Tech

New research on Google trends data presented at this year's European Congress on Obesity in Vienna, Austria (23-26 May) shows that over time, searches using the terms weight loss have increased, while those using the word obesity have decreased, potentially suggesting a normalisation of obesity in society. The study is by Dr Aditya S. Pawar from the Mayo Clinic Department of Nephrology and Hypertension, Rochester, MN, USA, and colleagues.

The global epidemic of overweight and obesity has become a major public health concern. At least 2.8 million die each year as a result of being overweight or obese. In children, according to a study by the World Health Organization, around half of boys and 40% of girls were overweight. Recent studies have shed light on the 'normalisation' of obesity in the society but there are no formal studies evaluating public interest and awareness of the topic.

Dr Pawar and colleagues studied data of awareness about obesity over the last twelve years worldwide. They used Google Trends which is based on the number of times worldwide the terms 'Obesity', 'Weight loss 'and 'Obese' were searched for using Google between 1st January 2006 and 31st December 2017.

The program assigns a reference value of 100 for the point of maximum popularity among the search terms, and provides relative monthly scores for all terms, which were termed relative interest scores (RIS).

The results found that the for the search term 'obesity', the mean RIS consistently decreased with each quartile. While the search term 'weight loss' RIS consistently increased with time.

The term 'weight loss' appeared to be especially popular during the month of January and its median RIS for January (n=12months) as compared to other months (n=122 months) was higher during the entire study period (88 vs 72), a result which was statistically significant. The RIS for term 'obese' did not change significantly over the study period.

Dr Pawar concludes: "Despite an increase in the prevalence of obesity, its popularity on the internet continues to decrease with time as reflected by the RIS score, which may suggest 'normalisation' of obesity in our society. Reassuringly however, the frequency of the search term 'weight loss' has increased significantly overtime, with significant interest in January every year."

"While this may be secondary to New Year's resolutions centred around a healthy lifestyle, the specific reasons for the increased interest in certain months should be explored and applied to awareness campaigns for better effectiveness. While formal studies are required to best characterise these phenomenon, the use of Google trends certainly provides valuable data to assess the public awareness and possibly health related campaigns, which are vital to the success of managing obesity at the global level."

New research presented at this year's European Congress on Obesity (ECO) in Vienna, Austria (23-26) May shows that weight reduction following a sleeve gastrectomy (obesity surgery), which reduces the size of the stomach, can rapidly reverse obesity-related hypogonadism in morbidly obese men, restoring normal levels of testosterone and sex drive. The study was conducted by Prof Marco Rossato and colleagues at the University of Padova, Italy.

Obesity in men is associated with hypogonadism; a condition in which production of testosterone is reduced, while estrogen levels are elevated. These effects seem to be the result of excess body fat interfering with sex steroid metabolism which leads to increased aromatisation of androgens (such as testosterone) into estrogens within the adipose tissue itself. It follows that weight loss should improve this hormonal imbalance, and contribute to a reversal of hypogonadism.

Research conducted so far has been limited to evaluating the effects of weight loss on male hypogonadism a long time after the reduction in body fat has occurred, so it was not known how rapidly hormones began to return to normal in human subjects. The goal of this study was to investigate levels of sex steroids immediately after rapid weight loss in a group of obese men who had undergone bariatric surgery, to determine how quickly those changes occurred.

The authors selected a group of 29 obese men with an average age of 40.5 years and an average body mass index (BMI) of 43.4kg/m2 (morbidly obese is defined as >40kg/m2). Blood tests were performed to measure total plasma testosterone, the sex hormones dihydrotestosterone (DHT), estradiol, luteinising hormone (LH), follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), as well as sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG), prostatic-specific antigen (PSA), and leptin in subjects before and one month after they underwent a sleeve gastrectomy to reduce the size of the stomach. As a control, the team studied a group of 19 healthy age-matched, non-obese male subjects.

The study found that among the obese subjects, 51.6% had hypogonadism and of those who had subnormal total testosterone, those with metabolic syndrome (45.2%) showed lower plasma testosterone than men without metabolic syndrome. BMI and waist circumference were found to be negatively correlated with total testosterone and plasma LH levels. Obese males had lower plasma testosterone than healthy subjects (10.8 vs. 15.7 nmol/L), higher estradiol levels (124.4 vs. 78.8 pmol/L), lower LH and FSH levels (3.6 and 2.5 vs 5.2 and 5.9 IU/L respectively). No differences were observed between the two groups in their DHT and PSA levels.

One month after the sleeve gastrectomy, obese subjects showed a significant weight reduction, averaging 17.2 kg and the proportion with hypogonadism had fallen to 11.6%. Average testosterone levels increased by 85%, to a level greater than that observed in the healthy control group (18.9 vs 15.7 nmol/L). Estradiol levels fell by 35% while PSA levels rose by 70%.

The study demonstrates that while obese males show an elevated prevalence of hypogonadism, this is rapidly reversed (within one month) after significant weight loss following bariatric surgery. Testosterone levels are increased significantly while estradiol levels fall due to the rapid and significant loss of fat mass and the consequent decrease in aromatization of androgens to estrogens that typically occur in adipose tissue.

The authors note that: "The clinical significance of the rapid increase in PSA plasma levels observed one month after bariatric surgery is still obscure and has to be confirmed on a larger number of subjects and after a longer period of observation after surgery and weight reduction maintenance".

They suggest that "it could be due to the rapid testosterone increase stimulating the prostate and/or to the rapid reduction in plasma volume after weight loss".

The authors also add a note of caution regarding low PSA levels that can be observed in obese men, since these can underestimate the true levels of PSA that would be seen if these men were normal weight. They say: "If you consider that obese males, as with all people with obesity, have higher prevalence of some type of cancer, including prostate cancer for men, this information could be of importance, since it could lead to doctors potentially missing cases of severe prostate disease in obese men."

Glacial retreat in cold, high-altitude ecosystems exposes environments that are extremely sensitive to phosphorus input, new University of Colorado Boulder-led research shows. The finding upends previous ecological assumptions, helps scientists understand plant and microbe responses to climate change and could expand scientists' understanding of the limits to life on Earth.

The study, which was recently published in the journal Science Advances, found that even in mountainous terrain above 17,000 feet above sea level, where soils freeze every night of the year, the addition of phosphorus resulted in rapid growth of plants and photosynthetic microbes, allowing them to overcome the chilly, arid climate.

"Life is more resourceful than we might have previously suspected," said Steven Schmidt, a professor in CU Boulder's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EBIO) and a co-author of the research. "Phosphorus allows microbes to react quickly and grow in these sites."

Nitrogen and phosphorus are both essential nutrients for vegetation and microbes, but plants are slower to re-grow in dry, high-elevation sites than in wet, temperate areas. Based on classical experiments, researchers had suspected that this sluggish regeneration was primarily due to the harsh climate and the relative lack of the nitrogen, limiting the potential for organic life.

"The thought has always been that nitrogen is most important to these newly-uncovered soils," said John Darcy, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii who co-authored the study while at CU Boulder. "But previous research has been concentrated in coastal and island landscapes. No one had looked at these cold, dry high-altitude systems before."

Researchers from CU Boulder, Duke University, the University of Montana and the University of Minnesota drew upon six years' worth of field data from arid sites in the central Alaska Range and the Andes Mountains of southern Peru. Both areas have experienced significant glacial retreat in recent decades due to climate change.

Post-glacial landscapes have been observed to remain largely un-vegetated for up to 150 years, leaving behind expanses of potentially unstable lakes and land that could result in floods, mudslides and potential water shortages.

The previously unappreciated importance of phosphorus for vegetation and microbes adds new context to long-held ecological theories and could inform future astrobiology studies as well as further research into agricultural runoff pollution.

"We're expanding the boundaries of what we know about the limits to life on Earth," Schmidt said.

Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) truly have matured enough to allow for first commercial products in form of small and large displays. In order to compete in further markets and even open new possibilities (automotive lighting, head-mounted-displays, micro displays, etc.), OLEDs need to see further improvements in device lifetime while operating at their best possible efficiency. Currently, intrinsic performance progress is solely driven by material development.

Now researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Technische Universität Dresden demonstrate the possibility of using ultrastable film formation to improve the performance of state-of-the-art OLEDs. In their joint paper published in Science Advances with the title 'High-performance organic light-emitting diodes comprising ultrastable glass layers', the researchers show in a detailed study significant increases of efficiency and operational stability (> 15% for both parameters and all cases, significantly higher for individual samples) are achieved for four different phosphorescent emitters. To achieve these results, the emission layers of the respective OLEDs were grown as ultrastable glasses - a growth condition that allows for thermodynamically most stable amorphous solids.

This finding is significant, because it is an optimization which does neither involve a change of materials used nor changes to the device architecture. Both are the typical levers for improvements in the field of OLEDs. This concept can universally be explored in every given specific OLED stack, which will be equally appreciated by leading industry. This in particular includes thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) OLEDs, which see a tremendous research and development interest at the moment. Furthermore, the improvements that, as shown by the researchers, can be tracked back to differences on the exciton dynamics on the nanoscale suggest that also other fundamental properties of organic semiconductors (e.g. transport, charge separation, energy transfer) can be equally affected.

BEND, Ore. - Chronic diseases like cancer, autoimmune disorders and obesity may ultimately vanquish the efforts of medical intervention unless people change their diet, an Oregon State University biologist argues in a paper published this week.

Matt Orr, assistant professor in the College of Science at OSU-Cascades, describes a "restoration ecology" approach toward patient health - every person is like an ecosystem, he says, and effectively fighting chronic disease requires fostering the communities of symbiotic gut microbes that people need for their health.

That means drawing on techniques, which have been developed by scientists over the last half-century, that have restored species diversity and ecosystem function of natural habitats.

"Western doctors generally ignore diet in chronic disease, even diseases of the gut," said Orr, inspired to do this research in part by his own health challenges. "They do not overly encourage or support their patients to change their diet away from high fat and high sugar. Industry and policy have created a platform for people to eat terribly in this country, and many Americans do eat terribly."

The paper, published in the Quarterly Review of Biology, notes that throughout history humans have harmed beneficial species, often inadvertently, through advances of culture and technology. Affected species include those inside of people as well as around them.

The highest known cell density of any microbial habitat on the planet is found in the human gut - there can be more than 1,000 species of bacteria containing more than a half-million genes.

But applying techniques of ecological restoration - assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that's been degraded, damaged or destroyed - to the field of medicine has been a largely unexplored option, Orr and his collaborators found.

Restoration techniques fall into one of two categories: passive and active. Passive means removing whatever disturbances have harmed an ecosystem - such as an unhealthy diet - and then letting the ecosystem heal itself.

If that doesn't work, the next step is active restoration. In nature that could mean physical manipulation of a landscape, exterminating unwanted species and introducing desired ones. In the gut, it might involve probiotics, antibiotics or fecal microbiota transplants.

One tenet of restoration ecology that is ignored by western medicine is that active interventions will not succeed if a passive platform is not established - the disturbance has to be removed.

Part of what compelled Orr to look at the human microbiota from an ecological perspective was the chronic gut irritation he developed from years of doing research in the tropics and taking antibiotics "for bugs picked up at unsanitary field stations."

"I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease and put on a monoclonal antibody inhibitor for life," he said. "Except that I cleaned up my diet, stopped getting the gut irritation, cut out the monoclonal antibody inhibitor, and my symptoms are gone. Two doctors overturned the Crohn's diagnosis in writing.

"All of that inspired me to think about ways that my knowledge of restoration ecology might help to guide physicians away from treating and misdiagnosing other people the way that they had treated and misdiagnosed me."

Gut microbes perform a wide range of beneficial functions. Among other things, they produce nutrients in the form of short-chain fatty acids and vitamins, control blood sugar and weight, reduce inflammation and even improve mental health and psychological well-being.

And as with natural habitats, where successful restoration techniques will vary from year to year and place to place depending on individual circumstances, gut restoration requires a similar approach - one toward personalized medicine given that no two gut sets of gut microbiota are identical.

Except for that they're all essential to the person's health and all subject to disturbances, including the food people eat and the medicine they take.

"Nineteenth-century research identified microbes as agents of disease and set the stage for 20th-century breakthroughs in antibiotic therapies," Orr said. "But antibiotic resistance is now a global crisis, and we're also now aware that antimicrobials can harm beneficial species too."

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Imagine being able to power your car partly from the heat that its engine gives off. Or what if you could get a portion of your home's electricity from the heat that a power plant emits? Such energy-efficient scenarios may one day be possible with improvements in thermoelectric materials -- which spontaneously produce electricity when one side of the material is heated.

Over the last 60 years or so, scientists have studied a number of materials to characterize their thermoelectric potential, or the efficiency with which they convert heat to power. But to date, most of these materials have yielded efficiencies that are too low for any widespread practical use.

MIT physicists have now found a way to significantly boost thermoelectricity's potential, with a theoretical method that they report today in Science Advances. The material they model with this method is five times more efficient, and could potentially generate twice the amount of energy, as the best thermoelectric materials that exist today.

"If everything works out to our wildest dreams, then suddenly, a lot of things that right now are too inefficient to do will become more efficient," says lead author Brian Skinner, a postdoc in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics. "You might see in people's cars little thermoelectric recoverers that take that waste heat your car engine is putting off, and use it to recharge the battery. Or these devices may be put around power plants so that heat that was formerly wasted by your nuclear reactor or coal power plant now gets recovered and put into the electric grid."

Skinner's co-author on the paper is Liang Fu, the Sarah W. Biedenharn Career Development Associate Professor of Physics at MIT.

Finding holes in a theory

A material's ability to produce energy from heat is based on the behavior of its electrons in the presence of a temperature difference. When one side of a thermoelectric material is heated, it can energize electrons to leap away from the hot side and accumulate on the cold side. The resulting buildup of electrons can create a measurable voltage.

Materials that have so far been explored have generated very little thermoelectric power, in part because electrons are relatively difficult to thermally energize. In most materials, electrons exist in specific bands, or energy ranges. Each band is separated by a gap -- a small range of energies in which electrons cannot exist. Energizing electrons enough to cross a band gap and physically migrate across a material has been extremely challenging.

Skinner and Fu decided to look at the thermoelectric potential of a family of materials known as topological semimetals. In contrast to most other solid materials such as semiconductors and insulators, topological semimetals are unique in that they have zero band gaps -- an energy configuration that enables electrons to easily jump to higher energy bands when heated.

Scientists had assumed that topological semimetals, a relatively new type of material that is largely synthesized in the lab, would not generate much thermoelectric power. When the material is heated on one side, electrons are energized, and do accumulate on the other end. But as these negatively charged electrons jump to higher energy bands, they leave behind what's known as "holes" -- particles of positive charge that also pile up on the material's cold side, canceling out the electrons' effect and producing very little energy in the end.

But the team wasn't quite ready to discount this material. In an unrelated bit of research, Skinner had noticed a curious effect in semiconductors that are exposed to a strong magnetic field. Under such conditions, the magnetic field can affect the motion of electrons, bending their trajectory. Skinner and Fu wondered: What kind of effect might a magnetic field have in topological semimetals?

They consulted the literature and found that a team from Princeton University, in attempting to fully characterize a type of topological material known as lead tin selenide, had also measured its thermoelectric properties under a magnetic field in 2013. Among their many observations of the material, the researchers had reported seeing an increase in thermoelectric generation, under a very high magnetic field of 35 tesla (most MRI machines, for comparison, operate around 2 to 3 tesla).

Skinner and Fu used properties of the material from the Princeton study to theoretically model the material's thermoelectric performance under a range of temperature and magnetic field conditions.

"We eventually figured out that under a strong magnetic field, a funny thing happens, where you could make electrons and holes move in opposite directions," Skinner says. "Electrons go toward the cold side, and holes toward the hot side. They work together and, in principle, you could get a bigger and bigger voltage out of the same material just by making the magnetic field stronger."

Tesla power

In their theoretical modeling, the group calculated lead tin selenide's ZT, or figure of merit, a quantity that tells you how close your material is to the theoretical limit for generating power from heat. The most efficient materials that have been reported so far have a ZT of about 2. Skinner and Fu found that, under a strong magnetic field of about 30 tesla, lead tin selenide can have a ZT of about 10 -- five times more efficient than the best-performing thermoelectrics.

"It's way off scale," Skinner says. "When we first stumbled on this idea, it seemed a little too dramatic. It took a few days to convince myself that it all adds up."

They calculate that a material with a ZT equal to 10, if heated at room temperature to about 500 kelvins, or 440 degrees Fahrenheit, under a 30-tesla magnetic field, should be able to turn 18 percent of that heat to electricity, compared to materials with a ZT equal to 2, which would only be able to convert 8 percent of that heat to energy.

The group acknowledges that, to achieve such high efficiencies, currently available topological semimetals would have to be heated under an extremely high magnetic field that could only be produced by a handful of facilities in the world. For these materials to be practical for use in power plants or automobiles, they should operate in the range of 1 to 2 tesla.

Fu says this should be doable if a topological semimetal were extremely clean, meaning that there are very few impurities in the material that would get in the way of electrons' flow.

"To make materials very clean is very challenging, but people have dedicated a lot of effort to high-quality growth of these materials," Fu says.

He adds that lead tin selenide, the material they focused on in their study, is not the cleanest topological semimetal that scientists have synthesized. In other words, there may be other, cleaner materials that may generate the same amount of thermal power with a much smaller magnetic field.

"We can see that this material is a good thermoelectric material, but there should be better ones," Fu says. "One approach is to take the best [topological semimetal] we have now, and apply a magnetic field of 3 tesla. It may not increase efficiency by a factor of 2, but maybe 20 or 50 percent, which is already a pretty big advance."

The team has filed a patent for their new thermolelectric approach and is collaborating with Princeton researchers to experimentally test the theory.

Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) truly have matured enough to allow for first commercial products in the form of small and large displays. In order to compete in further markets and even open new possibilities (automotive lighting, head-mounted-displays, micro displays, etc.), OLEDs need to see further improvements in device lifetime while operating at their best possible efficiency. Currently, intrinsic performance progress is solely driven by material development.

Now, researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Technische Universität Dresden have demonstrated the possibility of using ultrastable film formation to improve the performance of state-of-the-art OLEDs. In their joint paper published in Science Advances with the title 'High-performance organic light-emitting diodes comprising ultrastable glass layers', the researchers show in a detailed study that significant increases of efficiency and operational stability (> 15% for both parameters and all cases, significantly higher for individual samples) are achieved for four different phosphorescent emitters. To achieve these results, the emission layers of the respective OLEDs were grown as ultrastable glasses - a growth condition that allows for thermodynamically most stable amorphous solids.

Illustration summarizing the nanoscale difference of ultrastable glasses compared to conventional ones and the impact on the layer and device properties of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). This finding is significant, because it is an optimization which involves neither a change of materials used nor changes to the device architecture. Both are the typical starting points for improvements in the field of OLEDs. This concept can be universally explored in every given specific OLED stack, which will be equally appreciated by leading industry. This in particular includes thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) OLEDs, which are seeing tremendous research and development interest at the moment. Furthermore, the improvements that, as shown by the researchers, can be tracked back to differences in the exciton dynamics on the nanoscale suggest that other fundamental properties of organic semiconductors (e.g. transport, charge separation, energy transfer) can also be equally affected.

The research leading to these results was partly carried out in the project 'Modelling stability of organic phosphorescent light-emitting diodes (MOSTOPHOS)' funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 646259). Currently, this concept is being explored together with cynora GmbH, a MOSTOPHOS partner and a world-leading company in development of TADF emitters.

LOGAN, UTAH, USA -- Freeways choked with traffic, supermarkets laden with fertilizer-grown stock from distance fields and virtually everything we touch derived from petroleum-based plastics. It's hard to imagine life beyond our fossil-fueled world. Black gold has brought us unprecedented prosperity, but it's also polluted our environment, perhaps irreparably, and it's in finite supply. Now what?

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind. But not in the plaintive, unattainable way Bob Dylan expressed in his famous lyrics. Life-giving nitrogen flows all around us and, according to Utah State University biochemist Lance Seefeldt and other top scientists, it holds the key to sustainability beyond nonrenewable energy.

The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Basic Energy Sciences gathered Seefeldt and 16 other experts in nitrogen research in Washington, D.C. for an October 2016 summit to discuss the current field of nitrogen activation chemistry and its future directions. The team reports their conclusions in a review article in the May 25, 2018, issue of the journal Science.

"This gathering was a 'Who's Who' of nitrogen research," says Seefeldt, professor in USU's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, an American Academy for the Advancement of Science Fellow and a co-chair of the gathering. "Our group included Nobel Laureate Robert Schrock and the culmination of our efforts is truly a tour de force. No one of us, individually, could have written this report."

All life on earth requires nitrogen and a whopping 80 percent of the planet's atmosphere, in the form of dinitrogen, is comprised of the life-sustaining gas. Yet, neither animals nor plants can access nitrogen directly.

"It's an incredible irony," Seefeldt says. "We need nitrogen to survive and we're swimming in a sea of it, but we can't get to it. Humans and animals get nitrogen from protein in our food. Plants get nitrogen from the soil."

Which is where fossil fuels entered the picture about a century ago. German scientists Franz Haber and Carl Bösch pioneered a revolutionary process to break nitrogen's ultra-strong bonds and enable commercial-scale production of fertilizer, which spurred unprecedented growth of the global food supply and, subsequently, the world's population.

"It was one of history's technological marvels, but it currently consumes about two percent of the world's fossil fuel supply and thus, it's come with a very heavy carbon footprint," Seefeldt says.

What did he and his fellow scientists conclude from their summit? It's time to embark on a new revolution.

"Opportunities exist to achieve radically improved, new and different pathways (to achieve nitrogen transformations)," the scientists write. "But progress in this regard will require a molecular-level understanding of nitrogen transformation reactions, as well as ... discovery of new catalytic systems and alternative means of delivering the energy needed to drive those reactions."

Seefeldt and his USU team, whose research is supported by the DOE, have already pioneered efforts toward a clean and renewable light-driven process for converting nitrogen to ammonia, a primary component of fertilizer.

"Our research on this process, which uses nanomaterials to capture light energy, demonstrates how sunlight or artificial light can power nitrogen fixation," Seefeldt says. "It a potential game-changer."

New research being presented at this year's European Congress on Obesity (ECO) in Vienna, Austria (23-26 May) suggests that obese children who consume at least two servings of any type of cows' milk each day are more likely to have lower fasting insulin, indicating better blood sugar control.

"Our findings indicate that obese children who consume at least the daily recommended amount of milk may have more favourable sugar handling and this could help guard against metabolic syndrome", says author Dr Michael Yafi from McGovern Medical School at The University of Texas Health Science Center, Houston, USA. "Worryingly, only 1 in 10 young people in our study were consuming the recommended amount of milk."

Metabolic syndrome is defined as the presence of at least three of five conditions that increase the risk of diabetes, heart disease, and stroke - high blood pressure, high levels of blood sugar or triglycerides, excess belly fat, and low "good" cholesterol levels. At least a third of Americans are thought to have metabolic syndrome, while one in three American children and teens are overweight or obese. Previous studies have shown that milk protects against metabolic syndrome and diabetes in adults, but studies investigating the effect of milk consumption on metabolic health and metabolic syndrome risk factors in obese children are scarce.

To investigate this further, Dr Yafi and colleagues assessed daily milk intake and its association with fasting insulin levels--the hormone that stabilises blood sugar and a biomarker for metabolic syndrome risk--in obese children and adolescents attending a paediatric weight management clinic. A high insulin level is a sign of insulin resistance or prediabetes, and can also signify metabolic syndrome.

They conducted a retrospective chart review of 353 obese children and adolescents aged 3 to 18 years between December 2008 and December 2010. Information on fasting serum insulin was available for 171 children at their first visit. The research team also recorded information on daily milk intake, milk types, daily fruit juice and other sugary drinks intake, fasting blood glucose, and insulin sensitivity. They used an upper normal level of fasting insulin (19 microunits per ml; uiu/ml) to link the results to insulin resistance.

Over half of the participants were male, three quarters were Hispanics, and had an average age of 11.3 years. On average, just one in ten children (13%; 23/171) reported drinking the daily recommended milk intake of three cups or more. Girls reported drinking less milk than boys, but no difference in intake was noted by ethnicity.

The American Academy of Pediatrics and the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans advise two to three cups of low fat (1% or 2%) milk a day for children over the age of two. The study also found that under half (44%) of children who reported drinking less than one cup a day had fasting insulin levels of less than 19 uiu/ml, compared to almost three-quarters (72%) of children who reported drinking more than two cups a day.

Overall, children who drank less than one cup of milk each day had significantly higher levels of fasting insulin (median 23 uiu/ml) than those who drank less than two cups a day (15 uiu/ml), or at least two cups a day (13 uiu/ml). After adjusting for other aspects that might affect insulin levels including race, ethnicity, gender, level of physical activity, sugary drinks intake, glucose levels, and type of milk based on fat content, the researchers found lower fasting insulin levels among children who drank at least two cups of milk a day. No association was noted between milk intake and blood glucose or lipid levels.

Dr Yafi concludes: "Many studies have linked sugary drinks to childhood obesity. In contrast, our pilot study suggests that milk intake is not only safe but also protective against metabolic syndrome. We should encourage our children, especially those with obesity who are at higher risk of insulin resistance and poor glycaemic control, to consume the recommended daily amount of milk."

The authors acknowledge that their findings show observational differences rather than cause and effect. They point to several limitations, including the small sample size, and that the study includes mainly Hispanic children making the generalizability of the findings to other ethnicities uncertain.

A comprehensive review of the scientific evidence over the last 27 years concludes that cow's milk and other dairy products do not play a role in the development of childhood obesity. The research being presented at this year's European Congress on Obesity (ECO) in Vienna, Austria (23-26 May) also found no "underlying mechanistic rationale" to support the theory that milk and dairy products promote excess weight gain or increase appetite.

"An important finding was the consistency of findings across different types of milk and dairy products and age groups," explains Dr Anestis Dougkas, Institut Paul Bocuse, Ecully, France who led the research.

"Our results should alleviate any concerns that parents may have about limiting their children's consumption of milk and dairy products on the grounds that they might promote obesity."

It's well known that dairy products such as milk, yogurt, and cheese are nutrient rich foods which provide many essential nutrients throughout life. Previous reviews have shown that milk and dairy are not associated with childhood obesity. But whether milk and dairy promote obesity in children continues to be hotly debated, and public health advice about how much milk and dairy children need, and when to stop having it, remains unclear.

To investigate this further, Dr Anestis Dougkas from the Institut Paul Bocuse in France and colleagues analysed data from 43 cross sectional studies, 32 longitudinal cohort studies, and 20 randomised trials examining the effects of both full and low fat milk and other dairy product intake on obesity in childhood between January 1990 and June 2017. They also examined the possible mechanisms underlying the effect of different milk and dairy products on body-weight regulation.

Analysis of 95 trials involving 203,269 individuals showed that milk and dairy products were not associated with body fatness in children. The researchers found no evidence to suggest that body fatness varied by type of milk or dairy products, or with age of the children. However, they acknowledge a lack of data in children aged 1 to 5 years old. Only nine studies, of which two assessed milk proteins as components of dairy, found a positive association between milk and dairy products and body fatness.

Although the authors note no precise effect size, they conclude: "There is no harmful effect on obesity from incorporating dairy and especially milk in the diet of children and adolescents. These results call into question current recommendations that restrict consumption of milk and dairy products. The new and emerging range of products (including plant-base alternatives being used as dairy milk substitutes) have yet to be evaluated in scientific studies."

The authors note some limitations, including that they did not look for literature in other languages than English and did not assess the quality of the studies. However, their paper is the first to combine results across many studies making it a valuable reference that can be used to update existing nutritional guidelines around milk and dairy consumption in children.

New research presented at this year's European Congress on Obesity (ECO) in Vienna, Austria (23-26 May) shows that a daily use of a novel nasal device to reduce smelling ability can induce weight loss and changes to dietary preferences in people aged 50 years and under. The study was conducted by Dr. Dror Dicker, Hasharon Hospital, Rabin Medical Center, Petah Tikva, Israel and colleagues.

Food odours and our sense of smell can have a significant influence on how much we eat as well as our dietary preferences. There has been extensive study into the role of olfaction (smell) in regulating appetite, food intake, and body weight, but the mechanisms involved are so complex that we have only begun to understand this system. We know that exposure to food odours increases how much we eat, while loss of smell may lead to reduced food intake.

Being overweight or obese can actually sometimes reduce our sense of smell, but overweight and obese people have also been found to have a greater sensitivity to food smells and higher stimulation of their appetite when exposed to food odours which leads them to eating larger portions of food. Olfaction declines as we age, typically beginning around the age of 50. No studies up to now have deliberately reduced the ability to smell and observed its effect on weight loss in human subjects.

The authors conducted a pilot study to determine if a soft silicone nasal insert (Beck Medical, Israel) could be used by obese subjects to reduce their ability to smell, with a resulting reduction in body weight, a change in dietary preferences, and an improvement in metabolic dysfunction.

65 obese adults completed the trial, device group (37) and control group (28). The participants in the study group wore the novel nasal insert daily, and those in the control group inserted "placebo" drops of saline into each nostril daily. All participants were put on a diet with a 500 calorie per day deficit from their regular diet, and follow-up visits occurred every two weeks. Measurements of each subject's weight, olfactory sensitivity, as well as glucose, insulin, and lipid levels were made at the start and end of the study period. The study found that the nasal device worked as planned, causing a significant drop in olfactory sensitivity, while the placebo saline drops had no effect. Participants in both groups lost weight but when considering the research group as a whole, there was not significant difference in the amount of weight lost by those who used the device compared to the control group.

However, analysis of the results according to whether the subject's age was above or below 50 years, found that among participants ages ?50 years, weight loss in the nasal device group was significantly greater than in the control group (7.7% of body weight in device vs. 4.2% in control). In addition, dietary preferences for sugar, artificial sweeteners, and sweet beverages were significantly reduced in device relatively to control for the whole population and primarily for those age ?50. Furthermore, Insulin levels for the whole population reduced significantly in device group from beginning to end of the trial, while no significant difference occurred in control.

The team conclude: "This novel smell-reducing self-administered nasal device caused weight loss in subjects aged ?50 years and reduced dietary preference for sweet food for all participants,". They add: "Further studies should be conducted to explore this new option and to determine the role of this device for treatment of obesity and diabetes".

The wearable nasal insert is planned to be commercially available within few months, and will be marketed under the name NozNoz™ as a non-medical wellness device, while additional medical research is planned to further support its clinical future use.

Boldness correlates with the mating success, but not body size or sex, of yellow-spotted monitor lizards roaming the remote Oombulgurri floodplains of tropical Western Australia, ecologists report in the Ecological Society of America's open access journal Ecosphere. But boldness has a cost: bold individuals expose themselves to much higher risk of being eaten by predators during the dangerous wet season. The researchers demonstrated quantifiable behavioral syndromes in the large lizards, with an intriguing relationship to the lizards' seasonal hunting strategies.

"Personality is kind of interchangeable with the term behavioral syndrome. Some scientists have a weird thing about saying "personality"; they don't like to think animals have personalities. But they definitely do," said lead author Georgia Ward-Fear, a researcher at the University of Sydney. Boldness, she and her coauthors found, was not conveyed by imposing stature. "There are bold females as well as bold males, and shy females as well as shy males. Some of the biggest individuals we observed were really shy."

The yellow-spotted monitors (Varanus panoptes), affectionately known as goannas, are related to Komodo dragons and share many of their larger cousins' behaviors. Adults can be 1.6 meters long, and some males grow larger. The lizards hunt insects, frogs, and small mammals, and scavenge whatever they can get.

"This boldness syndrome was not only quantifiable, it correlated with a heap of ecological traits that we were monitoring. We we were only able to figure that out because we were radiotracking individuals to assess their home ranges and the characteristics of the habitats that they were choosing to stay in during the two distinct seasons," Ward-Fear said. "It was based on intuition really, to start with, but we couldn't have imagined how many correlations we would pull out based on the behavioral differences within individuals."

Traditionally, behavioral research is conducted in the lab. Standardized measures that can be repeated easily and reliably are difficult to achieve under field conditions. Ward-Fear's unusual field study of of goanna behavioral syndromes emerged spontaneously out of long term ecological study aimed at goanna conservervation.

Ward-Fear and her colleagues grew curious about goanna personality during field experiments designed to teach predatory lizards that poisonous, invasive cane toads (Rhinella marina) make a poor meal. The large Central and South American toads, introduced to Australia during the 1930s to control agricultural pests, have spread extremely successfully through Oceania, creating havoc in the ecosystems they infiltrate by poisoning native predators that try to eat them.

"Cane toads have caused huge impacts in all the environments that they have invaded. They are still invading across northern Australia," Ward-Fear said. Researchers are hoping to get ahead of the invasion front, teaching native lizards to avoid the poisonous toads.

With the goal of providing a non-lethal life lesson, the researchers fed the goannas canes toads that were small enough to make them sick without killing them. True toads, like the cane toad, possess potent cardiotoxins. Because Australian has no native toads, Australian reptiles like the yellow spotted monitors have not evolved defenses against the bufotoxins in the toads' skin and glands.

"Boldness is a really interesting part of the story, because conditioned taste aversion is a behavioral mechanism. We found that shyness is quite correlated with neophobia, fear of new things. You can imagine very shy individuals are probably less likely to eat novel prey that they meet in the field, so they may have more of a resilience to the cane toads naturally. So it was really cool to document this behavior in the context of the cane toad study," said Ward-Fear.

During the cane toad study, the team made 12 visits to Oombulgurri (15°08'34.0"S 127°52'36.0"E) over 3 years. They measured the body length, weight, and health of the goannas, took genetic samples, and fitted the goannas with radio transmitters. While tracking the animals through their complex lives, the team got to know them as individuals, with what seemed like distinct personalities, Ward Fear said. Consistently brave or shy behavior in approaching strange ecologists, unusual foods, and risky environments, did not seem to be associated with body size or sex. The ecologists were curious.

"Anyone who works with these animals knows that they are amazing. The are renowned for their intelligence, but there has been no formal study of their cognition. They do come across as intelligent lizards. They are quite sneaky, and inquisitive. They are a bit more like a mammal in that sense. They're fun to work with," Ward-Fear said.

To assess boldness, Ward-Fear and her colleagues designed stardard response scales for three behaviors. They assessed the goannas' skittishness in response to the standardized approach of an ecologist.

"They'll try to take you on if they feel too threatened, or if they're angry, or during the mating season. They stand up on their hind legs and they inflate their throats," Ward-Fear said, but the goannas are also curious. "They watch you from a long distance away, and they can let you get quite close to them."

A second scale quantified response to handling. Some individuals freeze, while other struggle mightily, whipping their tails, hissing, and inflating their throats in warning. A third scale indicated how the goannas reacted to cane toads, a frog-like potential prey that they had never seen before. Some goannas will go for the strange food immediately, others investigated warily, or would not try cane toads at all. The researchers combined the scores into a single measure of boldness.

Bolder individuals had larger home ranges and higher mating success, but a higher rate of death. Ward-Fear says the patterns of habitat use by bolder goanna suprized her the most.

"The coolest thing was the space use, habitat use that we saw," she said.

When annual monsoons flood the Oombulgurri, the plains burst to life along the rivers. The verdant river edges are prized goanna hunting areas, rich in food, but the thick plant life also hides dangerous predators. During the wet season, large pythons descend from the steep, rocky escarpment at the edge of the plain to patrol the river edges. The pythons, like dingos, raptors, and humans, are big enough to make a meal of yellow-spotted monitors. The food-rich wet season is also the season of highest risk for goannas.

Shy goannas abandon the high-risk riparian zone during the wet season, Ward-Fear discovered. Bold individuals stay close, managing risk by avoiding dense vegetation where snakes lurk. As a consequence, many bold goannas are eaten during the wet season. Shyer lizards stick to sparser plant cover at all times of year. During the dry season, when need for water draws shy goannas back to the rivers, shy individuals experience their highest rate of predation. The different personality types appear to persue complementary life strategies.

Ward-Fear does not yet know if the behavioral syndromes are inherited. She plans to investigate goanna aggression and adventurousness in future field work at Oombulgurri.

UBC computer scientists have turned Amazon Alexa into a tool for software engineers, tasking the virtual assistant to take care of mundane programming tasks, helping increase productivity and speed up workflow.

Software engineers use many different tools for any one project. They work with millions of lines of computer code and run their code through various independent tools to help edit, build and test systems and for project management to get their programs running smoothly.

"It can be quite complicated to switch between the different tools because they each use a unique syntax and you have to understand how to put them together," said Nick Bradley, who led this work during his master's research in computer science at UBC. "The idea to use Alexa came out of my frustration from using these different tools and having to spend so much time looking up how to do it and use those tools together."

Bradley and computer science professors Reid Holmes and Thomas Fritz decided to test whether Amazon's virtual assistant could help with this process. They wanted software engineers to use simple, conversational language to ask Alexa to complete some of their tasks, the same way we ask it to give us the weather forecast or play our favourite songs.

Researchers said it was more than just a matter of teaching Alexa some key phrases and mapping different commands to the work, they also had to figure out common multi-step tasks engineers were performing and build a system that could automate those tasks. They then asked 21 engineers from local Vancouver software companies to test out their system and evaluate it. While the engineers found the tool useful and provided lots of positive feedback, there was one challenge.

"The biggest problem was using voice commands in an office environment--they found it distracting to their neighbours," said Bradley.

The computer scientists' next development will be to create a chat bot to fulfill a similar function so engineers can type minimal requests and have the system perform their multi-step tasks so they can focus on the more important parts of their jobs.

Holmes says this research is part of a larger effort to understand how software engineers do their jobs.

"The pace of change in the software field is so fast that engineers don't have time to be introspective and think about the way they work," he said. "Our job in academia is to step back and really think about how we can better support engineers to quickly and correctly build the kinds of software we depend upon in our modern society. Systems keep getting larger and more complex and using personal assistants could be one way to help developers be more effective within this fast-paced environment."

The researchers also recognize that these virtual assistants could be programmed for a variety of occupations including medicine, law, or accounting.

"You can imagine a situation where a lawyer is reading a legal brief and asks Alexa to find relevant cases on similar topics to help with research," said Holmes.

The study will be presented next week at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in Gothenburg, Sweden: https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~rtholmes/papers/icse_2018_bradley.pdf

CHAPEL HILL - University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers have found that by helping to form clots within tumors, immune cells that flock to a particular type of lung cancer are actually building a foundation for the tumor to spread within the body.

In the journal Nature Communications, researchers report for a particular subset of lung cancer tumors, there is a high prevalence of immune cells called inflammatory monocytes. These immune cells, which normally help to build clotting scaffolds to promote wound healing, also make it possible for tumor cells to migrate and spread to other parts of the body.

"The way that these immune cells promote lung cancer metastases was very unexpected. They produce a large amount of a factor that leads to clot in the tumor, which the tumor cells can latch onto and climb across to spread in the body," said UNC Lineberger's Chad Pecot, MD, assistant professor in the UNC School of Medicine Division of Hematology and Oncology and the study's corresponding author. "Our goal is to use this information to teach the cancer 'wounds' to heal themselves."

Previous studies have classified lung squamous carcinoma - which accounts for about 30 percent of all lung cancers -- into four different types based on their biological and molecular characteristics. In the new study, Pecot and his collaborators found that lung squamous carcinoma could be reclassified into just two different categories based on whether they showed a high presence of inflammatory monocytes.

They used expression of the CD14 gene as a biomarker to show that high presence of this immune cell was linked to poor survival.

"It's important to understand that while there is so much focus on activating parts of the immune system to attack cancer, there is also a 'Jekyll and Hyde' process going on in most tumors," Pecot said. "There are immune cells we want to activate, but there are other immune cells we want to turn off."

The researchers used newly developed laboratory models of lung squamous carcinoma to study the role of the inflammatory monocytes. The tumors make a signal called CCL2, which helps to recruit inflammatory monocytes. These immune cells then release a clotting factor, Factor XIIIA, which Pecot said creates a fibrin scaffold that tumor cells climb across and then travel to distant organs.

"These results shed new light on tumor microenvironment functioning and, potentially, may lead to new approaches for targeting the metastases of this extremely aggressive disease," said Alessandro Porrello, PhD, researcher at UNC Lineberger and the study's first author.
By genetically modifying the expression of CCL2 in a metastasis model developed in their laboratory, they found low expression was linked to reduced metastases, while high expression was linked to enhanced metastatic features. They also demonstrated that the presence of a clot made it easier for cancer cells to move and migrate. Also, when looking at tumor samples from patients, they found that tumors with high amounts of the fibrin cross-linking was associated with an increased risk of the tumor spreading.

The researchers were able to reduce metastases by using a compound that blocks CCR2, a receptor on the surface of the inflammatory monocytes. They saw a significant decrease in lung metastases. Pecot said they want to continue investigating this strategy, and potentially other ways of preventing clotting within tumors, to see if it prevents metastases from initiating and whether it can stall the process once it has begun.

"We want to make progress for patients with lung squamous carcinoma and expand the therapeutic options available to these patients," Pecot said. "The more we understand the progression of the disease, including how metastases occurs, the more we'll be able to understand how we can regress this disease, or just keep it in check. We believe there are ways we can teach these tumors how to heal."

Understanding the evolution of a 400 million-year-old anti-viral protein that first emerged in marine life, is helping researchers get the upper-hand on human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Researchers at Western University were interested in the origin of a gene that encodes for protein, HERC5, shown to potently inhibit HIV. In a new study published in the Journal of Virology Stephen Barr, PhD, assistant professor at Western's Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, shows that the gene first emerged in fish over 400 million-years-ago and has been involved in an evolutionary arms race with viruses ever since.

The study shows that over hundreds of millions of years, this battle for survival caused the genes to develop sophisticated shields to block viruses, which in turn forced the viruses to continually evolve and change to circumvent these defences. This provides insight into both how the viruses and the immune system has evolved.

Using sequencing technology, Barr and his research team found that the HERC5 gene from this 400 million-year-old fish called a coelacanth encodes for a protein that can potently block the primate version of HIV, known as simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), but fails to block HIV.

"Of course HIV and these modern day viruses that we study aren't present in fish, but ancient versions of them are. So what we assume is that as these ancient retroviruses wreaked havoc on marine life, their immune systems had to develop a defense," Barr explained. "We think that one of those defenses is the HERC family. As retroviruses evolved, eventually giving rise to HIV, different variants of HERC genes emerged to combat these infections."

Since these viruses have been in battle for so long, they have had time to learn of ways to get around these shields and as a result became smarter. Consequently, this new level of sophistication likely helped these viruses to jump the species barrier and establish new infections in humans.

"By learning the big picture and identifying all the different proteins that can make up this defense against viruses, we can develop a more global approach to advance antiviral drugs. Our future goal is to discover the mechanisms that viruses use to inactivate HERCs and other similar antiviral proteins so that we can exploit this knowledge for the development of novel antiviral drugs," said Barr.