percent) than formula fed infants (8 percent).

"The underlying mechanisms of the infrequent stools syndrome in exclusively breastfed infants are unknown," the authors wrote. "Many hypotheses have been put forward, from better digestion of the fat in mother's milk than formula milk to a greater number of saccharolytic bacteria that can degrade unabsorbed and unabsorbable sugars."

SAN ANTONIO--Sometimes small things make the biggest differences.

A new study by UT Health San Antonio researchers found that a molecule thousands of times smaller than a gene is able to kill medulloblastoma, the most common childhood brain cancer.

This tiny molecule, named MiR-584-5p, is quite efficient in its action. MiR-584-5p sensitizes the cancer to chemotherapy and radiation, making it plausible to treat the tumors with one-tenth the dose that is currently required, said study senior author Manjeet Rao, Ph.D., associate professor of cell systems and anatomy at UT Health San Antonio and a member of the university's Greehey Children's Cancer Research Institute.

"Currently we barrage the brain with radiation and chemo, and patients have poor quality of life," Dr. Rao said. "Using this molecule, we could dial down those therapies considerably, by 90 percent. That's exciting."

MiR-584-5p is at very low levels or absent altogether in medulloblastoma. Increasing it to the amount found in healthy cells robs the cancer of mechanisms it uses to survive, studies show. "This can serve as a potent therapeutic for treating cancer," Dr. Rao said.

The journal Nature Communications published the findings Oct. 31.

The other excitement about MiR-584-5p is that it is normally present at high levels in brain cells and not so in other tissues, Dr. Rao said. Therefore, when it is used in the brain as therapy to kill tumors, it will have negligible effects on the healthy cells because those cells have seen it before. "They may not treat the molecule as something foreign," Dr. Rao said. A future therapy based on the molecule should be well-tolerated, he said.

A big challenge for treating brain cancer patients is the inability of cancer drugs to cross the blood-brain barrier, a protective mechanism that holds up brain cancer therapies. Because it is so petite, MiR-584-5p may be able to cross this barrier, which is leaky in some medulloblastoma patients. In the future, Dr. Rao said, the molecule may be delivered using a nanoparticle carrier.

Aside from medulloblastoma, the properties of MiR-584-5p make it an excellent drug candidate for treatment of glioblastoma, an aggressive and lethal adult brain cancer, Dr. Rao said.

A patent on the MiR-584-5p technology has been filed with Dr. Rao and Nourhan Abdelfattah, Ph.D., first author on the paper, listed as inventors. Dr. Abdelfattah completed her doctoral work in the Rao laboratory and is a postdoctoral fellow at Houston Methodist Cancer Center.

A second patent with Dr. Rao as inventor was issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Multiple commercialization business models are under review, including a possible start-up company, according to the Office of Technology Commercialization at UT Health San Antonio.

In aSkin Research & Technology study, spraying fine water particles onto the facial skin of adult women in winter, when skin is dry, improved skin hydration and softening. In addition, water retention remained constant at 360 minutes after spraying.

The benefits occurred because the diameter of the sprayed fine water particles was smaller than the intercellular spaces in the skin, and the particles were non-charged. Typical steam and mist humidifiers generate larger water particles and increase indoor humidity that can promote mold growth.

The findings indicate that sprays of non-charged fine water particles may help moisten skin in low humidity environments.

Research undertaken at the University of Birmingham has found that young people are able to judge which health related apps are relevant to their age and bodies, are able to source appropriate digital content as well as dismiss app content that might be harmful to them.

The research published today (Wednesday 7th November 2018) in the journal Learning, Media and Technology, states that many young people are 'critical participants' of digital health technologies and as apps and devices are highly accessible, they can offer private spaces in which to engage in health related activities, away from communal spaces that young people may find intimidating.

A sample of 245 young people aged from 13 - 18 across the UK took part in the research project. The key findings of the study suggest that one third of the participants were active users of apps and devices related to exercise, diet and wellness. The researchers also found that schools, PE lessons and sport, peers and parents were powerful influencers over the types of apps and devices young people used, but that many of the participants were able to disregard content that was either irrelevant to them, potentially harmful to their bodies, or simply 'boring'.

The researchers also found that the young people in the study thought through their uses of apps in an informed way. They had very high levels of knowledge and understanding of health related apps and were able to engage with the technologies on a trial and error basis, either dismissing or adopting the apps.

Some of the young people abandoned use of the apps at an early stage - this was because of the design of the technologies and the fact that they were focussed on the needs of adults.

Dr Victoria Goodyear, from the University of Birmingham's School of Sport, Exercise and Rehabilitation Sciences, who led the research said: 'There are currently over 160,000 health apps available on the major app stores focussed on wellness, diet and exercise and they are of particular interest to young people, however most of these apps are designed for adults. Health apps and devices have the potential to act as very engaging and attractive health promotion tools that could for example, help young people to learn about their bodies or improve their physical activity levels.

'Our research has shown that young people think through their uses of health apps and devices in impressive and well-informed ways. For some young people, they use apps to find information related to their bodies, and they can do this without an adult, and in ways that work around the school pressures of homework. However, not all young people experience positive impacts. For some, there tends to be a novelty period- where the use of apps are rarely sustained - such as in the case of PokemonGo. For others, they can develop very narrow views on health. There was evidence in our data that some young people learnt that effective exercises were those that "hurt" and resulted in pain.

'What the findings do highlight is that adults need to be more understanding of the opportunities, challenges and pitfalls of digital technologies for young people's health and wellbeing - and that we should not associate technology with, solely, health-related risks. Certainly, health education can be enhanced by learning from the ways in which young people access, select and use digital health technologies.'

Artificial intelligence systems simulate human intelligence by learning, reasoning, and self correction. This technology has the potential to be more accurate than doctors at making diagnoses and performing surgical interventions, says Jörg Goldhahn, MD, MAS, deputy head of the Institute for Translational Medicine at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

It has a "near unlimited capacity" for data processing and subsequent learning, and can do this at a speed that humans cannot match.

Increasing amounts of health data, from apps, personal monitoring devices, electronic medical records, and social media platforms are being brought together to give machines as much information as possible about people and their diseases. At the same time machines are "reading" and taking account of the rapidly expanding scientific literature.

"The notion that today's physicians could approximate this knowledge by keeping abreast of current medical research while maintaining close contacts with their patients is an illusion not least because of the sheer volume of data," says Goldhahn.

Machine learning is also not subject to the same level of potential bias seen in human learning that reflects cultural influences and links with particular institutions, for example.

While the ability to form relationships with patients is often presented as an argument in favour of human doctors, this may also be their "Achilles heel", Goldhahn points out. Trust is important to patients but machines and systems can be more trustworthy than humans if they can be regarded as unbiased and without conflicts of interest.

Furthermore, some patients, particularly younger ones and those with minor conditions, may rate correct diagnosis higher than empathy or continuity of care, he says. "In some very personal situations the services of a robot could help patients avoid feeling shame.

The key challenges for today's healthcare systems are rising costs and insufficient numbers of doctors. "Introducing AI-driven systems could be cheaper than hiring and training new staff, Goldhahn says. "They are also universally available, and can even monitor patients remotely."Doctors as we now know them will become obsolete eventually."

But Vanessa Rampton at the McGill Institute for Health and Social Policy in Montréal, Canada and Professor Giatgen Spinas at University Hospital in Zürich, Switzerland, maintain that machines will never replace doctors entirely because the interrelational quality of the doctor-patient relationship is vital and cannot be replicated.

They agree that machines will increasingly be able to perform tasks that human doctors do today, such as diagnosis and treatment, but say doctors will remain because they are better at dealing with the patient as a whole person.

Doctors can relate to the patient as a fellow human being and can gain holistic knowledge of their illness as it relates to the patient's life, they say.

A doctor-patient relationship where the doctor thinks laterally and takes into account an individual patient's preferences, values and social circumstances is important for healing, particularly for complex conditions, when there are symptoms with no obvious cause, and if there is a high risk of adverse effects.

"Feeling they've been heard by someone who understands the seriousness of the problem and whom they can trust can be crucial for patients," Rampton and Spinas argue.

"Computers aren't able to care for patients in the sense of showing devotion or concern for the other as a person, because they are not people and do not care about anything. Sophisticated robots might show empathy as a matter of form, just as humans might behave nicely in social situations yet remain emotionally disengaged because they are only performing a social role."

Most importantly there will be no cure for some patients - care will be about helping them have the best quality of life possible with their condition and for the longest time. "Here doctors are irreplaceable," they emphasise. "Robots cannot understand our concern with relating illness to the task of living a life."

Regulated and well implemented, machines that learn have the potential to bring huge benefit to patients, but who wants to receive a terminal diagnosis from a robot, ask Michael Mittelman and colleagues in a patient commentary?

"Patients need to be cared for by people, especially when we are ill and at our most vulnerable. A machine will never be able to show us true comfort," they say.

They acknowledge that AI may have the potential to become a highly useful and innovative aide in healthcare, but they hope there will always be room for humanity - human healthcare professionals.

"Ultimately, no one wants to be told he or she is dying by an entity that can have no understanding of what that means. We see AI as the servant rather than the director of our medical care," they conclude.

In a new article published in Nature an international research team presents high-resolution images of photosystem II, the protein complex that splits water into hydrogen ions and oxygen during photosynthesis. The images will help researchers better understand this complex mechanism, possibly opening up the door to developing cheap and efficient solar fuel devices.

When Earth was formed, the atmosphere was rich in carbon dioxide and no free oxygen molecules were present. Early life forms, comparable to present day microorganisms, satisfied their energy needs initially by 'eating' small energy-rich molecules. Subsequently, some 'discovered' how to harvest solar energy and store it in energy-rich molecules such as sugars, but it was not until these early life forms could extract electrons and protons from water molecules that evolution took a huge turn and allowed the development of life as we know it. This tremendous explosion of biological diversity was possible because of the abundance of water and solar energy. The by-product oxygen in turn enabled the evolution of complex animals after accumulating in the atmosphere.

It is now nearly 50 years since Bessel Kok established that biological water oxidation in photosystem II involves a five-step reaction cycle of a catalyst that accumulates four oxidising equivalents before water oxidation proceeds in a fast concerted reaction. Although high-resolution structures of the dark-stable state of photosystem II have been obtained in recent years, the structural changes that occur during the five-step reaction cycle remained largely unknown.

Using ultrashort (femtosecond) X-ray laser pulses delivered by the X-ray free electron laser near Stanford, USA, an international team of researchers has now managed to obtain high-resolution images of photosystem II and its remarkable water-splitting catalyst of all four stable states of the reaction cycle, as well as snapshots of reaction steps between some stable states. The research group of Johannes Messinger, chair of Molecular Biomimetics at the Department of Chemistry at the Ångström Laboratory at Uppsala University in Sweden was a part of the team.

"I have been working for 30 years now to understand the mechanism of water oxidation in photosynthesis. This result is a dream come true! These new images will facilitate understanding this complex reaction on a level of detail previously thought impossible," says Johannes Messinger.

Researchers expect that understanding how photosystem II can activate the cheap and abundant metal ions calcium and manganese to form one of the best water-oxidation catalysts available to date, will allow chemists to do the same. This would open the door to developing cheap and efficient solar fuel devices that store solar energy in the bonds of molecular hydrogen or other solar fuels obtained by carbon dioxide or nitrogen reduction.

"Solar fuels are carbon-free or carbon-neutral. They will be needed in addition to batteries to turn the present fossil fuel based energy system into a renewable energy economy. The need of solar fuels is obvious if one realises that world-wide 80 per cent of present day energy consumption is fuel based. Even in Sweden more than 50 percent of the energy is used in form of fuels and only 34 percent as electricity," says Johannes Messinger.

ITHACA, N.Y. - Lack of varied seasons and temperatures in tropical mountains have led to species that are highly adapted to their narrow niches, creating the right conditions for new species to arise in these areas, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Still, the same traits that make tropical mountains among the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth also make the species that live there more vulnerable to rapid climate changes, the study finds.

The research compares rates of species evolution in three types of aquatic stream insects - mayflies (Ephemeroptera), stoneflies (Plecoptera) and caddisflies (Trichoptera) - in temperate and tropical mountain areas. The findings have implications for similar patterns in other tropical mountain species.

An interdisciplinary team of physiologists, geneticists and genomics specialists, population biologists and taxonomists from four universities gathered samples and data from mountain streams in the Colorado Rocky Mountains and in the Ecuadorian Andes over a two-year period.

"Because the tropics are not as seasonal as the more northern temperate zones, bugs in the tropics can't get too cold or too hot, and thus they have a narrow thermal breadth," said Kelly Zamudio, professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University, and a senior co-author of the study. "We also found that they move less up and down the side of the mountain, and there are more species [on tropical mountains] as a result. Nobody had tested all three of those patterns in the same system before."

The findings support and reveal the mechanisms behind a classic 1967 paper that predicted these dynamics.

Factors of temperature tolerance and range of movement also effect how species in each of these regions will respond to climate change. Because tropical species can't withstand large temperature shifts and have limited movement, they are much more susceptible to rapid temperature shifts due to anthropogenic climate change.

"It's really paradoxical that the same factors that lead to a lot of species are the factors that are going to endanger those species in the tropics," Zamudio said.

SAN DIEGO -- Advances in connecting neural stimulation to physical control of the body are transforming the development of prosthetics and therapeutic training for people with disabilities, according to new research. The findings were presented at Neuroscience 2018, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world's largest source of emerging news about brain science and health.

As improved understanding of neural functions and interactions combines with technical advances, scientists are developing new and improved prosthetics and therapies aimed at improving quality of life for people with conditions such as paralysis, stroke, and blindness. Electrical signals that stimulate specific regions in the brain or body can bypass injuries in the spinal column or eyes and activate target regions, training the brain to process movement or vision in the most effective manner possible.

Today's new findings show that:

Advances in the precision and force of brain-controlled, computer-guided hand movements may enable people with quadriplegia and others suffering from hand paralysis to begin integrating electrical-stimulation-based prosthetics into their daily lives (Gaurav Sharma, abstract 271.01).

Using avatars to provide stroke patients with visual feedback in combination with real-time electronic feedback improved the use of motor function even years after a stroke (Christoph Guger, abstract 271.14).

A new prosthetic hand system is the first prosthesis designed for regular home use to restore task-related sensations to an amputee (Ranu Jung, abstract 404.10, see attached summary).

A new brain stimulation technique called "dynamic current steering" helps restore limited vision to blind people (Michael Beauchamp, abstract 226.09).

An assistive device that combines computer vision and sound cues can help blind people perform everyday tasks such as identifying and locating people and objects around them (Michael Paradiso, abstract 226.04).

"The advances presented today help expand what's possible with brain-machine interfaces," said press conference moderator Chethan Pandarinath, PhD, of Emory University, whose work interprets how the brain represents information and intention to build assistive devices for people with disabilities. "The neuroscience advances and range of techniques presented provide potential new assistive devices and treatment strategies for people with disabilities, and also open the door to a deeper understanding of how our brains translate intention into actions."

TORONTO - Approximately 500 billion cups of coffee are consumed worldwide each year.

A new study out of the Krembil Brain Institute, part of the Krembil Research Institute, suggests there could be more to that morning jolt of goodness than a boost in energy and attention. Drinking coffee may also protect you against developing both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

"Coffee consumption does seem to have some correlation to a decreased risk of developing Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease," says Dr. Donald Weaver, Co-director of the Krembil Brain Institute. "But we wanted to investigate why that is -- which compounds are involved and how they may impact age-related cognitive decline."

Dr. Weaver enlisted Dr. Ross Mancini, a research fellow in medicinal chemistry and Yanfei Wang, a biologist, to help. The team chose to investigate three different types of coffee - light roast, dark roast, and decaffeinated dark roast.

"The caffeinated and de-caffeinated dark roast both had identical potencies in our initial experimental tests," says Dr. Mancini. "So we observed early on that its protective effect could not be due to caffeine."

Dr. Mancini then identified a group of compounds known as phenylindanes, which emerge as a result of the roasting process for coffee beans. Phenylindanes are unique in that they are the only compound investigated in the study that prevent - or rather, inhibit - both beta amyloid and tau, two protein fragments common in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, from clumping. "So phenylindanes are a dual-inhibitor. Very interesting, we were not expecting that." says Dr. Weaver.

As roasting leads to higher quantities of phenylindanes, dark roasted coffee appears to be more protective than light roasted coffee.

"It's the first time anybody's investigated how phenylindanes interact with the proteins that are responsible for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's," says Dr. Mancini. "The next step would be to investigate how beneficial these compounds are, and whether they have the ability to enter the bloodstream, or cross the blood-brain barrier."

The fact that it's a natural compound vs. synthetic is also a major advantage, says Dr. Weaver.

"Mother Nature is a much better chemist than we are and Mother Nature is able to make these compounds. If you have a complicated compound, it's nicer to grow it in a crop, harvest the crop, grind the crop out and extract it than try to make it."

But, he admits, there is much more research needed before it can translate into potential therapeutic options.

"What this study does is take the epidemiological evidence and try to refine it and to demonstrate that there are indeed components within coffee that are beneficial to warding off cognitive decline. It's interesting but are we suggesting that coffee is a cure? Absolutely not."

Health professionals require more guidance to prepare and support children when a parent is dying, a new study in the journal Palliative Medicine reports.

In the first study of its kind, researchers from the University of Surrey and the Princess Alice Hospice carried out a review of studies examining the experiences of over 300 health and social care professionals when supporting parents who are dying and preparing their children for what is happening.

After analysing responses, researchers identified a number of key barriers preventing health professionals connecting with parents to help them support their children. Many perceived themselves to be lacking relevant skills, such as age-appropriate communication and counselling, preventing them from engaging with parents and children. Fear of making things worse for the children and causing distress in families by saying the wrong thing was also a concern amongst health professionals.

It was also found that some professionals, to manage the pain of over identifying with parents and children, developed distancing behaviours such as focussing on the physical care of the patient and avoided talking to the parents about their children.

Approximately 23,600 parents with dependent children died in the UK in 2015. Previous research in this area shows that if not prepared for parental death, or supported afterwards, children whose parents die are more likely than their peers to have higher levels of referral to psychiatric outpatient and specialist services, and experience absence from school.

To overcome this health professionals have called for more guidance and training in this area and for patient records to 'flag up' the presence of young children in the immediate family.

Lead author of the paper, Penny Franklin, a post graduate researcher from the University of Surrey, said: "Losing a parent at any age is a devastating experience however as a young child, unsure of what is happening, the occurrence can be particularly traumatic and can have a long-lasting impact.

"More guidance and training is needed by health professionals who need to hold discussions with parents about preparing their children for their Mum or Dad's death. Such discussion - when conducted well - can make this devastating situation more bearable for families. Support systems also need to be in place for professionals delivering such care allowing them to manage their own emotions.

"The UK needs to look to countries like Sweden, where it is mandatory for nurses to involve children in their dying parents' care. In the UK, there is no such requirement. Disappointingly NICE guidelines only generally acknowledge supporting patients' children resulting in them being at risk of being overlooked or forgotten by the system."

PITTSBURGH (November 5, 2018) ... Expectations for artificial intelligences are very real and very high. An analysis in Forbes projects revenues from A.I. will skyrocket from $1.62 billion in 2018 to $31.2 billion in 2025. The report also included a survey revealing 84 percent of enterprises believe investing in A.I. will lead to competitive advantages.

"It is exciting to see the tremendous successes and progress made in recent years," says Daniel Jiang, assistant professor of industrial engineering at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering. "To continue this trend, we are looking to develop more sophisticated methods for algorithms to learn strategies for optimal decision making."

Dr. Jiang designs algorithms that learn decision strategies in complex and uncertain environments. By testing algorithms in simulated environments, they can learn from their mistakes while discovering and reinforcing strategies for success. To perfect this process, Dr. Jiang and many researchers in his field require simulations that mirror the real world.

"As industrial engineers, we typically work on problems with an operational focus. For example, transportation, logistics and supply chains, energy systems and health care are several important areas," he says. "All of those problems are high-stakes operations with real-world consequences. They don't make the best environments for trying out experimental technologies, especially when many of our algorithms can be thought of as clever ways of repeated 'trial and error' over all possible actions."

One strategy for preparing advanced A.I. to take on real-world scenarios and complications is to use historical data. For instance, algorithms could run through decades' worth of data to find which decisions were effective and which led to less than optimal results. However, researchers have found it difficult to test algorithms that are designed to learn adaptive behaviors using only data from the past.

Dr. Jiang explains, "Historical data can be a problem because people's actions fix the consequences and don't present alternative possibilities. In other words, it is difficult for an algorithm to ask the question 'how would things be different if I chose door B instead of door A?' In historical data, all we can see are the consequences of door A."

Video games, as an alternative, offer rich testing environments full of complex decision making without the dangers of putting an immature A.I. fully in charge. Unlike the real world, they provide a safe way for an algorithm to learn from its mistakes.

"Video game designers aren't building games with the goal to test models or simulations," Dr. Jiang says. "They're often designing games with a two-fold mission: to create environments that mimic the real world and to challenge players to make difficult decisions. These goals happen to align with what we are looking for as well. Also, games are much faster. In a few hours of real time, we can evaluate the results of hundreds of thousands of gameplay decisions."

To test his algorithm, Dr. Jiang used a genre of video games called Multiplayer Online Battle Arena or MOBA. Games such as League of Legends or Heroes of the Storm are popular MOBAs in which players control one of several "hero" characters and try to destroy opponents' bases while protecting their own.

A successful algorithm for training a gameplay A.I. must overcome several challenges, such as real-time decision making and long decision horizons--a mathematical term for when the consequences of some decisions are not known until much later.

"We designed the algorithm to evaluate 41 pieces of information and then output one of 22 different actions, including movement, attacks and special moves," says Dr. Jiang. "We compared different training methods against one another. The most successful player used a method called Monte Carlo tree search to generate data, which is then fed into a neural network."

Monte Carlo tree search is a strategy for decision making in which the player moves randomly through a simulation or a video game. The algorithm then analyzes the game results to give more weight to more successful actions. Over time and multiple iterations of the game, the more successful actions persist, and the player becomes better at winning the game.

"Our research also gave some theoretical results to show that Monte Carlo tree search is an effective strategy for training an agent to succeed at making difficult decisions in real-time, even when operating in an uncertain world," Dr. Jiang explains.

Dr. Jiang published his research in a paper co-authored with Emmanuel Ekwedike and Han Liu and presented the results at the 2018 International Conference on Machine Learning in Stockholm, Sweden this past summer.

At the University of Pittsburgh, he continues to work in the area of sequential decision making with Ph.D. students Yijia Wang and Ibrahim El-Shar. The team focuses on problems related to ride-sharing, energy markets, and public health. As industries prepare to put A.I. in charge of critical responsibilities, Dr. Jiang ensures the underlying algorithms stay at the top of their game.

For more than ten years, the Borexino detector located 1,400 meters below surface of the Italian Gran Sasso massif has been exploring the interior of our Sun. During this time, the project has provided amazing insights into how the star at the center of our solar system generates its energy. The scientists involved, including physicists from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), have now published a general analysis of the data they have collated on solar neutrinos. Neutrinos can penetrate all matter almost without leaving a trace and are thus difficult to detect. As a result, they have become known as 'ghost particles'. They originate from a variety of sources, ranging from radioactive decay to astronomical objects and, in the case of solar neutrinos, from the Sun. The current paper in Nature not only describes the results of measurement of the solar neutrino spectrum but also uses this to deduce details about processes at the Sun's core, giving us an insight into the mechanism that has kept our Sun shining for billions of years.

The Borexino experiment is running at the Gran Sasso subterranean laboratory, which is maintained by the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN). Deep below the Earth's surface, the experimental facilities are well-shielded from cosmic rays. Thus, the experiment is able to detect the weak signal produced by solar neutrinos. Borexino was originally conceived 30 years ago and began recording data in 2007. This extensive collaborative project involves institutes from Italy, Germany, France, Poland, the USA, and Russia.

Our understanding of the Sun's interior once again confirmed

The project's scientific success is primarily due to the outstanding radiopurity of the experiment. At the innermost core of the facility only infinitesimal amounts of natural radioactivity are present, i.e., only one trillion times fewer atoms per gram of the elements uranium and thorium than in the surrounding rock. This extraordinary purity is crucial for precisely measuring the energy spectrum of solar neutrinos. It makes it possible to determine the rates of the fusion processes taking place inside the Sun, which are highly dependent on the temperature and elemental composition of the Sun's core. Alongside this glimpse into the conditions deep within our star, the results also provide detailed insights into the oscillation process the neutrinos undergo inside the Sun. Oscillations describe the transformation of the three different types of neutrinos into each other, a process that was only conclusively confirmed for solar neutrinos in 2001. "Borexino's findings far exceed the most optimistic predictions we made when we first started," said Gianpaolo Bellini, one of the pioneers of the INFN experiment.

Professor Michael Wurm, a physicist at JGU and a Borexino partner, affirmed this: "The new results generated by Borexino impressively confirm our current understanding of fusion processes inside the Sun. Our measurements of the complete neutrino spectrum clearly demonstrate the effect solar matter has on the oscillations of the neutrinos produced at the Sun's center." While, at the lower end of the spectrum, neutrinos leave the Sun unaltered, at the upper end of the spectrum, the effect of the oscillations is intensified.

The Mainz Borexino team is mainly concerned with studying the background conditions caused by cosmic muons in the detector. "These muons are the only cosmic ray particles that make it through the 1.5-kilometer-thick mountain shield above the underground laboratory," said Wurm. Reducing this background signal is crucial to detecting the solar neutrinos. The work of the group from Mainz is supported by JGU's Precision Physics, Fundamental Interactions and Structure of Matter (PRISMA) Cluster of Excellence.