Tech

ATLANTA--Targeted immunization against bacterial flagellin, a protein that forms the appendage that enables bacterial mobility, can beneficially alter the intestinal microbiota, decreasing the bacteria's ability to cause inflammation and thus protecting against an array of chronic inflammatory diseases, according to a new study by the Institute for Biomedical Sciences and the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State University.

The findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, suggest this approach offers a way to vaccinate against diseases associated with chronic inflammation of the digestive tract, a group of diseases that includes inflammatory bowel diseases, as well as obesity and metabolic syndrome.

The intestinal tract is colonized by billions of bacteria and other microorganisms that play numerous beneficial roles, but improperly controlled microbiota can lead to chronic inflammatory diseases. Previous studies have shown the intestinal microbiota are associated with inflammatory bowel diseases, such as ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, and diseases characterized by low-grade inflammation of the intestinal tract, such as obesity and metabolic syndrome.

Therapeutic options have focused on lessening the inflammatory response and have often overlooked the contribution of the intestinal microbiota. The researchers wanted to determine if a targeted immune response could be used to beneficially shape the intestinal microbiota and protect against inflammatory diseases. Previously, they found that a common feature of microbiotas associated with inflammation is an increased level of expression of flagellin by select microbiota members, which can drive bacteria to penetrate the intestinal mucosa and disrupt homeostasis.

The researchers immunized mice with flagellin to elicit an adaptative immune response and demonstrated targeted immunization against bacterial flagellin is sufficient to beneficially alter the composition and function of the intestinal microbiota. Anti-flagellin antibodies were produced and affected the microbiota by reducing its pro-inflammatory potential and ability to penetrate its host. These alterations were associated with protection against chronic inflammatory diseases.

"The administration of flagellin, and perhaps other bacterial antigens, has the potential to vaccinate against an array of diseases associated with, and driven by gut inflammation," said Dr. Benoit Chassaing, senior author of the study and assistant professor in the Neuroscience Institute and the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State and team leader at the National Institute for Health and Medical Research and the Universite de Paris in Paris, France. "This work is a proof of concept and demonstrates that targeted training of the immune system can protect against an array of chronic inflammatory diseases. Yet, significant work is now needed to test other antigens, other immunization routes and additional inflammatory models, as well as the human relevance of these findings."

"If the approach proves translatable to humans, its impact on public health would be enormous," adds co-author Dr. Andrew Gewirtz, a professor in Georgia State's Institute for Biomedical Sciences.

Concentrations of methane, a greenhouse gas about 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide, have risen steadily in Earth's atmosphere since 2007. Although several potential explanations, including an increase in methane emissions from the tropics, could account for this upsurge, due to a lack of regional data scientists have been unable to pinpoint the source. Now a study published in the European Geosciences Union (EGU) journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics uses satellite data to determine that one-third of the global increase originates in Africa's tropics.

"One of the suggestions for the continued rise in atmospheric methane, based on ground-based data, is that tropical sources have increased," says Mark Lunt, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Edinburgh and lead author of the study. He and his co-authors used data retrieved from GOSAT, the Japanese Greenhouse gases Observing Satellite, to examine annual--and even seasonal--trends in Africa between the latitudes of 26° N and 26° S.

"There are very few studies that have focused in detail on Africa, primarily because there isn't much atmospheric methane data from there," says Lunt. "Using satellite data gives a unique perspective on the continent that wouldn't otherwise be available."

Previous studies that have included African methane emission estimates have utilised global models, which are run at relatively coarse resolutions and resolve emission changes at continental scales. By instead focusing exclusively on sub-Saharan Africa, Lunt and his co-authors were able to run a regional model at a much higher resolution than would be feasible with a global version. This difference allowed the researchers to focus on changes in individual countries--a level of detail that could not previously be achieved.

The results indicate that about a third of the global atmospheric methane increase observed between 2010-2016 originates in Africa's tropics. Most of this came from East Africa, including a pronounced, short-term boost in emissions from the Sudd, one of the world's largest wetlands, in South Sudan.

"Our research highlights the importance of Africa, and even individual wetlands, in terms of their contributions to the global methane budget," says Lunt. But, he says, it's also important to note that the study period only dates back to 2010, the year GOSAT came online. "Based on this work, we cannot say anything about what started the rise in 2007," says Lunt. The team also cannot yet account for the source of additional increases in methane emissions they observed in East Africa. "Agriculture or other wetlands are likely suspects," says Lunt, "but we need more evidence to prove this."

According to Lunt, the findings could be used to improve wetland models, inform where intensive field campaigns should take place to identify the underlying causes of tropical methane emissions, and ultimately help us understand Earth's future climate. "In order to understand how methane might change in the future, it is essential that we can adequately explain changes in the present and recent past," says Lunt. "Studies such as this can help narrow down the list of possible explanations, and hopefully improve our predictive capabilities for the future."

You may have heard how excess nutrients, such as phosphorus, can run off of crop fields. This can cause harm when the nutrients end up in rivers and lakes. However, there are other sources of excess nutrients you might not think of, such as the pots nursery plants come in.

Before being shipped to farmers and garden centers, many tree crops and ornamental plants are grown in pots at nurseries. The growers apply fertilizer with nutrients, including phosphorus, to the plants in containers.

Phosphorus runoff, including that from container-grown plants, can be harmful to water quality. Because of this, researchers are looking into ways nurseries can keep phosphorus where it belongs - in the pots. Jacob Shreckhise of the USDA's Agricultural Research Service has been looking into this problem.

"Specialty crops, including ornamental plants, small fruits, and fruit trees, may spend all or a part of their life in a pot or container," explains Shreckhise. "Growing plants in containers saves space, helps with shipping and handling, and requires no arable land. These containers are usually filled with peat or bark instead of soil. Because peat and bark provide very little nutrients, plants are given fertilizer that release nutrients slowly over time."

However, little research has previously been done to determine what additions to the peat or bark might help keep the phosphorus in the containers. To help answer this question, he and other researchers performed a laboratory study on pine bark-based potting medium and two ingredients nurseries often add to it: dolomite and micronutrient fertilizer.

"It's important to remember that the growing media used to produce nursery crops in containers is totally different than the field soils other crops are grown in," says Shreckhise. "Bark and peat-based growing media can't stop the phosphorus from moving around as easily. So, it's free to drain from the containers when they are watered. That's what we are trying to prevent."

For their lab experiment, they filled columns with the potting material, a fertilizer and ingredients thought to help with keeping phosphorus around. Then, they watered the columns and collected the drainage water to analyze.

They found that the two additives, dolomite and micronutrient fertilizer, reduce the concentrations of a particular form of phosphorus by an average of 70%.

The additives work because of complex chemistry. Phosphate, a form of phosphorus that plants can use, has a negative charge. This means it likes to stick to things with a positive charge, such as dolomite and micronutrient fertilizer. In addition to improving plant growth, this research shows that these amendments help keep phosphorus in the pot.

Shreckhise and his team also studied how long dolomite and micronutrient fertilizers help to retain phosphorus in containers. Their next step is seeing if that retained phosphorus is in a form that plants can use.

Phosphorus runoff is becoming a bigger and bigger problem for the environment. Farms, including nurseries, must continue to combat it. "This research shows that we should continue exploring the use of amendments to help reduce the phosphorus that washes away from the containerized plants," says Shreckhise.

"This research was just the first step toward understanding the phosphorus chemistry occurring in these pots," he says. "Since plants were not involved in this study, we cannot make specific recommendations to growers based solely on this research. The general public should know that nursery growers routinely add these amendments to the potting medium. This is a step in the right direction to keeping the green industry 'green.'"

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have successfully used stem cells to engineer living biohybrid nerve tissue to develop 3D models of neural networks with the hopes of gaining a better understanding of how the brain and these networks work.

The first author, Gelson Pagan-Diaz-Diaz, likens the produced tissue to a computer processing unit, which provided the basic principle to today's supercomputer. Pagan-Diaz is a graduate student in Prof. Rashid Bashir's group in the Department of Bioengineering at the Grainger College of Engineering. Bashir is also the Dean of the College. "Being able to form 3-dimensional tissue consisting of neurons can give us the ability to develop tissue models for drug screening or processing units for biological computers", Pagan-Diaz said.

The brain is challenging to study in an actual person, but being able to understand how these networks develop using a 3D model outside the body promises to give researchers a new tool to better understand how it works. These models will be able to help understand how abnormalities form, e.g. what gives rise to diseases such as Alzheimer's.

The team was able to give 3D geometry to the living tissue made of neurons which optogenetics, so they could be activated with blue light. These tissues could be used to study complex behaviors that happen in the brain and how these tissues react with new drugs being developed. It could also mean less reliant on animals to test these drugs in the future.

"If we can control how these neurons communicate with each other, if we can train them using optogenetics, if we can program them, then we can potentially use to perform engineering functions," Bashir said. "In the future, our hope is that by being able to design these neural tissue, we can begin to realize biological processing units and biological computers, similar to the brain."

The project was funded through an NSF Science and Technology Center EBICS (Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems) and published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was inspired by work done five years ago in developing functioning muscles, where researchers in Bashir's lab, developed bio bots that can walk when stimulated with electricity or light.

This new work was performed by interdisciplinary team consists of Pagan-Diaz, Bashir, Karla Ramos-Cruz from bioengineering, Richard Sam from the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Mikhail Kandel and Prof. Gabriel Popescu from electrical and computer engineering, and Onur Aydin and Prof. Taher Saif from mechanical science and engineering.

In this study, the team developed neural tissue mimics that can form different shapes. The team used hydrogels and fibrin to make millimeter to centimeter scale structures that doesn't have rigid scaffolds and can be molded into a number of desired shapes.

"It's a bundle of hundreds to thousands of microns of cells that contains a lot of populations with a genetic makeup similar to in vivo tissues," Pagan-Diaz explained. "As we continue develop these bio-fabrication methods, we should be able to capture a lot of the phenomena that happens in vivo. Once we can prove that, we will be able to mimic the morphology that we see in the brain. Once we show that the tissue engineered outside the body is similar to the tissue in the body, then we can then fabricate them over and over again."

Besides drug testing, the team is especially interested in being able to recapitulate the way these networks might develop learning and memory.

"Being able to fabricate these tissue mimics outside the body allows us to characterize and study their electrical activity in great detail," Pagan-Diaz emphasized. "the broad set of design rules due to the 3D structure and shapes gives you a lot more experimental freedom and open up new avenues of research in neuroscience, medicine, and engineering applications."

Wild populations of the western honeybee Apis mellifera were widely assumed as extinct in Europe. "However, recent fieldwork studies reveal that wild honeybees still exist in forests: Their colonies mainly nest in tree cavities," says Dr. Fabrice Requier from the Biocenter of Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany.

So far, wild honeybees have only been observed in northern Poland and Germany (the Hainich forest and the Biosphere Reserve Swabian Alb). Research groups from Germany, France, Italy, and the Czech Republic, led by the JMU, have now asked themselves where there might be other suitable habitats in Europe.

The four teams analysed the tree cavity densities of 106 forest areas across Europe and inferred for the first time an expected population size of estimated 80,000 wild honeybee colonies in European forests. This is reported in the journal Conservation Letters.

Where there are hotspots for wild honeybees

The researchers have also identified the hotspots where wild honeybees find a particularly large number of nesting sites. On the one hand, these are unmanaged forests, for example in national park areas. Surprisingly, hotspots also include forests in which the nesting trees exist not so densely, such as the extensive coniferous forests in Sweden and Finland.

The scientists' conclusion: it is worthwhile to include the conservation of trees with cavities in forest management, even in commercial forests. This is entirely in line with the EU strategy to halt the decline of honeybees and other pollinators.

9 December 2019, Cambridge - Researchers at the EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) have created the largest reference phosphoproteome to date of almost 120 000 human phosphosites. To identify those most likely to be critical, they used a machine learning approach capable of ranking them according to functional importance.

Proteins are the core molecular machines of the cell that can be regulated by protein modifications, akin to molecular switches. Protein phosphorylation is one such molecular switch, that can alter the structural conformation of a protein, causing it to become activated, deactivated or modifying its function. Despite decades of work the total number of these modifications and which ones are truly critical for life remains a mystery.

This research, published in Nature Biotechnology, creates a freely-accessible resource that can be used by researchers to better understand which proteins are phosphorylated and which phosphosites have functional relevance. Access to this data has significant implications to accelerate the progression of research into many different biological processes and diseases.

Machine learning and data sharing

"This new resource would not have been possible if scientists around the world didn't share their research data and results," says Pedro Beltrao, Group Leader at the EMBL-EBI. "It would take a single machine over 500 consecutive days to run all the mass spectrometry experiments used to create this database. By applying machine learning to this huge dataset, we created a scoring system that will hopefully help researchers to determine which lesser-known phosphosites to explore next."

The researchers at EMBL-EBI curated over 100 publicly available phospho-enriched human datasets containing over 6000 mass-spectrometry experiments from EMBL-EBI's PRoteomics IDEntifications (PRIDE) database. This large-scale project has generated the biggest open access reference phosphoproteome database to date.

Functional human phosphosites

To identify the phosphosites most critical to human cells, machine learning was used to integrate diverse annotations for each site such as the degree of conservation. The phosphosite functional score generated in this study has enormous potential to help other scientists uncover more about their proteins of interest. It can be used to rank known phosphosites to distinguish those which are functionally relevant for molecular processes and disease.

For example, the researchers were able to demonstrate the practicality of their functional score model by identifying two high-scoring phosphosites which play a role in regulating neuronal differentiation.

"The functional score model created from this study can be used to uncover an abundance of new, functional phosphosites that may play crucial roles in disease," says David Ochoa, Project Coordinator at Open Targets. "We already know of several groups who are using the scoring model, so we would like to encourage researchers everywhere to explore the resource and make use of it."

Artificial light influences the behaviour of many nocturnal animals such as bats, which are very sensitive to all types of lighting. Particularly critical is the illumination of natural caves in which bats roost. Cave illumination is widespread in tourist areas worldwide and disturbs the animals in their resting places. Researchers of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) and the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology (MPIO) have now investigated how the illumination of bat caves affects the animals' behaviour and whether the colour of light makes a difference on their flight and emergence activity. Although red light irritates the small mammals somewhat less than white light, from the researchers' point of view neither the entrance nor the interior of bat caves should be illuminated if bats are present. The results are published in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation.

With two experiments the scientists tested how bats respond to the lighting of cave entrances and cave interiors and whether they show a preference for certain colours. The first experiment took place in a natural cave at the Siemers Bat Research Station in Tabachka in northern Bulgaria. Four bat species live here, including the common bent-wing bat Miniopterus schreibersii and Myotis capaccinii, the long-fingered bat. The six meter long and four meter wide entrance of the Zorovitsa Cave, which serves more than 1,000 animals as a daytime roost, was divided: Alternately one half was left unlit, while the other was briefly lit with white, amber or red LEDs. "With ultrasonic detectors, we measured which part of the cave entrance the bats used based on their acoustic activity," explains Voigt. The result: the animals avoid all light colours and prefer the dark entrance.

In order to find out how bats react to these different light colours inside the cave, the research team conducted an experiment in a flight room. The team captured 16 specimens of M. schreibersii and 21 M. capaccinii, which were released after the short experiments. In the simulated quarter - consisting of a windowless room divided almost entirely by a wall in the middle - they let the animals fly for 14 minutes each. The "participants" could decide for themselves whether they preferred to stay in the illuminated or dark part and were observed with infrared cameras and ultrasonic detectors. The results show again that bats react very sensitively to any light. Only if the dark was not a choice they showed a slight preference for red light over amber and white.

"It does not come as surprise that light drives bats out of their roosts. But now we also know that this happens almost independently of the light colour," explains Voigt. "We therefore recommend that lighting is not used at all inside or at the entrance to caves that are inhabited by bats." For bats, light means a high risk of being attacked by an owl or other birds of prey, but also by cats. That is why bats in and around quarters avoid bright illumination, regardless of colour.

In many European countries, street lighting is currently being switched to energy-saving LEDs. LEDs can easily be used in almost any light colour. The inexpensive and durable light-emitting diodes are used in many places for purely aesthetic purposes, for example to illuminate historical buildings - often in addition to conventional spotlights. In tourist areas in particular, caves where bats sometimes spend the day are colourfully illuminated day and night as a tourist attraction. Some LED manufacturers state that their products are particularly bat-friendly thanks to amber and red light instead of white light. Since the animals' eyes are particularly sensitive to short-wave UV light, they should be less able to perceive these colours, which are at the long-wave end of the light spectrum. The investigation of Voigt and his colleagues now shows that this theory is not entirely wrong, but in reality makes amber or red light not necessarily more acceptable for bats than any other colour.

With the launch of wearable devices and smartphones that require high capacity of electricity such as foldable phones and 5G phones, the interest in batteries are increasing and various battery types are developed. For example, flexible batteries embedded in the mobile watch band or wireless power sharing batteries that have developed from wireless charging. However, there is no manufacturing of a battery that produces a battery with thousands milliamp Hour (mAh) capacity to be foldable. Recently, a research team from Korea developed a monolithic electrode that can replace heavy copper collectors and enabled development of a flexible battery with high capacity.

Professor Soojin Park of Chemistry and Division of Advanced Materials Science with his postdoctoral researcher, Jaegeon Ryu and his PhD student, Jieun Kang successfully developed a flexible battery with thin and three-dimensional organic electrode in collaboration with Korea Institute of Materials Science.

Furthermore, they were able to lower the weight of a battery by 10 times more than the conventional copper collector1) by using a three-dimensional copper collector. Instead of using a graphite anode, they utilized organic materials and were able to increase the energy density of a battery by four times and more. Their research establishment was published in the recent issue of ACS Nano.

Electrical conductivity of an organic material is low and there was no solution to integrate collector and organic material. For this reason, it had not been possible to demonstrate a monolithic electrode with organic materials before their study. The research team studied a new way to replace a current collector that makes a battery heavy and a graphite anode with low energy density in order to lower the weight of battery innovatively.

The team produced a three-dimensional structure with high electrical conductivity by using single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) aerogels. Here, they constructed thin monolithic organic electrodes by coating a nanometer-scale imide-based network (IBN)2) organic material.

The three-dimensional monolithic electrodes coated with 8nm thin and adjustable thick organic IBN layers delivered capacity of up to 1550 mA h g-1 and were possible to recharge more than 800 times. These electrodes were coated with organic materials. Despite of their poor intrinsic electrical conductivity, they had high electrical conductivity and they also demonstrated improved electrochemical performances of rechargeable battery by helping fast transfer of lithium through abundant redox-active sites. Moreover, thickness of coated organic materials can be controlled easily and they were able to improve current density of organic electrode greatly.

The newly developed electrode can replace the metal-based collector and this enables development of light and flexible rechargeable battery which later can be applied to wearable electronic devices, flexible devices, telecommunication and electronic vehicles of next generation.

Professor Soojin Park who led the research commented, "We can lower the weight of a rechargeable battery enormously by using this newly developed monolithic electrode with SWCNT organic materials. This can overcome the limitations of the conventional rechargeable battery and can realize flexibility and weight lightening of an organic battery.

NEW YORK, NY (Dec. 11, 2019)--An estimated 30% of adults experience insomnia, and a new study by researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons suggests that diet may be partly to blame.

The study found that postmenopausal women who consumed a diet high in refined carbohydrates--particularly added sugars--were more likely to develop insomnia.

Women whose diet included higher amounts of vegetables, fiber, and whole fruit (not juice) were less likely to develop problems with insomnia.

"Insomnia is often treated with cognitive behavioral therapy or medications, but these can be expensive or carry side effects," says the study's senior author James Gangwisch, PhD, assistant professor at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

"By identifying other factors that lead to insomnia, we may find straightforward and low-cost interventions with fewer potential side effects."

The findings were published Dec. 11 online in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Link Between Diet and Sleep Is an Emerging Research Area

Previous studies have explored a possible link between refined carbohydrates and insomnia, but results have been inconsistent. And because the studies didn't follow individuals over time, it's not clear if a diet that's high in refined carbs triggered the onset of insomnia, or if insomnia caused individuals to eat more sweets.

One way to determine if carb intake is causing sleep problems is to look for the emergence of insomnia in people with different diets.

In the current study, Gangwisch and his team gathered data from more than 50,000 participants in the Women's Health Initiative who had completed food diaries. The researchers looked at whether women with higher dietary glycemic index were more likely to develop insomnia.

All Carbs Aren't Created Equally

Different kinds and amounts of carbohydrates increase blood sugar levels to varying degrees. Highly refined carbohydrates--such as added sugars, white bread, white rice, and soda--have a higher glycemic index, and cause a more rapid increase in blood sugar.

"When blood sugar is raised quickly, your body reacts by releasing insulin, and the resulting drop in blood sugar can lead to the release of hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol, which can interfere with sleep," Gangwisch says.

The researchers hypothesized that the rapid spikes and troughs in blood sugar after eating refined carbs may trigger insomnia.

Refined Carbs Triggered Insomnia

They found that the higher the dietary glycemic index--particularly when fueled by the consumption of added sugars and processed grains--the greater the risk of developing insomnia. They also discovered that women who consumed more vegetables and whole fruits (not juices) were less likely to develop insomnia.

"Whole fruits contain sugar, but the fiber in them slow the rate of absorption to help prevent spikes in blood sugar," says Gangwisch. "This suggests that the dietary culprit triggering the women's insomnia was the highly processed foods that contain larger amounts of refined sugars that aren't found naturally in food."

Since most people, not just postmenopausal women, experience a rapid rise in blood sugar after eating refined carbohydrates, the authors suspect that these findings may also hold true in a broader population.

"Based on our findings, we would need randomized clinical trials to determine if a dietary intervention, focused on increasing the consumption of whole foods and complex carbohydrates, could be used to prevent and treat insomnia," says Gangwisch.

Imperial College London bioengineers have found a way to create stretchy and squeezy soft sensing devices by bonding rubber to electrical components.

Stretchy and squeezy soft sensors that can fit around body parts or squeezed in hands could be used for applications including sports and rehabilitation after injury or stroke. For example, soft electrical force sensors in the form for a squeeze ball could monitor the rehabilitation of patients with hand injuries or neurological disorders.

While such sensors have been in development for a long time, none have made it to market because they cannot easily be integrated with electronic components, like the wires, computer chips and batteries needed to gather, process and send the data the sensor collects.

Now, a team of researchers from Imperial have invented a way to bond the stretchy and squeezy force-sensitive soft materials to electrical components. They have developed a bond so strong that the stretchy rubber itself breaks before the bond between the two different materials does.

Their results are published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

First author Michael Kasimatis, from the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial, said: "We hope this method will allow us to make low-cost soft sensors that are reliable and portable, that can be used to monitor people's health in their own homes.

"Such sensors could be coupled with a mobile device, such as a smartphone, so that the data they generate can be easily processed and stored on the cloud, which is important for applications in digital healthcare."

Previously, scientists had tried bonding the force-sensitive, conductive rubbers with electrical components using adhesives, which often came apart when pulled, or using metal clamps, which could tear the stretchy material.

The new method instead uses small pieces of metal-coated silicon, which create a chemical bond with the stretchy and squeezy rubber. The silicon contacts are smooth on one side, where they bond to the rubber, and pitted and plated with copper on the other side, so wires or other electric components can be easily attached via conventical methods such as soldering.

The team demonstrated how their bonding method can resist the strains of stretching and also tested it out in a few prototype sensors that could be used in healthcare and rehabilitation.

For example, they created a wearable breathing monitor, a leg band for exercise monitoring and a squeezy ball for monitoring hand rehabilitation.

Lead researcher Dr Firat Güder, from the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial, said: "Having successfully demonstrated how this new bonding approach could work and be applied in laboratory prototypes, we now want to take this technology out of the lab and make it available to everyone."

The team is currently looking for partners and funders to help translate and advance the technology.

For parents worried that their teenager's narcissism is out of control, there's hope. New research from Michigan State University conducted the longest study on narcissism to date, revealing how it changes over time.

"There's a narrative in our culture that generations are getting more and more narcissistic, but no one has ever looked at it throughout generations or how it varies with age at the same time," said William Chopik, associate professor of psychology at MSU and lead author.

The research, published in Psychology and Aging, assessed a sample of nearly 750 people to see how narcissism changed from age 13 to 70. The findings showed that qualities associated with narcissism - being full of yourself, sensitive to criticism and imposing your opinion on others - decline over time and with age. Some character traits - like having high aspirations for yourself - increased with age.

"There are things that happen in life that can shake people a little bit and force them to adapt their narcissistic qualities," Chopik said. "As you age, you form new relationships, have new experiences, start a family and so on. All of these factors make someone realize that it's not 'all about them.' And, the older you get, the more you think about the world that you may leave behind."

The greatest impetus for declining narcissism, Chopik said, was landing a first job.

"One thing about narcissists is that they're not open to criticism. When life happens and you're forced to accept feedback, break up with someone or have tragedy strike, you might need to adjust to understanding that you're not as awesome as you once thought," Chopik said. "There's a sense in which narcissists start to realize that being the way they are isn't smart if they want to have friends or meaningful relationships."

Chopik found that the fastest-changing age group was young adults. He also found that, contrary to popular belief, changes in the levels of narcissism are lifelong and changes don't stop at any certain age or stage in life.

"One of the most surprising findings was that - also contrary to what many people think - individuals who were born earlier in the century started off with higher levels of hyper-sensitivity, or the type of narcissism where people are full of themselves, as well as willfulness, which is the tendency to impose opinions on others," Chopik said. "There isn't much data on older generations, but now that Baby Boomers are aging into that phase of life, it's a huge part of the population that we need to be looking at."

With these his findings, the researchers hope that the public gains a greater understanding about the different types of narcissism as well as new insight to the understudied older populations. Also, if you're worried that someone is truly a narcissist, there's hope they will change for the better as they get older, Chopik added.

The Great Salt Lake reached historic low levels in recent years and continues to dry as a result of drought and water diversions. As water levels decrease, the exposed area of dry lakebed increases, creating major sources of mineral dust. Declining water levels are a major concern for scientists and the general public alike, but air quality is often overlooked as one of the potentially harmful consequences of receding lakes.

New research from BYU's geological sciences department found that about 90 percent of dust in Utah's Wasatch Front comes from the west desert, an area that was once covered by the prehistoric Lake Bonneville but that is now a dried lakebed. More recently, shallow lakes like Sevier Dry Lake and the Great Salt Lake, which are remnants of Lake Bonneville, have been exposed as water inflows are diverted for consumptive use. Researchers predict this percentage is only going to increase as water levels decline and more dry lakebed is exposed.

"Lakebeds are muddy, but as they dry out, they become a dust pan," said study co-author and former BYU graduate student Michael Goodman. "Dry lake beds are becoming a significant dust threat to nearby communities, not only impacting air quality but also impacting soil and what can grow in it."

Researchers collected and compared over 100 dust samples from three different sources: dried lakebeds from Sevier Lake and the Great Salt Lake in Utah's west desert, urban areas along the Wasatch Front and mountain snowpack from the Uintah Mountains. The team found salts common to dried lakebeds in the urban and mountain areas, suggesting that dust from dried lakebeds is transferred to these other locations.

While most dust along the Wasatch Front comes from drying lakebeds, researchers said that the most dangerous contaminants are still coming from urban areas.

"The dust we sampled contained potentially toxic metals, and those come primarily from the urban and mining areas," said BYU geology professor and co-author Greg Carling. "Even though the urban and mining area contributes only a small fraction of the dust load, it contains the most contaminants, such as antimony and copper."

Carling said whether it's the drying up of lakes or the emission of dangerous chemicals, our actions often have unintended consequences that may negatively affect the environment. The team also acknowledges that further knowledge of dust sources may be useful for understanding how water diversions, climate change and population growth affect the regional dust cycle in the future.

"Most people probably wouldn't think that something out in the west desert has a direct impact on the Wasatch Front," Carling said. "But we have to consider that there are consequences for our actions, many of which are indirect." Researchers also said dust should be considered an important factor in poor air quality and human health, and the amount of dust blown into urban areas could be lowered through preserving lakes.

Optical beams carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) have attracted a growing attention during the last decades, exhibiting disruptive applications in a wide range of fields: particle trapping and tweezing, high-resolution microscopy, astronomical coronagraphy, high-capacity telecommunication and security.

Light beams carrying OAM are endowed with peculiar twisted wavefronts, and modes with different OAM are orthogonal to each other and can carry independent information channels at the same frequency without any interference. Then, in the telecom field, the potentially unbounded state space provided by this even-unexploited degree of freedom offers a promising solution to increase the information capacity of optical networks and solve in a sustainable way the impelling problem of frequency saturation, otherwise called as the 'optical crunch', this approach being valid both for free-space and optical fibre propagation.

Currently, it is urgent to further develop novel devices that can reconfigure and switch between distinct OAM modes to fully exploit the extra degree of freedom provided by the OAM both for classical and quantum communications. So far, conventional methods are useful for implementing only shift operations on the OAM, i.e., addition or subtraction.

For the first time, novel optical elements have been designed and fabricated to perform the multiplication and division of the orbital angular momentum of light in a compact and efficient way. The study has been conducted by Dr. Gianluca Ruffato, Dr. Michele Massari, and Prof. Filippo Romanato at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of Padova University, in Italy. The research results have been recently published in Light: Science and Applications.

The key element of these optics is represented by an optical transformation mapping the azimuthal phase gradient of the input OAM beam onto a circular sector. By combining multiple circular-sector transformations into a single optical element, it is possible to multiply the value of the input OAM state by splitting and mapping the phase onto complementary circular sectors. Conversely, by combining multiple inverse transformations, the division of the initial OAM value is achievable by mapping distinct complementary circular sectors of the input beam into an equal number of circular phase gradients.

The designed optical elements have been fabricated in the form of miniaturized and compact phase-only diffractive optics with high-resolution electron-beam lithography, and optically characterized in the visible range to demonstrate the expected capability to either multiply or divide the OAM of the input beam.

This study can find promising applications for the multiplicative generation of higher-order OAM modes, optical information processing based on OAM-beam transmission, and optical routing/switching in telecom, both in the classical and single-photon regimes.

WASHINGTON, D.C., December 10, 2019 -- Scientists at the University of Illinois have created sugar cube-sized blocks of an electromagnetic material with potential to transform communication networks.

Several countries are building futuristic communication systems using higher frequency electromagnetic waves to transfer more data at faster rates, but they have lacked network components to handle these higher bandwidths. Researcher J. Gary Eden proved his new device can rapidly switch functionality to perform the varied tasks needed to support a network with carrier frequencies of over 100 gigahertz. The miniscule-scale architecture concealed within the sugar cube blocks is described in Applied Physics Reviews, from AIP Publishing.

"This technology is particularly interesting, because it generates multiple channels operating simultaneously at different frequencies. Basically, this allows multiple conversations to occur over the same network, which is the heart of high-speed wireless communications," explained Eden.

Plasma is critical for swiftly switching between functions and frequencies, but previous plasma-based electromagnetic crystals were much too large to operate at high frequencies. The key lies in creating a structure with spacing between the plasma and metal columns as small as the wavelength of radiation being manipulated.

The wavelength of electromagnetic waves shortens as the frequency and bandwidth increase. To realize crystals of high bandwidth operating at frequencies above 100 GHz, a small-scale design is required.

Eden's team developed a 3D-printed scaffold, which served as a negative of the desired network. A polymer was poured in and, once set, microcapillaries 0.3 millimeters in diameter were filled with plasma, metal or a dielectric gas. Using this replica-molding technique, it took nearly five years to perfect the dimensions and spacings of the microcapillaries in the woodpilelike lattice.

"Assembling the material was extremely demanding," said Eden, but eventually, he and his team were able to use their material to observe resonance spanning the 100 GHz to 300 GHz frequency region, which Eden noted as "an enormous spectral range over which to operate."

The group showed that rapid changes in the electromagnetic characteristics of these crystals -- such as switching between reflecting or transmitting signals -- could be achieved by simply turning on or off a few plasma columns. Such a capability shows the utility of such a dynamic and energy-efficient device for communications.

Eden is keen to further optimize the fabrication and switching efficiencies of this new device but is also excited to delve into other applications. For instance, the crystal could be tuned to respond to the resonances of specific molecules, e.g., atmospheric pollutants, and be used as a highly sensitive detector.

Sharing preferences for end of life care, known as advance care planning, may be linked to longer survival in terminally ill patients, suggests the first study of its kind, published online in the journal BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care.

Advance care planning enables adults to discuss wishes and priorities for their care, including stopping treatment to prolong life, when they are no longer able to do so.

But it's not known what impact this might have on survival in patients who are terminally ill.

The researchers used data from a previously published randomised controlled trial, which aimed to find out if advance care planning had any impact on meeting terminally ill patients' preferences for place of death.

This involved tracking the date of death for 205 terminally ill patients, 102 of whom had had a conversation about their preferences for end of life care with a doctor, and 103 of whom hadn't.

Around half the patients in each of the groups had advanced cancer, and half had been terminally ill with heart and lung conditions.

Additional analysis of these data showed that there was a difference in survival after a year of monitoring between those who had had this type of conversation and those who hadn't.

Nearly three out of four of those (73%) of those who had done so were alive after a year compared with over half (57%) of those who hadn't.

While there was no significant difference in survival between terminally ill cancer patients who had and hadn't had an advance care planning conversation, there was between those with other types of terminal illness, the analysis showed.

Among this group, nine out of 10 (90%) of those who had done so were alive after a year, compared with two thirds (67%) of those who hadn't.

By way of a possible explanation for this finding, the researchers suggest that this type of conversation helps these patients better understand the life-limiting nature of their illness.

This may change their views about having treatment that prolongs life, such as steroids, which, paradoxically, have been associated with a heightened risk of death and other illness - at least among those with serious lung disease, say the researchers.

The researchers didn't set out to look at the potential impact of advance care planning on survival, and this finding was a by-product of their research in a relatively small number of people, so requires further study, they say.

"[Advance care planning] was associated with a significantly improved survival among terminally ill patients, primarily [those] with non-cancer diseases. However, the analysis was explorative, and the association must be investigated further before drawing any firm conclusion," they conclude.