Tech

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Nov. 25, 2019 - A technology developed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and scaled up by Vertimass LLC to convert ethanol into fuels suitable for aviation, shipping and other heavy-duty applications can be price-competitive with conventional fuels while retaining the sustainability benefits of bio-based ethanol, according to a new analysis.

ORNL worked with technology licensee Vertimass and researchers at 10 other institutions on a technoeconomic and a life cycle sustainability analysis of the process - single-step catalytic conversion of ethanol into hydrocarbon blendstocks that can be added to jet, diesel, or gasoline fuels to lower their greenhouse gas emissions. This new technology is called Consolidated Dehydration and Oligomerization, or CADO.

The analysis, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that this single-step process for converting wet ethanol vapor could produce blendstocks at $2/gigajoule (GJ) today and $1.44/GJ in the future as the process is refined, including operating and annualized capital costs. Thus, the blendstock would be competitive with conventional jet fuel produced from oil at historically high prices of about $100/barrel. At $60/barrel oil, the use of existing renewable fuel incentives result in price parity, the analysis found.

The conversion makes use of a type of catalyst called a zeolite, which directly produces longer hydrocarbon chains from the original alcohol, in this case ethanol, replacing a traditional multi-step process with one that uses less energy and is highly efficient.

"The robustness of the catalyst enables direct conversion of wet ethanol, which greatly simplifies the process, reduces the cost of ethanol purification and makes hydrocarbon blendstock production costs competitive based on the analysis," said Zhenglong Li, staff scientist for biomass catalysis at ORNL and a collaborator on the project.

While this single-step catalysis was effective at laboratory scale, further testing and improvements by Vertimass resulted in even higher product yields when scaled up 300 times using commercial catalyst formulations. The conversion operation could be integrated into new biofuels plants or installed as bolt-on technology to existing ethanol plants with minimal new capital investment, the researchers noted.

Advanced biofuels hold promise as clean-burning, carbon-neutral renewable energy sources. The goal is to create advanced liquid biofuels that can take advantage of existing pipeline delivery infrastructure and can be used in existing or advanced engines without loss of performance. The fuels are particularly attractive to help reduce net carbon emissions in heavy-duty engines such as those in aircraft, ships and large commercial vehicles where electrification is challenging.

Given current standards, the advanced biofuel could be blended at 20% with petroleum-derived jet fuel and somewhat higher for gasoline, subject to certification and verification.

Meanwhile, a life-cycle analysis of the conversion process found that its greenhouse gas emissions profile is similar to that for the ethanol fed to the process.

"The sustainability of bio-derived ethanol, now mostly produced from corn in the United States but with some now being made from corn stover and eventually dedicated biomass feedstocks like switchgrass, carries through with the catalytic process," said Brian Davison, chief science officer for DOE's Center for Bioenergy Innovation (CBI) at ORNL and a collaborator on the project. CBI is pursuing specific research targets for a thriving bioeconomy: sustainable biomass feedstock crops; advanced processes to break down and convert plants into specialty biofuels; and valuable bioproducts, including chemical feedstocks, made from the lignin residue after bioprocessing.

"Our scientists constantly push the boundaries of what's possible to deliver breakthroughs for clean energy," said Moe Khaleel, associate laboratory director for Energy and Environmental Sciences at ORNL. "The conversion of ethanol into hydrocarbon blendstocks takes advantage of an abundant domestic energy resource while supporting the development of thriving American bioeconomies."

Refinements by Vertimass to the original, lab-scale process include the development of cheaper forms of the catalyst, as well as more than doubling the liquid fuel yield, the paper noted.

The paper details the refinements as well as results from analyses by Argonne National Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Vertimass, and ORNL in collaboration with Dartmouth, the Federal Aviation Administration, Boeing, Pennsylvania State University, University of California-Riverside, Imperial College of London, the Brazilian Bioethanol Science and Technology Laboratory, and the Brazilian Center for Research in Energy and Materials.

"This research shows how ethanol, in addition to being a valuable fuel for cars, can be an effective intermediate for sustainable production of low-cost fuels for air travel and heavy-duty vehicles," said professor Lee Lynd of Dartmouth College, who collaborated on the research and is the corresponding author. "The integration of biological and catalytic technologies shown here reflects the power of such hybrid systems."

The Korea Brain Research Institute (KBRI, President Pann Ghill Suh) announced on November 12 that korean research team made up of Dr. Hyung-Jun Kim and Shinrye Lee of KBRI, and professor Kiyoung Kim of Soonchunhyang University, found a new molecular mechanism of suppressing neuronal toxicity associateded dementia and Lou Gehrig's disease.

These findings were published in the November issue of Autophagy (IF=11.059). The authors' names and the title of the paper are as follows.

Paper: PTK2/FAK regulates UPS impairment via SQSTM1/p62 phosphorylation in TARDBP/TDP-43 proteinopathies

Authors: Shinrye Lee (first author), Yu-Mi Jeon, Sun Joo Cha, Seyeon Kim, Younghwi Kwon, Myungjin Jo, You-Na Jang, Seongsoo Lee, Jaekwang Kim, Sang Ryong Kim, Kea Joo Lee, Sung Bae Lee, Kiyoung Kim*, Hyung-Jun Kim*(corresponding author*)

Neurons in patients with dementia or Lou Gehrig's disease often have abnormal aggregates that contain TDP-43* protein, and these accumulated aggregates can cause neurodegeneration by interupting ubiquitin proteasome system (UPS) that removes damaged or unnecessary proteins.

UPS(Ubiquitin proteasome system): It is a part of protein quality control system (mechanism that removes or restores abnormal proteins to ensure a certain protein performs its intended function). It is known that UPS prevents cell death by degrading abnormal proteins in damaged neurons.

TDP-43 : Protein that contributes toward maintaining the function and safety of RNA. It is known as a major disease-related protein in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), frontotemporal lobar degeneration dementia (FTD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD).

The research team found a new role of three proteins (PTK2, TBK1, SQSTM1) which can inhibit neuronal degeneration by TDP-43 and demonstrated for the first time that their interaction can alleviate neurodegeneration by strengthening "autophagy lysosome pathway (ALP),*" which consists of another protein quality control system in case of damage to the UPS.

This research is regarded as one that presents new therapeutic strategies that can remove abnormal protein accumulation in the neurons of patients with dementia in the future by revealing a new molecular mechanism that restores neurodegeneration by TDP-43 protein, which has been the major cause of dementia and Lou Gehrig diseases.

Hyung-Jun Kim, the principal researcher at KBRI and senior author of the study, said, "this research reveals the pathogenesis of TDP-43 associated neurodegeneration at the basic level, so further clinical verification process is necessary to develop a therapy for dementia." He added, "we will proceed follow-up research to verify the mechanism in actual patient tissues in cooperation with brain banks and hospitals at home and abroad."

The Korea Brain Research Institute signed an MOU with the Dementia Research Institute of King's College at London (UK DRI) in August to analyze the etiology using the blood and brain tissues of patients. Research for verification based on human-originated resources will start next year.

NUS researchers have made a breakthrough in the field of cognitive computational neuroscience, by discovering a key aspect of how the brain encodes short-term memories.

The researchers working in The N.1 Institute for Health at the National University of Singapore (NUS), led by Assistant Professor Camilo Libedinsky from the Department of Psychology at NUS, and Senior Lecturer Shih-Cheng Yen from the Innovation and Design Programme in the Faculty of Engineering at NUS, discovered that a population of neurons in the brain's frontal lobe contain stable short-term memory information within dynamically-changing neural activity.

This discovery may have far-reaching consequences in understanding how organisms have the ability to perform multiple mental operations simultaneously, such as remembering, paying attention and making a decision, using a brain of limited size.

The results of this study were published in the journal Nature Communications on 1 November 2019.

Mapping short-term memory in the frontal lobe

In the human brain, the frontal lobe plays an important role in processing short-term memories. Short-term memory has a low capacity to retain information. "It can usually only hold six to eight items. Think for example about our ability to remember a phone number for a few seconds - that uses short-term memory," Asst Prof Libendisky explained.

Here, the NUS researchers studied how the frontal lobe represents short-term memory information by measuring the activity of many neurons. Previous results from the researchers had shown that if a distraction was presented during the memory maintenance period, it changed the code used by frontal lobe neurons that encode the memory.

"This was counterintuitive since the memory was stable but the code changed. In this study, we solved this riddle," Asst Prof Libedinsky said. Employing tools derived from machine learning, the researchers showed that stable information can be found within the changing neural population code.

This means that the NUS team demonstrated that memory information can be read out from a population of neurons that morphs their code after a distractor is presented.

Next steps

This simple finding has broader implications, suggesting that a single neural population may contain multiple independent types of information that do not interfere with each other. "This may be an important property of organisms that display cognitive flexibility," Asst Prof Libedinsky explained.

The researchers are currently extending these studies to explore of how multiple brain regions interact with each other with the objective of transferring and processing different types of information. This can be achieved by an interplay between making measurements in biological networks and simulating artificial neural networks that emulate their function. The researchers are also exploring these processes in unhealthy brains, such as those with dementia.

Animated shows with animal characters can increase public interest in real wildlife, including boosting donations to conservation programs at zoos. A new national analysis in Japan highlights the potential of entertainment-conservation partnerships to increase public interest in the natural world even as communities become increasingly urbanized.

"Our study was nationwide in Japan, but zoos exist all over the world. We believe zookeepers, conservationists and entertainers should feel encouraged to work together for global preservation of endangered animals," said Assistant Professor Yuya Fukano from the University of Tokyo Institute for Sustainable Agro-ecosystem Services.

When the summer heat wave in Tokyo made fieldwork impossible, Fukano, a field ecologist, began an office-work project in collaboration with a zookeeper and another UTokyo faculty member specializing in human-nature interactions.

The benefit of zoos

Although zoos are recognized as sites for public education about wildlife conservation, evidence of their impact is usually limited to small-scale visitor surveys. The research team used the big data available from Google Trends and Wikipedia page views to measure the nationwide impact of zoos on public interest in wildlife.

Internet searches for specific animal species are more common within prefectures that also have zoos caring for those animals, according to location details in the online data. The positive effect of a zoo in the prefecture was consistent across Japan, regardless of socioeconomic differences.

"Visiting zoos motivates people to learn more about the species they see there," said Fukano.

However, researchers noticed that for many animals, the number of online searches dramatically increased in the first few months of 2017.

"We wondered what was causing this noise in the data," said Fukano.

The impact of anime

Kemono Friends is a 30-minute animated series, or anime, originally broadcast in Japan late at night between Jan. 11 and March 29, 2017.

The premise of Kemono Friends is that an unexplained event has left one girl alone in a world filled with animals who help her navigate their habitats and discover her true identity as a human. The animals are portrayed as women in animal costumes with personalities and abilities characteristic of the species they represent.

Due to its popularity, the series was rebroadcast nationwide and via online streaming services. It became a franchise with merchandise, video games and additional seasons of the TV program. The majority of the show's audience is consistently people over the age of 20. The program also won a Japanese award for outstanding science fiction.

In the 18 months during and after the original Kemono Friends broadcast, there was a total increase of 4.66 million Google searches and 1 million Wikipedia page views for the animal species featured as characters in the anime compared to the 18 months before the broadcast.

"At first, we thought anime is just entertainment, so we could not take the data seriously. But Google Trends is a record of the public interest, and the data clearly shows Kemono Friends has a positive effect on public interest in wildlife, regardless of the species' conservation status," said Fukano.

Converting interest to impact

The researchers also looked at records of monetary donations to zoo conservation funds to determine if this anime-related boost in digital public interest also increased real-world conservation activity. Zoos in Tokyo that accept money allow donors to specify which species to support with their funds.

Animals at three Tokyo zoos had more donors on average after Kemono Friends aired, but animal species featured as main characters attracted larger increases in donors.

Preventing interest from causing harm

Increased public interest is not always a benefit to wildlife. For example, audiences captivated by the cute clownfish in the American animated film Finding Nemo may have inadvertently created a market for wildlife poaching.

"When we increase public interest, we must also prepare a good website or good zoo education program to turn people's interests into positive conservation and stop their interest from harming wildlife," said Fukano.

The creators of Kemono Friends reinforced the positive public interest in conservation created by the anime using both artistic and financial means. The Kemono Friends Project has collaborated with zoos to create special illustrations of individual zoo animals and allowed anime characters to be used in displays and posters around the zoo. The show's creators have also made monetary donations to those collaborating zoos and the World Wide Fund for Nature.

Fukano and his collaborators plan to continue studying nontraditional ways to increase public interest in wildlife conservation projects.

"There are so many environmental conservation issues in the world today: microplastics, biodiversity, climate change. These causes often compete for attention from audiences who are already interested in such issues. Collaborations between entertainers and zookeepers or conservationists could find a way to attract the very large potential audience that is not already interested in environmental topics," said Fukano.

About the research

Japanese is a language with many words that sound alike, so researchers excluded homonyms for the common names of the animals when searching Google Trends data. They also limited their study to species not native to Japan to be sure people were searching for animals they could have seen only in a zoo, not in their daily life.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- It may not be just location, location, location that influences where people move to in the United States, but also politics, politics, politics, according to a team of researchers.

In a study of county-to-county migration patterns in the U.S., the researchers found that when people migrate, they tend to move to other counties that reflect their political preferences. They added that the pattern also suggests that people moving from moderate partisan counties are just as likely to move to extreme partisan counties as they are to move to other moderate counties. However, people who live in a politically extreme county are significantly likely to move to a similarly extreme county.

This type of political sorting might turn extreme counties into "magnets" that pull people from moderate counties and exchange them with other extreme counties.

"We found that the places that were most likely to exhibit same-party preference in movement are counties that are politically extreme," said Bruce Desmarais, the DeGrandis-McCourtney Early Career Professor in Political Science, and a faculty co-hire of the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS), Penn State. "What we saw was that movement from very Democratic or very Republican counties tended to be isolated to migration to other counties that are politically similar."

These migration patterns could be a mechanism behind the growing political divide in the country, added Desmarais, who worked with Xi Liu, former doctoral student in geography at Penn State, and currently a software engineer with Google; and Clio Andris, assistant professor of city and regional planning and interactive computing at Georgia Tech.

"It's a geographic form of polarization," said Desmarais, who is also the associate director of the Center for Social Data Analytics. "It's a phenomenon that political scientists refer to as the 'hollowing out of the political center.' Forty years ago, you could find many moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans in Congress. You don't find that now -- and we're also seeing this dynamic in these migration patterns."

Other factors, such as jobs, still play an important role in decisions about where to move, according to the researchers.

"We included both the political factors and the usual economic drivers of migration," said Desmarais. "Those economic factors still explain more of the variance. People are not going to say, 'I'm going to move to a county that is politically similar to me, but where I can't find a job.'"

He added that political scientists are concerned that as people geographically separate themselves, they may be less likely to encounter different points of view, which may then further widen this political divide.

"Now that they're in that partisan environment, it could mean they might not pick up exposure to people from across the aisle and pick up other kinds of opinions," said Desmarais. "They're just going to be exposed to their own echo chamber or their political bubble by being either in a very Democratic county or a very Republican county."

According to the researchers, who report this findings in the current issue of PLOS One, the study appears to back previous research that shows that political preferences may be guiding where people choose to live.

"There is some micro-level research that we cite in our paper that experimentally shows that people really do want to live among co-partisans," said Desmarais. Co-partisans are people who share political preferences.

The researchers used county-to-county data on migration flows from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, which spanned 14 years, from 2002 to 2015. For county-level presidential election patterns, the researchers used the County Presidential Election Returns, an open dataset that covered 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016. This range of elections covers the administrations of the two previous presidents, several changes in party leadership over Congress and one redistricting period. The figures are also influenced by the 2016 election of the current president.

The researchers examined counties in the contiguous states with a population of more than 20,000 people, based on figures from the 2010 Census.

The researchers used the computational resources of the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences' advanced computing infrastructure.

"This was a really big project that needed a large amount of computational power," said Desmarais. "We ran all of our analysis on the high-performance computing cluster."

Australia's first space research mission to the International Space Station (ISS) will attempt to establish how some of the most aggressive cancer cells behave in a zero -gravity environment.

University of Technology (UTS) researcher Dr Joshua Chou is looking to replicate the promising results of experiments he has carried out on cancer cells in the zero gravity chamber built by his team in the UTS School of Biomedical Engineering.

Dr Chou organised the first ever Space Biology Symposium at UTS bringing together scientists, investors, government and space enthusiasts to consider advances in space biology and medicine. Topics included research and development of new types of pharmaceuticals, engineered tissues, and emerging medical technologies.

He also announced details of the ISS mission to determine how microgravity can affect some of the hardest cancers to kill: ovarian, breast, nose and lung.

UTS will work with YURI, a German company founded to enable and expand research and commercial applications in microgravity. It will provide the hardware - a bio-module - which will carry the cells into space.

he believes the mission findings could signal to the Australian research community that the era of space biology and medicine is well and truly here.

Cancer involves some body cells dividing uncontrollably and invading tissue, with the cells coming together to form a solid tumour which continues to grow until a point in which the cells are 'signalled' to invade the body.

No one knows exactly when that point is reached.

"There must be a means by which cancer cells 'feel' and 'sense' each other in order to form a tumour. We know the only way cancer cells sense their surroundings is through mechanical forces. And those forces only exist when there's gravity," said Dr Chou.

In tests in a microgravity environment at UTS, 80 to 90 per cent of the cells in the cancer types were disabled - they either die or float off because they can no longer hold on.

"We're ready to verify if the cells do the same thing in space. My hope is to confirm what we found in the lab and be able to identify new targets and introduce a drug that 'tricks' the cancer cell into thinking it's in space when it's actually still on Earth," he said.

"My vision is that this drug would work alongside existing treatments to improve treatment timespan and efficiency.

"It would not be a magic bullet, but it could give current treatments like chemotherapy a big enough boost to kill the disease."

Dr Chou's previous experience of how the space environment impacts understanding of cell biology and disease progression occurred in research he did at Harvard that created the osteoporotic drug EVENITY®. It was developed from research conducted at the ISS, and has been on the market and helping patients for six months.

MIT researchers have devised a method that accelerates the process for creating and customizing templates used in medical-image analysis, to guide disease diagnosis.

One use of medical image analysis is to crunch datasets of patients' medical images and capture structural relationships that may indicate the progression of diseases. In many cases, analysis requires use of a common image template, called an "atlas," that's an average representation of a given patient population. Atlases serve as a reference for comparison, for example to identify clinically significant changes in brain structures over time.

Building a template is a time-consuming, laborious process, often taking days or weeks to generate, especially when using 3D brain scans. To save time, researchers often download publicly available atlases previously generated by research groups. But those don't fully capture the diversity of individual datasets or specific subpopulations, such as those with new diseases or from young children. Ultimately, the atlas can't be smoothly mapped onto outlier images, producing poor results.

In a paper being presented at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems in December, the researchers describe an automated machine-learning model that generates "conditional" atlases based on specific patient attributes, such as age, sex, and disease. By leveraging shared information from across an entire dataset, the model can also synthesize atlases from patient subpopulations that may be completely missing in the dataset.

"The world needs more atlases," says first author Adrian Dalca, a former postdoc in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and now a faculty member in radiology at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. "Atlases are central to many medical image analyses. This method can build a lot more of them and build conditional ones as well."

Joining Dalca on the paper are Marianne Rakic, a visiting researcher in CSAIL; John Guttag, the Dugald C. Jackson Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and head of CSAIL's Data Driven Inference Group; and Mert R. Sabuncu of Cornell University.

Simultaneous alignment and atlases

Traditional atlas-building methods run lengthy, iterative optimization processes on all images in a dataset. They align, say, all 3D brain scans to an initial (often blurry) atlas, and compute a new average image from the aligned scans. They repeat this iterative process for all images. This computes a final atlas that minimizes the extent to which all scans in the dataset must deform to match the atlas. Doing this process for patient subpopulations can be complex and imprecise if there isn't enough data available.

Mapping an atlas to a new scan generates a "deformation field," which characterizes the differences between the two images. This captures structural variations, which can then be further analyzed. In brain scans, for instance, structural variations can be due to tissue degeneration at different stages of a disease.

In previous work, Dalca and other researchers developed a neural network to rapidly align these images. In part, that helped speed up the traditional atlas-building process. "We said, 'Why can't we build conditional atlases while learning to align images at the same time?'" Dalca says.

To do so, the researchers combined two neural networks: One network automatically learns an atlas at each iteration, and another -- adapted from the previous research -- simultaneously aligns that atlas to images in a dataset.

In training, the joint network is fed a random image from a dataset encoded with desired patient attributes. From that, it estimates an attribute-conditional atlas. The second network aligns the estimated atlas with the input image, and generates a deformation field.

The deformation field generated for each image pair is used to train a "loss function," a component of machine-learning models that helps minimize deviations from a given value. In this case, the function specifically learns to minimize distances between the learned atlas and each image. The network continuously refines the atlas to smoothly align to any given image across the dataset.

On-demand atlases

The end result is a function that's learned how specific attributes, such as age, correlate to structural variations across all images in a dataset. By plugging new patient attributes into the function, it leverages all learned information across the dataset to synthesize an on-demand atlas -- even if that attribute data is missing or scarce in the dataset.

Say someone wants a brain scan atlas for a 45-year-old female patient from a dataset with information from patients aged 30 to 90, but with little data for women aged 40 to 50. The function will analyze patterns of how the brain changes between the ages of 30 to 90 and incorporate what little data exists for that age and sex. Then, it will produce the most representative atlas for females of the desired age. In their paper, the researchers verified the function by generating conditional templates for various age groups from 15 to 90.

The researchers hope clinicians can use the model to build their own atlases quickly from their own, potentially small datasets. Dalca is now collaborating with researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, for instance, to harness a dataset of pediatric brain scans to generate conditional atlases for younger children, which are hard to come by.

A big dream is to build one function that can generate conditional atlases for any subpopulation, spanning birth to 90 years old. Researchers could log into a webpage, input an age, sex, diseases, and other parameters, and get an on-demand conditional atlas. "That would be wonderful, because everyone can refer to this one function as a single universal atlas reference," Dalca says.

Another potential application beyond medical imaging is athletic training. Someone could train the function to generate an atlas for, say, a tennis player's serve motion. The player could then compare new serves against the atlas to see exactly where they kept proper form or where things went wrong.

"If you watch sports, it's usually commenters saying they noticed if someone's form was off from one time compared to another," Dalca says. "But you can imagine that it could be much more quantitative than that."

Hibernation is one of nature's strangest quirks, inducing bears and other mammals to pack on massive weight--amounts that would be unhealthy for humans--so they can survive months of slumber. Yet when these animals reemerge, they are as fit as ever. Now University of Utah Health scientists say they have detected new genetic clues about this phenomenon that could lead to better understanding and treatment of obesity and metabolic disorders that afflict millions worldwide.

"Hibernators have evolved an incredible ability to control their metabolism," says Christopher Gregg, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Neurology & Anatomy. "Metabolism shapes risks for a lot of different diseases, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer's disease. We believe that understanding the parts of the genome that are linked to hibernation will help us learn to control risks for some these major diseases. A big surprise from our new study is that these important parts of the genome were hidden from us in 98 percent of the genome that does not contain genes--we used to call it 'junk DNA'."

The study appears in the Nov. 26, 2019 issue of Cell Reports.

In previous research, Gregg and Elliot Ferris, a bioinformatician in Gregg's lab, scoured mammalian genomes for evidence of genetic "switches" or regulatory elements that could help explain why certain animals evolved "biomedical superpowers," such as cancer resistance in elephants or blood clot resistance in dolphins. They found thousands of new genetic elements that help reveal portions of the human genome associated with those traits.

In this new study, Gregg and Ferris sought to determine if hibernating species could help detect parts of the genome that play a significant role in controlling obesity, which is a global epidemic.

The researchers focused on four hibernating mammals found in diverse habitats worldwide: the thirteen-lined ground squirrel, little brown bat, gray mouse lemur, and lesser Madagascar hedgehog tenrec. After comparing their genomes, Gregg's team concluded that these mammals had independently evolved short, non-coding DNA snippets called parallel accelerated regions. They discovered that these regions are disproportionately located near genes linked to obesity in humans.

To solidify this link, the researchers examined genes involved in Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS), a human genetic disorder that triggers insatiable appetite and leads to morbid obesity. They found that genes linked to PWS also have more hibernator accelerated regions compared to genes not associated with the syndrome.

Based on this and other findings, Gregg and Ferris theorize that hibernators have evolved ways to "turn off" specific genetic elements controlling the activity of obesity genes compared to mammals that do not hibernate. These newly discovered elements could improve our ability to learn how to evaluate and control obesity risks in humans.

"Our results show that hibernator accelerated regions are enriched near genes linked to obesity in studies of hundreds of thousands of people, as well as near genes linked to a syndromic form of obesity," Ferris says. "Therefore, by bringing together data from humans and hibernating animals, we were able to uncover candidate master regulatory switches in the genome for controlling mammalian obesity."

In all, the researchers identified 364 potential genetic elements that could have a role in regulating hibernation and obesity. They are currently testing these components in laboratory mice using specialized CRISPR epigenome editing technology developed by Jason Gertz, Ph.D., an investigator at Huntsman Cancer Institute.

"Since obesity and metabolism shape risks for so many different diseases, the discovery of these parts of the genome is a really exciting insight that lays foundations for many important new research directions," Gregg says. "We have new projects emerging for aging, dementia, and metabolic syndrome."

WASHINGTON, D.C., November 26, 2019 -- Organic solar cells are steadily improving as new materials are developed for the active layer, particularly when materials are stacked in a bulk heterojunction design that takes advantage of multiple combined absorption windows to use photons at more parts of the spectrum.

Non-fullerene materials are especially promising in binary organic solar cells, making it possible to tune optical and energy properties. But, despite their advantages, these materials have narrow absorption windows. Attempts to incorporate non-fullerene acceptors into organic solar cells include adding a third component to increase photon harvesting.

The third component material must be carefully selected so it does not influence molecular form and structure in ways that decrease efficiency but does ensure energy and charge transfer in the correct direction.

A paper published this week in Applied Physics Reviews, from AIP Publishing, presents a practical guide for selecting materials for ternary organic solar cells. The authors set out to employ component engineering to extend the light absorption and efficiency of solar cells in a simple, physical way instead of the complicated process of synthesizing new semiconductors.

They start with a unique non-fullerene electron acceptor called COi8DFIC, which has high-power conversion efficiency due to its high bandgap and the ability to transform its molecular orientation from lamella orientations to H- and J-type aggregations during hot substrate casting. In the study, they combine a PTB7-Th:COi8DFIC binary system with the polymer electron donor PBDB-T-SF and the small molecular electron acceptor IT-4F to determine each material's suitability for ternary devices.

They discovered that either a donor or acceptor material can be used successfully in ternary devices: PBDB-T-SF and IT-4F were found to be effective when added to the binary PTB7-Th:COi8DFIC system in amounts of 10% and 15%, respectively.

The materials improved spectral response, enhanced photon-harvesting and affected the molecular order of the host materials to enhance π-π stacking. Stacking the molecular planes parallel to the device electrode directly contributes to charge mobility, power conversion efficiency and maintaining fine phase separation.

"The coexistence of H- and J- type aggregations means the device has a broader absorption spectrum and will absorb more photons in both short and long wavelength ranges and convert them into charges, resulting in higher efficiency," author Tao Wang said.

The authors plan to explore physical methods to better control the material's formation, to inhibit H-type and encourage J-type aggregation, which extends the light absorption toward near-infrared, making semi-transparent organic solar cells possible.

A report from the Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee (ISIC) highlights the potential role of coffee consumption in reducing the risk of developing MetS, a condition which is estimated to affect more than one billion people across the globe1. Having MetS increases the risk of cardiovascular problems, including coronary heart disease and stroke1.

The report, titled 'Coffee and Metabolic Syndrome: A review of the latest research', summarises the research discussed at a satellite symposium hosted by ISIC at the 13th European Nutrition Conference organised by the Federation of European Nutrition Societies (FENS) in Dublin, Ireland.

During the symposium, Assistant Professor Giuseppe Grosso reviewed his own scientific research on the association between coffee consumption and MetS in Polish and Italian cohorts and explored the potential mechanistic perspectives behind the inverse association. His research suggests that polyphenols contained in coffee may be involved in the inverse association, specifically phenolic acids and flavonoids2,3. He also reviewed research that suggests that moderate coffee consumption is associated with a reduction of CVD, cancer, all-cause mortality and type 2 diabetes4,5,8,9,10.

Associate Professor Estefania Toledo reviewed meta-analyses considering associations between coffee consumption and MetS and discussed work in a Mediterranean cohort. Her research into the SUN (Seguimiento University of Navarra) cohort involved 22,000 people and specifically considered caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee6. The study concluded that moderate coffee consumption (1-4 cups per day) was associated with reduced risk of MetS, whilst higher intakes were not. This was reported for both regular and decaffeinated coffee6.

Key research findings highlighted in the roundtable report include:

Meta-analyses have suggested that drinking 1-4 cups of coffee per day is associated with a reduced risk of MetS in observational studies2,3.

Research suggests that specific conditions of MetS, namely type 2 diabetes and hypertension, are also inversely associated with coffee consumption5,6,8,9,10. Associations with obesity are less clear11.

The inverse association between coffee consumption and metabolic syndrome was shown in both men and women5,7,10.

Meta-analyses have suggested that a moderate consumption of both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee may be associated with a reduced risk of metabolic syndrome6.

Further research is required to better understand the mechanisms involved in the association. To date, in research the importance of polyphenols and hydroxycinnamic acids has been of note2,3.

A one-off dose of ketamine could help heavy drinkers reduce their alcohol intake, finds a new UCL experimental study.

Giving a shot of ketamine to heavy drinkers after reactivating their drinking-related memories led to a rapid decrease in urges to drink and a prolonged decrease in alcohol intake over nine months, according to the study published in Nature Communications.

"We found that heavy drinkers experienced a long-term improvement after a very quick and simple experimental treatment," said the study's lead author, Dr Ravi Das (UCL Clinical Psychopharmacology Unit).

The researchers were seeking to upend the maladaptive reward memories that are central to drug and alcohol addiction.

"Learning is at the heart of why people become addicted to drugs or alcohol. Essentially, the drug hijacks the brain's in-built reward-learning system, so that you end up associating environmental 'triggers' with the drug. These produce an exaggerated desire to take the drug," Dr Das explained.

"Unfortunately, once these reward memories are established, it's very difficult to re-learn more healthy associations, but it's vital in order to prevent relapse."

The study involved 90 people with harmful drinking behaviour, who all preferred beer. They were heavy drinkers, but did not have a formal diagnosis of alcohol use disorder and had not sought treatment. On average, they were drinking 74 units of alcohol per week, equivalent to roughly 30 pints of beer - five times the recommended limit.

The participants were given a glass of beer, and told they could drink it after finishing a task. They rated their urge to drink and were shown images of beer and other drinks, while rating their anticipated pleasure, thus retrieving the reward memories surrounding beer drinking. On the first day of the study, in order to establish their baseline drinking urges, they were then allowed to drink the beer, but on the second day, the beer was unexpectedly taken away from them.

Unexpectedly removing an anticipated reward is known to be key factor to destabilising a retrieved reward memory. Typically the brain would then undergo an active process to re-stabilise and store the memory. However, ketamine prevents this memory re-storage process by blocking a receptor in the brain that is needed to restabilise memories.

On the key day, one third of the study participants were given an intravenous infusion of ketamine after the beer was taken away from them. Another group was given an infusion of a placebo, while the other third were given ketamine, but without previously completing the drinking memory retrieval task.

The method appeared to be successful, as over a 10-day follow-up, the people who were given ketamine combined with memory retrieval showed significant reductions in their urge to drink, drank less alcohol and drank on fewer days than the other study participants. When given a small sample of beer, they had less urge to drink it, enjoyed it less and had less desire to continue drinking than the other groups.

The effect was sustained over a nine-month follow-up; while all three groups decreased their drinking to some degree, those given the ketamine + memory retrieval had a much more pronounced initial improvement and a greater overall improvement over time. People who were given the ketamine + memory retrieval halved their average weekly alcohol consumption over the nine months.

Only the two groups given ketamine showed a statistically significant reduction in drinking volume, and only the ketamine + memory retrieval group significantly reduced their number of drinking days, and bingeing behaviour.

The researchers also conducted blood tests, and found that the treatment was more effective in people where the ketamine was most readily available in their blood, suggesting that a higher dose may have led to greater improvement in some people.

"This is a first demonstration of a very simple, accessible approach, so we hope that with more research into optimising the method, this could be turned into a helpful treatment for excessive drinking, or potentially for other drug addictions," said Dr Das.

The researchers caution that the study is experimental and is not a clinical trial. Further research is needed to optimise the treatment method and determine who it could benefit, and specialist supervision would still be required as the treatment may not be advisable for people with some conditions.

While often thought of as a horse tranquilliser or a party drug, ketamine is also commonly used clinically as a sedative or pain reliever and is an essential medicine on the NHS and globally.

The study's senior author Professor Sunjeev Kamboj (UCL Clinical Psychopharmacology Unit) said: "Ketamine is a safe, common drug that is being explored for multiple psychiatric uses, including depression, while other researchers are also exploring other ways it could help with problem drinking. An advantage to our study, alongside the pronounced, long-term effect on drinking, is that it's based on a strong understanding of how the drug is working in the brain to achieve its effect."

The study involved researchers at UCL, UCLH and the University of Amsterdam, and was supported by the Medical Research Council.

The percentage of medical students who told their schools that they have a disability rose sharply in recent years, a new study shows.

Medical schools made changes, called accommodations, for nearly all medical students who disclosed the fact that they have a condition that qualifies as a disability, the study also finds. For instance, schools adjusted testing times, or the length of patient care training.

The reasons for the increase in medical students' disclosures of disabilities are not clear, according to authors of the new research letter in JAMA.

And even with the increase, students with disabilities still represent less than 5% of all future physicians, even when disability is defined as including physical, sensory, learning, psychological, and chronic health conditions.

Having more medical students with all categories of disability could improve the diversity of the physician workforce, reduce stigma and stereotypes about people with disabilities, and inform the care of patients, the researchers say.

Charting the rise

Lisa Meeks, Ph.D., M.A., of the University of Michigan and her colleagues surveyed medical schools in 2016, and again in late 2018 and early 2019.

The second survey came after a major report by the Association of American Medical Colleges, or AAMC, giving medical schools a framework to reduce barriers facing aspiring physicians with disabilities.

In just three years, the percentage of students with disabilities rose from 2.7% to 4.6%, at the 64 medical schools that responded to the survey in both years.

This 69% relative rise was mainly due to growth in the percentage of students who disclosed a psychological disability or a chronic health condition. Psychological disabilities include anxiety, depression and eating disorders.

Meeks notes that the reasons for the rise still need further study, and may include many factors.

"A constellation of events has likely contributed to the increase in disclosure," says Meeks, an assistant professor of family medicine at the U-M Medical School. "This may include increased awareness of the availability of accommodations, an increase in the number of students who have received accommodations throughout their education and are comfortable with their identities as a person with a disability, the creation of educational resources by AAMC, and the diligent efforts of medical education programs to improve accessibility."

Accommodating disability

All the schools that responded to the 2019 survey said they had provided formal accommodations for students related to academic testing. Three-quarters provided accommodations such as note takers, and adjustments to tests of students' clinical skills.

One-third of schools said they had modified their clinical procedures for students. But the researchers note that all students still must complete the required clinical competencies to graduate, but that accommodations allow them to do so through an alternative, equally safe, approach.

Meeks and her colleagues, including senior author Bonnielin K. Swenor, Ph.D., M.P.H. of the Johns Hopkins University's Wilmer Eye Institute, note that their results aren't necessarily representative of all medical schools, because of lower participation in the survey by schools in the south, and the study's focus on allopathic schools.

However, the schools that participated represent more than 41,000 medical students in 2018.

Next steps

The new study comes at a time of increased attention to the issue of disability and health among medical trainees.

"The AAMC is committed to working with leaders at the nation's medical schools and teaching hospitals to shape the culture, establishing accountability, and allocating necessary resources to enhance access and inclusion for individuals with disabilities," said Geoffrey Young, Ph.D., senior director of student affairs and programs at the AAMC.

"The 2018 report, Accessibility, Inclusion, and Action in Medical Education: Lived Experiences of Learners and Physicians With Disabilities, served as the first comprehensive examination of the experiences of medical learners with disabilities, and gave a voice to medical students, residents, and physicians with physical, psychological, sensory, learning, or chronic health disabilities," he says. "Since the publication of this report, we have begun collecting data on the percentage of students who self-identify as having a disability and whether they requested and received accommodations and are using this data to provide enhanced support to students."

Meeks' own institution has made a commitment to accommodating admitted students with disabilities.

"At Michigan, we are committed to a more inclusive learning environment in the fullest sense of the word," says Rajesh Mangrulkar, M.D., the associate dean for medical student education at the U-M Medical School. "The crucial, ongoing research that Dr. Meeks and her team are doing show that we are beginning to move the needle on understanding the lived experience for our medical students who have both apparent and nonapparent disabilities. And while we are making progress, far more work is required for us to build the culture for these students to thrive and develop; all for the betterment of their future patients."

The authors are already conducting further research that will go beyond documenting the current rates of disability disclosure and accommodation. They're seeking to better understand issues such as the career trajectories and experiences of medical students with disabilities, and the potential benefit to patients of having a doctor who has a disability.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- Around 12 billion years ago, the universe emerged from a great cosmic dark age as the first stars and galaxies lit up. With a new analysis of data collected by the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope, scientists are now closer than ever to detecting the ultra-faint signature of this turning point in cosmic history.

In a paper on the preprint site ArXiv and soon to be published in the Astrophysical Journal, researchers present the first analysis of data from a new configuration of the MWA designed specifically to look for the signal of neutral hydrogen, the gas that dominated the universe during the cosmic dark age. The analysis sets a new limit -- the lowest limit yet -- for the strength of the neutral hydrogen signal.

"We can say with confidence that if the neutral hydrogen signal was any stronger than the limit we set in the paper, then the telescope would have detected it," said Jonathan Pober, an assistant professor of physics at Brown University and corresponding author on the new paper. "These findings can help us to further constrain the timing of when the cosmic dark ages ended and the first stars emerged."

The research was led by Wenyang Li, who performed the work as a Ph.D. student at Brown. Li and Pober collaborated with an international group of researchers working with the MWA.

Despite its importance in cosmic history, little is known about the period when the first stars formed, which is known as the Epoch of Reionization (EoR). The first atoms that formed after the Big Bang were positively charged hydrogen ions -- atoms whose electrons were stripped away by the energy of the infant universe. As the universe cooled and expanded, hydrogen atoms reunited with their electrons to form neutral hydrogen. And that's just about all there was in the universe until about 12 billion years ago, when atoms started clumping together to form stars and galaxies. Light from those objects re-ionized the neutral hydrogen, causing it to largely disappear from interstellar space.

The goal of projects like the one happening at MWA is to locate the signal of neutral hydrogen from the dark ages and measure how it changed as the EoR unfolded. Doing so could reveal new and critical information about the first stars -- the building blocks of the universe we see today. But catching any glimpse of that 12-billion-year-old signal is a difficult task that requires instruments with exquisite sensitivity.

When it began operating in 2013, the MWA was an array of 2,048 radio antennas arranged across the remote countryside of Western Australia. The antennas are bundled together into 128 "tiles," whose signals are combined by a supercomputer called the Correlator. In 2016, the number of tiles was doubled to 256, and their configuration across the landscape was altered to improve their sensitivity to the neutral hydrogen signal. This new paper is the first analysis of data from the expanded array.

Neutral hydrogen emits radiation at a wavelength of 21 centimeters. As the universe has expanded over the past 12 billion years, the signal from the EoR is now stretched to about 2 meters, and that's what MWA astronomers are looking for. The problem is there are myriad other sources that emit at the same wavelength -- human-made sources like digital television as well as natural sources from within the Milky Way and from millions of other galaxies.

"All of these other sources are many orders of magnitude stronger than the signal we're trying to detect," Pober said. "Even an FM radio signal that's reflected off an airplane that happens to be passing above the telescope is enough to contaminate the data."

To home in on the signal, the researchers use a myriad of processing techniques to weed out those contaminants. At the same time, they account for the unique frequency responses of the telescope itself.

"If we look at different radio frequencies or wavelengths, the telescope behaves a little differently," Pober said. "Correcting for the telescope response is absolutely critical for then doing the separation of astrophysical contaminants and the signal of interest."

Those data analysis techniques combined with the expanded capacity of the telescope itself resulted in a new upper bound of the EoR signal strength. It's the second consecutive best-limit-to-date analysis to be released by MWA and raises hope that the experiment will one day detect the elusive EoR signal.

"This analysis demonstrates that the phase two upgrade had a lot of its desired effects and that the new analysis techniques will improve future analyses," Pober said. "The fact that MWA has now published back-to-back the two best limits on the signal gives momentum to the idea that this experiment and its approach has a lot of promise."

Surprisingly, the antiviral cytokine type I interferon (IFN-I) was found to be a master regulator of metabolic pathways in liver cells. The researchers focused on the urea cycle, a central metabolic node, and found that it is disrupted by IFN-I during viral infection. This led to altered serum metabolite concentrations which regulated antiviral immunity and reduced liver pathology.

The liver is a crucial organ for systemic metabolism in our body. Apart from the turnover of biomolecules and drug metabolism, the liver's main function is the removal of toxic substances from the organism. Hepatocytes, or liver cells, are the most abundant cell type and functional unit of the liver. They are metabolic powerhouses in the healthy organism, but they also serve as important immune signaling platforms during infections. As such, they have the potential to react to a range of cytokines - small molecules that are essential for the coordination of immune responses.

Previous studies in the field of immunology and metabolism, or immunometabolism, unveiled groundbreaking mechanisms about how cells of the immune system need to adjust their metabolism to perform their functions to fight pathogens and cancer. Building on this, Andreas Bergthaler and his group at CeMM aimed to study the immunometabolic changes that occur in the whole organism during infection. They particularly focused on the liver due to its important role in controlling systemic metabolism.

To dissect the involved complex processes, the authors took advantage of the benchmark model of chronic infection, the lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV). Research with LCMV had already led to fundamental insights into immunology over the past 80 years, and notably contributed to three Nobel Prizes. Among them is the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which was awarded to James Allison and Tasuku Honjo for their discoveries relating to the revolutionary new cancer immunotherapies which exploit the body's own immune killer cells, or CD8 T cells.

The present study by Alexander Lercher, Anannya Bhattacharya et al. is the result of cross-disciplinary collaborations with researchers from the Medical University of Vienna and the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna (Austria), as well as from the Hannover Medical School (Germany), the Cantonal Hospital St. Gallen (Switzerland) and the company Bio-Cancer Treatment International Ltd (China). The study was designed as an integrative unbiased approach to investigate the molecular changes in the liver during chronic infection. Next to expected inflammatory changes, the authors identified intriguing changes in hepatocyte metabolism. Many central metabolic pathways, among them the urea cycle, were found to be repressed upon infection. The urea cycle is essential to remove toxic ammonia from the body to prevent brain damage. Surprisingly, the researchers identified the antiviral cytokine signaling pathway of type I interferons (IFN-I) as a regulator of the urea cycle. This resulted in altered blood concentrations of the amino acids arginine and ornithine. "A key experiment for us was that when we removed the receptor for IFN-I on the surface of hepatocytes, we didn't see these metabolic changes anymore", says Alexander Lercher, first author of the study and PhD student in the laboratory of CeMM Principal Investigator Andreas Bergthaler. The systemic changes of arginine and ornithine were found to inhibit antiviral CD8 T cell responses and to reduce liver damage.

One of the most important revelations of this study was the identification of IFN-I signaling as a master regulator for the repression of metabolic processes in hepatocytes upon infection. "We were really surprised that an antiviral molecule affects such vital biological processes as the urea cycle during infection", says Michael Trauner, co-author of the study and head of the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the Medical University of Vienna. Together, these findings shed new light on how the body's immune system evolved to regulate liver metabolism that modulate CD8 T cell responses and reduce collateral tissue damage during infection. Andreas Bergthaler: "We regard this study an important contribution to the field of systemic immunometabolism. It also highlights the central role of the liver for our immune system and how organs of the body communicate through metabolites." In the future, such findings may be exploited to therapeutically intervene with the regulation of metabolic processes to modulate CD8 T cell responses in diverse diseases such as infection, cancer and autoimmunity.

A move towards a more sustainable bio-based economy has been given a new boost by researchers who have been able to simplify a process to transform waste materials into high value chemicals.

A collaboration between the UK and Brazil has shown that waste sugar cane and wheat straw from agricultural processes can be made directly into valuable chemicals with an increase in value of 5000-fold.

Unlike fossil fuels, biofuels are renewable. Rather than relying on crude oil, which is in finite supply. However, the economics of producing biofuels is currently very challenging compared to fossil fuels.

The new breakthrough demonstrates that high-value chemicals, such as chemicals used the food industry and precursors for human therapeutic drugs, can be produced directly from waste biomass in a single 'one-pot' process. This added value offers the potential to make the economics of biofuel production from plant-based sources more viable.

This agricultural by-product is currently burned rather than reused. The new process provides alternative suitable routes to fine chemical building blocks currently derived from petrochemical sources, and in addition has the potential to add value to the process of making biofuels from plants particularly from sugarcane and wheat straw which are abundantly found in Brazil and the UK respectively.

The chemical building blocks are used to make everyday products from air fresher, fabric softener, flavouring for food stuffs and life-saving medicines and new drug candidates under clinical development.

The research was published in the journal Green Chemistry, Neil Dixon who led the study from the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB), The University of Manchester said: "Sustainable production of fine chemicals and biofuels from renewable biomass offers a potential alternative to the continued use of finite geological oil reserves. However, in order to compete with current petrochemical refinery processes, alternative biorefinery processes must overcome significant costs and productivity barriers."

"This new system represents a consolidated biodegradation-biotransformation strategy for the production of high value fine chemicals from waste plant biomass, offering the potential to minimise environmental waste and add value to agro-industrial residues."

The international team of scientists have demonstrated the production of the versatile chemical building block, coniferol, for the first time, directly from dry plant matter biomass. Following the biocatalytic treatment of the waste plant matter to release and convert ferulic acid into coniferol with high efficiency. The entire process can be comparatively cost effective by taking place in a single vessel.

The move towards a circular bio-economy is being driven by policy and regulation, which in turn is influenced by concerns over finite petrochemical feed stocks and environmental implications. Major scientific and bioprocessing challenges must still be met if alternative bio-based strategies are to become competitive with existing processes.

This study reports a consolidated biodegradation-biotransformation strategy for the efficient production of high-value chemical building blocks directly from low value waste biomass, offering the potential to minimize environmental waste and add value to agro-industrial residues.