Tech

The next time you see your favorite collegiate athlete on the field or court, think again about their road to getting there.

That is something Clio Andris, assistant professor of geography at Penn State, has spent the past several years piecing together. Her findings were published in The Professional Geographer.

Andris wanted to understand the power of universities in their ability to attract athletes. She and her team set out hand-scraping more than two decades of data for 160,000 student-athletes from 1,600 teams at 128 schools to find what she calls the "pull ranking."

Andris mapped the distance each athlete traveled to create broad averages based on schools and each sport.

She found that Ivy League schools such as Harvard University and Stanford University -- likely due to reputation -- were strongest in attracting athletes from afar. Next came less centrally located schools such as the universities of Washington State, Arizona and Idaho. This is likely due to population densities of the East giving schools a more localized pool of potential players.

Regardless of the reason, school athletics were increasing diversity on these campuses and were doing a surprisingly good job of doing so in less diverse regions.

Andris said people attending Idaho might not think they will be surrounded by people from all across the nation, but, at least among athletes, that is the case. For example, the average athlete traveled about 600 miles, ranking the university among the top 15 in Andris' findings.

"It means that these institutions are really important for drawing different people to a place that would be isolated otherwise," Andris said. "It's not necessarily a city that pulls people but it's the colleges and institutions that exist there. This research shows that institutions such as universities can bring people to the area from all over the world."

As a whole, the average distance a student-athlete traveled was 736 miles, while that distance doubled at the top private schools. The Universities of Arizona, New Mexico and Idaho ranked highest among distance traveled for public schools, each averaging more than 1,000 miles.

The sport itself also had a hand in how far -- and where -- players traveled. Tennis topped the rankings, with the average player traveling more than 2,000 miles. Other specialized sports such as skiing, squash and swimming had players traveling more than 800 miles.

Andris also weighed the percentage of homegrown athletes, as in athletes playing for teams near their hometowns. The results showed that schools in the Northeast had the greatest number of local players, on average.

"If you go to a University of Idaho football game or other sporting event, most of the students on the team are not from Idaho," Andris said. "You don't necessarily think that but if you go to a Rutgers game, the vast majority of the players are from New Jersey. It's interesting to think about which sports teams are mostly homegrown and which ones are importing their athletes."

Rutgers' baseball, cross-country and track and field programs all have athletes traveling, on average, fewer than 100 miles. Conversely, for the University of Tulsa's tennis program, players traveled the farthest with an average distance of more than 5,000 miles.

Andris said she became interested in the research because an institution's collective geographic diversity can shape its members' outlooks, experiences and perspectives.

"A university can start to use this data to promote the benefits," Andris said. "They're now able to quantify who they bring in and all the places they are connecting with, which is a benefit to the university, the students and the surrounding communities."

Other key findings are that certain sports are likely to furnish more international students than others and teams can create pipelines that source multiple athletes from a single country. For example, rowing teams found troves of athletes from the U.K. and Australia while skiing teams often sourced athletes from Norway.

School spending on athletics did not appear to correlate with pull power.

Most of the human brain's estimated 86 billion nerve cells, or neurons, can ultimately engage in a two-way dialogue with any other neuron. To shed more light on how neurons in this labyrinthine network integrate information - that is, precisely how multiple neurons send and combine their messages to a target neuron - a team of researchers at BIDMC and Boston Children's Hospital (BCH) focused on a rare case in which information only travels in one direction: from the retina to the brain.

In this study published May 31 in the journal Cell, Mark Andermann, PhD, Chinfei Chen, MD, PhD, and colleagues developed a means of tracking the activity of the far-reaching ends of retinal neurons (called boutons) as they deliver visual information to the thalamus, a brain region involved in image processing.

As they relay discrete bits of visual information to the brain, different types of retinal neurons respond to distinct features of visual content such as an object's direction of motion, brightness, or size. Conventional wisdom held that these lines of information remained separated in the thalamus. Instead, Andermann and Chen's team found that boutons from different types of retinal neurons were often organized in local clusters and that boutons in a cluster typically make contact with a common target neuron, leading to a mixing of different lines of information. However, this mixing was not random - boutons in a cluster tended to share a common sensitivity to one or more visual features.

"The selective mixing of information from this arrangement of nearby boutons may be the retina's version of Pointillism, the neo-expressionist art technique in which nearby dots of different colors are fused together to create new and diverse colors," said Andermann, a member of the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism at BIDMC and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. "In this way, this first interface between eye and brain is surprisingly sophisticated." (May 2018)

While current training for food safety and sanitation usually incorporates high-technology presentations, such as videos and slide shows, there is still a need for low-tech approaches, according to Penn State researchers.

For unique audiences, such as employees of small-scale dairies that produce artisan cheeses, old-school teaching strategies that do not require electricity may work best. Workers in this sector need to be better trained because of the inherent food-safety risks associated with producing specialty cheeses -- mostly from raw milk.

"Investigating and proposing solutions to improve food safety in this sector is important, given that dairy farm and processing environments may be responsible for foodborne pathogens that can contaminate raw milk, cheese and other dairy products," said Catherine Cutter, professor of food science, College of Agricultural Sciences. "Little is known about the food-safety and sanitation knowledge, behavior, attitude and skills of farmstead cheese-makers in the U.S."

Cutter, assistant director of food safety programs for Penn State Extension, noted that after performing a two-year assessment of farmstead cheese-makers in Pennsylvania, her research group developed alternative training materials such as customized, richly illustrated, color flipcharts to train workers.

"These presentations can be given on a picnic table, in a barn or on a front porch," she said. "We saw a need to think outside-the-box for training this audience and developed a method to help them, building on previous work done by colleagues in our department. And while we were working with small-scale cheese-makers in Pennsylvania, what we came up with could be adapted for other similar audiences across the country."

Lead researcher Robson Machado, now a faculty member at the University of Maine who was a doctoral student in food science at Penn State when he conducted the research, assessed the sanitation, personal hygiene and food-safety practices of 17 small-scale cheese-making operations. He administered pre- and post-tests to workers that addressed food-safety knowledge, attitude and behavior, as well as an evaluation of hand-washing skills. He also tested environmental samples from the processing plants to see what microorganisms were present and where they could be found.

Then, he gave workers the low-tech food-safety training and documented how they altered their behavior later. Afterward, Machado measured to see if the newly trained cheese-makers' actions improved conditions at their plants. He discovered that they had.

The curriculum Machado and Cutter developed for the training contains strategies that consider specific characteristics of small and very small dairy farms. It includes two lessons designed to provide workers on dairy farms with the knowledge, skills and a comprehensive explanation of the food-safety rules that they need to follow at work.

The first lesson in the training describes the four steps for cleaning and sanitizing and why they are needed, and the basics of cross-contamination and how it can be avoided.

The second lesson describes the importance of good personal hygiene practices and shows the correct procedure for hand washing, the correct use of gloves and other personal habits.

"Not only did the training have an impact on the food handlers themselves, but we also assessed the environment to see if we could see a reduction in microbes," Machado said. "We saw an improvement in certain microbial populations, such as a reduction in E. coli and other indicators of hygiene."

One troubling aspect of the research that was published today (July 2) in Food Protection Trends was that participating small-scale cheese-makers did not seem to know they were not following sound food-safety principles before being trained, Cutter pointed out.

"What we found is that the processors think that they are doing a great job when the reality is they're not," she said. "The research that Robson did in this study indicated that sanitation and personal hygiene are problems."

In a sort of epilogue to this research, other food safety specialists in Penn State Extension are now developing flip chart-focused lessons to train Amish growers to comply with produce standards in the federal Food Safety Modernization Act.

As a physical system undergoes a phase transition, it typically becomes more --- or, less --- ordered. For instance, when a piece of iron is heated to above the Curie temperature, the strong ferromagnetic alignment of the elementary magnetic dipole moments gives way to much weaker paramagnetic alignment. Such changes are well described in the general framework of order parameters, provided by the Landau theory of phase transitions. However, many materials of current fundamental and technological interest are characterised by more than one order parameter. And here the situation can become extraordinarily complex rather quickly, in particular when the different orders interact with one another. The traditional route to gaining an understanding of such complex quantum systems is, simply speaking, to carefully explore the response to changes in external conditions and to various probes, and thus to map out the phase diagram of the system. A complementary approach is now presented by Tobias Donner and his team in the group of Tilman Esslinger in the Department of Physics of ETH Zurich. They control all relevant microscopic parameters of a quantum system governed by two coupled order parameters and therefore can essentially construct, and modify, the phase diagram from bottom up, as they report in a paper published today in the journal Nature Materials.

Phenomenological models that reproduce the experimentally determined phase diagrams of materials with one or more ordering tendencies have provided deep insight into the behaviour of a variety of systems, such as multiferroics --- where a material exhibits simultaneously ferromagnetism and ferroelectrism, opening the door to new functionality --- or certain families of superconductors. However, the microscopic processes underlying the formation of macroscopic order in these systems remain often unknown. This gap in understanding limits the predictive power of phenomenological models and at the same time makes it difficult to know just how a given material should be modified to obtain desired properties. Hence the appeal of the approach taken by Donner and his colleagues, who started not with a specific system and its phenomenological description, but with a flexible quantum system whose relevant microscopic parameters can be controlled with high accuracy, and be tuned across a broad range of values, enabling the realization of diverse scenarios.

To create such a versatile platform, the team optically trapped a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) at the intersection of two optical cavity modes (see the figure). In this configuration, the BEC can crystallise in two different patterns, each of which is associated with a different order parameter. Depending on the experimental setting, the two orders either competed with one another --- forcing the system into one of the two patterns (red and yellow) --- or to coexists, leading to a new coupled phase (blue), where the two orders do not simply add, but give rise to a more complex spatial arrangement. The extent of this mixed-order phase can be controlled as well, to favour regimes of mutual exclusion or of mutual enhancement.

Whereas these particular phases have no known direct role in practical materials, the approach established with these experiments can be modified to simulate in the future properties of materials that are technologically highly relevant indeed. In particular, in cuprate high-temperature superconductors coupled spin and charge order are know to have an important, yet not fully understood role. The sort of experiments now pioneered by the ETH physicists should offer a unique tool to explore such phases --- and various others --- starting from a 'clean' quantum system with well-controlled and widely tunable interactions.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - One in 10 youth experience dating violence. They've been purposely hit, slapped or hurt while in a relationship -- actions that can impart long-lasting effects on the victim.

But just one session of a behavioral intervention held in the emergency department to reduce underage drinking also significantly reduced dating violence perpetration and depression symptoms.

"Dating violence is a significant concern for many teens," says Quyen Ngo, Ph.D., LP, a research assistant professor at the University of Michigan Injury Prevention Center. "It is a time in their lives when they are establishing long-term patterns for their future, and it's important to intervene."

In a study published in the journal Pediatrics, Ngo and her team found that participants had a 47 percent lower rate of self-reported dating violence perpetration 12 months after a therapist-based intervention compared with those who did not receive one.

The rate of depressive symptoms was 15 percent lower at three months post-intervention among those who received the therapist intervention compared with the control group.

A different group of participants who had a computer-based intervention reported a 48 percent lower rate of dating violence perpetration six months after receiving the intervention compared with those without an intervention, the study found. Among those in the computer-based program, the rate of depressive symptoms was 22 percent lower versus those in the control.

"I was delighted and surprised that we were seeing these positive effects after the behavioral intervention. To have those effects one year after a brief computer-assisted alcohol intervention is promising," says Ngo, the paper's lead author.

Ngo is a career development awardee funded by the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which also funded the study. She worked with principal investigators Maureen Walton, Ph.D., MPH, of the Michigan Medicine Department of Psychiatry, and Rebecca Cunningham, M.D., of the Michigan Medicine Department of Emergency Medicine.

'A turning point'

The in-person and computer interventions both were conducted in the same place: the emergency department at Michigan Medicine.

That setting was intentional: "In a stressful situation in an emergency room, kids may be more open to thinking about what they want for themselves," says Ngo, also a clinical psychologist. "The screening was a brief time, a moment of self-reflection, when they were encouraged to think about what's important in their lives as well as their risky drinking and its consequences ... dating violence and depression symptoms.

"The intervention could have signaled a turning point for their lives."

The motivational interview was designed to be nonjudgmental and empathetic, and it focused on drinking behaviors in a way that encouraged youth to be thoughtful about their actions. Questions were deliberately phrased as behaviors, not judgments -- asking, for example: "Have you ever pushed or slapped your partner?" rather than "Have you ever been abusive?"

By addressing indecision, resistance and low confidence, the interviews supported teens as they found internal motivation to change difficult behaviors. An interactive approach helped teens to identify their goals and determine if drinking and dating violence were consistent with achieving those goals.

That appeared to help make a connection and glean insight.

"Youth are hungry for interaction that is nonjudgmental," Ngo says. "They are willing to talk if you have an open heart. They'll tell you all sorts of things if they feel you truly want to help them."

And each case, she knows, is different.

"In terms of dating aggression, there are a lot of reasons why youth get into conflicts that escalate and become physical," Ngo says. "It could be jealously, rumors or just having a bad day. It's important to treat aggressors with empathy."

Potential for wider use

Teens monitored in the Pediatrics study came to a hospital emergency department for a variety of reasons, not necessarily through police involvement. Research staff screened 4,389 youth for risky drinking behavior during the study period.

Of the 1,054 who self-reported risky drinking, 836 teens enrolled in the trial. Random assignments were made to a computer-based alcohol behavioral intervention, a therapist alcohol intervention or a control group.

The mean age of the participants was 18; about 80 percent were white. Slightly more than half were male. An additional brief behavioral intervention was performed at three months, and follow-up assessments were conducted six and 12 months after the first session. For each visit, participants received incentives ranging from $20 to $45.

The approach could be beneficial when applied on a wider scale.

"Other intervention researchers might say that we don't really know in terms of severity of violence whether or not this intervention would work for everyone," Ngo says. "Although it is true that for youth with particularly severe alcohol use or violence severity this may not be as effective -- they may need more intensive interventions -- but for the vast majority of youth this can be an effective and cost-effective way of intervening with these risk behaviors.

"Moreover, exposure to this intervention among even the most severe cases may inspire youth to seek further treatment," she says. "One limitation people may point out is the racial composition of the sample. This is certainly a limitation of the research and points to directions for future research."

When busy emergency department personnel cannot provide ancillary care to patients, the intervention could provide flexibility for computer-based delivery or therapist delivery.

Ngo's next research step will be to modify the intervention to focus on dating violence aggression and exactly how it plays out when alcohol is involved. She has also suggested the need for future research that continues to leverage technology in the treatment of intimate partner aggression and mental health.

(SACRAMENTO) -- Using catheter-based ablation instead of medications alone reduces the risks of death and stroke in patients with the common form of heart arrhythmia known as atrial fibrillation, or AFib, new research from UC Davis physicians shows.

Ablation is currently only recommended when AFib medications don't work or aren't well tolerated.

"Less than 2 percent of patients undergo ablation early in the course of AFib when the procedure can be most beneficial," said lead author Uma Srivatsa, professor of cardiovascular medicine at UC Davis Health. "Our study shows that ablation may be considered as a primary treatment for everyone with the condition."

Part of the hesitation to use ablation earlier and more often could be because comparative outcomes research so far has produced inconsistent results. Most of those studies focused on single centers or were controversial in terms of patient selection and cross over, according to Srivatsa.

The new study, published in the journal Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology, addresses those limitations by evaluating AFib treatment outcomes over a long period of time and for large numbers of multi-ethnic patients with similar health statuses.

"It's only with more robust, real-world studies like ours that we'll be able to develop a clear picture of what works best in addressing clinical outcomes for AFib patients," Srivatsa said.

It's estimated that at least 2.7 million Americans have AFib, which is diagnosed when the heart beats inconsistently due to uncoordinated signals between its upper chambers. The condition can cause lightheadedness, fatigue, shortness of breath and chest pain, and is associated with increased risks of stroke and death.

Medications can help reduce AFib symptoms and risks by controlling heart rate and rhythm and reducing blood clots. Ablation is a more long-term solution that involves using heat or extreme cold to destroy the heart tissue responsible for the faulty electrical signals, reducing the need for rhythm-control medications.

In conducting the study, Srivatsa and her colleagues evaluated medical records from the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development for AFib patients hospitalized between 2005 and 2013. Two groups of about 4,000 each were compared: one that was treated with ablation and another that was not. The groups were matched in terms of AFib patterns and prior hospitalizations.

Outcomes for both groups were similar in terms of rates of death, ischemic stroke and hemorrhagic stroke within 30 days of hospitalization. Beyond 30 days, however, the benefits of ablation were apparent:

84 patients in the ablation group died, versus 189 in the control group

55 patients in the ablation group had ischemic strokes, versus 86 in the control group

17 patients in the ablation group had hemorrhagic strokes, versus 53 in the control group

The study confirms the overall short- and long-term safety of ablation as an AFib treatment, according to Srivatsa.

"Our data supports wider utilization of ablation along with improving the awareness of its benefits," she said.

In an editorial published with the study, cardiologists from the University of Toronto wrote that, while retrospective studies have some limits, Srivatsa and her colleagues have highlighted a significant area for additional research. Together with randomized trials, they said, the UC Davis work will help "confirm or refute whether or not [AFib] ablation is truly a life or death situation."

When the Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core satellite passed over the Northwestern Pacific Ocean, it saw very heavy rainfall occurring in one part of Tropical Storm Prapiroon.

Tropical Depression 09W was located east of the Philippines when it was upgraded early today, June 29, to Tropical Storm Prapiroon. The tropical storm is in a favorable environment for intensification. Vertical wind shear is low above the tropical cyclone and sea surface temperatures are warm below.

NASA's GPM core observatory satellite had a good view of Tropical Storm Prapiroon on June 29, 2018 at 0246 UTC (June 28 at 10:46 p.m. EDT). GPM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA.

At the time GPM passed overhead, Prapiroon was barely a tropical storm with maximum sustained wind speeds estimated at about 35 knots (40.3 mph). GPM's Microwave Imager (GMI) and Dual-Frequency Precipitation Radar (DPR) instruments measured precipitation around Prapiroon. GPM showed that intensifying the storm was fairly large with its most intense rainfall located in the southern part of the storm. GPM's radar (DPR Ku Band) scanned convective storms in a feeder band on the southwestern side of the tropical storm where it found that some very intense storms there were dropping rain at a rate of over 192 mm (7.6 inches) per hour.

A 3-D view of Tropical Storm Prapiroon's precipitation, looking toward the southwest, was created at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, using data captured by GPM's radar (DPR Ku Band). GPM's DPR probes provided excellent information about the powerful storms in the large rain band wrapping around Prapiroon's western side. Storm top heights in that part of the storm were measured by GPM's radar reaching heights above 12.5 km (7.8 miles).

On June 29 at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 UTC), Prapiroon was centered near 20.0 degrees north latitude and 129.7 degrees east longitude. That's about 404 nautical miles south-southeast of Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, Japan. The storm is moving to the northwest at 5 knots (5.7 mph/9.2 kph). Maximum sustained winds 45 knots (52 mph/83 kph).

The Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) predicts that Prapiroon will move toward the north-northwest and intensify into a typhoon on June 30. Prapiroon is expected to continue intensifying and have peak wind speeds of about 75 knots (86 mph/139 kph) as it passes over the East China Sea in a few days.

Prapiroon is predicted by the JTWC to be a minimal typhoon with winds of 65 knots (75 mph/120 kph) as it approaches South Korea on July 2, 2018.

Infrared NASA satellite imagery provided cloud top temperatures of thunderstorms that make up Tropical Storm Emilia. Comparing those NASA temperature readings with another satellite's data obtained the following day, forecasters determined that Emilia had strengthened.

At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, infrared data taken of Emilia by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua satellite was made into a false-colored infrared image. That data from June 28 at 4:59 p.m. EDT (2059 UTC) revealed powerful storms with very cold cloud top temperatures in excess of minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 degrees Celsius) around the center.

By Friday, June 29, 2018 the National Hurricane Center noted that those cloud tops had cooled, indicating the uplift in the storm was stronger, and the cloud tops were higher. That means the storm was intensifying. NHC said "Shortwave infrared imagery and an earlier [4:55 a.m. EDT] 0855 UTC polar orbiter (satellite) pass show deep convective bursts, with associated minus 78 degree Celsius [minus 108.4 degrees Fahrenheit] cloud tops, developing near the surface center."

Emilia is far enough away from land so that there are no coastal watches or warnings in effect.

At 11 a.m. EDT (1500 UTC) on June 29, the center of Tropical Storm Emilia was located near latitude 16.2 degrees north and longitude 116.3 degrees west. That's about 620 miles (1,000 km) southwest of the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico.

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) said that Emilia is moving toward the west-northwest near 12 mph (19 kph), and this general motion is expected to continue for the next few days. Maximum sustained winds have increased to near 60 mph (95 kph) with higher gusts. Tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 80 miles (130 km) from the center. The estimated minimum central pressure is 997 millibars.

NHC said "Some additional strengthening is possible during the next 24 hours before Emilia moves over cool waters and begins to weaken over the weekend."

Boulder, Colo., USA: Yosemite National Park contains some of the world's most iconic landforms, including Half Dome, Yosemite Falls, and El Capitan. Although the cliffs of Yosemite Valley may appear static, rockfalls from these cliffs are common, with a rockfall occurring every four to five days on average. Rockfalls are key to shaping this iconic landscape but also pose risk to the four- to five-million visitors to the park annually.

On 27 and 28 September 2017, eight large rockfalls occurred from the southeast face of El Capitan. These rockfalls resulted in one fatality and two serious injuries, and spurred a complicated rescue and temporary closure of the main road exiting Yosemite Valley. In order to manage these challenging events, the National Park Service (NPS) had a critical, immediate need for quantitative information about the sequence of rockfalls and the potential for additional activity.

Using new "structure-from-motion" photogrammetry techniques in conjunction with baseline laser-scanning data, scientists from the NPS, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the University of Lausanne, Switzerland rapidly analyzed these rockfalls. By comparing 3-dimensional (3D) models of the cliff before, during, and after the rockfalls, the researchers were able to pinpoint the exact locations, dimensions, and volumes of the rockfalls, along with the spatial and temporal pattern of their progression up the cliff.

Structural assessments enabled by the 3D data indicated low potential for imminent rockfall that could reach the road. By having the necessary baseline data in place prior to the El Capitan rockfalls, these analyses and assessments were carried out within hours of the rockfalls occurring, allowing park managers to make difficult decisions quickly.

The ability to rapidly collect, analyze, and disseminate rockfall information in near-real time represents a significant stride forward in informing land managers and the public about this potent natural process.

EVANSTON, Ill. -- A new study from Northwestern University and the Chicago Botanic Garden has found that climate change may drive local extinction of mason bees in Arizona and other naturally warm climates.

In a two-year, in situ field experiment that altered the temperature of the bees' nests to simulate a warmer, future climate, 35 percent of bees died in the first year and 70 percent died in the second year. This is compared to a 1-2 percent mortality rate in the control group.

"The projected temperatures appear to be pushing this species up against its physiological limits," said Northwestern's Paul CaraDonna, who led the research. "This is evidence that we might see local extinction in the warmer parts of this species' range, which is pretty sobering."

The study will publish online on Thursday, June 28 in the British Ecological Society's journal Functional Ecology. CaraDonna is an assistant professor of instruction in the Program in Plant Biology and Conservation in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and a research scientist at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

This species of mason bee (Osmia ribifloris), often called the "blueberry mason bee," is native to the western United States and northern Mexico. This particular type of solitary bee builds nests inside of holes and cracks in dead tree stumps. Yet, as a primary pollinator of manzanita shrubs in the wild, this little-studied bee may have a big effect on its ecosystem.

"Native pollinators are a really important part of what makes nature run smoothly," said CaraDonna, an expert on pollination ecology. "It's estimated that close to 90 percent of all flowering plants benefit from animal pollination. That ends up at around more than 300,000 plant species worldwide."

To study how climate change affects mason bees, CaraDonna's team set up three types of nesting environments in Arizona's Santa Catalina Mountains, where the bees thrive. The team manipulated the temperatures of the nests by painting them to simulate past, present and future climates. The team painted a third of the nests black to absorb more radiant heat, thus simulating a future climate predicted for the years 2040 to 2099. By painting another third with a white, reflective, cooling treatment, the team sent that third of the nests back in time to a climate similar to that of the 1950s. As a control, the team painted the final third nests with a transparent paint, leaving their natural wood color for a control group. The experiment included 90 nests total, each housing anywhere from 2 to 15 bees.

"It's pretty low-tech, but it works," CaraDonna said of the experiment. "The field site is so remote that something more high-tech with solar panels or a power source was out of the question."

CaraDonna ran the experiment twice during two back-to-back seasons. Bees experienced the altered environments from early in larval development all the way through metamorphosis and adult diapause, which is a term to describe insect hibernation. CaraDonna noted that the bees in nests simulating past and current climates woke up from diapause and emerged in February, which is normal.

The bees nesting in the warmer boxes, however, underwent multiple disturbing changes. Not only were their mortality rates remarkably high, they also emerged from diapause over a much longer period of time. While mason bees in this area typically emerge from diapause over the course of 10 to 15 days, bees in the warming treatment emerged over the course of 50 days.

"This suggests that they are responding to a stressful environment," CaraDonna said. "Because their emergence times are altered, they now potentially have fewer floral resources available to them as a population, and it might be a lot harder to find mates."

CaraDonna also noted that the bees in the warmer nests emerged with smaller bodies and lower body fat. He thinks this is because the warmer temperatures cause the bees' metabolisms to increase during diapause, so they burn through fat reserves more quickly, which can be problematic in nature once they emerge.

"For insects, size is a big deal," he said. "Bigger is usually better. It means you have greater energy stores, which essentially means you can weather more storms. As a bee, that means you are likely able to reproduce more, which has implications for the stability of the population."

CaraDonna believes these mason bees could move farther up the mountains to cooler climates in the future, but this will take them away from the manzanita plants, which are their main source of food. This would not only have consequences for the bees but also for the plants that rely on them for pollination.

"This mason bee is probably one of the best pollinators for this plant species, so if you take away the pollinator, you might take away the plant in the longer term," he said. "We need to understand how nature works and see how it responds to important sources of variation. Otherwise, we don't have the ability to keep it safe."

Many popular online games include the option of paying small fees (microtransactions) to access additional features or content that enhance the player's experience. An editorial published today by Addiction argues that some online games use in-game purchasing systems that disguise or withhold the long-term cost of microtransactions until the player is already financially and psychologically committed. Such purchasing systems push free-to-play online gaming closer to gambling and may present financial risks for vulnerable players.

The authors focus on a monetization scheme called the 'loot box', an in-game reward system in which players can repetitively buy a random selection of virtual items. Players hoping to win a particular item may end up repeatedly buying loot boxes at significant personal expense. The authors argue that because loot boxes require no player skill and have a randomly determined outcome or prize, they function similarly to gambling slot machines.

The authors call loot boxes and similar schemes 'predatory monetization' because they encourage repeated spending using tactics that may involve limited disclosure of the product, unavoidable solicitations, and manipulation of reward outcomes to encourage purchasing behaviours over skilful play. The authors point out that some of the top-earning game publishers have registered patents for microtransaction systems that incentivise the player to spend money (1,2) but there are few regulations or consumer protections associated with these systems.

The editorial appears in the wake of the World Health Organization's announcement on 18 June that it plans for the first time to include 'gaming disorder' in its diagnostic manual, the International Classification of Diseases.

Speed limits apply not only to traffic. There are limitations on the control of light as well, in optical switches for internet traffic, for example. Physicists at Chalmers University of Technology now understand why it is not possible to increase the speed beyond a certain limit - and know the circumstances in which it is best to opt for a different route.

Light and other electromagnetic waves play a crucial role in almost all modern electronics, for example in our mobile phones. In recent years researchers have developed artificial speciality materials - known as optomechanical metamaterials - which overcome the limitations inherent in natural materials, in order to control the properties of light with a high degree of precision.

For example, what are termed optical switches are used to change the colour or intensity of light. In internet traffic these switches can be switched on and off up to 100 billion times in a single second. But beyond that the speed cannot be increased any further. These unique speciality materials are also subject to this limit.

"Researchers had high hopes of achieving higher and higher speeds in optical switches by further developing optomechanical metamaterials. We now know why these materials failed to outcompete existing technology in internet traffic and mobile communication networks," says Sophie Viaene, a nanophotonics researcher at the Department of Physics at Chalmers.

To find out why there are speed limits and what they mean, Viaene went outside the field of optics and analysed the phenomenon using what is termed non-linear dynamics in her doctoral thesis. The conclusion she reached is that it is necessary to choose a different route to circumvent the speed limits: instead of controlling an entire surface at once, the interaction with light can be controlled more efficiently by manipulating one particle at a time. Another way of solving the problem is to allow the speciality material to remain in constant motion at a constant speed and to measure the variations from this movement.

But Viaene and her supervisor, Associate Professor Philippe Tassin, say that the speed limit does not pose a problem for all applications. It is not necessary to change the properties of light at such high speeds for screens and various types of displays. So there is great potential for the use of these speciality materials here, since they are thin and can be flexible.

Their results have determined the direction researchers should take in this area of research, and the scientific article was recently published in the highly regarded journal Physical Review Letters. The pathway is now open for the ever smarter watches, screens and glasses of the future.

"The switching speed limit is not a problem in applications where we see the light, because our eyes do not react all that rapidly. We see a great potential for optomechanical metamaterials in the development of thin, flexible gadgets for interactive visualisation technology," says Tassin, an associate professor in the Department of Physics at Chalmers.

A ground-breaking study has concluded that patients who see the same doctor over time have lower death rates.

The study, a collaboration between St Leonard's Practice in Exeter and the University of Exeter Medical School, is published today in BMJ Open. It is the first ever systematic review of the relationship between death rates and continuity of care - seeing the same doctor over time. The study analyses all the available evidence in the field to draw its conclusions.

Sir Denis Pereira Gray, of St Leonard's Practice, said: "Patients have long known that it matters which doctor they see and how well they can communicate with them. Until now arranging for patients to see the doctor of their choice has been considered a matter of convenience or courtesy: now it is clear it is about the quality of medical practice and is literally 'a matter of life and death'."

Professor Philip Evans, of the University of Exeter Medical School, said: "Continuity of care happens when a patient and a doctor see each other repeatedly and get to know each other. This leads to better communication, patient satisfaction, adherence to medical advice and much lower use of hospital services.

"As medical technology and new treatments dominate the medical news, the human aspect of medical practice has been neglected. Our study shows it is potentially life-saving and should be prioritised."

The study found that repeated patient-doctor contact is linked to fewer deaths. The effect applied across different cultures, and was true not just for family doctors, but for specialists including psychiatrists and surgeons as well.

The review analysed the results of 22 eligible high-quality studies with varying time frames. The studies were from nine countries with very different cultures and health systems. Of those, 18 (82%) found that repeated contact with the same doctor over time meant significantly fewer deaths over the study periods compared with those without continuity.

The review, Continuity of care with doctors - a matter of life and death? A systematic review of continuity of care and mortality, is published in BMJ Open. Authors were Denis J Pereira Gray, Kate Sidaway-Lee, Eleanor White, Angus Thorne, and Philip H Evans.

People with diabetes could be able to monitor their blood sugar without drawing blood using a system now being developed at the University of Waterloo.

In a recent study, researchers combined radar and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to detect changes in glucose levels without the need for painful finger pricks several times a day.

"We want to sense blood inside the body without actually having to sample any fluid," said George Shaker, an engineering professor who leads a large team working on the concept. "Our hope is this can be realized as a smartwatch to monitor glucose continuously."

The research involves collaboration with Google and German hardware company Infineon, which jointly developed a small radar device and sought input from select teams around the world on potential applications.

The system at Waterloo uses the radar device to send high-frequency radio waves into liquids containing various levels of glucose and receive radio waves that are reflected back to it.

Information on the reflected waves is then converted into digital data for analysis by machine-learning AI algorithms developed by the researchers.

The software is capable of detecting glucose changes based on more than 500 wave features or characteristics, including how long it takes for them to bounce back to the device.

Initial tests with volunteers at the Research Institute for Aging in Waterloo achieved results that were 85 per cent as accurate as traditional, invasive blood analysis. "The correlation was actually amazing," said Shaker. "We have shown it is possible to use radar to look into the blood to detect changes."

Next steps include refining the system to precisely quantify glucose levels and obtain results through the skin, which complicates the process.

Researchers are also working with Infineon to shrink the radar device so that it is both low-cost and low-power.

The data analyzed by AI algorithms is now sent wirelessly to computers, but the ultimate aim is self-contained technology similar to the smartwatches that monitor heart rate.

"I'm hoping we'll see a wearable device on the market within the next five years," said Shaker. "There are challenges, but the research has been going at a really good rate."

Nerve agents are scary stuff. They are among the most deadly substances on earth, yet can be odorless, tasteless and difficult to detect. But researchers now report in ACS Central Science that they have adapted building materials normally associated with children's toys and a cell phone to help sense these compounds. The new method can sensitively detect these poisons, quantify the amount and distinguish between different classes present at contaminated sites.

Because nerve agents shut off enzymes that control the body's nervous system function, death comes quickly -- in minutes or even seconds. Thus, it's important to detect these compounds quickly so that swift action can be taken. But in addition to taking too long, current methods require expensive instruments and are poorly suited for field use. Complicating matters, there are two main categories of nerve agents, requiring different decontamination protocols. Existing tools are not effective in differentiating between these classes, which is important because one is more toxic and less volatile than the other, leading to a greater potential for mass harm. Eric Anslyn, Edward M. Marcotte, and colleagues sought to develop an instrumental set-up and method that addressed these issues and would be simple to use.

The researchers developed a cascade of reactions that amplify an optical signal that results from a byproduct of a decomposition reaction of the nerve agents. The resulting mixtures change their color and intensity of emission relative to the amount of chemical weapon present. This visual change of emission provides a sensitive test that can be read using common, inexpensive household and laboratory items. The simple design features a LEGO® box with a template to guide a smartphone's placement on a stage, where the phone acts as the instrument's camera. The only other necessary components are a UV/visible lamp and a standard 96-well test plate. Free software helps analyze the resulting image. To encourage wide adoption of their technology, the researchers uploaded their analytic code, image guides, and a demonstration video to GitHub.

The authors acknowledge funding from the U.S. Department of Defense, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the W.M. Keck Foundation.

This paper will be freely available on June 27, 2018, at 8 a.m. Eastern time here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscentsci.8b00193.

The American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society, is a not-for-profit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS is a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. ACS does not conduct research, but publishes and publicizes peer-reviewed scientific studies. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.

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