Tech

Probably the last place anyone would want to find airborne polychlorinated biphenyl compounds (PCBs) is in the kitchen, yet that's exactly where scientists detected their presence, according to a new report in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology. They say that the PCBs, which are widely considered carcinogenic, are unwanted byproducts of sealant breakdown in modern kitchen cabinetry.

As a group, PCBs are classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as known human carcinogens, and their manufacture was banned in the U.S. in 1979. But because of the tendency of these chemicals to stick around in the environment and their inadvertent production as manufacturing byproducts, PCBs can still be found in offices and schools. Keri C. Hornbuckle and colleagues at the University of Iowa College of Engineering wanted to determine how much and what types of PCBs are present in and around residences.

The researchers measured the concentrations of PCBs using polyurethane-equipped passive air samplers (PUF-PAS) for a 6-week interval from August 22, 2017, to October 2, 2017, inside and outside 16 homes in Iowa. They found neurotoxic PCB-47 and PCB-51, as well as PCB-68, at much higher levels than expected. The concentrations seemed to be dependent on the year the house was built, with higher levels in more recent years. After testing the emissions coming from a variety of household items, including the stove, floor and walls, the researchers found the PCBs wafting off the finished kitchen cabinetry. The researchers suspect that the substances come from the decomposition of 2,4-dichlorobenzoyl peroxide, a common ingredient in modern cabinet sealants. This finding brings to light a previously unknown source of a toxic chemical in the home.

Using computer models and laboratory rats, Johns Hopkins researchers have demonstrated that "direct electrical current" can be delivered to nerves preferentially, blocking pain signals while leaving other sensations undisturbed.

The researchers say the experiments advance the search for improved implantable devices able to treat chronic pain that is due to peripheral nerve injury or disease.

"We have developed a potential new concept for neural implants that works differently than conventional electrical stimulators," says Gene Fridman, Ph.D., M.S., assistant professor of otolaryngology--head and neck surgery and biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "We believe we are the first to investigate the idea of using this concept for implantable medical devices that use direct electrical current, long thought to be unsafe."

Implantable spinal cord stimulators and peripheral nerve stimulators designed to interrupt nerve pain impulses were developed more than 30 years ago, but the devices work by interacting with sensory nerve cells, leading to numbness, tingling and other side effects.

In a report on the new findings, published online April 11 in Science Advances, the researchers say direct electrical current devices would allow for more precise, preferential targeting of the appropriate pain-transmitting nerve cells, making them more effective for pain suppression and reducing the side effects of conventional devices.

Traditionally, direct current -- or single-direction streaming electrical signaling -- has been considered unsafe for medical devices that deliver electrical stimulation in the body. The continual flow of electrical current results in chemical reactions at the site of the electrodes delivering the signal, causing gas bubbles, corrosion and toxic byproducts to form.

All modern implantable electrical stimulation devices use alternating current pulses instead, in which the electrical current switches back and forth very quickly in a circuit between positive and negative voltage. Such rapid pulses allow the devices to interact with the nervous system but don't create the toxic chemical reactions.

In 2013, Fridman and his team reported on successful efforts to develop an ionic direct current system, which converts the "safe" pulses like those delivered in the conventional stimulator into direct ionic current that may potentially be applied to the body safely.

To find out if the modified system of direct ionic current could be safely used to preferentially target and silence pain-transmitting neurons, Fridman teamed up with pain researcher Yun Guan, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor of anesthesiology, critical care medicine and neurological surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

When nerve cells receive a signal of pain or other sensation, the signal opens sodium channels and floods the cell with positively charged sodium ions, which positively charge the neurons until the electrochemistry changes enough to inactivate the channels and close them.

This change in electrical charge of the neuron is what propagates and sends the signal to the spinal cord and then to the brain to register as a sensation, such as pain or pressure.

Each nerve in mammalian arms and legs contains multiple sensory neurons (nerve cells) transmitting pain and other sensations such as touch or feeling to the spinal cord. Fridman and Guan realized that the pain and "feeling" sensory neurons each contained different kinds of sodium channels and that it may be possible to block one kind of channel and not the others to prevent patients from feeling pain but not other sensations.

Fridman and Guan's team first devised a computer model to try to predict what happens when researchers use direct current to block the pain signals or inhibit other sensory neurons. In the model they sent negatively charged direct current to the nerves to weaken their activity. The model showed that the sodium channels 1.6 in the feeling sensory neurons were blocked with 670 microamperes, but the pain neuron's sodium channels 1.7 were blocked at only 290 microamperes. For comparison, holding a 9-volt battery to the tongue delivers approximately 2,000 microamperes, causing a small shock. This suggested to the researchers that it was theoretically possible to preferentially target one type of neuron over another, since the channels could be blocked at different levels of current.

Next, working with anesthetized rats, they sent direct ionic current into the sciatic nerve in the legs and, using neural recording electrodes, recorded whether this current inhibited the activity of individual or groups of neurons at the spinal cord.

In a series of experiments, they increased the current in two-minute increments from 0.1 to 0.2, 0.4 and 0.8 milliamperes. The current at 0.8 milliamperes completely blocked the response of the pain-transmitting neurons. Although signals from the feeling sensory neurons were reduced by 20 percent, they were still active and sending sensation signals to the spinal cord. After the current was stopped, the signal from the pain-transmitting neurons remained blocked for another two minutes, whereas the signal from the feeling sensory neurons quickly came back.

"Using direct current, we can inhibit the pain-transmitting neurons at much lower amplitudes than the feeling sensory neurons, allowing us to be preferential in how we target the nerve," says Guan. "We also found that because the pain neurons take longer to come back on line, we may be able to conserve energy and not have to deliver this electrical current constantly to keep them blocked."

Being able to deliver this current periodically rather than constantly would mean longer use of the neural implant before needing to recharge the battery, says Guan.

Guan cautions that more studies will be needed to verify safety and measure the strength and duration of pain relief before direct ionic current devices could be used for people.

For years, bioengineer Yaling Liu has been in pursuit of the deadly tumor cell. Liu has been perfecting a microfluidic device the size of two quarters that has the ability to catch and release circulating tumor cells (CTCs)--cancer cells that circulate in a cancer patient's blood. Such a device could lead to earlier detection of primary tumors and metastasis, as well as determine the effectiveness of treatment--all through a simple, non-invasive blood test.

Liu, a faculty member in both bioengineering and mechanical engineering at Lehigh University, is in the early stages of testing his device in a clinical setting--and the results are promising.

Liu's "lab on a chip" is notable for its ability to not only capture tumor cells circulating in the blood, but to "release" those cells as well.

"Our circulating tumor cell device can release a tumor cell captured from a blood sample, enabling single cell analysis," says Liu. "It could be used to check the effectiveness of treatment, by identifying the amount of tumor cells circulating. Conducting genetic testing on a released single cell could also reveal whether the primary tumor had metastasized, as metastasized cells have unique genetic markers."

The device could also be used to check the effectiveness of cancer gene therapy.

"Genetic tests could be performed on the released CTCs, indicating if the gene therapy is triggering changes in gene expression," says Liu. In other words, such testing could help detect whether a therapy is working or if other methods should be explored.

Liu will present some of these findings today, April 18th, at a conference taking place in Istanbul, Turkey called The Future of Medicine hosted by Royal Academy of Science International Trust (RASIT) and Bahçe?ehir University. Liu will present via Skype from his office on Lehigh University's campus in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Liu's device is part of a clinical drug trial for melanoma and renal cancers at the Lehigh Valley Cancer Institute. Funding for the study has been provided by the Andy Derr Foundation for Kidney Cancer Research. The goal is to gather preliminary data about whether the device can improve care.

The first stage of the trial, which involved an analysis of circulating tumor cells from a single blood draw of several dozen patients, has demonstrated strong potential.

"The next step will be to track a few patients over the course of their treatment, taking several blood draws to see if the data captured by the microfluidic device correlates with the data their medical team is collecting through other methods," says Liu.

Liu and his team are preparing to undertake that next step within the next few months.

Magnetism, wavy-herringbone design key to CTC device's success

Liu's microfluidic device achieves two key standards by which the success of CTC devices is measured: high capture efficiency and high selectivity. Capture efficiency refers to the percentage of CTCs that the device collects. Selectivity measures how well it rejects unwanted cells, such as red and white blood cells.

The rectangular chip --smaller than a few square centimeters and using as little as a few milliliters of blood--is made of the polymer PDMS. The chip's key feature is a tiny flow channel on a hierarchically designed pad that is optimized to capture tumor cells from the blood flowing across it.

Using microfluidic design principles, Liu's group engineered vortices in their device to increase the chance that tumor cells will collide with the surface of the flow channel. The group also arranged ripples in a wavy-herringbone pattern lining the bottom of the capture pad.

"The herringbone surface generates a passive vortex that mixes the cells and increases the chance that they will collide with the capture pad," says Liu. "High selectivity is achieved by smoothing the sharp grooved herringbone pattern into a wavy one, helping to filter out unwanted cells."

The group uses immunoaffinity--the specific chemical affinity between an antibody and an antigen-- to make CTCs adhere to the device while normal blood cells flow past. They coat the pad with a layer of anti-epithelial cell adhesion molecules (anti-EpCAM) which bond with CTCs but not with normal cells.

Liu and his team recently improved upon the device's release efficiency--or its ability to allow circulating tumor cells to be collected for further study. Instead of permanently depositing particles through immunoaffinity, anti-EpCAM coated magnetic microparticles were trapped over the untreated PDMS surface by an external magnetic field and were then released by readily removing the magnet for CTC collection. The results were published in the journal Lab on a Chip (Lab on a Chip 17 (19), 3291-3299) in an article called: "Magnetic particles assisted capture and release of rare circulating tumor cells using wavy-herringbone structured microfluidic devices."

According to Liu, under optimized conditions, the capture efficiency of the tumor cells were as high as 92% ± 2.8%. Capture experiments were also performed on whole blood samples, and the capture efficiency was in a high range of 81-95%, at different tumor cell concentrations.

He says such a method can potentially be used for CTC sorting from patient blood samples, CTC concentration monitoring, therapeutic guidance and drug dosage choice, and further study of tumors, such as drug screening and tumor mutations.

Adds Liu: "With metastatic cancers accounting for around 90% of deaths from solid tumors, the hope is that one day a device that can enable the analysis of single tumor cells circulating in the blood could make a big difference in early diagnosis, detection and monitoring of numerous types of cancer, without invasive biopsies."

MINNEAPOLIS - A preliminary study suggests that an investigational drug may help increase protein levels in babies with spinal muscular atrophy. The open-label study is released today and will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology's 70th Annual Meeting in Los Angeles, April 21 to 27, 2018.

Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is an inherited disease that leads to loss of motor function. It is the leading genetic cause of death in infants and toddlers. The disease is caused by reduced levels of the survival motor neuron (SMN) protein. In SMA, the SMN1 gene is mutated or missing. The backup SMN2 gene allows production of some of the necessary protein.

The new drug, called RG7916, is a liquid solution given orally once a day. It is designed to modulate the SMN2 gene splicing to increase SMN protein.

The study involved babies with type 1 spinal muscular atrophy who have two copies of the SMN2 gene. On average, these babies survive for 10.5 months before they die or need permanent breathing support.

The first phase of the study involved 21 babies who were three to seven months old at the start of the study. They were given the drug every day for four weeks at different dose levels.

Study results showed an increase of the SMN protein in the blood, with greater increases for higher doses of the drug. For the highest dose, the levels were up to 6.5 times higher after four weeks of treatment compared to levels at the beginning of the study.

At the time of the analysis, 19 babies were alive. The two fatal events reported were disease related and not considered related to the investigational drug. The average study duration for the 19 babies was four months with a range of one month to 13.5 months.

None of the 19 babies lost the ability to swallow, needed a tracheostomy for breathing or needed permanent breathing support during the study. There were no safety problems that required any babies to be removed from the study.

"These results are exciting, as children with SMA type 2, which is less severe than type 1, have approximately twice as much SMN protein as those with type 1 so to see an increase of up to 6.5 times the amount of protein is very encouraging and supports the possibility to see improved function in these babies," said study author Giovanni Baranello, MD, PhD, at the Carlo Besta Neurological Institute in Milan, Italy. "This research is continuing and much more needs to be done to determine whether this treatment will provide meaningful benefits for children with spinal muscular atrophy."

Baranello noted that the first phase of the study was designed to assess the safety of the treatment and to find the right dose for the babies; it was not designed to determine how effective the treatment was. This will be assessed in the second phase of the study, which has started and is currently recruiting participants.

A group of scientists, including specialists from Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics (ITF), described a universal characteristic, in which many unique graphene properties are "hidden". It turned out that abnormal graphene behavior can be fully characterised by Poisson ratio, which determines material capability to shrink or extend in transverse dimension. Moreover,scientists found key factors that can influence this characteristic. The results are published in Physical Review B.

Graphene is a two-dimensional sheet consisting of one layer of carbon atoms. Due to its unusual properties, today graphene is considered one of the most promising materials for new non-silicon elastic electronics. One of the most interesting things about graphene is the relation between its unique elastic and electrical properties. For instance, graphene shows extremely high mobility of electric charges, which can change drastically under elastic stress. Physicists tried to find a universal physical characteristic fully reflecting this unusual behaviour. This would make it possible to use graphene more effectively, as well as create new materials with required exotic properties. However, until recently researchers could not find any such parameter.

The key to understanding this question lied in the unusual behavior of graphene under stretching. Most common materials shrink in transverse direction while stretching: a rubber band is a typical example. However, about a hundred years ago, the German physicist Voldemar Voight discovered that pyrite crystals, on the contrary, extend under stretching. Such materials were called auxetics, and in the late 1970s scientists obtained first artificial auxetic. The secret of such materials comes from their unusual geometry. Although in a relaxed state auxetic structural elements are folded, when stretching is applied they unfold and grow in size.

Auxetics have a number of unusual features that will help improve existing technologies and create new ones. "Conventional materials expand when heated and this impairs their original properties through various mechanical stresses and disturbances. Auxetics can, on the contrary, shrink. So there is an idea to create combined materials with zero expansion ratio using auxetics. As the temperature rises, the conventional compound of such materials will tend to expand, but auxetic compound will compensate for this," comments Valentin Kachorovskii, a leading researcher at The Ioffe Institute and ITF.

The feature determining material capability to shrink or extend in transverse dimension under tension is called the Poisson ratio. In auxetics it is negative, in ordinary materials -- positive. "Scientists were long interested in graphene Poisson ratio," says Kachorovskii. "For a long time we thought that it was equal to the universal negative value -?. However, a number of recent numerical calculations showed that graphene Poisson ratio could be both positive and negative. At first glance, results of various calculations contradict each other completely."

Direct experimental verification of this parameter is difficult. Graphene is hard to obtain in isolation: it is usually "grown" on various substrates, and their characteristics mask the true value of graphene Poisson ratio. What is more, samples of isolated graphene are so small that it is practically impossible to attach brackets for controlled stretching. At the same time, researchers and engineers who develop new carbon-based technologies need to know exactly whether graphene is auxetic or not.

Authors of the new work managed to "reconcile" contradictory results of previous calculations and find parameters that exactly determine the Poisson ratio of graphene. Physicists found out that it is a variable value depending on tensile force applied. "With a very large force, graphene behaves like a normal material, demonstrating positive Poisson ratio. However, when the applied force decreases, we find ourselves in an area where graphene exhibits typically auxetic properties," notes Kachorovskii.

Scientists explained this unusual link between Poisson ratio and stretching. On popular images graphene is shown as a two-dimensional sheet of carbon atoms, usually flat. However, in reality so-called bending waves run along this "sheet". They tend to turn graphene from a flat state into a crumpled state. "This is called a crumpling transition," Kachorovskii explains. "For a long time the theory of membranes predicted that due to this phenomenon two-dimensional crystals such as graphene could not exist in principle. They would always strive to shrink into a ball. As we see, this assumption was a mistake since along the surface of graphene ordinary compression-extension waves run along with bending ones. Nonlinear interaction between two wave types does not allow the membrane to shrink into a ball. Even though, the dimension of such crystals does not actually equal to two. Due to crumpling transition, it is in an intermediate state between two and three dimensions."

Membrane striving to curl due to ordinary compression-extension waves competes with the effect of smoothing transverse waves due to an external applied force. This results in a changing sign of Poisson ratio. In other words, if the external force is high, the abnormal auxetic properties are suppressed and Poisson ratio is positive. As the scientists showed, the unusual properties of graphene are based on that slightly crumpled resting state. "In folds of transverse bending waves additional energy is stored, which accounts for graphene abnormal elasticity and other unusual properties. For example, when heated graphene begins to shrink in the longitudinal direction, since the entire extension goes to transverse folds," continues Kachorovskii. "And universal characteristic which determines exactly graphene behavior is Poisson ratio. With its help, you can describe and predict a large number of properties of graphene and other materials."

What is more, current work contains explanation why previous studies of the Poisson ratio of graphene had contradictory results. "We derived an analytically complete system of equations for the elastic balance of graphene sheet. It turns out that there are two modes of behavior for graphene membrane. In the usual one, all the properties of graphene are determined by standard formulas and Poisson ratio is positive. At the same time, for samples larger than so-called Ginzburg length, an abnormal elasticity regime is realized, leading to negative Poisson ratio", adds Kachorovskii. For graphene, Ginzburg's length ranges from 40 to 70 angstroms. The size of samples used in practice is certainly greater, therefore it is possible to see the most unusual auxetic behavior.

The explanation of this phenomenon is also connected with waves of different types, which interact with each other in a very complicated manner. "Ginzburg length characterizes the scale at which these interactions can no longer be neglected as they begin to abnormally shift the material. For example, such large-scale interaction does not allow two-dimensional crystals to shrink into a ball", explains Kachorovskii. Different substances have different Ginzburg lengths and knowing them is extremely important for the development of new materials. "Often people create new materials without calculating Ginzburg length and then they try to find something unusual in their properties. But our work shows that if Ginzburg length is as large as 1 kilometer, for example, regular sized samples will not show any special properties", Kachorovskii notes.

The fact that graphene can stretch normally or abnormally depending on the applied force in perspective will help create hypersensitive sound sensors, for example. "Sound waves stretch graphene membrane, and depending on the degree of stretching graphene noticeably changes the electrical resistance. Calculations show that sensitivity of such detector can be gigantic. In addition, in auxetics the sound velocity is noticeably higher than in "normal" materials. The value of other elastic constants, for example, the Young's modulus remains the same. Therefore, when graphene becomes stretched to the state of auxetic, the sound in it spreads very quickly. This allows us to create ultra-fast sensors which can detect a very rapid change of oscillations", summarizes Kachorovskii.

Philadelphia, April 17, 2018 - Evidence suggests that developing cooking and food preparation skills is important for health and nutrition, yet the practice of home cooking is declining and now rarely taught in school. A new study published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior found that developing cooking skills as a young adult may have long-term benefits for health and nutrition.

"The impact of developing cooking skills early in life may not be apparent until later in adulthood when individuals have more opportunity and responsibility for meal preparation," said lead author Jennifer Utter, PhD, MPH, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. "The strength of this study is the large, population-based sample size followed over a period of 10 years to explore the impact of perceived cooking skills on later nutritional well-being."

Data were collected as part of the Project Eating and Activity in Teens and Young Adults longitudinal study conducted in Minneapolis-Saint Paul area schools. Participants reported on adequacy of cooking skills in 2002-2003 when they were 18 to 23 years old. Data was then collected in 2015-2016 on nutrition-related outcomes when participants were 30 to 35 years old. Questions assessed the perceived adequacy of cooking skills, how often they prepared a meal that included vegetables, how often they ate meals as a family, and how often they ate at a fast food restaurant.

Most participants perceived their cooking skills to be adequate at age 18 - 23, with approximately one quarter of adults reporting their cooking skills to be very adequate. There were no differences in perceived cooking skills by sex, race or ethnicity, educational attainment, or age. Perceived adequacy of cooking skills predicted multiple indicators of nutrition outcomes later in adulthood including greater odds of preparing a meal with vegetables most days and less frequent consumption of fast food. If those who perceived their cooking skills as adequate had families, they ate more frequent family meals, less frequent fast food meals, and had fewer barriers to food preparation.

"Opportunities to develop cooking skills by adolescents may result in long-term benefits for nutritional well-being," said Dr. Utter. "Families, health and nutrition professionals, educators, community agencies, and funders can continue to invest in home economics and cooking education knowing that the benefits may not be fully realized until young adults develop more autonomy and live independently."

Biologists at the University of California San Diego have developed a method of manipulating the genes of an agricultural pest that has invaded much of the United States and caused millions of dollars in damage to high-value berry and other fruit crops.

Research led by Anna Buchman in the lab of Omar Akbari, a new UC San Diego insect genetics professor, describes the world's first "gene drive" system--a mechanism for manipulating genetic inheritance--in Drosophila suzukii, a fruit fly commonly known as the spotted-wing drosophila.

As reported April 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Buchman and her colleagues developed a gene drive system termed Medea (named after the mythological Greek enchantress who killed her offspring) in which a synthetic "toxin" and a corresponding "antidote" function to dramatically influence inheritance rates with nearly perfect efficiency.

"We've designed a gene drive system that dramatically biases inheritance in these flies and can spread through their populations," said Buchman. "It bypasses normal inheritance rules. It's a new method for manipulating populations of these invasive pests, which don't belong here in the first place."

Native to Japan, the highly invasive fly was first found on the West Coast in 2008 and has now been reported in more than 40 states. The spotted wing drosophila uses a sharp organ known as an ovipositor to pierce ripening fruit and deposit eggs directly inside the crop, making it much more damaging than other drosophila flies that lay eggs only on top of decaying fruit. Drosophila suzukii has reportedly caused more than $39 million in revenue losses for the California raspberry industry alone and an estimated $700 million overall per year in the U.S.

In contained cage experiments of spotted wing drosophila using the synthetic Medea system, the researchers reported up to 100 percent effective inheritance bias in populations descending 19 generations.

"We envision, for example, replacing wild flies with flies that are alive but can't lay eggs directly in blueberries," said Buchman.

Applications for the new synthetic gene drive system could include spreading genetic elements that confer susceptibility to certain environmental factors, such as temperature. If a certain temperature is reached, for example, the genes within the modified spotted wing flies would trigger its death. Other species of fruit flies would not be impacted by this system.

"This is the first gene drive system in a major worldwide crop pest," said Akbari, who recently moved his lab to UC San Diego from UC Riverside, where the research began. "Given that some strains demonstrated 100 percent non-Mendelian transmission ratios, far greater than the 50 percent expected for normal Mendelian transmission, this system could in the future be used to control populations of D. suzukii."

Another possibility for the new gene drive system would be to enhance susceptibility to environmentally friendly insecticides already used in the agricultural industry.

"I think everybody wants access to quality fresh produce that's not contaminated with anything and not treated with toxic pesticides, and so if we don't deal with Drosophila suzukii, crop losses will continue and might lead to higher prices," said Buchman. "So this gene drive system is a biologically friendly, environmentally friendly way to protect an important part of our food supply."

New answers have been uncovered in the fight against bare-nosed wombat sarcoptic mange, thanks to the latest research by the University of Tasmania.

The findings published today (18 April 2018) in the Royal Society journal Open Science uncover previously unknown health issues in Tasmania's bare-nosed wombat population affected by sarcoptic mange.

The research follows the recent outbreak of sarcoptic mange at Narawntapu National Park in the Tasmania's North, which has seen a 94 per cent decrease in the wombat population in that area, over the past seven years.

Sarcoptic mange is caused by skin burrowing parasites and is known predominately to cause hair loss, skin thickening and death in Tasmanian bare-nosed wombats.

The latest research led by the University's School of Natural Sciences researcher Alynn Martin shows sarcoptic mange also causes a major loss of body heat, highly increased metabolic rate, detrimental behaviour changes and alteration of fat composition in wombats.

The loss of heat and metabolic rise leads to affected wombats burning up high amounts of energy and being restricted by the disease in their foraging efforts, resulting in an inability to eat enough to replace energy levels and in many cases to survive.

The new findings particularly challenge past assumptions that wombats with mange spent more foraging.

"This research addresses critical knowledge gaps about the impact of physiological changes in wombats with mange giving us a more comprehensive picture of the health implications," Ms Martin said.

"We found while wombats with sarcoptic mange do spend more time out of their burrows, they actually spend less time foraging and more time resting and itching because of the mange.
"This means they are not eating enough to make up for the high amount of energy they are burning - which can result in death."

Importantly, the research also showed obvious changes in fatty tissue composition in wombats with the disease, suggesting a high fat diet might work as part of the solution to the health issues associated with mange.

"Supplementation has the potential to help arrest the fatty tissue changes we have seen in mange ridden wombat, enable the storage of more nutrients to meet the animals high metabolic rate and help keep these animals alive," Ms Martin said.

"With this extra piece of the puzzle there is the potential for a combination approach to management including diet supplementation of individual wombats, improved disease treatment options and treatment delivery.

"We are working closely with the state government, and are excited about the positive direction of this research for the welfare of individual wombats."

With sarcoptic mange affecting more than 100 species globally, it is also hoped the latest research which is part of a broader, collaborative wildlife disease research project, can also be applied to other species.

"We've seen the same sort of heat loss due to hair loss in wolves for example," Ms Martin said.

"Even though we are researching wombats specifically, the management implications we've found are far broader reaching."

ANN ARBOR--Most of the roughly 15.5 million cancer survivors in the U.S. receive chemotherapy, and roughly 65 percent develop some degree of the chemotherapy-induced nerve damage known as peripheral neuropathy.

Peripheral neuropathy simply means nerves outside of the brain and spinal cord are affected, and symptoms include numbness and tingling in extremities, and in about 30 percent of patients, pain. Neuropathy can drastically diminish quality of life--and in extreme cases, may necessitate chemotherapy dose reductions.

Unfortunately, neuropathy often goes underreported and untreated, said Ellen Lavoie Smith, associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Nursing. This happens because clinicians and researchers don't have a valid, standardized way to measure symptoms or the effectiveness of neuropathy treatments. Right now, the drug Cymbalta (duloxetine) is the only drug FDA-approved to treat painful neuropathy symptoms.

Some doctors and nurses ask patients about neuropathy, or whether they have symptoms of numbness and tingling, and others don't.

"If we don't have a reliable measurement tool, we can't know if the interventions are effective or not," Smith said. "Historically, it's possible that we've discounted treatments and said they are ineffective based on poor measurements."

Smith's lab wanted to find a better way to quantify neuropathy symptoms and treatment efficacy.

"The ultimate goal is to use a measurement tool in research and clinical settings that has been thoroughly tested and found to be reliable and valid. We believe we have that now," she said.

The neuropathy measurement tool Smith examined in her research is a questionnaire developed in Europe and owned by an international research network. It's a patient-reported outcome measure called the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer Quality of Life Questionnaire Chemotherapy-Induced Peripheral Neuropathy Scale (QLQ-CIPN20).37.

Findings suggest that with minor revisions, it could be universally adopted in both labs and doctors' offices to help researchers and clinicians quantify and treat this painful condition.

Six previous publications provide evidence supporting the tool's effectiveness. However, two studies provide conflicting evidence about the instrument's validity, and another study suggests that minor revisions could improve that.

Some researchers use the questionnaire now, but for a variety of reasons it's not used in the clinic with cancer patients, Smith said.

"The next step is for researchers worldwide to consider using the same tool, because then the results from one researcher can be compared directly with results from the next," she said.

Without microorganisms humans would not be able to survive. Especially our gut flora is an extremely densely populated ecosystem that houses billions of bacteria which help us to digest or detoxify food, supply us with vitamins, or modulate our immune system. Similarly, plants have also a so-called microbiome. In contrast to animals and humans, microorganisms associated with plants are primarily soil microbiota. Scientists consider the soil microbiome as a kind or external plant immune system. However, due to the enormous complexity of these microbiomes it is very difficult for scientists to group bacteria as beneficial or deleterious, and some bacterial taxa are even able to morph from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde upon environmental stresses.

A team of scientists led by Ian T. Baldwin is investigating the microbiome of the wild tobacco species Nicotiana attenuata. "In order to manipulate the microbiome, we used the expression of antimicrobial peptides. Our plants showed activity against different Bacillus species, which are mainly known as plant beneficial microbes. We assumed that that these transgenic plants might show deficits in growth or reproduction in field experiments. In other words: we wanted to make an unhappy plant to see how important microbes are for them. To our surprise, the plants appeared rather unimpressed when we compared them with controls in the field," first author Arne Weinhold summarizes.

However, a closer look and the results of further experiments indicate that different strains of the same bacterial species differ in sensitivity against antimicrobial peptides. Current methods used to characterize the microbiome fail to recognize these differences. The scientists believe that the antimicrobial peptides target single strains. Yet, the enormous diversity of bacteria in the soil provides a vast potential for new partnerships. The potential negative effects that AMP expression might have on a transgenic plant are lower than previously thought.

Animals and plants produce natural antimicrobial peptides. Even in our gut, antimicrobial peptides are produced. Since most of the commensal or beneficial microbes from the human gut flora are naturally resistant to inflammation-associated antimicrobial peptides they help to keep the gut flora in balance during an inflammation. For medical purpose the agents are even considered as potential alternatives to antibiotics to fight pathogens which have become drug resistant. While antimicrobial peptides may be very potent against single bacterial strains under laboratory conditions, their effect on a whole community of bacterial strains in natural environments has rarely been evaluated and is rather questionable. "This is why it is so important to study plants not only in the greenhouse, but also under natural conditions, in the natural soils of their ancestral habitat. Laboratory experiments, in which humans control the variables that will be varied, will only provide results that are limited by the human imagination. Experiments conducted in the real world, in nature, deliver results, which sometimes challenging to interpret, are not bounded by human imagination," says the leader of the study, Ian Baldwin, who has been studying the ecological interactions of Nicotiana attenuata in nature for more than 20 years.

Studying the microbiome of a plant and its effects on the plant's development and the health, turns out to be much more difficult and complex than expected. The Jena researchers are now planning further experiments with tobacco plants in order to find out how these plants recruit soil bacteria, how they maintain the relationship with their bacterial partners and how they keep them from morphing into deleterious pathogens.

Gosselies, Belgium - April 17, 2018: OncoDNA ("OncoDNA or "the Company"), the healthcare technology company that collates and translates complex cancer biomarker data to make precision medicine a reality, is pleased to announce the publication of a study in the journal Oncotarget evaluating the utility of OncoDNA's comprehensive biomarker analysis and interpretation services in clinical settings.

The study, published online today and titled "The clinical impact of using complex molecular profiling strategies in routine oncology practice", found that combining advanced, comprehensive testing of cancer biomarkers with OncoDNA's proprietary cancer treatment knowledge database can enable oncologists to make better treatment decisions for their patients. This is because OncoDNA's testing combines immunohistochemistry, next generation sequencing (NGS), and other tests including inherited heart condition testing, DNA methylation, and microsatellite instability (MSI) testing, rather than the industry standard of NGS testing alone.

The study analysed samples from 1,057 late-stage and advanced grade cancer patients from over 30 different countries on four continents between January 2015 and January 2016 for whom at least one standard of care treatment had already failed. Samples were analysed either by the sequencing of a solid biopsy only - with either a hotspot panel or comprehensive panel including more than 400 genes - or the study of biomarkers determined by immunohistochemistry and other biomolecular tests, or a combination of both. In order to assess the utility of tumour profiling in clinical practice, the study also analysed the therapeutic decisions made by oncologists after receiving OncoDNA's tumour analysis and treatment recommendation.

Overall, OncoDNA's treatment recommendation was followed in 60.4% of cases and in 99% of the cases that did not follow the recommendation the cited reason was drug unavailability or cost, not clinical consideration. The vast majority of treatment decisions (93.4%) were made based on OncoDNA's combination of tests rather than NGS alone. This is a substantial increase on NGS testing alone, which will typically yield a treatment recommendation in only 30% of cases. For the cases in which OncoDNA's treatment recommendation was followed, 27% of patients had an overall survival of >12 months, a significant improvement for late-stage patients, who normally have a life expectancy of no more than six months.

Jean-Pol Detiffe, Chief Executive Officer of OncoDNA, said: "This dataset demonstrates the utility and power of OncoDNA's proprietary, living database and our holistic approach to genomic and molecular profiling. For oncologists, the study suggests our testing and analysis products could represent the best way to make informed therapeutic decisions in clinical practice. Not only were OncoDNA's recommendations followed in the majority of cases, but the study also suggests that our comprehensive testing and analyses could represent the best approach for obtaining useful molecular insight, while reducing physicians' exposure to irrelevant aberrations. As we continue to expand our business through Europe and beyond, these results will help raise awareness of the benefits of our product offering among oncologists and further the healthcare industry's ability to prescribe precision medicine."

Prescribing practice for gluten free foods in England varies hugely, and doesn't seem to be driven by obvious medical factors, reveals research published in the online journal BMJ Open.

And those living in the most deprived areas of the country are the least likely to be prescribed these products, which may be due to a lower rate of diagnosis of coeliac disease in disadvantaged groups, say the researchers.

A gluten free diet is the only effective treatment for the lifelong autoimmune condition, coeliac disease. But the cost to the NHS of prescribing these foodstuffs and their ready availability in supermarkets, has prompted calls for them to be removed from the list of prescription items to divert much needed cash elsewhere in the NHS.

But following a public consultation, the government decided earlier this year to allow a restricted range of gluten free products to be retained rather than impose an outright ban.*

To explore the factors associated with the prescribing of gluten free foods and how this might have changed over time in England, the researchers mined prescribing and treatment cost data for the period 1998-2017 for 7627 general practices with a list size more than 1000 patients.

Their data analysis revealed that after a steady increase in prescriptions between 1998 and 2010, the prescription rate for gluten free foods has fallen in recent years.

Between July 2016 and June 2017, family doctors prescribed 1.3 million gluten free products, at a total cost of £18.7 million to the NHS-roughly around £14.50 per item.

In 2012-13, the equivalent figures were 1.8 million prescribed items at an overall cost of £24.4 million to the NHS.

Prescribing patterns varied widely among clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) in 2016-17, ranging from 0.1 to 55.5 items per 1000 patients. And while some practices prescribed no gluten free items, the highest rate for any practice was 148 items/1000 patients/year in 2016-17.

Practices with the highest number of patients over the age of 65 prescribed at a rate that was 46 percent higher than that of those with the fewest older patients: this is not unexpected as the risk of coeliac disease rises with age, say the researchers.

But most of this variation seemed to be driven by differences in prescribing policy among CCGs, a pattern that has changed little over time, the analysis shows.

Differences in prescribing patterns according to level of deprivation and performance were also evident.

Practices in areas of the greatest deprivation had prescribing rates that were 11 percent lower than those in the least deprived areas.

And practices that performed worst on composite indicators of quality were more likely to prescribe gluten free foods than those performing the best.

"Gluten free prescribing is clearly in a state of flux at the moment, with an apparent rapid reduction in prescribing nationally," comment the researchers, adding that this is likely to continue.

But they point out: "Although gluten free foods are perceived to be becoming cheaper and more widely available, they remain more expensive than budget wheat-containing options (on average five times greater), and it is argued that vulnerable populations may struggle to source appropriate foods for their condition without prescriptions."

Any move to further restrict availability on prescription would therefore be controversial, they suggest.

"However, it is clear that the level of variation in gluten free prescribing is very high, and that this variation appears to exist largely without good reason, being determined to a large extent by factors such as CCG," they conclude.

Over the past decades, computers have become faster and faster and hard disks and storage chips have reached enormous capacities. But this trend cannot continue forever: we are already running up against physical limits that will prevent silicon-based computer technology from attaining any impressive speed gains from this point on. Researchers are particularly optimistic that the next era of technological advancements will start with the development of novel information-processing materials and technologies that combine electrical circuits with optical ones. Using short laser pulses, a research team led by Misha Ivanov of the Max Born Institute in Berlin together with scientists from the Russian Quantum Center in Moscow have now shed light on the extremely rapid processes taking place within these novel materials. Their results have appeared in the prestigious journal Nature Photonics.

Of particular interest for modern material research in solid state physics are "strongly correlated systems", so called for the strong interactions between the electrons in these materials. Magnets are a good example of this: the electrons in magnets align themselves in a preferred direction of spin inside the material, and it is this that produces the magnetic field. But there are other, entirely different structural orders that deserve attention. In so-called Mott insulators for example, a class of materials now being intensively researched, the electrons ought to flow freely and the materials should therefore be able to conduct electricity as well as metals. But the mutual interaction between electrons in these strongly correlated materials impedes their flow and so the materials behave as insulators instead.

By disrupting this order with a strong laser pulse, the physical properties can be made to change dramatically. This can be likened to a phase transition from solid to liquid: as ice melts, for example, rigid ice crystals transform into free-flowing water molecules. Very similarly, the electrons in a strongly correlated material become free to flow when an external laser pulse forces a phase transition in their structural order. Such phase transitions should allow us to develop entirely new switching elements for next-generation electronics that are faster and potentially more energy efficient than present-day transistors. In theory, computers could be made around a thousand times faster by "turbo-charging" their electrical components with light pulses.

The problem with studying these phase transitions is that they are extremely fast and it is therefore very difficult to "catch them in the act". So far, scientists have had to content themselves with characterising the state of a material before and after a phase transition of this kind. Researchers Rui E. F. Silva, Olga Smirnova, and Misha Ivanov of the Berlin Max Born Institute, however, have now devised a method that will, in the truest sense, shed light on the process. Their theory involves firing extremely short, tailored laser pulses at a material - pulses that can only recently be produced in the appropriate quality given the latest developments in lasers. One then observes the material's reaction to these pulses to see how the electrons in the material are excited into motion and, like a bell, emit resonant vibrations at specific frequencies, as harmonics of the incident light.

"By analysing this high harmonic spectrum, we can observe the change in the structural order in these strongly correlated materials 'live' for the first time," says first author of the paper Rui Silva of the Max Born Institute. Laser sources capable of targetedly triggering these transitions have only been available since very recently. The laser pulses namely have to be amply strong and extremely short - on the order of femtoseconds in duration (millionths of a billionth of a second).

In some cases, it takes only a single oscillation of light to disrupt the electronic order of a material and turn an insulator into a metal-like conductor. The scientists at the Berlin Max Born Institute are among the world's leading experts in the field of ultrashort laser pulses.

"If we want to use light to control the properties of electrons in a material, then we need to know exactly how the electrons will react to light pulses," Ivanov explains. With the latest-generation laser sources, which allow full control over the electromagnetic field even down to a single oscillation, the newly published method will allow deep insights into the materials of the future.

Malaria causes the bodies of its human hosts to emit specific odours from the skin that make the hosts even more attractive to mosquitoes, which invites further bites and risks infection of more mosquitoes and wider transmission of the disease.

It's a vicious circle but one that has enabled a multinational team of researchers to identify the odours as organic hydrocarbons in the form of three aldehydes, heptanal, octanal and nonanal, whose discovery could bring relief to a disease that claimed nearly half a million lives in 2016.

"These are fairly common smells, which are described as fruity or grassy," says Jetske de Boer, a researcher in entomology and chemical ecology at Wageningen University & Research in The Netherlands. "Now that we have identified and quantified the aldehydes associated with malaria infection, we understand more of the parasite's infection route."

The team is led by Wageningen and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, with support from key stakeholders including Rothamsted Research, for its expertise in data analysis and the chemical ecology of insects. The team's findings are published today in PNAS.
"Our work provides evidence that human hosts become more attractive to malarial mosquitoes during infection," says Mike Birkett, a chemical ecologist in the Department of Biointeractions and Crop Protection at Rothamsted.

He adds: "Identification of the volatile human-derived compounds that cause this phenomenon provides opportunities to develop these compounds as biomarkers of malaria and as components of chemical lures to trap mosquitoes".

Malaria occurs mainly in tropical regions and its incidence started to rise in 2016, after falling since 2010, records WHO's World Malaria Report 2017. In 2016, 91 countries reported 216 million cases, and 445, 000 deaths; 15 countries account for 80% of the figures, and all but one is in sub-Saharan Africa.

The latest study focused on a group of 56 children between 5 and 12 years old, and it followed earlier research that showed children who carry the malaria parasite, Plasmodium, to be more attractive to mosquitoes, which can bite through skin and infect bloodstreams, than healthy children.

"The specific smell is the odour plume of volatiles emitted from skin, think sweat," says John Caulfield, an analytical chemist at Rothamsted, who used gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to identify the active compounds. "Only a handful are of interest to mosquitoes."
Confirmation of the chemistry results came through statistical analysis of the data from the experiments, which comprised "linear mixed modelling of quantified volatile compounds and generalised linear modelling of counts of mosquitoes," says Stephen Powers, a data analyst at Rothamsted.
This statistical analysis, he notes, "revealed how confident we can be that certain compounds were indeed produced in greater amounts by infected individuals and that mosquitoes had enhanced attraction to these chemicals."

Washington, DC (April 16, 2018) As Instagram is viewed as a place for building the ideal self, some users have created fake Instagram (Finsta) accounts to buck this trend. But are these "fake" accounts really there to express the real, sometimes ugly self, or is there a deeper motivation? A recent study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University, found that users align their real Instagram accounts (Rinsta) with their actual self and to escape from reality, whereas Finsta to foster social bonding.

Jin Kang (Pennsylvania State University), and Lewen Wei (Pennsylvania State University) will present their findings at the 68th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association in Prague, Czech Republic. The researchers conducted an online survey with a total of 106 undergraduate students who had both fake Instagram (Finsta) and real Instagram (Rinsta) accounts. In the survey, the students were asked how Finsta was different from Rinsta in two different ways. One, was administered in an existing valid measure that taps onto four different user motivations, archiving, self-presentation, escapism and social interaction. In the Second, students elaborated their answers in an open-ended format.

The data analyzed revealed Rinsta was rated higher for escapism and archiving. One might expect for the Finsta to be rated higher on these two motivations; higher on escapism as there are more pictures being updated from other users to distract their attention and higher on archiving as users can post pictures anytime. One potential explanation is that Finsta is just "too real." As users post pictures that closely reflect the reality, Finsta may constantly remind users of their actual reality, rather than allowing them to immerse themselves in an illusion that "life is perfect," as portrayed by other users.

Research on self-presentation on social media is ever expanding. Finsta is another venue for individuals to express different aspects of the self to the public. This study shows that there are two things that make Finsta unique: 1. It is an agreed-upon place for everyone to be inappropriate and silly and 2. Most users are doing the opposite of the normally seen positive self-presentation on other platforms. If individuals display their best self (e.g., ideal-self) on places like Facebook, individuals are displaying their worse self on Finsta.

"We showed exactly how Rinsta and Finsta are different in terms of user motivation. Contrary to popular belief, individuals used Rinsta to express one's actual-self and used Rinsta to escape from reality. On Finsta, users posted inappropriate and silly pictures not just for self-expression, but also posted these pictures as a way to bond with their friends, that is, to make their friends laugh and to archive the crazy moments they shared together, said Kang. "Also, at least in our study, we found that creating Finsta mainly happened among female students which also raises an interesting future question of if female users have stronger need to express an inappropriate side of themselves than male users."

"Let Me Be at My Ugliest: Instagram Users' Motivations for Using Finsta (Fake Instagram)," by Jin Kang and Lewen Wei; to be presented at the 68th Annual International Communication Association Conference, Prague, Czech Republic, 24-28 May 2018.