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LEBANON, NH - High-fat diets and obesity have been shown to increase the risk of breast cancer and worsen outcomes and prognosis of breast cancer patients. A team of researchers from Dartmouth and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Norris Cotton Cancer Center led by William Kinlaw III, MD, sought to understand how fat from the diet might influence breast cancer cells. In their new study, they found that in addition to making new fat to fuel proliferation, breast cancer cells can take up large quantities of fat derived from the lipid-rich particles that circulate in the bloodstream. The particles bind to the breast cancer cell surface and are then taken into the cell by a novel mechanism not previously described in cancer cells. This uptake provides a large supply of fat that drives proliferation of the cancer cells. Their findings, "Endocytosis of very low-density lipoproteins: an unexpected mechanism for lipid acquisition by breast cancer cells" is newly in press at the Journal of Lipid Research.

"We previously showed that fatty particles in the bloodstream may augment the growth of breast cancer cells," says Kinlaw. "Our new work demonstrates that breast cancer cells can engulf large amounts of preformed fat from the blood using an unexpected mechanism of fat particle uptake called 'endocytosis of lipoproteins'." The uptake results in metabolic reprogramming of the cells to take advantage of this "free lunch" and reveals a direct connection between dietary fat and cancer cell biology.

The literature has also largely focused on manufacture of new fat by cancer cells as a therapeutic target. Many academic- and pharma-based efforts are underway to target the synthesis of new fat by cancer cells. Kinlaw's work shows that "breast cancer cells can evade being killed by drugs that inhibit fat synthesis by simply taking up more exogenous fat particles," he explains. The team's next publication will detail the impact of high fat diets on breast cancer biology in vivo, using mouse models.

It has long been believed that people can't change their personalities, which are largely stable and inherited. But a review of recent research in personality science points to the possibility that personality traits can change through persistent intervention and major life events.

Personality traits, identified as neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness, can predict a wide range of important outcomes such as health, happiness and income. Because of this, these traits might represent an important target for policy interventions designed to improve human welfare.

The research, scheduled to be published in the December issue of American Psychologist, is the product of the Personality Change Consortium, an international group of researchers committed to advancing understanding of personality change. The consortium was initiated by Wiebke Bleidorn and Christopher Hopwood, University of California, Davis, professors of psychology who are also co-authors of the latest paper, "The Policy Relevance of Personality Traits." The paper has 13 other co-authors.

Policy change could be more effective

"In this paper, we present the case that traits can serve both as relatively stable predictors of success and actionable targets for policy changes and interventions," Bleidorn said.

"Parents, teachers, employers and others have been trying to change personality forever because of their implicit awareness that it is good to make people better people," Hopwood added.

But now, he said, strong evidence suggests that personality traits are broad enough to account for a wide range of socially important behaviors at levels that surpass known predictors, and that they can change, especially if you catch people at the right age and exert sustained effort. However, these traits also remain relatively stable; thus while they can change, they are not easy to change.

Resources are often invested in costly interventions that are unlikely to work because they are not informed by evidence about personality traits. "For that reason, it would be helpful for public policymakers to think more explicitly about what it takes to change personality to improve personal and public welfare, the costs and benefits of such interventions, and the resources needed to achieve the best outcomes by both being informed by evidence about personality traits and investing more sustained resources and attention toward better understanding personality change," researchers said.

Why focus on personality traits?

Research has found that a relatively small number of personality traits can account for most of the ways in which people differ from one another. Thus, they are related to a wide range of important life outcomes. These traits are also relatively stable, but changeable with effort and good timing. This combination -- broad and enduring, yet changeable -- makes them particularly promising targets for large-scale interventions. Both neuroticism and conscientiousness, for example, may represent good intervention targets in young adulthood. And certain interventions -- especially those that require persistence and long-term commitment -- may be more effective among conscientious, emotionally stable people. It is also important to consider motivational factors, as success is more likely if people are motivated and think change is feasible, researchers said.

Bleidorn and Hopwood said examples of important questions that could be more informed by personality science include: What is the long-term impact of social media and video games? How do we get children to be kinder and work harder at school? How do we help people acculturate to new environments? And, what is the best way to help people age with grace and dignity?

Small insects that would normally be undetectable to bats using echolocation suddenly become detectable when they occur in large swarms. Arjan Boonman of Tel-Aviv University and colleagues present these findings in PLOS Computational Biology.

Bats use echolocation to hunt insects, many of which fly in swarms. In this process, bats emit a sound signal that bounces off the target object, revealing its location. However, few studies have addressed what swarms of insects--as opposed to single insects--"look" like in the world of bat echolocation.

Now, Boonman and colleagues have combined 3-D computer simulations of insect swarms with real-world measurements of bat echolocation signals to examine how bats sense swarms that vary in size and density. They found that small insects that are probably undetectable alone, such as mosquitos, suddenly become "visible" to bats when they occur in large swarms.

They also discovered that a feature of bat echolocation signals called Quasi Constant Frequency (QCF), whose function was previously unknown, turns out to be well suited to the task of detecting insect swarms. QCF signals appear to be ideal for detecting an object if more than one target is inside the signal beam at once.

"With our simulations, we investigated something that could never have been measured in reality," Boonman says. "Modeling enabled us to have full control over any aspect of an insect swarm, even the full elimination of the shape of each insect within the swarm."

The findings could provide new insights into the evolution of bat echolocation; bats may have been able to gradually improve their echolocation abilities by hunting swarms of insects without being limited to only very large insects. The findings could also explain why tiny insects are found in the diets of bats that seem to use frequencies too high to effectively detect them.

Moreover, the algorithms developed for this study could potentially be applied to radar echoes of drone swarms in order to lower the probability of detection by enemy radar.

The normal way to study cassava roots is digging up the plant. Unfortunately, that tends to kill the plant, causing serious complications for researchers who are interested in learning more about how cassava grows. To solve this, scientists at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture grew cassava in the air - using a technique called aeroponics - and in doing so removed an obstacle for researchers interested in getting the most out of one of the world's hardiest staple crops.

Cassava is sometimes considered a "forgotten" crop in the Global North but its bulky root is a staple food for some 800 million people across the globe. It is an important industrial crop in Southeast Asia, where it faces various diseases that are putting cassava-based livelihoods at risk. Scientists and governments are increasingly interested in finding easier ways to conduct research the crop.

There is considerable potential for increasing cassava production for food security and income generation if obstacles to increased production can be overcome. Due to its resilience to drought, heat and poor soil conditions, cassava is already considered an ideal crop for climate change.

"We invested a lot of effort in developing the aeroponics system because we ultimately wanted to know what prompts a root to start swelling," says Michael Selvaraj, crop physiologist at CIAT and the lead author of the study published in November in Plant Methods. "If we can double the number of storage roots, farmers will be able to harvest twice during the growing season."

Before aeroponics, scientists mainly relied on destroying a high number of plant roots - a process sometimes referred to as "shovelomics" - to analyze them, which can be expensive and time-consuming.

Recording real-time growth

The aeroponic system gives plant breeders a way to visualize cassava's root system in its early development stages, helping them effectively select faster-growing varieties. The system, developed by researchers CIAT and the University of Nottingham, could help make the tropical root crop even more popular among farmers and fit for growing at large scale. After maize and rice, cassava is the third-highest provider of crop-sourced calories in tropical countries.

Researchers tested how cassava behaved in three types of growing systems, tracking when the plant started to develop storage roots (which stock up on starch and water), the number of roots and their growth pace. The aeroponic system fed by mist dispensers proved to be the best option -- compared to the drip or semi-aeroponic one -- allowing the cassava to sprout faster bigger storage roots.

Cassava has complex roots that perform various functions, which had previously limited scientists from performing in-depth studies of the growth of storage roots and phenotyping them. Plant phenotyping for cassava takes into consideration how genetics, environmental pressures, and farming influences root growth and can help breeders select more productive plants.

The aeroponic mist system allowed researchers to observe in real-time how cassava develops storage roots, especially in critical stages of early development. The low-cost system also provides more oxygen to storage roots, boosting their growth and allows researchers to analyze plant samples without destroying the rest of the plant.

A path to faster production

Researchers also studied how auxin, a plant hormone, accelerated the early development of roots when applied to the plants. The findings point to further research that can use aeroponics to help identify the genes that regulate cassava root growth. This has far-reaching implications for genetic improvement, sustainable intensification and the acceleration of the plant's growth.

Cassava generally has a slow growth cycle, ranging between 8-24 months. Many farmers prefer planting other crops that they can harvest several times a year. But to select plants with traits fostering a quicker growth, breeders need to see how and at what pace cassava develops underground.

"Using the developed aeroponic mist system should help identification of these genes, and ultimately improve yield," the study concluded.

Researchers have created the first map of wind circulation in the upper atmosphere of a planet besides Earth, using data from NASA's MAVEN spacecraft that were collected during the last two years. The new map of Mars winds helps scientists to better understand the workings of the Martian climate, giving them a more accurate picture of its ancient past and its ongoing evolution.

MAVEN, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN mission, recently celebrated the five-year anniversary of its entrance into orbit around Mars on September 21. The primary scientific goal of the mission is to study what is left of Mars' atmosphere to determine how, in the distant past, an ocean-covered and potentially habitable Mars became the dry and desolate place it is today. Studying the present Martian atmosphere -- the rate at which it is being lost to space and how and why it is being stripped away -- gives us clues with which we can piece together the puzzle of understanding planetary atmospheres, including our own.

"The observed global circulation provides critical inputs needed to constrain global atmospheric models," said Mehdi Benna of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who led one of the two studies that enabled the creation of the revolutionary winds map. "These are the same models that are used to extrapolate the state of the Martian climate into the distant past." Benna is lead author of a paper on this research published December 12 in Science.

"The winds observed in the Martian upper atmosphere are sometimes similar to what we see in global model simulations, but other times can be quite different," said Kali Roeten of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. "These winds can also be highly variable on the timescale of hours, yet in other cases, are consistent throughout the observation period." Roeten is lead author of the second paper on this research published December 12 in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets.

Upper atmospheric winds on Earth have already been mapped in detail. Winds drive a series of processes in the atmosphere that can affect the propagation of radio waves, which are crucial for communications purposes for those on the surface, and the prediction of paths satellites will take in their orbit around Earth. Mapping Martian winds, therefore, is a crucial step towards understanding characteristics of extraterrestrial atmospheres beyond what we know about processes on Earth.

Planetary atmospheres aren't static, and they certainly aren't uniform. To categorize where distinctive processes occur, the layers of atmospheres are differentiated based on temperature. For example, humans live in the lowest level: the troposphere. That's where weather happens, and temperature gets cooler at higher altitudes.

The upper atmospheric winds on both Earth and Mars are in the planets' respective thermospheres, which are areas where temperature increases with height. The measurements of winds that were recently mapped above Mars were found at an altitude range of about 140-240 kilometers (85-150 miles) above the planet's surface.

MAVEN's journey

The wind data has been gathered by the Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer (NGIMS). NGIMS' original purpose was to determine the structure and composition of the Martian atmosphere by measuring in it the amounts of ions (electrically charged particles) and gases. However, although it was not originally designed to do so, in April 2016, the MAVEN team began using NGIMS to observe horizontal winds. Pausing normal collection of data, scientists on Earth programmed the instrument to nod back and forth so that it could detect the direction of winds along its track.

By combining data from many tracks as MAVEN orbits Mars, scientists slowly built up a map of wind behavior. This led to a startling discovery: the wind patterns actually correlated with the Martian topography below.

Far above and down below

Mars has tall mountains and steep valleys just as Earth does, and winds on the surface are forced above and around this topography. The disturbance of surface winds leads to echoes of these wind patterns in the Martian thermosphere as gravity waves.

Atmospheric gravity waves (not to be confused with extragalactic gravitational waves) are caused by the displacement of air masses from a resting state. Gravity tries to bring the fluid back to equilibrium, and in doing so, creates waves in the disturbed fluid.

As the gravity waves created when wind on Mars is forced around surface topography ripple upwards through the atmosphere, MAVEN can detect where valleys and mountains are on the surface -- even if it's orbiting at the very edge of space.

This discovery was the first detection of topography-induced gravity wave ripples in the thermosphere of any planet, even Earth. The MAVEN team plans to study these gravity waves further during different seasons and in different locations on Mars to improve understanding of not only the specifics of thermospheric winds but also of the very fundamentals of physics itself.

"Everything is determined by forces over which we have no control... Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper." -- Albert Einstein

Galaxies lead a graceful existence on cosmic timescales. Over millions of years, they can engage in elaborate dances that produce some of Nature's most exquisite and striking grand designs. Few are as captivating as the galactic duo known as NGC 5394/5, sometimes nicknamed the Heron Galaxy. This image, obtained by the Gemini Observatory of NSF's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, captures a snapshot of this compelling interacting pair.

The existence of our Universe is dependent upon interactions -- from the tiniest subatomic particles to the largest clusters of galaxies. At galactic scales, interactions can take millions of years to unfold, a process seen in this image of two galaxies released today by the Gemini Observatory. The new image captures the slow and intimate dance of a pair of galaxies some 160 million light-years distant and reveals the sparkle of subsequent star formation fueled by the pair's interactions.

The two galaxies, astronomers have concluded, have already "collided" at least once. However, galactic collisions can be a lengthy process of successive gravitational encounters, which over time can morph the galaxies into exotic, yet unrecognizable forms. These galaxies, as in all galactic collisions, are engaged in a ghostly dance as the distances between the stars in each galaxy preclude actual stellar collisions and their overall shapes are deformed only by each galaxy's gravity.

One byproduct of the turbulence caused by the interaction is the coalescence of hydrogen gas into regions of star formation. In this image, these stellar nurseries are revealed in the form of the reddish clumps scattered in a ring-like fashion in the larger galaxy (and a few in the smaller galaxy). Also visible is a dusty ring that is seen in silhouette against the backdrop of the larger galaxy. A similar ring structure is seen in this previous image from the Gemini Observatory, likely the result of another interacting galactic pair.

A well-known target for amateur astronomers, the light from NGC 5394/5 first piqued humanity's interest when it was observed by William Herschel in 1787. Herschel used his giant 20-foot-long telescope to discover the two galaxies in the same year that he discovered two moons of Uranus. Many stargazers today imagine the two galaxies as a Heron. In this interpretation, the larger galaxy is the bird's body and the smaller one is its head -- with its beak preying upon a fish-like background galaxy!

NGC 5394 [1] and NGC 5395, also known collectively known as Arp 84 or the Heron Galaxy, are interacting spiral galaxies 160 million light-years from Earth in the constellation of Canes Venatici. The larger galaxy, NGC 5395 (on the left), is 140,000 light-years across and the smaller one, NGC 5394, is 90,000 light-years across.

Influenza can be especially dangerous for children, who are at greater risk for serious complications from the illness, including hospitalization and even death. Yet child care centers in the U.S. rarely require children or the adults who care for them to be vaccinated against flu, according to a new study published in the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society.

"When kids are in close proximity to each other in child care centers they spread infectious diseases very efficiently," said lead study author Timothy R. Shope, MD, MPH, of UPMC Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh. "The interventions that we use for older children and adults to prevent influenza, such as maintaining a distance of 3 feet between individuals, and coughing or sneezing into a shoulder or an elbow, don't work very well for a 2-year-old. So the best way we can protect them is through immunization."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends influenza vaccination for everyone 6 months of age and older every flu season. In the new study, only 24.5 percent of child care center directors reported having a flu vaccine requirement for children. Even fewer directors, 13.1 percent, said they had such a requirement for adult caregivers. The findings are drawn from a telephone-based survey, conducted in 2016, that included 518 directors across 48 states, randomly selected from a national database of licensed U.S. child care centers.

Researchers also looked at various factors to see if they predicted whether flu vaccination was required, including quality indicators for child care centers, directors' years of experience, their previous experience with flu outbreaks, and the relevant laws in their state. Only state law was associated with directors having a flu vaccine requirement for children. Directors located in one of the four states that currently have laws mandating flu vaccination for children in day care (Connecticut, New Jersey, Ohio, and Rhode Island) were more likely to report having flu vaccination requirements at their own child care centers, compared to directors in states without such laws. Child care center directors who reported having a flu vaccine requirement for children were, in turn, more likely to have a requirement for adult caregivers.

"We can't depend on child care directors' experience or knowledge for implementing their own influenza vaccine requirements," Dr. Shope said. "If we're concerned with the public health of children and preventing influenza morbidity and mortality, we have to legislate the issue."

Legislation that limits non-medical exemptions from childhood vaccination laws has advanced in several states in response to outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, including measles, which suggests that there may be progress on this issue. In the meantime, parents should take the initiative themselves. "For parents, they don't need to wait until there is an influenza vaccination requirement for children in child care," Dr. Shope said. "They should do what is best for their child's health and get them immunized."

Approximately 30 percent of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere by human activities, mainly the use of fossil fuels and deforestation, is taken up by terrestrial ecosystems such as forests and grasslands. The recent reports from the IPCC concluded that new land-use options to enhance this terrestrial carbon sink are needed to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement on Climate. "Yet, it is important to understand the best science-based estimate of where atmospheric CO2 is fixed in terrestrial ecosystems today, and our study makes a significant step in that direction," says Masayuki Kondo, an Assistant Professor at the Center for Environmental Remote Sensing, Chiba University.

The net CO2 balance between the atmosphere and land is referred to as the "net CO2 flux", which is the sum of CO2 absorption by photosynthesis (-) and CO2 emissions (+) due to respiration, decomposition of soil organic matter, forest fires, and land-use changes such as deforestation and forest conversion to farmland. A series of the IPCC assessment reports in the past have demonstrated that calculating the total CO2 balance over different regions of the globe is a challenging task.

"There is an urgent need of how much carbon mitigation is required to achieve the temperature targets of the Paris agreement, but we still had a wide spread of estimates on how much CO2 the world terrestrial ecosystems are removing," says Kondo. He and his colleagues have been trying to comprehensively understand net CO2 flux from the latest results of 'terrestrial biosphere models' that simulate terrestrial CO2 fluxes of various processes on theoretical and semi-empirical basis and 'atmospheric inversions' that read atmospheric CO2 concentration measured by a global network of monitoring stations and use global 3D atmospheric transport models to provide a dynamic picture of the CO2 fluxes exchanged between different biomes and the atmosphere.

"Up until now, scientists in various fields of earth science have proposed many kinds of methods to estimate net CO2 flux, including biosphere models and atmospheric inversions. These methods do not provide consistent results until we added the CO2 that is outgassed to the atmosphere by rivers and lakes to the biosphere models". Such inconsistencies between different approaches to mapping terrestrial carbon fluxes most likely to have led the mismatches in flux estimations from biosphere models and atmospheric inversions shown in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report.

Kondo began to revise the definition of each model with not only those involved in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report but also in a team of multi-disciplinary researchers belonging to 24 universities and research institutions around the world. "The researchers' areas of expertise were diverse, ranging from ecology, environmental science, atmospheric physics and chemistry, hydrology, and remote sensing. The periodic update of the Global Carbon Budgets has also helped our cause. We discussed over and over to compensate for differences in definitions."

As a result of the integrated analysis, the research team succeeded in reducing the mismatches between net CO2 fluxes from multiple data sources. With verifying the accuracy of each method, the research team will continue further research to minimize the discrepancy between net CO2 flux estimations, even at a smaller scale of major individual nations. Lastly, Kondo notes, "With the degree of accuracy that we achieved, we are getting confidence in how much CO2 the world terrestrial ecosystems are removing today. This is a good sign of our progress towards the goals of the Paris agreement. We need to continue working together with experts from various fields of research more than ever." The team reports their results on December 12 in Global Change Biology.

Following the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in March 2011, the Japanese authorities decided to carry out major decontamination works in the affected area, which covers more than 9,000 km2. On December 12, 2019, with most of this work having been completed, the scientific journal SOIL of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) is publishing a synthesis of approximately sixty scientific publications that together provide an overview of the decontamination strategies used and their effectiveness, with a focus on radiocesium. This work is the result of an international collaboration led by Olivier Evrard, researcher at the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement [Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences] (LSCE – CEA/CNRS/UVSQ, Université Paris Saclay).

Soil decontamination, which began in 2013 following the accident at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, has now been nearly completed in the priority areas identified1. Indeed, areas that are difficult to access have not yet been decontaminated, such as the municipalities located in the immediate vicinity of the nuclear power plant. Olivier Evrard, a researcher at the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences and coordinator of the study (CEA/CNRS/UVSQ), in collaboration with Patrick Laceby of Alberta Environment and Parks (Canada) and Atsushi Nakao of Kyoto Prefecture University (Japan), compiled the results of approximately sixty scientific studies published on the topic.

This synthesis focuses mainly on the fate of radioactive cesium in the environment because this radioisotope was emitted in large quantities during the accident, contaminating an area of more than 9,000 km2. In addition, since one of the cesium isotopes (137Cs) has a half-life of 30 years, it constitutes the highest risk to the local population in the medium and long term, as it can be estimated that in the absence of decontamination it will remain in the environment for around three centuries. “The feedback on decontamination processes following the Fukushima nuclear accident is unprecedented,” according to Olivier Evrard, “because it is the first time that such a major clean-up effort has been made following a nuclear accident. The Fukushima accident gives us valuable insights into the effectiveness of decontamination techniques, particularly for removing cesium from the environment.”

This analysis provides new scientific lessons on decontamination strategies and techniques implemented in the municipalities affected by the radioactive fallout from the Fukushima accident. This synthesis indicates that removing the surface layer of the soil to a thickness of 5 cm, the main method used by the Japanese authorities to clean up cultivated land, has reduced cesium concentrations by about 80% in treated areas. Nevertheless, the removal of the uppermost part of the topsoil, which has proved effective in treating cultivated land, has cost the Japanese state about €24 billion. This technique generates a significant amount of waste, which is difficult to treat, to transport and to store for several decades in the vicinity of the power plant, a step that is necessary before it is shipped to final disposal sites located outside Fukushima prefecture by 2050. By early 2019, Fukushima’s decontamination efforts had generated about 20 million cubic metres of waste.

Decontamination activities have mainly targeted agricultural landscapes and residential areas. The review points out that the forests have not been cleaned up – because of the difficulty and very high costs that these operations2 would represent – as they cover 75% of the surface area located within the radioactive fallout zone. These forests constitute a potential long-term reservoir of radiocesium, which can be redistributed across landscapes as a result of soil erosion, landslides and floods, particularly during typhoons that can affect the region between July and October. Atsushi Nakao, co-author of the publication, stresses the importance of continuing to monitor the transfer of radioactive contamination at the scale of coastal watersheds that drain the most contaminated part of the radioactive fallout zone. This monitoring will help scientists understand the fate of residual radiocesium in the environment in order to detect possible recontamination of the remediated areas due to flooding or intense erosion events in the forests.

The analysis recommends further research on:

the issues associated with the recultivation of decontaminated agricultural land3,
the monitoring of the contribution of radioactive contamination from forests to the rivers that flow across the region,
and the return of inhabitants and their reappropriation of the territory after evacuation and decontamination.

This research will be the subject of a Franco-Japanese and multidisciplinary international research project, MITATE (Irradiation Measurement Human Tolerance viA Environmental Tolerance), led by the CNRS in collaboration with various French (including the CEA) and Japanese organizations, which will start on January 1, 2020 for an initial period of 5 years.

Complementary approaches

This research is complementary to the project to develop bio- and eco-technological methods for the rational remediation of effluents and soils, in support of a post-accident agricultural rehabilitation strategy (DEMETERRES), led by the CEA, and conducted in partnership with INRA and CIRAD Montpellier.

Decontamination techniques

In cultivated areas within the special decontamination zone, the surface layer of the soil was removed to a depth of 5 cm and replaced with a new “soil” made of crushed granite available locally. In areas further from the plant, substances known to fix or substitute for radiocesium (potassium fertilizers, zeolite powders) have been applied to the soil.
As far as woodland areas are concerned, only those that were within 20 metres of the houses were treated (cutting branches and collecting litter).
Residential areas were also cleaned (ditch cleaning, roof and gutter cleaning, etc.), and (vegetable) gardens were treated as cultivated areas.

In the paper, a C6v-symmetric structure is thoroughly studied in which the valley Hall effect plays an important role when the Dirac cone at the corner point of the Brillouin region is opened, accompanied by a new band gap, by changing the symmetry of the structure from C6v into C3v. Further, the researchers analyze the acoustic wave propagation in two types of topological states in the range of this new band gap. The first type appears at the top or bottom boundary of the single structure, whereas the second type is confined to the interface between two structures exhibiting different topological properties.

As depicted in Figures 1(a) and 1(b), the sonic crystal is composed of a triangular-lattice array. The side lengths of two adjacent regular triangles connected by rectangular waveguides are d1 and d2, respectively and d1/d2=(1-r)/(1+r). Figures 1(c) and 1(d) provide the dispersion relations of the sonic crystal along the typical boundaries of the Brillouin zone when r=0 and r=0.1/-0.1, respectively. In Figure 1(c), double degeneracy occurs, which is located at the K-point due to the C6v symmetry of the structure. In constrast to Figure 1(c), a band gap appears in Figure 1(d) by breaking the C6v symmetry into the C3v symmetry. Therefore, an acoustic topological insulator based on the mechanism of valley Hall effect is constructed. Both the two types of topological states in the range of this new band gap can propagate in both the directions (i.e., dual-channel propagation).

In Figure 2(a), the three boundaries are all selected to be Type 8 (please refer to the paper for the classification of the boundaries), and the researchers apply a point source at the middle point of the top boundary. Then the acoustic wave propagates in both the directions along the boundaries as shown in the figure. Although the edge state has the characteristic of dual-channel propagation, one-way propagation can be achieved by tailoring the boundaries as shown in Figure2(b). Further, the output position can be adjusted arbitrarily via changing the types of the boundaries as shown in Figures 2(c) and 2(d). In Figure 3, combining the edge and interface states together, the acoustic wave propagation path can be programmed in various ways.

In Figures 3(c)-(e), the researchers only change the selections of the two parts of the top boundary to control the propagation behavior of acoustic waves. The acoustic wave first propagates from bulk to the boundary of the composite structure, and then propagates on the top boundary to the right, to the left or in both the directions, according to the boundary types in Figures 3(c)-(e). The structure in Figure 3(f) is the same as that in Figure 3(e), but the point source is set at the left side of the top boundary. The acoustic wave first propagates along the top boundary of the structure with r=-0.1. When the wave meets the interface between r=0.1 and r=-0.1, there yields a bifurcation in the wave propagation. In the superposed composite structure, the boundary types only affect the existence of the edge state and have no influence on the interface state.

By combining the edge state and the interface state together, the acoustic wave propagation path in the band gap can be tailored in more flexible, diverse, and intriguing ways. It provides a new idea for the design of tunable acoustic devices.

(Boston)--Cigarette smoking changes the types of cells that are present in the respiratory track and some biological processes necessary for detoxification of cigarette smoke are restricted to specific types of cells.

"Our study describes novel respiratory cell changes that result from cigarette smoke exposure that may be associated with the development of pre-cancerous tissue," explained corresponding author Jennifer Beane, PhD, assistant professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. Specifically, the researchers have identified a novel type of cell present in current smokers that remains active even after smoking cessation. Gene expressed by these cells have also been detected in both pre-cancerous lung tissue and lung tumors. Further study of these cells may result in therapies to prevent the development of lung cancer or ways to measure risk of developing lung cancer.

Cigarette smoking is a major risk factor for the development of lung cancer. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the U.S. While studies have shown that smoking alters bronchial epithelial function and form, its precise effects on specific cell types and overall tissue composition have been unclear.

Never and current smokers underwent a medical procedure called a bronchoscopy to collect cells from their respiratory tract. Lead author, Grant Duclos, explains "Using a breakthrough approach referred to as ;single-cell genomics', the cells sampled from each subject were isolated and the expression of their genes were measured to identify distinct types of cells and characterize differences in the distribution of the cells between never and current smokers." The results were then confirmed by looking at these differences in tissue sampled from additional never and current smokers.

The researchers believe that a detailed understanding of the molecular consequences of drivers of deadly lung diseases - smoking in particular - will enable them to understand the transition from healthy, normal states to pathological conditions. "We hope that this study and the work that follows it will lead to effective strategies for early detection, prevention and reversal of smoking-associated lung diseases," added co-corresponding author Joshua Campbell, PhD, assistant professor of medicine at BUSM.

These finding appear in the journal Science Advances.

Scientists from Australia and the US have discovered and identified the genetic cause of a previously unknown human autoinflammatory disease.

The researchers determined that the autoinflammatory disease, which they termed CRIA (cleavage-resistant RIPK1-induced autoinflammatory) syndrome, is caused by a mutation in a critical cell death component called RIPK1.

The research team was led by Dr Najoua Lalaoui and Professor John Silke from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Australia, and Dr Steven Boyden, Dr Hirotsugu Oda and Dr Dan Kastner from the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), US. The study was published today in Nature.

Discovering a new disease

Dr Lalaoui said the research team had identified a new human autoinflammatory disease and the associated mutation in a critical cell death molecule that was driving the disease.

"Cell death pathways have developed a series of inbuilt mechanisms that regulate inflammatory signals and cell death, because the alternative is so potentially hazardous," she said. "However in this disease, the mutation in RIPK1 is overcoming all the normal checks and balances that exist, resulting in uncontrolled cell death and inflammation."

Autoinflammatory diseases are caused by abnormal activation of the innate immune system, leading to recurrent episodes of fever and inflammation that can damage vital organs. In the paper, the researchers describe patients from three families with a history of episodic high fevers and painful swollen lymph nodes. The patients, who were diagnosed with a new autoinflammatory disease (CRIA syndrome), had a host of other inflammatory symptoms which began in childhood and continued into their adult years.

Dr Boyden said the first clue that the disease was linked to cell death was when they delved into the patients' exomes - the part of the genome that encodes all of the proteins in the body.

"We sequenced the entire exome of each patient and discovered unique mutations in the exact same amino acid of RIPK1 in each of the three families," Dr Boyden said. "It is remarkable, like lightning striking three times in the same place. Each of the three mutations has the same result - it blocks cleavage of RIPK1 - which shows how important RIPK1 cleavage is in maintaining the normal function of the cell."

Dr Lalaoui said Walter and Eliza Hall Institute researchers confirmed the link between the RIPK1 mutations and CRIA syndrome in laboratory models. "We showed that mice with mutations in the same location in RIPK1 as in the CRIA syndrome patients had a similar exacerbation of inflammation," she said.

Potential for new treatments

Dr Dan Kastner - widely regarded as the 'father of autoinflammatory disease' - said the NIH team had treated CRIA syndrome patients with a number of anti-inflammatory medications, including high doses of corticosteroids and biologics. Although some of the patients markedly improved on an interleukin-6 inhibitor, others responded less well or had significant side effects.

"Understanding the molecular mechanism by which CRIA syndrome causes inflammation affords an opportunity to get right to the root of the problem," Dr Kastner said.

Dr Kastner noted that RIPK1 inhibitors - which are already available on a research basis - may provide a focused, 'precision medicine' approach to treating patients.

"RIPK1 inhibitors may be just what the doctor ordered for these patients. The discovery of CRIA syndrome also suggests a possible role for RIPK1 in a broad spectrum of human illnesses, such as colitis, arthritis and psoriasis."

Cell death and disease

Several laboratories at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute are devoted to disentangling the complicated pathways associated with cell death. Cell death research began at the Institute in the 1980s, with the discovery that mutations in the Bcl-2 protein could keep cancer cells alive.

Professor Silke has been studying cell death pathways for more than 20 years, and said RIPK1 was a critical regulator of inflammation and cell death.

"RIPK1 is a potent molecule," Professor Silke said. "The cell has developed a way of managing its effects, which includes cleaving RIPK1 into two pieces to 'disarm' the molecule and halt its inflammatory activity. In this autoinflammatory disease, the mutations are preventing the molecule from being cleaved into two pieces, resulting in uncontrolled cell death and inflammation."

Professor Silke said RIPK1 was a complex protein, with a complicated role in cell death pathways.

"Mutations in RIPK1 can drive both too much inflammation - such as in autoinflammatory and autoimmune diseases - and too little inflammation, resulting in immunodeficiency. There is still a lot to learn about the varied roles of RIPK1 in cell death, and how we can effectively target RIPK1 to treat disease," Professor Silke said.

Generally speaking, "flue gas" refers to any gas coming out of a pipe, exhaust, chimney etc as a product of combustion in a fireplace, oven, furnace, boiler, or steam generator. But the term is more commonly used to describe the exhaust vapors exiting the flues of factories and powerplants. Iconic though they may be, these flue gases contain significant amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2), which is a major greenhouse gas contributing to global warming.

One way to ameliorate the polluting impact of flue gases is to take the CO2 out of them and store it in geological formations or recycle it; there is, in fact, an enormous amount of research trying to find novel materials that can capture CO2 from these flue gasses.

Metal Organic Frame works (MOFs) are among the most promising of these materials, but most of these materials require drying the "wet" flue gas first, which is technically feasible but also very expensive - and thus less likely to be implemented commercially.

In a strange twist of nature - or design chemistry - materials that are good at capturing CO2 have proven to be even better at capturing water, which renders them of little use with wet flue gasses. It seems that in most of these materials, CO2 and water compete for the same adsorption sites - the areas in the material's structure that actually capture the target molecule.

Now, a team of scientists led by Berend Smit at EPFL Valais Wallis have designed a new material that prevents this competition, is not affected by water, and can capture CO2 out of wet flue gases more efficiently than even commercial materials.

In what Smit calls "a breakthrough for computational materials design", the scientists used an out-of-the-box approach to overcome the difficulties presented with material design: the tools of drug discovery.

When pharmaceutical companies search for a new drug candidate, they first test millions of molecules to see which ones will bind to a target protein that is related to the disease in question. The ones that do are then compared to determine what structural properties they share in common. A common motif is established, and that forms the basis for designing and synthesizing actual drug molecules.

Using this approach, the EPFL scientists computer-generated 325,000 materials whose common motif is the ability to bind CO2. All the materials belong to the family of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) - popular and versatile materials that Smit's research has been leading the charge on for years.

To narrow down the selection, the scientists then looked for common structural motifs among the MOFs that can bind CO2 very well but not water. This subclass was then further narrowed down by adding parameters of selectivity and efficiency, until the researchers' MOF-generation algorithm finally settled on 35 materials that show better CO2 capturing ability from wet flue-gas than current materials that are commercially available.

"What makes this work stand out is that we were also able to synthesize these materials," says Smit. "That allowed us to work with our colleagues to show that the MOFs actually adsorb CO2 and not water, actually test them for carbon capture, and compare them with existing commercial materials." This part of the study was carried out in collaboration with the University of California Berkeley, the University of Ottawa, Heriot-Watt University and the Universidad de Granada.

"The experiments carried out in Berkeley showed that all our predictions were correct," says Smit. "The group in Heriot-Watt showed that our designed materials can capture carbon dioxide from wet flue gasses better than the commercial materials."

An analysis of sediment carried by glaciers in both South America and East Africa indicates that tropical glaciers not just in South America but across the tropics began to melt earlier than expected at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum (26,000-19,000 years ago), before atmospheric carbon dioxide levels began to rise. The study's authors suggest that the early melting may have been triggered by rising temperatures at the North and South Poles, which reduced a heat-driven atmospheric circulation cycle that in turn slowed the movement of heat out of the tropics. The findings provide insights into mechanisms that create harmony between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres during glacial cycles--one of the greatest mysteries in paleoclimate research. While atmospheric greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, are often used to explain why glacial cycles occur simultaneously in both hemispheres, other climate processes are also believed to play a role. Previous research suggests some tropical glaciers began melting earlier than glaciers in other parts of the world during the Last Glacial Maximum, before the rise in carbon dioxide, but these data are limited to South America and could have been the result of regional conditions. To determine if this phenomenon occurred across the tropics as a whole, Margaret Jackson et al. compared previously gathered Beryllium-10 isotope data from nine sites in South America (for which they recalculated harmonized ages) with 17 new and eight previously published glacial sediment datasets from East Africa. Together, the data from both continents confirmed that temperatures began to warm between 20,000 and 19,000 years ago, about 1,000 to 2,000 years before the spike in carbon dioxide levels.

CORVALLIS, Ore. - An international team co-led by an Oregon State University chemistry researcher has uncovered a better way to scrub carbon dioxide from smokestack emissions, which could be a key to mitigating global climate change.

Published today in Nature, the findings are important because atmospheric CO2 has increased 40 percent since the dawn of the industrial age, contributing heavily to a warming planet.

Kyriakos Stylianou of the OSU College of Science and colleagues from the École Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Heriot-Watt University in Scotland, the University of Ottawa, and the University of Granada in Spain used data mining as a springboard for diving into a key challenge: dealing with the water portion of smokestack gases that greatly complicates removing the CO2.

The data mining involved hundreds of thousands of nanomaterials known as metal organic frameworks, usually abbreviated to MOFs. MOFs hold the potential to intercept, through adsorption, CO2 molecules as the flue gases make their way out of the smokestack.

Flue gases can be dried, but that adds significant expense to the CO2 capture process.

"There are a countless number of structurally and chemically distinct MOFs, but the challenge with most of them is that they do not perform well when subjected to testing with realistic flue gases," Stylianou said. "The water in flue gases competes with the CO2 for the same adsorption sites, which means those MOFs are not scrubbing selectively like we want them to."

Sifting through more than 325,000 MOFs in a digital library, scientists identified different types of CO2 binding sites, which they dubbed "adsorbaphores," that would maintain their selectivity in the presence of water.

Then in the lab, Stylianou's doctoral student, Arunraj Chidambaram, made two of the MOFs that contained a hydrophobic - water-repelling - adsorbaphore consisting of two aromatic cores and tested them. The scientists found that not only was the separation performance of the MOFs unaffected by water, they also outperformed some of the CO2 removal materials currently on the market such as activated carbon and zeolite 13X.

"We went from design to synthesis and application," Stylianou said. "We used computations to discover active sites for CO2 capture. The MOFs performed optimally for wet flue CO2 capture because these MOFs have two distinct sites in their structures; one for water and one for CO2, and therefore, CO2 and water molecules do not compete with each other."

Further research, he added, will look at scaling: How to make and test the MOFs on the type of scope required by the large-magnitude challenge industrial CO2 emissions represent.

According to the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration, the global average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration in 2018 was 407.4 parts per million, higher than at any time in at least 800,000 years.

Fossil fuels like coal and oil contain carbon that plants pulled out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis over millions of years. That same carbon is now being returned to the atmosphere in a matter of hundreds of years because fossil fuels are being burned for energy, including by factories and other large-scale industrial facilities.

The annual rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 over the past six decades is roughly 100 times faster than increases resulting from natural causes, such as those that happened following the last ice age more than 10,000 years ago, according to NOAA.

Unlike oxygen or nitrogen, which account for most of the atmosphere, greenhouse gases absorb heat and release it gradually over time. Absent those greenhouse gases, the planet's average annual temperature would be below freezing rather than around 60 degrees Fahrenheit, but too-high levels of greenhouse gases cause the Earth's energy budget to become unbalanced.