Tech

The coronavirus pandemic forced states across the nation to transform the way their residents voted in 2020, ramping up get-out-the-vote messaging and allowing for more people than ever to vote by mail.

But what's the best way to let residents know about new voting rules? And how much does something like voting by mail increase voter turnout overall?

Political scientists Daniel Hopkins and Marc Meredith looked at these questions during Philadelphia's 2020 primary, and worked with city officials to run an experiment to see whether an inexpensive postcard campaign about mail-in voting would be effective. They partnered with Anjali Chainani, Nathaniel Olin, and Tiffany Tse of Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney's policy office to get the project rolling.

Together they sent 47,000 randomly selected Philadelphia voters postcards encouraging them to vote by mail in the June 2 election and describing how to apply to do it, while the city was still under a stay-at-home order to curb climbing COVID-19 cases. The study was funded by a School of Arts & Sciences Making a Difference in Diverse Communities grant.

Their findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that a single postcard campaign increased applications to vote by mail by 0.5 percentage points, and boosted mail ballots cast by 0.4 percentage points.

"As the pandemic hit, it seemed like a critical time to see if providing basic information about the deadline for applying would move the needle in terms of people's voting by mail and maybe even in terms of their voting overall," says Hopkins, who works with city officials on a number of projects using social and behavioral sciences to help advance their goals. "We were successful in increasing voting by mail and helping in a small way to keep people safe while exercising the franchise."

One critical question in the experiment asked, "Does voting by mail cause a substitution effect, where people who were already planning to vote now simply vote by mail?"

"We don't have precise estimates due to our sample sizes, but it does appear as though at least some of our people who voted by mail would otherwise not have voted," Hopkins says.

The study also found the postcards were equally impactful for Black and white registrants.

To produce and mail a single postcard cost less than $1, Meredith says, making it a relatively cost-effective way to reach voters and increase turnout. That's good news for a cash-strapped city like Philadelphia.

"You want to know not just is this effect going to be positive or negative, but you want to get a sense of the magnitude of the effect. It's only then that you can start to compare the cost effectiveness of different techniques," says Hopkins.

However, a key reason why some of the experiment's votes counted at all was due to a last-minute executive order signed by Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf that allowed ballots to be counted even were received after the election.

Hopkins says, "Here in Philadelphia and elsewhere, there were significant delays as these overworked boards of election had to get mail-in ballots out and then tally them for the first time at scale and do that in the midst of a pandemic."

A sizable fraction of their experiment's ballots was received after the election, he says. "A postcard can matter, but it matters in a particular context in which decisionmakers have structured the rules for what will and what won't count."

Hopkins and Meredith ran a follow-up experiment in the general election and are awaiting the final data from it. In that study, they used a postcard to communicate with voters about the steps needed to successfully cast a mail ballot, with advice including returning it quickly and making sure to put it in the secrecy envelope.

"We're excited to see what that shows," says Meredith.

A type of novel molecular voltage sensor makes it possible to watch nerve cells at work. The principle of the method has been known for some time. However, researchers at the University of Bonn and the University of California in Los Angeles have now succeeded in significantly improving it. It allows the propagation of electrical signals in living nerve cells to be observed with high temporal and spatial resolution. This enables investigations into completely new questions that were previously closed to research. The study has now been published in the journal PNAS.

When we smell a bottle of suntan lotion, electrical pulses are generated in the sensory cells of the nose. Via the olfactory bulb in the brain, they enter the primary olfactory cortex, which then distributes them to various brain centers. Memories such as summer vacations by the sea long ago are then conjured up in the hippocampus and other regions.

In recent decades, brain researchers have gained an increasingly precise idea of how stimuli are processed in the brain and which path the electrical excitation takes in the process. However, in many aspects these insights are still very approximate. The method now presented by researchers at the University of Bonn and the University of California in Los Angeles may help solve this problem.

Nerve cells transmit electrical signals to other nerve cells via biological "cables" known as axons. Each nerve cell is encased in a thin membrane that separates it from its environment. In the resting state, there are many positively charged ions on the outside of this membrane, significantly more than on the inside. There is therefore an electrical voltage between the inside and the outside. Neuroscientists also speak of a membrane potential.

Light chain for nerve cells

When a signal passes a certain point on the axon, this potential changes there for a short time. "And we can make this change visible," explains Prof. Dr. Istvan Mody of the Institute for Experimental Epileptology and Cognition Research (IEECR) at the University of Bonn Medical Center. To do this, the researchers drape a chain of lights around the nerve cells, so to speak. The special thing about it: Each lamp of this chain carries a voltage-dependent dimmer. This means that it gets darker when the membrane potential at the location of the lamp changes.

This makes excitation propagation visible as a kind of "dark drop" running along the axon. The researchers use fluorescent proteins as a light chain. "We introduced the gene for this into the cells," Mody explains. The researchers also tagged the genetic makeup with a kind of shipping label. "This label ensures that the fluorescent dyes are transported to the outside of the membrane immediately after they are produced. A kind of anchor then ensures they stay put."

The dimmer is not part of the nano lamp, but another molecule: a so-called "dark quencher". This is normally located on the inside of the membrane. However, due to the voltage change during signal forwarding, it changes to the outside. There it meets the fluorescent proteins and shields them. The nano lamp becomes darker as a result. As soon as the potential normalizes, the dark quencher moves back to the inside, and the luminosity increases again.

"This method is not really anything new," Mody says. "However, we have fundamentally improved it in two respects." Until now, the fluorescent proteins were integrated directly into the membrane, which significantly disrupted the function of the neurons. The new nano lamps, in contrast, sit outside the membrane. They also do not fade as quickly, but retain their luminosity for 40 minutes, four times as long as conventional fluorescent dyes.

Highly explosive dimmer

The second change concerns the dark quencher: The compound normally used for this purpose is toxic and also highly combustible. It was even used as an explosive during the Second World War. "Our quencher, on the other hand, is completely harmless," Mody emphasizes. "It also reacts even faster and more sensitively to the smallest changes in potential. This allows our method to visualize up to 100 electrical pulses per second."

The method permits the function of nerve cells to be observed without disturbing them. This makes it possible, for instance, to gain a more precise insight into the associated malfunctions in certain neuronal diseases. It is ultimately a promising new tool to better understand the workings of the brain.

That is the question that Prof. Alan Deidun, resident academic within the Department of Geosciences of the Faculty of Science, along with a cohort of high-profile co-authors, posed within a study recently published in the Microplastics and Nanoplastics journal. Specifically, the study overviews a plethora of marine litter monitoring survey data available for different regions of the world ocean, as well as modelling data, in order to answer this compelling question.

The study, whose lead author is renowned litter researcher Dr Francois Galgani from IFREMER, concludes that, despite the well-known increase in the volume of plastics making their way to the marine domain from land, most studies indicate constant amounts of litter in coastal marine systems in recent years until 2019. For instance, collections of marine litter by Continuous Plankton Recorders showed relatively unchanged amounts trapped annually in the North East Atlantic since the year 2000, following a steady increase since the 1950s. For some components of marine litter, such as industrial pellets, policy-making seems to be effective given that measures taken to reduce their use in industrial practices seem to have translated into smaller volumes of this component being detected within the marine domain.

Although a prima facie a surprising find, this 'steady state' scenario could be indicative of:

a transfer of plastic litter to remote areas of the global ocean, where human monitoring programmes are non-existent or subdued, such that the same litter does not feature in statistics and/or

the degradation into smaller fragments (micro- and nanoplastics) of the same litter which can go undetected due to its small size (e.g. fibres within microplastic nets) or since they are within marine biota.

The published study emanated from Chapter 12 of the UN's Second World Ocean Assessment, which is imminently set to be released by the UN in the coming months. Prof. Deidun features as a co-author within two different chapters in such an Assessment, including the ones on marine alien species and on benthic invertebrates. The same study concludes by soliciting, within the current UN Decade for Ocean Sciences, a greater research effort to be invested in identifying the sources of the marine litter as well as in the degradation pathways for different components of the same litter, as otherwise our capacity to identify temporal trends in marine litter will not progress further.

Statistics related to marine plastic litter make for sobering reading. For instance, according to the Ocean Conservancy, an estimated 8 million tons of plastic enter seas worldwide each year, on top of the 150 million plastic tons already roaming the same seas. A staggering 380 million tons of plastic are produced annually, of which an estimated 50% is Single-Use Plastic (SUP), including the 500 billion plastic bags sold worldwide each year and which, on average, have a lifetime of just 15 minutes.

The impact of ozone on soybean production can be predicted more accurately thanks to improvements to a computer modelling system.

Surface ozone is a pollutant that affects plant growth by entering leaves and reducing the rate of photosynthesis, and rising ozone levels could severely limit production of crops including soy.

Being able to estimate this damage on soybean production using a "climate-vegetation model" is vital for predicting global and regional soy yields in the future.

This study uses results from a field experiment in the USA, which found that a normal ozone level of 10ppm/h (AOT40) could reduce soybean yield by 10%.

At extreme ozone levels - comparable to those observed on very polluted days in some parts of the world - soybean production fell to less than half the amount grown in unpolluted air.

"Currently, ozone concentrations are projected to increase globally, which could have a significant impact on agriculture and food security," said Dr Felix Leung, of the University of Exeter.

"Economic loss from ozone damage to crops is already estimated at $14 billion to $26 billion USD.

"Policy decisions - such as the promotion of electric vehicles over diesel and petrol cars - are urgently required to limit surface ozone levels."

Ozone in the stratosphere protect us from harmful ultra violet radiation, but in the lower atmosphere, the troposphere, it is toxic to humans and plants.

As well as limiting photosynthesis - and therefore reducing carbon storage by plants - it is also a greenhouse gas, and is toxic to humans and animals.

Ozone is caused by a combination of pollutants including nitrogen oxide, which mostly comes from vehicle and factory emissions.

The climate-vegetation computer model used in this study is called JULES.

It was developed by a wide community of UK researchers, coordinated by the Met Office and Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.

"The newly calibrated version of JULES will be applied regionally and globally in future JULES simulations," said Dr Leung.

"This study helps to build a state-of-the-art impact assessment model and contribute to a more complete understanding of the impacts of climate change on food production."

The research team included Dr Karina Williams and Dr Andy Wiltshire, who were both among Met Office staff who took joint positions at the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter last year.

Using salt as a key ingredient, Chinese and British researchers have designed a new type of rechargeable battery that could accelerate the shift to greener, electric transport on our roads.

Many electric vehicles (EV) are powered by rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, but they can lose energy and power over time. Under certain conditions, such batteries can also overheat while working or charging, which can also degrade battery life and reduce miles per charge.

To solve these issues, the University of Nottingham is collaborating with six scientific research institutes across China to develop an innovative and affordable energy store with the combined performance merits of a solid-oxide fuel cell and a metal-air battery. The new battery could significantly extend the range of electric vehicles, while being fully recyclable, environmentally-friendly, low-cost and safe.

A solid-oxide fuel cell converts hydrogen and oxygen into electricity as a result of a chemical reaction. While they are highly-efficient at extracting energy from a fuel, durable, low-cost and greener to produce, they are not rechargeable. Meanwhile, metal-air batteries are electrochemical cells that uses a cheap metal such as iron and the oxygen present in air to generate electricity. During charging, they emit only oxygen into the atmosphere. Although not very durable, these high-energy dense batteries are rechargeable and can store and discharge as much electricity as lithium-ion batteries, but much more safely and cheaply.

In the early research phases, the research team explored a high-temperature, iron-air battery design that used molten salt as a type of electrolyte - activated by heat - for electrical conductivity. Cheap and inflammable, molten salts help to give a battery impressive energy storage and power capability and a lengthy lifecycle.

However, molten salts also possess adverse characteristics. University of Nottingham study lead, Professor George Chen said: "In extreme heat, molten salt can be aggressively corrosive, volatile and evaporate or leak, which is challenging to the safety and stability of battery design. There was an urgent need to fine-tune these electrolyte characteristics for better battery performance and to enable its future use in electric transport."

The researchers have now successfully improved the technology by turning the molten salt into soft-solid salt, using solid oxide nano-powders. Professor Jianqiang Wang, from the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, who is leading this collaboration project has predicted that this quasi-solid-state (QSS) electrolyte is suitable for metal-air batteries which operate at 800 ºC; as it suppresses the evaporation and fluidity of the molten salts that can occur at such high operating temperatures.

Project collaborator, Dr Cheng Peng, also from the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, explains a unique and useful design aspect of this experimental research. The quasi-solidification has been achieved using nanotechnology to construct a flexibly-connected network of solid oxide particles that act as a structural barrier locking in the molten salt electrolytes, while still allowing them to safely conduct electricity in extreme heat.

Professor Chen, who is leading a molten salt electrolysis laboratory in Nottingham, hopes the team's "encouraging results" will help to establish a simpler and more efficient approach to designing low-cost and high-performance molten salt metal-air batteries with high stability and safety.

He adds, "The modified molten salt iron-oxygen battery has great potential applications in new markets, including electric transport and renewable energy which require innovative storage solutions in our homes and at grid-level. The battery is also, in principle, capable of storing solar heat as well as electricity, which is highly-desirable for both domestic and industrial energy needs. Molten salts are currently used at large scale in Spain and China to capture and store solar heat which is then converted to electricity - our molten salt metal air battery does the two jobs in one device."

The year 2020 played host to an uncharacteristically large number of natural disasters. The year began with large wildfires in the Amazon rainforest and Australia. A series of wildfires broke out in the American states of California during summer and Oregon in September 2020. In particular, the Oregon wildfire intensified to an uncontrollable extent and was spread over a wide area by strong gusts of wind that carried it forward. These unseasonably strong winds may have been stoked by an unexpected source: typhoons on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

In late August and early September, three storms--Bavi, Mayask, and Haishen--occurred just two weeks apart in the Korean peninsula, causing floods, mudslides, and several casualties. In a recently published article in Geophysical Research Letters, evidence was presented that these storms had more than enough energy to perturb the jet stream - creating an atmospheric "wave train" that amplified weather conditions, which increased the likelihood of wildfires in North America. This evidence was discovered by an international team led by Associate Professor Jin-Ho Yoon from Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Korea, and Prof. Shih-Yu (Simon) Wang from Utah State University.

Commenting on their findings, Dr. Yoon states, "Typhoon Haishen prolonged the initial fire spread and maintained anomalously hot and dry conditions in California and extreme wind events in Oregon." "One typhoon of this magnitude would not be unusual in Korea each year," said co-author Prof. Wang, "But three in two weeks? That was quite historic."

How could a typhoon that hit Korea affect weather in America? Dr. Yoon explains that the outflow from the three typhoons amplified an atmospheric "wave train," creating a reverse air flow across the Pacific by shifting a climatologically west wind regime to an east wind regime. It also increased the pressure gradient across Western America, such that the atmospheric pressure was at an all-time low in the last 40 years.

The team's findings show how weather-related disasters, often thought to be confined to a smaller geographical region, have a "domino effect," causing effects that snowball into larger disasters even over an ocean away.

T-cells are an important component of our immune system: with the receptors they carry on their surface, they can recognise highly specific antigens. Upon detection of an intruder, an immune response is triggered. It is still unclear exactly what happens when antigens are recognised: How many antigens are necessary to elicit an immune response, and does the response depend on their spatial arrangement?

These effects take place in the nanometer range - on the size scale of molecules, far below what can be seen with ordinary microscopes. To study all this, tiny tools are needed. Therefore, an unusual method was used at TU Wien: DNA molecules were folded in an ingenious way, similar to the paper folding art origami. In this way, not just a double helix is created, but a rectangular "molecular raft" that floats across a cell membrane and serves as a tool for novel measurements. The results have now been published in the scientific journal PNAS.

Artificial cell membranes

"T cells react to antigens presented by specific cells on their surface. To be able to study this interaction between the T-cells and the antigen-presenting cells in detail, we replace the antigen-presenting cell with an artificial cell membrane. This allows us to control the number and type of antigens ourselves," says Prof. Eva Sevcsik, biophysicist at the Institute of Applied Physics at TU Wien.

"There was some evidence that the spatial distance between antigens plays an important role in T-cell activation," says Joschka Hellmeier, who did research on this project as part of his dissertation. "However, it is difficult to study these effects precisely: The distance between the individual antigens is not so easy to determine."

The cell membrane is not a fixed structure where every molecule stays in place. The antigens in the cell membrane can move freely, much like inflatable plastic toys floating on a water surface. "Therefore, we wanted to establish a method to precisely set certain distances between antigens and then study the reaction of the T-cells," Eva Sevcsik explains.

DNA origami

To do this, the researchers made use of an important natural phenomenon: DNA, the carrier of genetic information in our body, consists of two precisely matching single strands that join together without external intervention to form a DNA double helix.

This property is exploited in DNA nanotechnology: "By cleverly designing single strands that only fit together in certain sections, you can connect several double helices with each other and thus create complicated structures," explains Eva Sevcsik. "This technique is called DNA origami - instead of folding paper, we fold DNA strands."

In this way, the research team built rectangular DNA platforms to which one can fix an antigen. This DNA rectangle is placed on the artificial membrane and it moves there like a raft.

"This way we can guarantee that the antigens do not come arbitrarily close to each other," says Joschka Hellmeier. "Even if two of these DNA rafts move close together, there is still a minimum distance between the antigens if only one antigen is fixed on each DNA raft." In addition, it is possible to built DNA raft variants each carrying two antigens at the same time. That way it is possible to study how the T-cells react to different antigen spacing.

Old riddle solved

Using this strategy, they were able to explain the contradictory observations that had caused confusion in the field of molecular immunology in recent years: sometimes, several neighbouring antigens seemed to be necessary to activate T-cells, in other cases, a single one was sufficient. "With the help of our DNA origami technique, we were able to clarify the role of molecular distances for T-cell activation," says Eva Sevcsik.

For naturally occurring antigens, the distance does not matter - they act "solo" and are thus very efficient in T-cell activation. In research, however, instead of antigens, artificial T-cell activators are often used that bind particularly strongly to the T-cell receptor - and in this case at least two neighbouring molecules are needed to activate the T-cell. "This is an important result," says Eva Sevcsik. "We were able to show for the first time that there are two different mechanisms here, this will play an important role for future studies and the development of T-cell-based immunotherapies used to treat cancer."

Titanium dioxide nanoparticles decorated by gold absorb about 96% of the solar spectrum and turn it into heat. The material can accelerate the evaporation in desalination plants up to 2.5 times and can track hazardous molecules and compounds. An international research team with representatives from Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU), ITMO University, and the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, published a related article in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.

Access to safe water is included in the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Children's Fund (UNICEF) addressed the problem in 2019 report, noting that 2.2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water.

One of the ways to provide clean drinking water is to desalinate seawater by evaporation and subsequent concentration of steam. To achieve greater production, new materials to accelerate evaporation are wanted. Over the past five years, this has become a rapidly growing research field globally.

Such innovative materials were designed by FEFU, FEB RAS, and ITMO University scientists teamed up with colleagues from Spain, Japan, Bulgaria, and Belarus. Researchers claim it can be used as a nano-heater for water evaporation and as an optical detector in sensor systems tracking the smallest traces of various substances in a liquid. Later properties can be relevant for micro-fluid biomedical systems, lab-on-chips, and environmental monitoring of pollutants, antibiotics, or viruses in water.

"Upon laser irradiation, the initially crystalline titanium dioxide became completely amorphous acquiring strong and broadband light absorption properties. Decoration and doping of the material by gold nanoclusters additionally facilitated visible light absorption. Initially, we intended to use the feature in the context of solar energy but quickly realized that due to the new amorphous structure nanoparticles in the active layer of solar cells will convert the absorbed solar energy into heat rather than electricity. But the idea came to use it as a kind of nano heater in a desalination tank, which was successfully done in laboratory conditions.", says one of the authors of the paper Alexander Kuchmizhak, a senior researcher at the Institute of Automation and Control Processes of the FEB RAS.

The material was obtained through a simple and environmentally friendly technology of laser ablation in a liquid.

&laquoWe added titanium dioxide nanopowders to a liquid containing gold ions and irradiated the mixture with laser pulses of the visible spectrum. The method does not require expensive equipment, hazardous chemicals and can be easily optimized to synthesize unique nanomaterial at gram per hour rate", said research participant Stanislav Gurbatov, junior researcher at FEFU Polytechnic Institute (School).

Noteworthy, the initial nanoparticles of titanium dioxide do not absorb visible laser radiation. However, they catalyze the formation of nanosized gold clusters on their surface stimulating further melting of titanium dioxide. Several hybrid nanoparticles fuse forming unique nanomorphology, in which gold nanoclusters are located both inside and on the surface of titanium dioxide.

Au-decorated amorphous titanium dioxide nanopowder appears completely black to the human eye since it efficiently absorbs within the entire visible light spectrum like a black hole in space does and converts it into heat. In sharp contrast, the commercial titanium dioxide powder used as a starting material, one sees as white.

The development of new materials, including those supporting new manageable physical principles for a wide range of applications, consists within priority areas of FEFU which scientists are working on in close partnership with the Russian Academy of Sciences, domestic and foreign colleagues.

Skoltech researchers helped their colleagues from Japan, Germany, the United States, and China study the crystal structure and optical properties of a new class of two-dimensional compounds, which can be used as effective visible-light-responsive photocatalysts for energy and chemical conversion. They used the Advanced Imaging Core Facility equipment for imaging and structural analysis. The paper was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

One potential use of photocatalysts, so-called water splitting can help substitute climate-warming fossil fuels with more environmentally friendly hydrogen. For this process to work on a large scale, engineers need better-designed catalysts that can utilize the solar spectrum effectively.

Skoltech Professor and Director of the Center for Energy Science and Technology Artem Abakumov and research scientist of the Advanced Imaging Core Facility Maria Kirsanova were part of an international collaboration that studied layered oxychlorides of the type Bi2MO4Cl, where M can stand for yttrium (Y), lanthanum (La), or bismuth (Bi).

"Based on AICF facilities, the Skoltech team performed high-resolution transmission electron microscopy imaging and analysis of local structural features that are responsible for high photocatalytic activity of Bi2MO4Cl compounds," Kirsanova explained.

Skoltech Advanced Imaging Core Facility has the most advanced equipment for conducting research using electron microscopy, both scanning and transmission, including the transmission electron microscope Titan Themis Z.

"The capabilities of the transmission electron microscope Titan Themis Z make it possible to investigate various materials, including photocatalysts, for example, you can visualize the crystal lattice of a material and the defects in crystal lattice using scanning transmission electron microscopy technique. The task of visualizing a crystal lattice is not the most trivial one, so the most important thing for us is the availability of employees with the necessary qualifications and with an extensive background, which is necessary for the interpretation of experimental results. In this regard, we pay great attention to improving the qualifications of our employees, since progress does not stand still and new techniques in the field of electron microscopy appear every year," Yaroslava Shakhova, head of AICF, explained.

By inserting a MO2 layer in the conventional Bi2O2 layer, the researchers effectively increased the number of dimensions of this material from one to two; they hypothesize that it may be interesting to go further, from 2D to 3D, by thickening the fluorite block of the compound. This can improve both the photocatalytic properties and other remarkable properties observed in this class of compounds, such as ferroelectricity (spontaneous electric polarization that can be reversed with an external magnetic field).

Protein alteration in the family of lamins causes several diseases, known as laminopathies, such as progeria or precocious ageing. A study in which UB researchers have taken part states that alterations in the levels of one of these proteins, lamin B1, contribute to the degeneration of different brain neuronal populations in Huntington's disease. Caused by a mutation in the huntingtin gen, this pathology features involuntary movements, cognitive deficit and psychiatric disorders, and has no cure yet.

According to the study, published in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine, these results open new therapeutic pathways for the treatment of this disease, since research shows pharmacological normalization of levels of lamin B1 improve the cognitive symptoms in a transgenic model of the disease.

The study counts on the participation of researchers of the Institute of Neurosciences of the University of Barcelona (UBNeuro), the Biomedical Research Networking Center in Neurodegenerative Diseases (CIBERNED), and the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBAPS), and is led by Esther Pérez-Navarro, tenured university lecturer at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences.

Among the participants in the study are also researchers from the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG), Pompeu Fabra University, Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology and the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom).

An innovative technique to analyze cell nucleus

The level increase of lamin B1, a protein in the cell nucleus, causes a rare disease, the autosomal dominant leukodystrophy, which features motor and cognitive deficits and demyelination in the central nervous system. In this study, researchers analyzed the impact at a physiologic, transcriptomic and epigenetic level of these alterations in Huntington's disease. To do so, they used the experiments in a transgenic mice model of the pathology and post-mortem brain samples from patients. One of the most relevant aspects of the study is the development of an innovative technique, the fluorescence-activated nuclear suspension imaging (FANSI) to identify and analyze the neuron nucleus of specific populations in the brain. "This technique could be used by other research groups", notes Esther Pérez-Navarro.

"Moreover --the researcher adds--, we have applied the ChIP-sequencing technique in collaboration with other research groups experts in this technique and the interpretation of results: the groups led by Mashami Narita, from the University of Cambridge, and Luciano Di Croce, from CRG. This allowed us to analyze how the alteration of levels in lamin B1 can involve changes in gene transcription".

Later, researchers gave the mice betulinic acid, a drug that can partially restore the levels of lamin B1, to test the effect in the mice models of the disease. Normalization of levels of this protein in the nucleus of neuronal populations palliated motor and cognitive disfunctions in animals. According to the researchers, these results show that the level increase of lamin B1 contributes to the alteration of the nuclear function of specific neurons in the brain in Huntington's disease. Pérez-Navarro states that "to date, we did not know about the alteration of this protein being involved in Huntington's physiopathology", and she questions whether this alteration could be involved in the neuronal degeneration of other diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

First step to design new drugs

The identification of this molecular mechanism sheds light on the design of new drugs to treat a disease with no cure yet. "Betulinic acid used in this research has other effects and therefore we need to identify specific drugs that target the modulation of lamin B1 levels", notes the researcher.

Moreover, this study could have implications in the identification of new biomarkers of the disease. In this sense, the future goal of the researchers is to determine whether lamin B levels are also altered in cells outside the brain, such as blood cells and fibroblasts (skin cells). "The benefits of this study in a disease such as Huntington's, associated with a genetic mutation, is that we can analyze these chanhes in carriers that have no symptoms yet and monitor it over time. To carry out these studies, we are working with the Department of Movement Disorders (Jesús Pérez and Jaime Kulisevsky) in Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, a distinguished center regarding this disease", concludes the researcher.

Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Texas have developed and demonstrated a new approach for designing photonic devices. The advance allows them to control the direction and polarization of light from thin-film LEDs, paving the way for a new generation of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies.

"This is a fundamentally new device architecture for photonic devices," says Franky So, corresponding author of a paper describing the work. "And we've demonstrated that, using our approach, directional and polarized emissions from an organic LED or a perovskite LED without external optical elements can be realized." So is the Walter and Ida Freeman Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at NC State.

In practical terms, an approach that allows for directional control of light using thin-film LEDs makes it possible to develop VR and AR headsets that are substantially lighter and less bulky. And the improved efficiency of the devices means that you get more photons out of the display unit for every electron that you put in.

For AR units, it also means that more light from the outside world gets through to the user. In other words, you'll still be able to see the image being superimposed on your view of the real world, and your view of the real world will be clearer.

"Because the device we've demonstrated is simple to fabricate and can be easily scaled-up, our discovery of this strong directional and polarized light emission from OLEDs and perovskite LEDs has important applications for displays, lighting and other photonic applications," So says.

Self-control significantly affects well-being and objective success in life. Although many agree that a high degree of self-control is beneficial, helping people develop more self-control is a tricky challenge. Self-control training, like training in any domain, is affected by the basic question of whether a person is motivated to improve self-control. Recent work has found that people differ as to how strongly they desire better self-control, and reveals some of the factors affecting this desire.

Desire for self-control (DSC) reflects a wish to have an improved self-control ability. This desire is influenced by societal or cultural demands, as well as internal motivations. In a new study led by Israel's Bar-Ilan University, Australia's University of Queensland, and Texas Tech University in the US, researchers sought to discover the elements that drive people to experience greater DSC. Their findings were recently published in the APA journal Motivation Science.

The research involved four separate studies. Across all studies, individuals low in trait self-control expressed greater DSC. That is, individuals who chronically believe they are deficient in self-control wish they had more (reflecting deficiency). However, importantly, the four studies showed that DSC also hinges on individuals' sense that self-control is needed to accomplish current goals (reflecting necessity). In Study 1, necessity was expressed by greater fear of failure in not meeting goals, and in Study 2 it was expressed by associating DSC with meeting goals in the near future. Crucially, Studies 3 and 4 used experimental designs, and showed that acknowledgement of the relevance of self-control for current goals (by, for example, knowing of an upcoming difficult task) causes an increase in desire for self-control.

The study also found that stronger desire for self-control predicted greater willingness to enroll in self-control training, by that highlighting the practical relevance of understanding the bases of this desire.

In a 2017 study, two of the current study's authors (Uziel & Baumeister) explored the implications of having a strong desire for self-control on task performance. It revealed an ironic effect, whereby wishing for more self-control resulted in impaired task performance in the face of difficult challenges. Those who wished for more self-control expected to perform worse on the task, and thus gave up. In the context of this study, one might wonder what makes people want more self-control if it leads to dire consequences. The explanation that arises from the present findings is that the desire often arises too late in the process of addressing challenges and the prospects of succeeding cannot improve.

"Wishing for more self-control can lead to better self-control, but only when this wish serves a long-term process of self-improvement. If the desire arises when one already needs a high degree of self-control, the desire could be detrimental," says Dr. Liad Uziel, of the Department of Psychology at Bar-Ilan University, who led the study. "In order for desire for self-control to carry beneficial effects, it must arise at a point where change is feasible. Changing one's self-control is a very difficult challenge and must be considered a journey, not a one-shot occurrence," notes Uziel.

The findings add a missing piece in understanding the processes that govern people's ability to develop better self-control. They also highlight the need to address the wish for having better self-control, and to understand its effect in bringing about actual behaviors aimed at improving self-control as an important factor in programs aimed at improving self-control.

HOUSTON - (Feb. 1, 2021) - When aboveground storage tanks fail during a storm and their toxic contents spread, the threat to human health can and probably will flow downwind of the immediate area.

Rice University engineers have developed a model to quantify what could happen when a hurricane or other natural disaster causes such damage based on data gathered from the Houston Ship Channel, the largest petrochemical complex in the United States, during and after two hurricanes, Ike in 2008 and Harvey in 2017.

Pollutants like toxic organic chemicals evaporate from spills and can be carried a long way from the site by the wind, depending on the storm's characteristics.

The computational model, according to atmospheric scientist Rob Griffin of Rice's Brown School of Engineering, uses real data from the two storms as a proof of concept. The model is available upon request to help researchers predict the "what if" consequences of future storms that threaten storage tanks or chemical spills in general.

"We first had to understand the surge models, and that takes time after a storm," Griffin said. "This paper combines the hydrology from those storm scenarios with structural fragility models, leading to predicting the atmospheric consequences."

The study appears in the journal Atmospheric Environment.

The model follows the hypothetical fate of toxins like organic solvents including benzene and toluene and their reaction products as they drift with the wind for up to 12 hours after a spill, up to about 5,000 feet. The pollutants pose further damage as they evolve into secondary toxins within the downwind plumes, according to the researchers.

The model predicted downwind oil plumes would cover a broader region than organic solvent plumes that would remain concentrated along the path of the prevailing wind, according to the study. It showed substantial formation of ozone and secondary organic aerosols forming in the solvent plumes, depending on other factors like sunlight and background pollutants.

The researchers noted models could provide the only means to estimate the spread of pollutants that threaten the population downwind of a spill if a storm knocks out air quality monitoring systems in its path.

A 2015 study by Rice civil and environmental engineer Jamie Padgett and alumnus Sabarethinam Kameshwar, now an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Louisiana State University, predicted a percentage of storage tanks would fail if a Category 4 or greater hurricane hit the Houston Ship Channel, either lifting them off their foundations, crushing them or penetrating them with debris.

They estimated a 24-foot storm surge could release 90 million gallons or more of oil and hazardous substances.

That study was a jumping-off point for Griffin, Padgett and Phil Bedient, director of Rice's Severe Storm Prediction, Education and Evacuation from Disasters (SPPEED) Center, along with Hanadi Rifai, a Rice alumna and environmental engineer at the University of Houston, to model how such a spill would spread pollutants through the atmosphere.

"The earlier study predicted the (surface-bound) plume in the ship channel if this spill were to happen," Griffin said. "It talked about potential exposure to the environment and damage to the channel itself, but as an atmospheric chemist, I thought, that stuff's not going to just sit there. It's going to evaporate."

One model related to conditions during and after Hurricane Ike showed a diesel plume from a single tank spill would expand slowly for the first six hours to cover about 42 square kilometers, but then expand rapidly to cover 500 square kilometers after nine hours. The swirling winds would have kept the plume within Texas, the model shows.

But travel downwind would have been significantly different during Harvey, for which the model showed a narrower and more concentrated plume directed by the wind straight into the Gulf of Mexico.

Models of the fate of evaporated toluene and benzene during Ike showed the plumes tracked with the storm's eastward path, with levels dangerous to human health most likely at the center of the plume within the first minutes of a tank failure. These would pose a risk to workers and communities near the spill, but the chemicals' concentrations would decrease rapidly further downwind.

"I don't think the information about what's in the tanks is public knowledge, so we had to make some assumptions about what would spill if there were a spill," Griffin said. "But it's valuable to think about what would happen to those chemicals once they're in the atmosphere. The same results could be just as applicable to something like the Deepwater Horizon. Once that material reached the surface of the ocean, what happens to it when it evaporates?

"I would love to see some of the owners of these tanks use this to look at their structures," he said. "I can imagine folks like the Environmental Defense Fund or other advocates picking up on the study as well."

Griffin noted the model isn't set up to allow a company to predict the effects of a single tank failure. "It's a more general model of a region with tanks that are likely to fail, based on real situations that happened," he said. "But we can make the chemistry and atmospheric code available. If others want to study a given storm situation and a given leaking tank, some significant legwork would need to go into that."

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. -- Army-funded researchers discovered how to make materials capable of self-propulsion, allowing materials to move without motors or hands.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst discovered how to make materials that snap and reset themselves, only relying upon energy flow from their environment. This research, published in Nature Materials and funded by the U.S. Army, could enable future military robots to move from their own energy.

"This work is part of a larger multi-disciplinary effort that seeks to understand biological and engineered impulsive systems that will lay the foundations for scalable methods for generating forces for mechanical action and energy storing structures and materials," said Dr. Ralph Anthenien, branch chief, Army Research Office, an element of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, now known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory. "The work will have myriad possible future applications in actuation and motive systems for the Army and DOD."

Researchers uncovered the physics during a mundane experiment that involved watching a gel strip dry. The researchers observed that when the long, elastic gel strip lost internal liquid due to evaporation, the strip moved. Most movements were slow, but every so often, they sped up.

Scientists discover how to make materials that snap and reset themselves, only relying upon energy flow from their environment. This research could enable future military robots that are able to move off their own energy.

These faster movements were snap instabilities that continued to occur as the liquid evaporated further. Additional studies revealed that the shape of the material mattered, and that the strips could reset themselves to continue their movements.

"Many plants and animals, especially small ones, use special parts that act like springs and latches to help them move really fast, much faster than animals with muscles alone," said Dr. Al Crosby, a professor of polymer science and engineering in the College of Natural Sciences, UMass Amherst. "Plants like the Venus flytraps are good examples of this kind of movement, as are grasshoppers and trap-jaw ants in the animal world."

Snap instabilities are one way that nature combines a spring and a latch and are increasingly used to create fast movements in small robots and other devices as well as toys like rubber poppers.

"However, most of these snapping devices need a motor or a human hand to keep moving," Crosby said. "With this discovery, there could be various applications that won't require batteries or motors to fuel movement."

Scientists discover how future military robots may be able to move off just their own energy.

After learning the essential physics from the drying strips, the team experimented with different shapes to find the ones most likely to react in expected ways, and that would move repeatedly without any motors or hands resetting them. The team even showed that the reshaped strips could do work, such as climb a set of stairs on their own.

"These lessons demonstrate how materials can generate powerful movement by harnessing interactions with their environment, such as through evaporation, and they are important for designing new robots, especially at small sizes where it's difficult to have motors, batteries, or other energy sources," Crosby said.

WASHINGTON -- In a new study, investigators report an optimized approach to using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) for analyzing hydrogen isotopes. Their new findings could enable improved rapid identification and measurement of hydrogen and other light isotopes that are important in nuclear reactor materials and other applications.

LIBS is promising for measuring hydrogen isotopes because it requires no sample preparation and data can be rapidly acquired with a relatively simple experimental setup. However, quantifying the concentration of hydrogen has been challenging with this analytical technique.

In The Optical Society (OSA) journal Optics Express, researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory show that combining an ultrafast laser -- which has ultrashort pulses -- with certain environmental conditions helps improve LIBS measurements of hydrogen isotopes in industrially important alloys. This optimized technique could enable a faster analysis of materials that have been irradiated in nuclear reactor cores.

"Improved chemical imaging of hydrogen isotopes, like what we performed in this work, can be used to monitor the behavior of materials in nuclear reactors that provide us with electricity," said research team leader Sivanandan S. Harilal. "It can also be very valuable for the development of next generation materials for hydrogen storage that can enable new energy technologies and for analyzing material corrosion when exposed to water."

Measuring isotopes

In the new work, the researchers worked to find the best conditions for measuring hydrogen isotopes in Zircaloy-4. Zirconium alloys are widely used in nuclear technology, including as cladding for nuclear fuel rods in pressurized water reactors. Measuring how much hydrogen the material picks up during reactor operation is important for understanding the material performance.

To perform LIBS, a pulsed laser is used to generate a plasma on the sample. The laser-produced plasma emits light that is characteristic of the different species in the plasma plume, such as ions, atoms, electrons and nanoparticles.

Using LIBS for detecting specific isotopes requires measuring extremely narrow emission spectra of atoms. This is difficult for isotopes of lighter elements such as hydrogen because the extreme temperatures -- 10,000 Kelvin or higher -- of laser-produced plasmas broadens the spectral lines.

For the study, the researchers performed LIBS with different plasma generation conditions by using various lasers to generate plasmas and by testing different analysis environments. They collected emitted light at different times after the plasma was generated and at different distances from the sample using spatially and temporally resolved spectral imaging, or 2D spectral imaging.

"2D spectral imaging let us track where and when emission from hydrogen isotopes was the strongest," said Harilal. "Because of the multiple species present in a plasma plume and its transient nature, it is critical to analyze plasmas in a spatially and temporally resolved manner."

Ultrafast is best

The results showed that plasmas produced by ultrafast lasers were better for hydrogen isotopic analysis than traditional nanosecond laser-produced plasmas and that generating the plasmas in a helium gas environment with moderate pressure provided the best analysis conditions.

"Hydrogen is present in all environments, making it challenging to distinguish the hydrogen that needs to be measured from that in the environment using any analytical technique," said Harilal. "Our results show that ultrafast LIBS is capable of differentiating hydrogen impurities from solute hydrogen."

The researchers plan to perform additional studies to further optimize the use of ultrafast lasers for hydrogen isotopic analysis with LIBS.