Tech

FOLSOM, Calif., November 10, 2020 - Findings from a randomized controlled trial recently published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, indicate that people in their 60s and 70s who regularly consume walnuts may have reduced inflammation, a factor associated with a lower risk of heart disease, compared to those who do not eat walnuts. The research was part of the Walnuts and Healthy Aging (WAHA) study - the largest and longest trial to date exploring the benefits of daily walnut consumption.

In the study, conducted by Dr. Emilio Ros from the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona, in partnership with Loma Linda University, more than 600 healthy older adults consumed 30 to 60 grams of walnuts per day as part of their typical diet or followed their standard diet (without walnuts) for two years. Those who consumed walnuts had a significant reduction in inflammation, measured by the concentration of known inflammatory markers in the blood, which were reduced by up to 11.5%. Of the 10 well-known inflammatory markers that were measured in the study, six were significantly reduced on the walnut diet, including interleukin-1β, a potent pro-inflammatory cytokine which pharmacologic inactivation has been strongly associated with reduced rates of coronary heart disease. The study's conclusion is that the anti-inflammatory effects of walnuts provide a mechanistic explanation for cardiovascular disease reduction beyond cholesterol lowering.

"Acute inflammation is a physiological process due to activation of the immune system by injury such as trauma or infection, and is an important defense of the body", says Dr. Emilio Ros, a lead researcher in the study. "Short-term inflammation helps us heal wounds and fight infections, but inflammation that persists overtime (chronic), caused by factors such as poor diet, obesity, stress and high blood pressure, is damaging instead of healing, particularly when it comes to cardiovascular health. The findings of this study suggest walnuts are one food that may lessen chronic inflammation, which could help to reduce the risk for heart disease - a condition we become more susceptible to as we age."

Chronic inflammation is a critical factor in the development and progression of atherosclerosis, which is the buildup of plaque or "hardening" of the arteries, the principal cause of heart attacks and stroke. Therefore, the severity of atherosclerosis depends greatly on chronic inflammation, and dietary and lifestyle changes are key to mitigating this process.

While existing scientific evidence establishes walnuts as a heart-healthy1 food, researchers continue to investigate the "how" and "why" behind walnuts' cardiovascular benefits. According to Dr. Ros, "Walnuts have an optimal mix of essential nutrients like the omega-3 alpha-linolenic acid, or ALA (2.5g/oz), and other highly bioactive components like polyphenols2, that likely play a role in their anti-inflammatory effect and other health benefits."

The study findings were also reinforced by an editorial in the same publication entitled "Ideal Dietary Patterns and Foods to Prevent Cardiovascular Disease: Beware of Their Anti-Inflammatory Potential", which concludes that a better knowledge of the mechanisms of health protection by the different foods and diets, mainly their anti-inflammatory properties, should inform healthier food choices (such as including walnuts regularly in the usual diet).

While these results are promising, the research does have limitations. Study participants were older adults who were healthy and free living with the option to eat a variety of other foods in addition to walnuts. Additionally, further investigation is needed in more diverse and disadvantaged populations.

Insects have difficulties handling the higher temperatures brought on by climate change, and might risk overheating. The ability to reproduce is also strongly affected by rising temperatures, even in northern areas of the world, according to a new study from Lund University in Sweden.

Insects cannot regulate their own body temperature, which is instead strongly influenced by the temperature in their immediate environment. In the current study, the researchers studied two closely related species of damselflies in Sweden. The goal was to understand their robustness and ability to tolerate changes in temperature.

To study this, the researchers used a combination of field work in southern Sweden and infrared camera technology (thermography), a technology that makes it possible to measure body temperature in natural conditions. This information was then connected to the survival rates and reproductive success of the damselflies in their natural populations.

The results show that survivorship of these damselflies was high at relatively low temperatures, 15 - 20 C °. The reproductive capacity, on the other hand, was higher at temperatures between 20 and 30 C °, depending on the species.

"There is therefore a temperature-dependent conflict between survival on one hand and the ability to reproduce on the other", says Erik Svensson, professor at the Department of Biology at Lund University, who led the study.

The study also shows that the damselflies ability to handle heat-related stress is limited. Insects are cold-blooded invertebrates, so they rely on external sources such as the sun or hot stones to raise their body temperature.

"Our results show that cold-blooded animals can suffer from overheating even if they live far up in the northern hemisphere, and that their ability to buffer their body temperature against rising external temperatures is limited. The results also challenge a popular theory that animals' plasticity, i. e. their individual flexibility, can help them survive under harsher environmental conditions, such as during heat waves", says Erik Svensson.

Materials can assume completely different properties - depending on temperature, pressure, electrical voltage or other physical quantities. In theoretical solid-state physics, state-of-the-art computer models are used to understand these properties in detail. Sometimes this works well, but sometimes strange effects occur that still seem puzzling - such as phenomena linked to high-temperature superconductivity.

A few years ago, scientists at TU Wien were already able to clarify mathematically where the boundary lies between the area that follows the known rules and the area where unusual effects play an important role. Now, with the help of complex calculations on supercomputers, it has been possible for the first time to explain exactly what happens when this boundary is crossed: The repulsion between the electrons is suddenly counteracted by an additional attractive force that enables completely counterintuitive effects.

Similar to the way water molecules combine to form droplets, the electrons can then come together at certain points, as if they were partially sticking together. The results, which were obtained in an international cooperation between TU Wien, the University of Würzburg, the University of L'Aquila and Georgetown University in Washington D.C., have now been published in the journal "Physical Review Letters".

To infinity - and beyond

"Electrons are negatively charged, they repel each other. Therefore, electrons that move through the material are scattered by other electrons", says Prof. Alessandro Toschi from the Institute of Solid State Physics at TU Wien. "However, this scattering is not always equally strong. It is possible that the repulsion between the electrons is screened in the material. This depends on many factors, such as the chemical composition of the material."

Exactly at the borderline where unusual effects start to appear, the scattering processes between the electrons become theoretically infinitely strong due to the lack of screening. This is known as "divergence" - and these divergences pose a great challenge for research. "For a long time, there was a very controversial discussion: Do these divergences actually have a real physical meaning?" says Patrick Chalupa, who is researching this problem as part of his dissertation in Alessandro Toschi's group. "We were able to answer this question: Yes, these divergences are not just a mathematical curiosity, but the key to a better understanding of important material effects," says Matthias Reitner, who wrote his Master thesis on this topic.

If you approach the mathematical limit, the repulsion becomes stronger and stronger. At the limit, the corresponding scattering between the electrons become infinitely large, but if you cross the limit, something surprising happens: The repulsion suddenly causes an additional attraction. This effective attraction forces the electrons to gather at certain points in a confined space, as if they were partially sticking together. This drastic change in behavior is closely related to the occurrence of the divergences.

Phase transition, similar to water vapor

"The result is a situation that is reminiscent of liquid water and water vapor," says Alessandro Toschi, "under certain conditions there is an attraction between the water molecules. They bind together and create a mixture of liquid droplets and gaseous steam. However, the origin of this attraction is completely different in the two cases."

For the first time, it has been possible to obtain a detailed picture of what happens in such situations from a materials science perspective on a microscopic level. "This means that it is now possible to understand exactly why certain mathematical approaches, so-called perturbative methods, did not produce the right result," says Patrick Chalupa.

This new microscopic insight could be a missing piece of the puzzle for the theoretical understanding of so-called unconventional superconductors. These are materials based on iron, copper or nickel that can be superconducting under certain conditions up to amazingly high temperatures. "Perhaps we will finally be able to answer some of the essential questions that have remained unanswered since the discovery of these mysterious materials 40 years ago," hopes Matthias Reitner.

How can stress in animals be measured? Scientists from Uppsala University and elsewhere have now found that what are known as epigenetic biomarkers could be used to detect long-term exposure to stress in commercially raised chickens. This may, in time, lead to improved conditions in animal rearing. The study has been published in the journal Frontiers in Genetics.

Subjected to chronic stress, animals show deterioration in their general state of health and a weakened immune system, which is unfortunate in terms of animal protection. For commercial animal production, it means that animal products are of a lower quality and a larger quantity of meat has to be discarded. These repercussions, in turn, adversely affect farmers' finances and consumers' food quality. Nonetheless, there are currently no reliable ways of measuring long-term stress in animals.

Researchers from Sweden and Brazil have now, in chicken studies, looked for signs of how chronic stress can affect the genes of red blood cells, causing "epigenetic changes". In brief, this means that specific molecule types ("methyl groups") attach themselves to different parts of the DNA strand ("methylation"), depending on how the animal has lived. This may exert long-term effects on gene expression. Genes can, for example, be turned on or off (activated or deactivated).

The chickens studied, males of the popular White Leghorn breed of laying birds, were divided into two groups. One group was raised in a normal commercial environment, housed with other chickens and with good access to food and water. In the other group, the birds were exposed to factors known to induce stress. They were periodically isolated from one another, with also limited access to food and water. The same experiment was performed in both Sweden and Brazil.

"We took blood samples from the chickens in both the control group and the stress group after the stress treatment ended. We analysed the methylation of red blood cells and compared methylation patterns in the two groups," says Fábio Pértille of the University of São Paulo, the first author of the study.

What they then saw was that in the stressed birds, the way in which the methyl groups had bound to the DNA of the red blood cells was entirely different from how this occurred in the control chickens. Although the scientists were unable to see how long these changes persisted, they were nonetheless an indication that the chickens had been exposed to prolonged stress.

"It's early days, but the results from this study are a step towards being able to identify specific epigenetic biomarkers that are evidence of the stress imposed on commercially raised animals in their living environment. It would be highly useful to have a diagnostic tool for tracking recurrent stress in production animals. And that could bring about, for example, improved health and protection for farmed animals; meat and dairy products of higher quality; and reduced use of antibiotics," says Carlos Guerrero-Bosagna, a researcher in environmental toxicology at Uppsala University.

If you've ever seen a seagull snatch a pasty or felt their beady eyes on your sandwich in the park, you'd be right to suspect they know exactly when to strike to increase their chances of getting a human snack.

A new study by the University of Bristol is the most in-depth look to date at the foraging behaviours of urban gulls and how they've adapted to patterns of human activity in a city.

In comparison to natural environments, urban environments are novel for animals on an evolutionary timescale and present a wide array of potential food sources. In urban environments food availability often fluctuates according to patterns of human activity, which can follow a daily or weekly cycle. However, until now, little has been known about how urban animals adapt to these time differences in human food availability.

A team of scientists from Bristol's Faculties of Engineering and Life Sciences used different data to record the behaviour of urban gulls at three different settings in the city: a public park, a school and a waste centre. The study used data from mini GPS tracker backpacks fitted to 12 Lesser Black?backed Gulls, as well as observations of gull numbers at the different sites.

The team found the birds' foraging patterns closely matched the timing of school breaks and the opening and closing times of the waste centre, but that their activity in the park appeared to correspond with the availability of natural food sources.

These findings suggest gulls may have the behavioural flexibility to adapt their foraging behaviour to human time schedules when beneficial, and that this trait helps them to thrive in cities.

Dr Anouk Spelt, lead author of the paper published in Ibis, the International Journal of Avian Science, said:

"Our first day at the school, the students were excited to tell us about the gulls visiting their school at lunch time. Indeed, our data showed that gulls were not only present in high numbers during lunch time to feed on leftovers, but also just before the start of the school and during the first break when students had their snack. Similarly, at the waste centre the gulls were present in higher numbers on weekdays when the centre was open and trucks were unloading food waste.

"Although everybody has experienced or seen gulls stealing food from people in parks, our gulls mainly went to park first thing in the morning and this may be because earthworms and insects are present in higher numbers during these early hours."

Dr Shane Windsor, co-author, said:

"With this study in Bristol we have shown that gulls in cities are able to adapt their foraging schedule to make best use of food resources depending on their availability. Some gulls even used all three feeding grounds in the same day, suggesting they might track the availability to optimise their energy intake. These results highlight the behavioural flexibility of gulls and their ability to adapt to the artificial environments and time schedules of urban living."

Wearable exoskeletons are increasingly being used in physically demanding jobs to support good ergonomics and augment muscular strength. In ground-breaking studies led by researchers at Tampere University and LUT University in Finland, exoskeleton vests were worn by nurses to discover how the new technology would suit the special requirements of patient care.

According to Postdoctoral Research Fellow Tuuli Turja from Tampere University, Finnish nurses expect the new technologies to reduce physical strain.

"This message from the field led us to investigate what conditions exoskeletons would need to meet in order to reform nursing," Turja says.

"Currently, exoskeletons are mainly used in manufacturing and logistics. Isn't it high time to introduce exoskeletons in female-dominated sectors, where musculoskeletal disorders are rampant?" she continues.

In the field of care, exoskeleton-type technology is generally utilised in rehabilitation, where patients wear the skeleton of a walking robot, for example.

"However, in our study, a very different type of mobile and light exoskeleton was worn by nurses in patient care," Turja explains.

The research article on the intention to use exoskeletons in geriatric care work was the first of its kind in the world. The peer-reviewed article was published in the journal Ergonomics in Design (link below), and it is openly available.

The article presents findings from two studies involving users of the Laevo Exoskeleton - a wearable back support vest, which, according to the manufacturer, alleviates lower back strain by 40-50%. In the first study, pairs of nursing students assisted geriatric patients in moving from a hospital bed into a wheelchair with and without the exoskeleton. In the second study, seven nurses tested the exoskeleton vest in a real care environment for a week.

The results show that due to the special characteristics of patient care, exoskeletons need to be developed further before being completely suitable for everyday nursing work. Nurses are willing to use exoskeletons to assist their work if the devices are comfortable and effortless to use and product development considers the requirements of nursing, such as interactive features and safety, in hectic work situations.

Looking like robots in the eyes of geriatric patients may be a downside, but the idea of making care work lighter with a slightly more agile and unobtrusive exoskeleton received the nurses' approval.

The researchers ask whether the necessary product development could happen in Finland; perhaps Finnish manufacturers could make it possible for all the world's caregivers to wear improved exoskeletons.

Huntington's disease is an hereditary neurodegenerative disease featured by alterations in movement, cognitive deficiency and psychiatric disorders resulting from the degeneration of neurons in the striatum nucleus of the brain. A study led by researchers of the Institute of Neurosciences of the UB (UBNeuro) has characterized one of the neuronal circuits involved in the development of the disease: the connection of the secondary motor cortex (M2) in the dorsolateral striatum nucleus (DSL).

The study, published in the journal eLife, shows in an animal model with the pathology, that optogenetic stimulation of the circuit causes improvements in the typical symptomatology of the disease. According to the researchers, these results shed light to other pathologies with similar traits such as Parkinson's disease and Tourette's syndrome.

The study is led by Mercè Masana, tenure track-1 lecturer at the Faculty of Medicine of the UB and researcher at UBNeuro, IDIBAPS and the Biomedical Research Networking Center in Neurodegenerative Diseases (CIBERNED). The study counts on the participation of the lecturers and researchers from the same faculty Jordi Alberch and Manuel José Rodríguez (UBNeuro-IDIBAPS), and David Bernal-Casas, from the Faculty of Biology of the UB. Among other participants are also the researchers from the Institute of Biomedical Research of Barcelona (IIBB-CSIC), the Biomedical Research Networking Center in Mental Health (CIBERSAM) and the IDIBAPS Magnetic Resonance Imaging Unit.

Alterations in the connection between the cortex and the brain striatum

The aim of this study was to analyse the alterations in the brain circuits that cause neurological symptoms in Huntington's disease. In collaboration with the IDIBAPS Magnetic Resonance Imaging Unit, researchers used this technology to analyse functional alterations in the circuits that connect the brain cortex to the striatum nucleus of basal ganglia, which plays an important role in the control of the movement and behaviour. "The results of the first analysis in an animal model with symptoms of the disease showed that the functional connectivity of the brain cortex with the striatum nucleus is highly altered", notes Mercè Masana.

"After this -continues the expert-, we studied in detail a specific circuit that, according to previous studies, shows structural alterations in this disease: the connection of the secondary motor cortex with the dorsolateral striatum".

To study the function of this circuit, researchers used optogenetics, a powerful and innovative technique that combines genetic and optic methods to boost selectively brain circuits through light. Opsins, proteins from a type of algae, develop channels of photosensitive ions which open when they receive flashes of blue light, and enable the activation of neurons. By administrating the opsin gene to the brain cortex, the neuronal terminals can be selectively activated in the striatum nucleus, and these express the protein. "Using optogenetics, combined with electrophysiology and microdialysis, we could determine that the M2-DLS circuit in the model with Huntington's disease released reduced glutamate levels, the main neurotransmitter involved in this circuit, and that neurons in the striatum nucleus did not respond to the circuit activation", notes the researcher.

Increase in synaptic plasticity and reversion of symptoms

Later, researchers used optogenetics again to boost the altered circuit repeatedly. The results show that this stimulation improves the symptomatology in model mice of the disease. "After applying this technique we saw the typical motor symptoms of the pathology reversed, a situation that was joined by a restoration of the synaptic plasticity of the stimulated circuit", notes Mercè Masana.

Although its application in humans is far from happening yet, the success of this experiment leads to a potential therapeutic strategy based on the restoration of neuronal circuits. "The new study shows that optogenetics could be a powerful tool for the treatment of diseases in which brain circuit activity is altered, and in the future, it could lead to new therapeutic approaches similar to the deep brain stimulation, which is used in Parkinson's disease", concludes the researcher.

Huntington's disease affects more than 4,000 people in Spain and more than 15,000 people are at the risk of having inherited the gen of the disease because they have a family member who is affected by it. At the moment there is no cure for the disease, and there are only treatments aimed at alleviating its symptoms.

Scientists have detected what they say are the sediments of a huge ancient lake bed sealed more than a mile under the ice of northwest Greenland--the first-ever discovery of such a sub-glacial feature anywhere in the world. Apparently formed at a time when the area was ice-free but now completely frozen in, the lake bed may be hundreds of thousands or millions of years old, and contain unique fossil and chemical traces of past climates and life. Scientists consider such data vital to understanding what the Greenland ice sheet may do in coming years as climate warms, and thus the site makes a tantalizing target for drilling. A paper describing the discovery is in press at the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

"This could be an important repository of information, in a landscape that right now is totally concealed and inaccessible," said Guy Paxman, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and lead author of the report. "We're working to try and understand how the Greenland ice sheet has behaved in the past. It's important if we want to understand how it will behave in future decades." The ice sheet, which has been melting at an accelerating pace in recent years, contains enough water to raise global sea levels by about 24 feet.

The researchers mapped out the lake bed by analyzing data from airborne geophysical instruments that can read signals that penetrate the ice and provide images of the geologic structures below. Most of the data came from aircraft flying at low altitude over the ice sheet as part of NASA's Operation IceBridge.

The team says the basin once hosted a lake covering about 7,100 square kilometers (2,700 square miles), about the size of the U.S. states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. Sediments in the basin, shaped vaguely like a meat cleaver, appear to range as much as 1.2 kilometers (three quarters of a mile) thick. The geophysical images show a network of at least 18 apparent onetime stream beds carved into the adjoining bedrock in a sloping escarpment to the north that must have fed the lake. The image also show at least one apparent outlet stream to the south. The researchers calculate that the water depth in the onetime lake ranged from about 50 meters to 250 meters (a maximum of about 800 feet).

In recent years, scientists have found existing subglacial lakes in both Greenland and Antarctica, containing liquid water sandwiched in the ice, or between bedrock and ice. This is the first time anyone has spotted a fossil lake bed, apparently formed when there was no ice, and then later covered over and frozen in place. There is no evidence that the Greenland basin contains liquid water today.

Paxman says there is no way to tell how old the lake bed is. Researchers say it is likely that ice has periodically advanced and retreated over much of Greenland for the last 10 million years, and maybe going back as far as 30 million years. A 2016 study led by Lamont-Doherty geochemist Joerg Schaefer has suggested that most of the Greenland ice may have melted for one or more extended periods some time in the last million years or so, but the details of that are sketchy. This particular area could have been repeatedly covered and uncovered, Paxman said, leaving a wide range of possibilities for the lake's history. In any case, Paxman says, the substantial depth of the sediments in the basin suggest that they must have built up during ice-free times over hundreds of thousands or millions of years.

"If we could get at those sediments, they could tell us when the ice was present or absent," he said.

The researchers assembled a detailed picture of the lake basin and its surroundings by analyzing radar, gravity and magnetic data gathered by NASA. Ice-penetrating radar provided a basic topographic map of the earth' s surface underlying the ice. This revealed the outlines of the smooth, low-lying basin, nestled among higher-elevation rocks. Gravity measurements showed that the material in the basin is less dense than the surrounding hard, metamorphic rocks--evidence that it is composed of sediments washed in from the sides. Measurements of magnetism (sediments are less magnetic than solid rock) helped the team map the depths of the sediments.

The researchers say the basin may have formed along a now long-dormant fault line, when the bedrock stretched out and formed a low spot. Alternatively, but less likely, previous glaciations may have carved out the depression, leaving it to fill with water when the ice receded.

What the sediments might contain is a mystery. Material washed out from the edges of the ice sheet have been found to contain the remains of pollen and other materials, suggesting that Greenland may have undergone warm periods during the last million years, allowing plants and maybe even forests to take hold. But the evidence is not conclusive, in part because it is hard to date such loose materials. The newly discovered lake bed, in contrast, could provide an intact archive of fossils and chemical signals dating to a so-far unknown distant past.

The basin "may therefore be an important site for future sub-ice drilling and the recovery of sediment records that may yield valuable insights into the glacial, climatological and environmental history" of the region, the researchers write. With the top of the sediments lying 1.8 kilometers below the current ice surface (1.1 miles), such drilling would be daunting, but not impossible. In the 1990s, researchers penetrated almost 2 miles into the summit of the Greenland ice sheet and recovered several feet of bedrock--at the time, the deepest ice core ever drilled. The feat, which took five years, has not since been repeated in Greenland, but a new project aimed at reaching shallower bedrock in another part of northwest Greenland is being planned for the next few years.

Advanced ink formulations could be the key to turning perovskite solar cells (PSCs) from heroes of academic labs into commercially successful products. Researchers at KAUST have developed a perovskite ink tailor-made for a mass manufacturing process called slot-die coating, producing PSCs that captured solar energy with high efficiency. The ink could also be coated onto silicon to create perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells that capture even more of the Sun's energy.

"PSCs have shown a lot of promise in lab-scale work over the past decade," says Anand Subbiah, a postdoc in Stefaan De Wolf's lab. "As a community, we need to start looking at the stability and scalability of PSC technology," he says.

PSCs made in research labs are typically made by spin-coating, which is unsuited to mass manufacture. Slot-die coating, in contrast, is a manufacturing technique used industrially for almost 70 years. "The process involves continuously and precisely forcing an ink through a narrow slit that is moved across the substrate to form a continuous film," Subbiah says. "This high-throughput technique would allow for roll-to-roll fabrication, similar to printing newspapers."

To produce high-efficiency slot-die coated PSCs, the team faced several challenges. Some of the best-performing spin-coated PSCs combine the perovskite with a poly(triarylamine) (PTAA) transport layer, but PTAA is hydrophobic and highly repellent to liquid perovskite ink. Adding a surfactant to the ink formulation overcame the repellence, resulting in better quality interface and films and better device performance, Subbiah says. The team also switched the ink to a lower-boiling solvent, reducing ink drying time without the need for further processing steps.

Overall, the team's optimized slot-die coated PSCs captured solar energy with up to 21.8 percent efficiency, a significant improvement over the 18.3 percent previously recorded for PSCs made this way.

Even more significantly, from a commercial standpoint, was that the ink could readily be coated onto textured silicon to produce a perovskite/silicon tandem solar cell, Subbiah says. "We were also able to make the very first slot-die coated silicon-perovskite monolithic tandem solar cell, recording a 23.8 percent efficiency," he says.

"The development of scalable deposition techniques for perovskite solar cells is essential to bring this technology from the research labs to the market," De Wolf says. "Our next steps are making large-area devices and modules using our developed technology and testing their stability in the lab and the outdoors, while continuing to improve performance."

SAN ANTONIO -- Nov. 10, 2020 -- Last week NASA snagged a sample from the surface of asteroid Bennu, an Empire State Building-sized body that Southwest Research Institute scientists have helped map with nearly unprecedented precision. Using orbital data from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, researchers measured centimeter- to meter-sized craters on the boulders scattered around its rugged surface to shed light on the age of the asteroid.

While the collected sample will yield enormous scientific value when it is returned to Earth in 2023, a key job for scientists during the time in orbit at Bennu was to understand the geology of the entire asteroid to provide important context for the sample. This provides insights into all the processes that might have affected the nature of the sample.

"The amazing data collected by OSIRIS-REx at asteroid Bennu have allowed us to not just find impact craters across its surface, but to actually find and study the craters on the surfaces of boulders," said SwRI's Dr. Kevin Walsh, a coauthor of "Bennu's near-Earth lifetime of 1.75 million years inferred from craters on its boulders," published October 26 in the journal Nature. "The craters that we could observe and measure on the surfaces of boulders allowed us to estimate their strengths, a first-of-its-kind measurement."

Bennu is a dark rubble pile held together by gravity and thought to be an asteroid remnant created following a collision involving a larger main-belt object. Boulders are scattered across its heavily cratered surface, indicating that it has had a rough-and-tumble life since being liberated from its much larger parent asteroid millions or even billions of years ago. Scientists use studies of impact craters to determine the ages of planetary surfaces.

Team members from the University of Arizona developed a mathematical formula that allows researchers to calculate the maximum impact energy a boulder of a given size and strength could endure before being smashed.

Walsh, lead author Dr. Ron Ballouz (a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona), and colleagues brought together an understanding of the number of craters, the strength of the materials impacted, and the numbers of impactors to help constrain the chronology of Bennu's existence in the inner Solar System at 1.75 million years. Since the spacecraft arrived at Bennu in 2018, scientists have been characterizing the asteroid's composition from orbit and comparing it to other asteroids and meteorites. Now NASA has collected an actual sample of its surface that scientists will be able to study.

"We held our breath as the spacecraft touched the asteroid's boulder-strewn surface with a robotic arm for a few seconds to collect a sample of rocks and dust on October 20 -- a first for NASA," Walsh said. "Hitting pay dirt on the first attempt is fantastic. We look forward to learning so much more when the sample arrives back at Earth in 2023."

The manuscript describes a method for measuring the strength of solid objects uses remote observations of craters on surface boulders. Determining the strengths of boulders on asteroid surfaces is a leap forward from measuring the strength of much smaller meteorites, which have the bias of surviving passage through Earth's atmosphere.

"The rocks tell their history through the craters they accumulated over time," said Ballouz. "The boulders serve as witnesses to Bennu's time as a near-Earth asteroid, validating decades of dynamical studies of the lifetime of near-Earth asteroids."

According to a new Finnish study, different groups of insectivores compete for the same type of food. Researchers of the University of Turku, Finland, and the Finnish Museum of Natural History made a discovery by comparing birds, bats and dragonflies that forage in the same area in Southwest Finland. These very distantly related predators consumed the same insect groups, such as flies, mosquitoes, and other dipterans. The results shed new light on the decline in insect populations, because a remarkable portion of insectivores may actually be in greater danger than previously believed.

According to the study, one common source of food for birds, bats and dragonflies is chironomids. These mosquito-lookalikes do not consume anything as adults and can be found in great masses on the surfaces of lakes and other water systems. In Finland alone, there are up to 800 species of chironomids. Chironomids are a very substantial and diverse family, and many insectivores have taken to their flavour. If an important group of insects like this dies out, the cascading effect on the nature and humans may be considerable.

- This is exactly what causes deeper concern. If many predators consume roughly the same food, the decline of chironomids, for example, could lead to an unprecedented ecocatastrophe, explains University Lecturer Eero Vesterinen from the Department of Biology at the University of Turku.

Basis in Extensive Research on Dietary Habits of Insectivores

Eero Vesterinen, who designed the study, has studied interspecific interaction for over a decade, focusing on food chains, or more specifically food webs.

- I compared the material I had collected along the years with the studies I had published, and noticed an exciting pattern. It seemed that even though predators that prey on insects are placed in different parts of the animal kingdom, and therefore do not share the same evolutionary history, there are clear similarities in their diet.

A more precise analysis was conducted on insectivores that were collected from the same area in order for the available prey taxa to be comparable. The insectivores from Southwest Finland selected for the study were the European pied flycatcher, northern bat, brown long-eared bat, Daubenton's bat, whiskered bat, Brandt's bat, black darter, common spreadwing, northern bluet, spearhead bluet, crescent bluet, and variable bluet.

- It is striking how similar the dietary composition between the invertebrates, such as dragonflies and the vertebrates, was in the study. These results also raise concerns about what would happen if the small dipterans that all our focal predators harvest would decline, says Senior Researcher Kari Kaunisto from the Biodiversity Unit at the University of Turku.

- The majority of all the bats in the world are insectivores, and our previous studies have already revealed many significant details about their diet, notes Academy Research Fellow Thomas Lilley from the Finnish Museum of Natural History.

Mass Decline of Insects Resonates Widely on Food Chain and Ecosystem

The mass decline of insects has received extensive coverage in the recent years, and several reports based on long-term observations have been published on the topic. In places, the insect population has collapsed to under 50 percent, and news across the world is reporting similar events.

- The situation may be worse than previously estimated, if the results of the new study can be generalised inter-continentally. Our study seems to have produced different and elaborated data that helps us focus our future research on the phenomenon's cascade effect higher in the food chain, ponders Vesterinen.

From 'The Terminator' and 'Blade Runner' to 'The Matrix', Hollywood has taught us to be wary of artificial intelligence. But rather than sealing our doom on the big screen, algorithms could be the solution to at least one issue presented by the climate crisis.

Researchers at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Exciton Science have successfully created a new type of machine learning model to predict the power-conversion efficiency (PCE) of materials that can be used in next-generation organic solar cells, including 'virtual' compounds that don't exist yet.

Unlike some time-consuming and complicated models, the latest approach is quick, easy to use and the code is freely available for all scientists and engineers.

The key to developing a more efficient and user-friendly model was to replace complicated and computationally expensive parameters, which require quantum mechanical calculations, with simpler and chemically interpretable signature descriptors of the molecules being analysed. They provide important data about the most significant chemical fragments in materials that affect PCE, generating information that can be used to design improved materials.

The new approach could help to significantly speed up the process of designing more efficient solar cells at a time when the demand for renewable energy, and its importance in reducing carbon emissions, is greater than ever. The results have been published in the Nature journal Computational Materials.

After decades of relying on silicon, which is relatively expensive and lacks flexibility, attention is increasingly turning to organic photovoltaic (OPV) solar cells, which will be cheaper to make by using printing technologies, as well as being more versatile and easier to dispose of.

A major challenge is sorting through the huge volume of potentially suitable chemical compounds that can be synthesised (tailor-made by scientists) for use in OPVs.

Researchers have tried using machine learning before to address this issue, but many of those models were time consuming, required significant computer processing power and were difficult to replicate. And, crucially, they did not provide enough guidance for the experimental scientists seeking to build new solar devices.

Now, work led by Dr Nastaran Meftahi and Professor Salvy Russo of RMIT University, in conjunction with Professor Udo Bach's team at Monash University, has successfully addressed many of those challenges.

"The majority of the other models use electronic descriptors which are complicated and computationally expensive, and they're not chemically interpretable," Nastaran said.

"It means that the experimental chemist or scientist can't get ideas from those models to design and synthesise materials in the lab. If they look at my models, because I used simple, chemically interpretable descriptors, they can see the important fragments."

Nastaran's work was strongly supported by her co-author Professor Dave Winkler of CSIRO's Data 61, Monash University, La Trobe University, and the University of Nottingham. Professor Winkler co-created the BioModeller program which provided the basis for the new, open source model.

By using it, the researchers have been able produce results that are robust and predictive, and generate, among other data, quantitative relationships between the molecular signatures under examination and the efficiency of future OPV devices.

Nastaran and her colleagues now intend to extend the scope of their work to include bigger and more accurate computed and experimental datasets.

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The universe is getting hotter, a new study has found.

The study, published Oct. 13 in the Astrophysical Journal, probed the thermal history of the universe over the last 10 billion years. It found that the mean temperature of gas across the universe has increased more than 10 times over that time period and reached about 2 million degrees Kelvin today -- approximately 4 million degrees Fahrenheit.

"Our new measurement provides a direct confirmation of the seminal work by Jim Peebles -- the 2019 Nobel Laureate in Physics -- who laid out the theory of how the large-scale structure forms in the universe," said Yi-Kuan Chiang, lead author of the study and a research fellow at The Ohio State University Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics.

The large-scale structure of the universe refers to the global patterns of galaxies and galaxy clusters on scales beyond individual galaxies. It is formed by the gravitational collapse of dark matter and gas.

"As the universe evolves, gravity pulls dark matter and gas in space together into galaxies and clusters of galaxies," Chiang said. "The drag is violent -- so violent that more and more gas is shocked and heated up."

The findings, Chiang said, showed scientists how to clock the progress of cosmic structure formation by "checking the temperature" of the universe.

The researchers used a new method that allowed them to estimate the temperature of gas farther away from Earth -- which means further back in time -- and compare them to gases closer to Earth and near the present time. Now, he said, researchers have confirmed that the universe is getting hotter over time due to the gravitational collapse of cosmic structure, and the heating will likely continue.

To understand how the temperature of the universe has changed over time, researchers used data on light throughout space collected by two missions, Planck and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Planck is the European Space Agency mission that operates with heavy involvement from NASA; Sloan collects detailed images and light spectra from the universe.

They combined data from the two missions and evaluated the distances of the hot gases near and far via measuring redshift, a notion that astrophysicists use to estimate the cosmic age at which distant objects are observed. ("Redshift" gets its name from the way wavelengths of light lengthen. The farther away something is in the universe, the longer its wavelength of light. Scientists who study the cosmos call that lengthening the redshift effect.)

The concept of redshift works because the light we see from objects farther away from Earth is older than the light we see from objects closer to Earth -- the light from distant objects has traveled a longer journey to reach us. That fact, together with a method to estimate temperature from light, allowed the researchers to measure the mean temperature of gases in the early universe -- gases that surround objects farther away -- and compare that mean with the mean temperature of gases closer to Earth -- gases today.

Those gases in the universe today, the researchers found, reach temperatures of about 2 million degrees Kelvin -- approximately 4 million degrees Fahrenheit, around objects closer to Earth. That is about 10 times the temperature of the gases around objects farther away and further back in time.

The universe, Chiang said, is warming because of the natural process of galaxy and structure formation. It is unrelated to the warming on Earth. "These phenomena are happening on very different scales," he said. "They are not at all connected."

AMES, Iowa - A new study shows diversifying agricultural systems beyond a narrow selection of crops leads to a range of ecosystem improvements while also maintaining or improving yields. But a professor of agronomy at Iowa State University who co-authored the study said some marketing and agricultural policy considerations will have to change for farmers to adopt diversification practices more widely.

The study, published last week in the academic journal Science Advances, analyzed the results of 5,188 separate studies that included 41,946 comparisons between diversified and simplified agricultural practices. An international team of researchers carried out the study, known as a meta-analysis, and looked for patterns in the mountains of data collected in previous field studies. The results showed that in 63% of the cases examined, diversification enhanced ecosystem services while also maintaining or even improving crop yields. The researchers described this as a "win-win" result.

"The overall conclusion is there's a lot to be gained from diversifying cropping practices," said Matt Liebman, a professor of agronomy at Iowa State and co-author. "Across many different countries in many different climates and soils, with many different crops, the general pattern is that with diversification, you maintain or increase crop yields while gaining environmental benefits."

Agriculture in the Midwest is dominated by just a few crops, mainly corn and soybeans. But the study looked at a range of farming practices aimed at introducing more diversity to cropland. Those diversification practices include crop rotations, planting prairie strips within and along fields, establishing wildlife habitat near fields, reducing tillage and enriching soil with organic matter. Such measures improve water quality, pollination, pest regulation by natural enemies, nutrient turnover and reduced negative climate impacts by sequestering carbon in the soil.

"My colleagues and I wanted to test if diversification is beneficial for both agricultural production and ecosystem services. The current trend is that we simplify major cropping systems worldwide. We grow monocultures on enlarged fields in homogenized landscapes. The results of our study indicate that diversification can reverse the negative impacts that we observe in simplified forms of cropping on the environment and on production itself," said lead author Giovanni Tamburini at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and University of Bari.

Changes in policy needed

Liebman said barriers related to government ag policy, market considerations and the dissemination of data discourage farmers from adopting many of the diversification practices examined in the study. But showing that such practices do not depress yields, and in some cases increase them, might encourage farmers to consider the practices.

Many current policies and market conditions incentivize farmers to focus on a few highly productive and profitable crops. In Iowa, that means corn and soybeans are grown on the majority of cropland. But Liebman said rethinking those considerations, as well as working with farmers to transfer knowledge that allows them to gain confidence with diversification, could lead to wider use of the practices.

The meta-analysis approach allowed the research team to combine data from thousands of other studies that tested how crop diversification affects yields. The researchers used innovative data analytics to find patterns in those results, Liebman said. The approach allowed the research team to gain a new level of insight that isn't possible with individual experiments.

"What our study suggests is that if we want improved water quality and enhanced wildlife habitat and if we want to continue to work on the soil erosion problem, diversification offers a lot of options to us," Liebman said.

Mount Sinai researchers have developed machine learning models that predict the likelihood of critical events and mortality in COVID-19 patients within clinically relevant time windows. The new models outlined in the study--one of the first to use machine learning for risk prediction in COVID-19 patients among a large and diverse population, and published November 6 in the Journal of Medical Internet Research--could aid clinical practitioners at Mount Sinai and across the world in the care and management of COVID-19 patients.

"From the initial outburst of COVID-19 in New York City, we saw that COVID-19 presentation and disease course are heterogeneous and we have built machine learning models using patient data to predict outcomes," said Benjamin Glicksberg, PhD, Assistant Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, member of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at Mount Sinai and Mount Sinai Clinical Intelligence Center (MSCIC), and one of the study's principal investigators. "Now in the early stages of a second wave, we are much better prepared than before. We are currently assessing how these models can aid clinical practitioners in managing care of their patients in practice."

In the retrospective study using electronic health records from more than 4,000 adult patients admitted to five Mount Sinai Health System hospitals from March to May, researchers and clinicians from the MSCIC analyzed characteristics of COVID-19 patients, including past medical history, comorbidities, vital signs, and laboratory test results at admission, to predict critical events such as intubation and mortality within various clinically relevant time windows that can forecast short and medium-term risks of patients over the hospitalization.

The researchers used the models to predict a critical event or mortality at time windows of 3, 5, 7, and 10 days from admission. At the one-week mark--which performed best overall, correctly flagging the most critical events while returning the fewest false positives--acute kidney injury, fast breathing, high blood sugar, and elevated lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) indicating tissue damage or disease were the strongest drivers in predicting critical illness. Older age, blood level imbalance, and C-reactive protein levels indicating inflammation, were the strongest drivers in predicting mortality.

"We have created high-performing predictive models using machine learning to improve the care of our patients at Mount Sinai," said Girish Nadkarni, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Nephrology) at the Icahn School of Medicine, Clinical Director of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at Mount Sinai, and Co-Chair of MSCIC. "More importantly, we have created a method that identifies important health markers that drive likelihood estimates for acute care prognosis and can be used by health institutions across the world to improve care decisions, at both the physician and hospital level, and more effectively manage patients with COVID-19."