Tech

October 19, 2020 - Cultural taboos may leave Muslim American adolescents uninformed about romantic relationships and sex, placing them at risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). A sex education program designed specifically for Muslim teens - with a foundation in Islamic morals and values - is reported in the November/December issue of The Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care (JANAC). The official journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care, JANAC is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

Titled Sex Education in the Mosque, the program "addressed sex education and HIV prevention with a primary focus on abstinence and making self-empowered choices," according to the new research by Shaakira Abdullah, DNP, FNP-BC, of Widener University, Chester, Pa., and colleagues. They report on the development and initial evaluation of their program: the first evidence-based curriculum to address sexual education in the Muslim community.

Teens Learn About Sex and Relationships - With a Focus on Muslim Values

Islamic teachings focus on the value of chastity and forbid having sex before marriage. But many Muslim parents do not talk about sex with their children. "Refraining from discussing issues of sexuality in the home in an effort to prevent promiscuity often backfires and leads adolescents to learn from unreliable sources and engage in risky behaviors, potentially exposing themselves to HIV/STIs or teen pregnancy," Dr. Abdullah and coauthors write. They cite statistics showing that Muslim adolescents have risky sexual behaviors similar to their non-Muslim peers.

Sex Education in the Mosque was designed as a comprehensive sex education program for Muslim youth and adolescents, grounded in the framework of Islamic teachings. The authors report their experience with initial implementation of the program in New Jersey, home to the second-largest Muslim population in the United States, with 18 adolescent Muslim females, average age 16 years, at a mosque in Newark. Mosques were targeted to recruit participants because of their integral role in lifelong education in Muslim communities. The program was implemented with the full support of mosque Imams and administrators.

On pretest questionnaires, the young women had low understanding of HIV, STIs, and pregnancy. Posttest questionnaires showed significant gains in knowledge, which were well-maintained at three months' follow-up.

"There was also an increase in positive attitudes and intentions to abstain from sex before marriage on the posttests," the researchers write. All of the young women gave the program positive ratings; one teen wrote that she appreciated learning "many methods on how to be true to ourselves and cool at the same time!"

The program was adapted from an established curriculum that uses social and behavior theories to educate young people about their sexuality. Dr. Abdullah and colleagues integrated Muslim values and a focus on having a strong Islamic identity to strengthen teens' self-confidence and ability to make healthy decisions. "The program distinguished itself from typical abstinence-based programs because it portrayed sex as a pleasurable and natural experience," according to the authors.

"This project laid the groundwork for creating an effective curriculum that can address Muslim youth's unique needs," Dr. Abdullah and coauthors write. They also discuss important lessons for future implementations: many parents felt their daughters didn't need sex education or misunderstood the purpose of the program. The researchers plan to incorporate parental education sessions into future programs.

In response to interest in sex education and HIV prevention from other communities, Dr. Abdullah has initiated a nonprofit organization called Love Beyond Love, dedicated to strengthening and expanding the program. She and her coauthors conclude: "Muslim youth have the power and potential to hold themselves to a higher standard when given the opportunity to access knowledge, confidence, and skills needed to meet today's challenges."

MIPT researchers Leopold Lobkovsky and Raissa Mazova, and their young colleagues from Nizhny Novgorod State Technical University have created a model of landslide-induced tsunamis that accounts for the initial location of the landslide body. Reported in Landslides, the model reveals that tsunami height is affected by the coastal slope and the position of the land mass before slipping. The highest and most devastating waves result from onshore landslide masses. This realization will make future predictions of tsunamis more accurate, as well as providing deeper insights into past events.

The recent decades have seen unusually large tsunamis that had on-shelf sources and were not always accompanied by seismic events. Instead, the underlying cause may be a fully or partially underwater landslide.

Researchers come up with models to predict wave runup onto the shore following a landslide on an underwater slope. The challenging part is to account for the nonlinear nature of wave runup and rundown, as well as the complex shelf zone geometry. Another important factor at the heart of the models is the technique used to compute landslide mass movement.

A number of landslide-induced tsunami models have been developed, with two of them used the most. The so-called rigid-block models assume a solid state perspective on the motion of the landslide, with shallow-water equations governing the generation of surface water waves. Models of the other type -- referred to as viscoplastic -- rely on shallow-water equations to describe both surface wave generation and landslide movement.

Despite a number of refinements accounting for some features of landslide mass movement, the models have so far remained hydrodynamic in their nature. This means they are not helpful for analyzing the detailed structure of the landslide body or the characteristics of its constituents during the slip. But unless the actual physical properties of the landslide mass are considered, modeling its movement is problematic.

The study reported in this story employs an elastoplastic model presented in 2000 by Igor Garagash and Leopold Lobkovsky. It accounts for the detailed structure of the landslide body and the mechanical characteristics of the land mass constituents during the slip, as well as incorporating the processes occurring in the landslide body. The model implementation in the study relied on the programming code called FLAC 3D, which enables calculations under an explicit finite-difference scheme for solving three-dimensional problems of continuum mechanics.

The researchers found that wave runup onto the shore varied considerably depending on the initial position of the landslide body on the shelf slope, even when the other parameters were fixed.

"In contrast to other models, where the tsunami wave climbs the original coastal slope, here the slope surface is continuously transformed during the landslide motion," study co-author Raissa Mazova from MIPT explained. "In other words, at each moment of time, the tsunami runup occurs onto a new surface of the coastal slope, which leads to a complex displacement of the shoreline. Such an effect has not been obtained before, and it is impossible to obtain within the framework of the movement of a landslide as a solid body or within the framework of a viscous model."

The role of the sediment layer on the slope also proved substantial. The numerical simulation predicts maximum runup on the slope for tsunamis induced by landslide masses initially located on a dry shore.

"Rather than attempting to implement a novel methodology for calculating a landslide model, we used a familiar model, introducing additional boundary conditions," commented Leopold Lobkovsky, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the head of the MIPT Laboratory of Geophysical Research of the Arctic and Continental Margins of the World Ocean. "Our findings demonstrate that shoreline dynamics significantly depend on the initial location of the landslide body, with the shoreline point potentially shifting. This feature may enable us to infer some information about the location of the submarine landslide by solving the inverse problem after a tsunami has taken place."

"However, the inverse problem is fairly difficult to solve, even when determining the location of the seismic source of a tsunami, and it is not always possible to achieve adequate results. That said, we have already begun a study to that end, and hope to estimate the locations of the landslides and gain insights into their nature," the researcher added.

A new study provides strong evidence that exposure to light pollution alters predator-prey dynamics between mule deer and cougars across the intermountain West, a rapidly growing region where nighttime skyglow is an increasing environmental disturbance.

The University of Michigan-led study, published online Oct. 18 in the journal Ecography, is the first to assess the impacts of light pollution on predator-prey interactions at a regional scale. It combines satellite-derived estimates of artificial nighttime lights with GPS location data from hundreds of radio-collared mule deer and cougars across the intermountain West.

The study found that:

Mule deer living in light-polluted areas are drawn to artificial nighttime lighting, which is associated with green vegetation around homes.

Cougars, also known as mountain lions and pumas, are able to successfully hunt within light-polluted areas by selecting the darkest spots on the landscape to make their kill.

While mule deer that live in dark wildland locations are most active around dawn and dusk, those living around artificial night light forage throughout the day and are more active at night than wildland deer--especially during the summer.

The animal data used in the study were collected by state and federal wildlife agencies across the region. Collation of those records by the study authors yielded what is believed to be the largest dataset on interactions between cougars and mule deer, two of the most ecologically and economically important large-mammal species in the West.

"Our findings illuminate some of the ways that changes in land use are creating a brighter world that impacts the biology and ecology of highly mobile mammalian species, including an apex carnivore," said study lead author Mark Ditmer, formerly a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, now at Colorado State University.

The intermountain West spans nearly 400,000 square miles and is an ideal place to assess how varying light-pollution exposures influence the behavior of mule deer and cougars and their predator-prey dynamics. Both species are widely distributed throughout the region--the mule deer is the cougar's primary prey species--and the region presents a wide range of nighttime lighting conditions.

The intermountain West is home to some of the darkest night skies in the continental United States, as well as some of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas, including Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. Between the dark wildlands and the brightly illuminated cities is the wildland-urban interface, the rapidly expanding zone where homes and associated structures are built within forests and other types of undeveloped wildland vegetation.

For their study, the researchers obtained detailed estimates of nighttime lighting sources from the NASA-NOAA Suomi polar-orbiting satellite. They collected GPS location data for 117 cougars and 486 mule deer from four states: Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California. In addition, wildlife agencies provided locations of 1,562 sites where cougars successfully killed mule deer.

"This paper represents a massive undertaking, and to our knowledge this dataset is the largest ever compiled for these two species," said study senior author Neil Carter, a conservation ecologist at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability.

Deer in the arid West are attracted to the greenery in the backyards and parks of the wildland-urban interface. Predators follow them there, despite increased nighttime light levels that they would normally shun. Going into the study, the researchers suspected that light pollution within the wildland-urban interface could alter cougar-mule deer interactions in one of two ways.

Perhaps artificial nighttime light would create a shield that protects deer from predators and allows them to forage freely. Alternatively, cougars might exploit elevated deer densities within the wildland-urban interface, feasting on easy prey inside what scientists call an ecological trap.

Data from the study provides support for both the predator shield and ecological trap hypotheses, according to the researchers. At certain times and locations within the wildland-urban interface, there is simply too much artificial light and/or human activity for cougars, creating a protective shield for deer.

An ecological trap occurs when an animal is misled, or trapped, into settling for apparently attractive but in fact low-quality habitat. In this particular case, mule deer are drawn to the greenery of the wildland-urban interface and may mistakenly perceive that the enhanced nighttime lighting creates a predator-free zone.

But the cougars are able to successfully hunt within the wildland-urban interface by carefully selecting the darkest spots on the landscape to make their kill, according to the study. In contrast, cougars living in dark wildland locations hunt in places where nighttime light levels are slightly higher than the surroundings, the researchers found.

"The intermountain West is the fastest-growing region of the U.S., and we anticipate that night light levels will dramatically increase in magnitude and across space," said U-M's Carter. "These elevated levels of night light are likely to fundamentally alter a predator-prey system of ecological and management significance--both species are hunted extensively in this region and are economically and culturally important."

Food waste is one of the most important issues of current food systems: Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has estimated that more than one third of food is either lost or wasted along the entire food supply chain causing significant economic, social and environmental impacts.

From an environmental point of view, food waste represents between 8% and 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and the annual water footprint of the agricultural phase of food waste is about 250 km3, five times the volume of Lake Garda and higher than any national food consumption water footprint. The IPCC Special Report Climate Change and Land (2018) estimates that 37% of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are attributable to the food system considering its complete cycle, from agriculture and land use, storage, transport, packaging, processing, retail, consumption and waste. In the European Union (EU), 88 million tons of food waste are generated each year (i.e., 173 kg per capita) with significant economic, environmental and social impacts. It has been estimated that 15-16% of the total environmental impact of the food supply chain in Europe can be attributed to food waste.

Cities have emerged as crucial actors in the global food security geography: today they occupy approximately only 3% of the total land, but the number of people living in urban areas surpassed for the first time the number of people living in rural areas, and urban contexts are therefore the biggest source of post-consumption food waste, using between 70% and 80% of world's food.

However, cities have proved to be crucial actors in tackling food waste, launching effective policies and initiatives to address it.

By looking at 40 cities across 16 European countries, a study recently published on Resources - Special issue Food Loss and Waste: The Challenge of a Sustainable Management through a Circular Economy Perspective presented a new framework for assessing urban food waste policies and initiatives.

"Food loss and waste is recognized as one of the most challenging distortion of current food system", explains Marta Antonelli, senior scientist at the CMCC Foundation and Head of Research at Barilla Foundation. "We talk about distortion because we produce tons of edible food waste every year. Food loss occurs from farm up to and excluding retail, whilst food waste occurs at retail, food service and household level. Causes range from poor handling, inadequate transport or storage, lack of cold chain capacity, extreme weather conditions to cosmetic standards, and a lack of planning and cooking skills among consumers. This year we have witnessed an increase in food loss and waste as a result of movement and transport restrictions due to the pandemic. COVID-19 aside, each year about 14% of the world's food is lost before even reaching the market."

Reducing food lost or wasted means more food for all, less greenhouse gas emissions, less pressure on environment, especially on water and land resources, increased productivity and economic growth, and more sustainable societies.

"Food waste management is a very complex challenge" explains Marta Antonelli, "since it requires diversified but integrated actions that involve many public local authorities, such as cities, regions, metropolitan areas and provinces, and other actors including retailers, school canteens, hospitals, food markets, citizens and non-governmental organizations. All these actors and levels of governance need to work in a synergic way to ensure effective urban food waste policies.

Cities can have a crucial role acting on different sectors and levels of the urban food system. The City of Milan, for example, approved a waste tax deduction for actors that contribute to reducing food waste through donations. In particular, the City of Milan has explicitly declared its ambition to halve food waste by 2030 and its intention to adopt a food supply chain approach, in order to reduce food waste across all tiers of the chain from food production to final consumption."?The authors started from a review of the most recent literature on food waste policy assessment frameworks and on urban food waste initiatives to capture the specificities of urban contexts and identify the most interesting urban initiatives and policies implemented. Finally, they identified direct and indirect links with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), showing the role that cities can play in achieving the targets of the UN 2030 Agenda. The framework proposed identifies and sheds light on the links between the different types of policies launched (information based, market based, regulatory, nudging initiatives, etc), the main areas of interventions addressed, as well as the different actors intervening in urban food waste management.

The analysis highlighted that several urban food waste policies or initiatives (e.g. in Bari, Bologna, Milan, Turin, Genoa, Venice and Cremona, with public as well as and private initiatives) proved to be effective in tackling poverty and socio-economic exclusion through food donations and, also, through the creation of new job opportunities for some marginalised groups of the population.

"Tackling food waste can be a key component of wider initiatives based on integrated management of the urban challenges and that promote the collaboration and coordination of the urban ecosystem", Marta Antonelli adds. "If we look at urban food waste interventions, we have very few cases of integrated, multi-sectorial and multi-actorial management of food waste. Cities are currently promoting new models of governance, for instance launching new institutional settings like the Food Policy Councils, creating regional and global networks of mayors advocating for more sustainable food systems, and coordinating initiatives to address food waste-related challenges in an integrated manner, from food production to food distribution."

The study undermines the importance of providing city officials with effective tools to collect data on urban food waste levels, to understand the scope of the problem and design action. Gap in metrics and data are still many. Concrete metrics and publicly available quantification tools developed at city level are currently still missing.

"Moreover, it is essential that urban food waste policies and interventions are fully aligned with the targets of the Agenda 2030", Dr. Marta Antonelli concludes. "Only in four cases (Cremona, Liège, Milan and Montpellier), food waste interventions were explicitly put in relation with the SDGs. The research showed that cities seldom use the SDGs as a policy framework, thus limiting the evaluation of the impact of these interventions on the sustainability agenda.

Therefore, it is important to raise more awareness among local policy makers, public officials, the private sector, and citizens to fully monitor the link and the impact of food waste on the SDGs. Cities are implementing many urban food waste initiatives, but what it's still rare is an integrated vision in addressing these issues In this sense, the recently adopted 'Farm to Fork' Strategy, part of the broader objective of making the EU food system the global standard for sustainability, represents the first step of the European Commission to address food system-related challenges in an integrated manner, for example putting human health and sustainability on the same level."

The analysis could be easily expanded and replicated to other contexts, and in the future, the same framework could be valuable for other non-European cities that are starting to tackle food waste and are addressing similar challenges.

Using a magnetic field and hydrogels, a team of researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have demonstrated a new possible way to rebuild complex body tissues, which could result in more lasting fixes to common injuries, such as cartilage degeneration. This research was published today in Advanced Materials.

"We found that we were able to arrange objects, such as cells, in ways that could generate new, complex tissues without having to alter the cells themselves," said the study's first author, Hannah Zlotnick, a graduate student in Bioengineering who works in the McKay Orthopaedic Research Laboratory at Penn Medicine. "Others have had to add magnetic particles to the cells so that they respond to a magnetic field, but that approach can have unwanted long-term effects on cell health. Instead, we manipulated the magnetic character of the environment surrounding the cells, allowing us to arrange the objects with magnets."

In humans, tissues like cartilage can often break down, causing joint instability or pain. Often, the breakdown isn't in total, but covers an area, forming a hole. Current fixes are to fill those holes in with synthetic or biologic materials, which can work but often wear away because they are not the same exact material as what was there before. It's similar to fixing a pothole in a road by filling it with gravel and making a tar patch: the hole will be smoothed out but eventually wear away with use because it's not the same material and can't bond the same way.

What complicates fixing cartilage or other similar tissues is that their make-up is complex.

"There is a natural gradient from the top of cartilage to the bottom, where it contacts the bone," Zlotnick explained. "Superficially, or at the surface, cartilage has a high cellularity, meaning there is a higher number of cells. But where cartilage attaches to the bone, deeper inside, its cellularity is low."

So the researchers, which included senior author Robert Mauck, PhD, director of the McKay Lab and a professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and Bioengineering, sought to find a way to fix the potholes by repaving them instead of filling them in. With that in mind, the research team found that if they added a magnetic liquid to a three-dimensional hydrogel solution, cells, and other non-magnetic objects including drug delivery microcapsules, could be arranged into specific patterns that mimicked natural tissue through the use of an external magnetic field.

After brief contact with the magnetic field, the hydrogel solution (and the objects in it) was exposed to ultraviolet light in a process called "photo crosslinking" to lock everything in place, and the magnetic solution subsequently was diffused out. After this, the engineered tissues maintained the necessary cellular gradient.

With this magneto-patterning technique, the team was able to recreate articular cartilage, the tissue that covers the ends of bones.

"These magneto-patterned engineered tissues better resemble the native tissue, in terms of their cell disposition and mechanical properties, compared to standard uniform synthetic materials or biologics that have been produced," said Mauck. "By locking cells and other drug delivering agents in place via magneto-patterning, we are able to start tissues on the appropriate trajectory to produce better implants for cartilage repair."

While the technique was restricted to in vitro studies, it's the first step toward potential longer-lasting, more efficient fixes in living subjects.

"This new approach can be used to generate living tissues for implantation to fix localized cartilage defects, and may one day be extended to generate living joint surfaces," Mauck explained.

HOUSTON - (Oct. 19, 2020) - The abstract benefits of biochar for long-term storage of carbon and nitrogen on American farms are clear, and now new research from Rice University shows a short-term, concrete bonus for farmers as well.

That would be money. To be precise, money not spent on irrigation.

In the best-case scenarios for some regions, extensive use of biochar could save farmers a little more than 50% of the water they now use to grow crops. That represents a significant immediate savings to go with the established environmental benefits of biochar.

The open-access study appears in the journal GCB-Bioenergy.

Biochar is basically charcoal produced through pyrolysis, the high-temperature decomposition of biomass, including straw, wood, shells, grass and other materials. It has been the subject of extensive study at Rice and elsewhere as the agriculture industry seeks ways to enhance productivity, sequester carbon and preserve soil.

The new model built by Rice researchers explores a different benefit, using less water.

"There's a lot of biochar research that focuses mostly on its carbon benefits, but there's fairly little on how it could help stakeholders on a more commercial level," said lead author and Rice alumna Jennifer Kroeger, now a fellow at the Science and Technology Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. "It's still an emerging field."

The study co-led by Rice biogeochemist Caroline Masiello and economist Kenneth Medlock provides formulas to help farmers estimate irrigation cost savings from increased water-holding capacity (WHC) with biochar amendment.

The researchers used their formulas to reveal that regions of the country with sandy soils would see the most benefit, and thus the most potential irrigation savings, with biochar amendment, areas primarily in the southeast, far north, northeast and western United States.

The study analyzes the relationship between biochar properties, application rates and changes in WHC for various soils detailed in 16 existing studies to judge their ability to curtail irrigation.

The researchers defined WHC as the amount of water that remains after allowing saturated soil to drain for a set period, typically 30 minutes. Clay soils have a higher WHC than sandy soils, but sandy soils combined with biochar open more pore space for water, making them more efficient.

WHC is also determined by pore space in the biochar particles themselves, with the best results from grassy feedstocks, according to their analysis.

In one comprehensively studied plot of sandy soil operated by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Agricultural Water Management Network, Kroeger calculated a specific water savings of 37.9% for soil amended with biochar. Her figures included average rainfall and irrigation levels for the summer of 2019.

The researchers noted that lab experiments typically pack more biochar into a soil sample than would be used in the field, so farmers' results may vary. But they hope their formula will be a worthy guide to those looking to structure future research or maximize their use of biochar.

More comprehensive data for clay soils, along with better characterization of a range of biochar types, will help the researchers build models for use in other parts of the country, they wrote.

"This study draws attention to the value of biochar amendment especially in sandy soils, but it's important to note that the reason we are calling out sandy soils here is because of a lack of data on finer-textured soils," Masiello said. "It's possible that there are also significant financial benefits on other soil types as well; the data just weren't available to constrain our model under those conditions."

"Nature-based solutions are gaining traction at federal, state and international levels," Medlock added, noting the recently introduced Growing Climate Solutions Act as one example. "Biochar soil amendment can enhance soil carbon sequestration while providing significant co-benefits, such as nitrogen remediation, improved water retention and higher agricultural productivity. The suite of potential benefits raises the attractiveness for commercial action in the agriculture sector as well as supportive policy frameworks."

While plastics recycling is not new science, current processes don't make it economically worthwhile-- waste plastics get "down-cycled" into lower grade, less useful material. It's a challenge that continues to be an obstacle in tackling a growing global pollution crisis in single use plastics.

A multi-institutional team of scientists led by the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory has developed a first-of-its-kind catalyst that is able to process polyolefin plastics such as polyethylene and polypropylene, types of polymers widely used in things like plastic grocery bags, milk jugs, shampoo bottles, toys, and food containers. The process results in uniform, high-quality components that can be used to produce fuels, solvents, and lubricating oils, products that have high value and could potentially turn these and other used plastics into an untapped resource.

"We've made a big step forward with this work," said Aaron Sadow, a scientist at Ames Laboratory and the Director of the Institute for Cooperative Upcycling of Plastics (iCOUP). "We hypothesized that we could borrow from nature, and mimic the processes by which enzymes precisely break apart macromolecules like proteins and cellulose. We succeeded in doing that, and we're excited to pursue optimizing and developing this process further."

The unique process relies on nanoparticle technology. Ames Lab scientist Wenyu Huang designed a mesoporous silica nanoparticle consisting of a core of platinum with catalytic active sites, surrounded by long silica pores, or channels, through which the long polymer chains thread through to the catalyst. With this design, the catalyst is able to hold on to and cleave the longer polymer chains into consistent, uniform shorter pieces that have the most potential to be upcycled into new, more useful end products.

"This type of controlled catalysis process has never before been designed based on inorganic materials," Huang, who specializes in the design of structurally well-defined nano-catalysts. "We were able to show that the catalytic process is capable of performing multiple identical deconstruction steps on the same molecule before releasing it."

Ames Laboratory's solid state NMR expert Fred Perras' measurements allowed the team to scrutinize the catalyst's activity at the atomic scale, and confirmed that the long polymer chains moved readily through the catalyst pores in the manner resembling the enzymatic processes that the scientists were aiming to emulate.

This research will be expanded and continued under direction of the Institute for Cooperative Upcycling of Plastics (iCOUP), led by Ames Laboratory. iCOUP is an Energy Frontier Research Center consisting of scientists from Ames Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, UC Santa Barbara, University of South Carolina, Cornell University, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

TROY, N.Y. -- Bioimaging technologies are the eyes that allow doctors to see inside the body in order to diagnose, treat, and monitor disease. Ge Wang, an endowed professor of biomedical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has received significant recognition for devoting his research to coupling those imaging technologies with artificial intelligence in order to improve physicians' "vision."

In research published today in Patterns, a team of engineers led by Wang demonstrated how a deep learning algorithm can be applied to a conventional computerized tomography (CT) scan in order to produce images that would typically require a higher level of imaging technology known as dual-energy CT.

Wenxiang Cong, a research scientist at Rensselaer, is first author on this paper. Wang and Cong were also joined by coauthors from Shanghai First-Imaging Tech, and researchers from GE Research.

"We hope that this technique will help extract more information from a regular single-spectrum X-ray CT scan, make it more quantitative, and improve diagnosis," said Wang, who is also the director of the Biomedical Imaging Center within the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS) at Rensselaer.

Conventional CT scans produce images that show the shape of tissues within the body, but they don't give doctors sufficient information about the composition of those tissues. Even with iodine and other contrast agents, which are used to help doctors differentiate between soft tissue and vasculature, it's hard to distinguish between subtle structures.

A higher-level technology called dual-energy CT gathers two datasets in order to produce images that reveal both tissue shape and information about tissue composition. However, this imaging approach often requires a higher dose of radiation and is more expensive due to needed additional hardware.

"With traditional CT, you take a grayscale image, but with dual-energy CT you take an image with two colors," Wang said. "With deep learning, we try to use the standard machine to do the job of dual-energy CT imaging."

In this research, Wang and his team demonstrated how their neural network was able to produce those more complex images using single-spectrum CT data. The researchers used images produced by dual-energy CT to train their model and found that it was able to produce high-quality approximations with a relative error of less than 2%.

"Professor Wang and his team’s expertise in bioimaging is giving physicians and surgeons ‘new eyes’ in diagnosing and treating disease,” said Deepak Vashishth, director of CBIS. “This research effort is a prime example of the partnership needed to personalize and solve persistent human health challenges."

When the air outside is bad, office workers are more likely to order food delivery than go out for lunch, which in turn increases plastic waste from food packaging, according to a study by researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS).

Associate Professor Alberto Salvo from the Department of Economics at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and an author of the study, said, "Plastic waste is a growing global environmental concern. While we see more research on the impact plastic pollution is having on the natural environment, there has been less work trying to understand the human behaviour that drives plastic pollution. This is where our study seeks to contribute - finding a strong causal link between air pollution and plastic waste through the demand for food delivery. Air quality in the urban developing world is routinely poor and in the past decade, the food delivery industry has been growing sharply. The evidence we collected shows a lot of single-use plastic in delivered meals, from containers to carrier bags."

The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

Air pollution drives demand for food delivery services

The NUS team, including Assoc Prof Liu Haoming and Assoc Prof Chu Junhong, focused their study on China, which is among the world's largest users of online food delivery platforms, with 350 million registered users. An estimated 65 million meal containers are discarded each day across China, with office workers contributing over one-half of demand.

The study surveyed the lunch choices of 251 office workers repeatedly over time (each worker for 11 workdays) in three often smog-filled Chinese cities - Beijing, Shenyang and Shijiazhuang - between January and June 2018. To complement the office-worker survey, the researchers also accessed the 2016 Beijing order book of an online food delivery platform, which broadly represented all market segments served by the food delivery industry - collecting observational data on 3.5 million food delivery orders from about 350,000 users.

Data from the survey and order book were then compared with PM2.5 measurements (fine particles less than 2.5 micrometres in diameter) during lunchtime periods from the air-monitoring network in all three cities. It was observed that PM2.5 levels during these periods were often well above the 24-hour US National Ambient Air Quality Standard of 35 μg/m³, making pollution highly visible. The researchers were careful to control for confounding factors such as economic activity.

Both data sources indicated a strong link between PM2.5 (haze) pollution and food delivery consumption. Correcting for weather and seasonal influences, the firm's order book revealed that a 100 μg/m³ increase in PM2.5 raised food delivery consumption by 7.2 per cent. The impact of a 100 μg/m³ PM2.5 shift on office workers' propensity to order delivery was six times larger, at 43 per cent.

Assoc Prof Chu from the Department of Marketing at NUS Business School elaborated, "Faced with smog or haze outside, a typical office worker at lunchtime can avoid exposure only by ordering food to be delivered to his or her doorstep. A broader base of consumers has more alternatives to avoiding the outdoor environment on a polluted day, for example, by using a home kitchen when at home. This explains why the impact of air pollution on food delivery is smaller in the firm's order book study than what we observed among workers, particularly those without access to a canteen in their office building. Nevertheless, we find the impact to be economically large also among the broader population served by the food delivery platform that we examined."

Air pollution control brings plastic waste co-benefits

Over 3,000 photos of meals were submitted by office workers, enabling the NUS team to quantify how much disposable plastic varies across different lunch choices, in particular, meals eaten at the restaurant versus those delivered to the office. The researchers estimated that a 100 μg/m³ PM2.5 increase raised a meal's disposable plastic use by 10 grams on average - equivalent to about one-third the mass of a plastic container. Photographs that were published as part of the study indicated that the average delivered meal used 2.8 single-use plastic items and an estimated 54 grams of plastic. The average dine-in meal used an estimated 6.6 grams of plastic, such as in chopstick sleeves or bottles.

Based on the order book, the researchers also estimated that on a given day, if all of China were exposed to a 100 μg/m³ PM2.5 increase in dose as is routinely observed in Beijing, 2.5 million more meals would be delivered, requiring an additional 2.5 million plastic bags and 2.5 million plastic containers.

Assoc Prof Liu from the Department of Economics said, "Our findings probably apply to other typically polluted developing-nation cities, such as in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia and Vietnam. Waste management practices vary widely, with wind blowing plastic debris away from uncovered landfills or plastic being discarded into rivers and from there into the ocean. So, with eight million tonnes of plastic estimated to enter the seas each year, our study speaks to a wider issue. Individuals protect themselves from - and show their distaste for - air pollution by ordering food delivery which often comes in plastic packaging. It is evident from our study that air pollution control can reduce plastic waste."

Moving forward, the researchers will continue working on behavioural feedback by which pollution begets pollution: in particular, to defend themselves from environmental pollution, humans use more natural resources and pollute more. As a recent example, the researchers note how concern over exposure to COVID-19 has led to booming demand for home-delivered meals which are predominantly packaged in plastic. They hope that their work will add to the voices calling for more environmentally friendly packaging and improved waste management.

Scientists from Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU), Ozersk Technological Institute, and the Russian Academy of Sciences have improved a processing technology of a monazite concentrate which is a mineral raw material employed as a source of rare earth elements and thorium. The latter, in turn, is a part of the thorium-uranium fuel cycle that is more eco-friendly compared to the one based on uranium and plutonium. A related article appears in Energies.

A team of scientists from FEFU and Ozersk Technological Institute (a branch of the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI) have optimized the technology of alkaline extraction of thorium from its main source, i.e. monazite concentrate stored at Uralmonazite State Enterprise (Krasnoufimsk, Sverdlovsk Region). The raw material contained 50% to 68% of REEs and 10% to 28% of thorium oxide.

The technology includes grinding and alkaline opening of the mineral raw material, turning target components into a solution, followed by extraction separation and purification of uranium, thorium, and REEs. The new method provided for the extraction of up to 90% of thorium and uranium and 100% of rare earth elements.

"Unlike uranium mineral products, the mineral commodities of thorium are found in abundance both in the Russian Federation and all over the world. A shift to the thorium-uranium cycle would secure the environmentally friendly development of the nuclear industry because this technology does not lead to the accumulation of nuclear waste. Moreover, as it claimed in scientific papers, with thorium-based fuel elements adoption, the nuclear core can be reduced by 2 to 3 times with no losses in the energy output. Also, according to this scenario, the reactor can be operated continuously for an estimated 50 years without fuel reloading", said Prof. Ivan Tananaev, the author of the work, and the Head of the School of Natural Sciences at FEFU.

According to the scientist, moving on to the thorium-uranium fuel cycle could become a medium-term matter in Russia due to the National nuclear energy development program which is considered a priority area for the modernization of the country's economy. Until recently, the nuclear industry in Russia has been working on the basis of the uranium-plutonium cycle that was developed in the middle of the XX century and guaranteed nuclear deterrence.
As Prof. Tananaev believes, the utilization of an alternative thorium-uranium cycle has a number of indirect benefits. For example, the production of thorium leads to the development of the REE industry. Furthermore, secondary products of monazite processing are phosphate fertilizers that can be exploited in agro technologies.

New Rochelle, NY, October 19, 2020--Texas has the most restrictive electoral environment in 2020, and Oregon has the least restrictive voting practices of the 50 states. This is based on a study of the relative "cost of voting" in each of the 50 states, as described in the peer-reviewed Election Law Journal. Click here (http://doi.org/10.1089/elj.2020.0666) to read the Issue now.

Many states have gone out of their way to reduce the cost of voting and make it more hassle free, for example, by adopting automatic voter registration processes. Other states have failed to innovate and adopt technological advances that could make it easier for the public to vote. A few states, such as Texas, have increased the restrictiveness of voting mainly by reducing the number of polling stations.

"What is abundantly clear from the examples of Virginia and Michigan is that if a state wishes to make voting more accessible it is entirely possible to do so. Particularly interesting is the fact that some of the reforms, such as online voter registration, are found to come with a reduced monetary cost for states," say Scot Schraufnagel, Northern Illinois University, and coauthors.

"The ease of voting varies tremendously across the 50 states and the political battles over access to the polls have never been more intense. This timely article provides an updated comparison of the costs of voting in the states," says Election Law Journal Editor-in-Chief David Canon, University of Wisconsin.

Scientists at the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation (KSLOF) have released their findings on the state of coral reefs in Palau. Their research, based on extensive underwater surveys, found Palau's reefs had the highest live coral cover of all the reefs studied on the Global Reef Expedition, a scientific research mission to assess the health and resiliency of coral reefs around the world. Published today, the Global Reef Expedition: The Republic of Palau Final Report summarizes the Foundation's research on the status of coral reefs and reef fish in Palau and provides conservation recommendations that can help preserve these outstanding coral reefs for generations to come.

Over the course of five years, KSLOF's Global Reef Expedition circumnavigated the globe collecting valuable baseline data on coral reefs to address the coral reef crisis. In 2015, the Global Reef Expedition came to Palau, where an international team of scientists and local experts spent nearly a month at sea surveying coral reefs in ten states across the country. Working together, they conducted over 1,800 standardized surveys of the benthic and fish communities on coral reefs in Palau.

They found Palau's coral communities to be in excellent condition compared to other reefs in the region. The average live coral cover recorded in Palau was over 45% and reached 60 or 70% in some marine protected areas. This coral cover is very high, even among the world's best coral reefs. "Palau's coral cover is truly exceptional," said Alexandra Dempsey, the Director of Science Management at KSLOF and one of the report's authors. "It indicates a robust benthic coral reef community with high coral cover and species diversity."

These coral reefs have likely benefited from Palau's efforts to conserve their natural marine heritage. Palau has a long history of marine conservation. Key is the traditional policy of "bul"--a moratorium on catching particular species or fishing on certain reefs to protect habitats that are critical to the community's food security. Conservation of the country's reefs was further boosted in 2015 by the establishment of the Palau National Marine Sanctuary, which delivered one of the world's largest protected areas of ocean.

"Unsurprisingly, this long-term commitment to marine conservation has delivered some of the most vibrant reefs the Foundation encountered on its Global Reef Expedition," said Dr. Sam Purkis, KSLOF's Chief Scientist as well as Professor and Chair of the Department of Marine Geosciences at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. "Given that Palau's efforts are yielding tangible conservation results, the country might serve as a role model to other countries in the South Pacific and beyond."

Despite a thriving coral community, Palau's reefs had fewer and smaller fish than would be expected for a healthy coral reef ecosystem. Reef fish communities in Palau were similar to those surveyed in other nearby countries in the south and western Pacific. Many of the biggest fish appeared to be missing. Signs of overfishing were also observed on some of Palau's nearshore reefs despite existing regulations, particularly on reefs near population centers.

"Fish are a critical component of a robust coral reef community. They're important not only ecologically, but for the people who depend upon the reefs food or income," said Renée Carlton, Marine Ecologist at KSLOF and lead author on the report. "We saw some warning signs regarding reef fish communities, but are also hopeful that by expanding current fisheries management regulations and establishing more no-take no-entry areas, Palau's reef fish communities could become some of the best in the world. The commitment Palauan's have made to conserving their reefs is highly commendable and I hope they're able to use the findings in this report to continue preserving their natural resources for future generations."

The Global Reef Expedition mission to Palau gave scientists the chance to study some of the most beautiful and pristine coral reefs in the western Pacific Ocean. For the most part, the report released today shows what reefs can be when given the opportunity to thrive.

Although several years have passed since the expedition, data from this research mission will be critical for monitoring changes to the reefs over time and help managers identify priority sites for conservation action. The Living Oceans Foundation has shared copies of the report with government officials, conservation organizations, and marine managers so that these findings can aid in ongoing coral reef conservation and management efforts in Palau.

Scientists affiliated with the Center for Research on Inflammatory Diseases (CRID http://crid.fmrp.usp.br), hosted by the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil, have discovered that an enzyme involved in key metabolic processes also plays a role in immune cell differentiation and hence in the development of autoimmune diseases. The finding could contribute to the future development of new treatments and more cost-effective and resolutive medications for this kind of disease.

The study is reported (https://rupress.org/jem/article/217/10/e20190613/151965/PKM2-promotes-Th17-cell-differentiation-and) in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. The article describes the role of PKM2 (pyruvate kinase M2), the enzyme responsible for the final step of glycolysis, in the development and maintenance of the exacerbated inflammation typical of autoimmune diseases. Glycolysis is the breakdown of glucose to extract energy for cellular metabolism.

"We demonstrated in the study that there's a link between cellular metabolism and the immune system. It's increasingly clear that enzymes and other metabolic molecules are important not just to cellular metabolism but also to other functions such as immune response. In this particular case we found that the enzyme PKM2 acts in parallel with the differentiation of Th17, a lymphocyte subtype that triggers experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis, an animal model of multiple sclerosis," said José Carlos Farias Alves Filho (https://bv.fapesp.br/en/pesquisador/62548/jose-carlos-farias-alves-filho), a researcher at CRID, which is one of several Research, Innovation and Dissemination Centers (RIDCs (https://cepid.fapesp.br/en/home)) supported by São Paulo Research Foundation - FAPESP. CRID is hosted by USP's Ribeirão Preto Medical School (FMRP-USP).

The study (https://bv.fapesp.br/en/bolsas/167614) was conducted during the master's research of Luis Eduardo Alves Damasceno (https://bv.fapesp.br/en/pesquisador/689340/luis-eduardo-alves-damasceno), with a scholarship from FAPESP and supervision by Alves Filho.

T helper lymphocytes

In order to neutralize different pathogens specifically, immune cells called T lymphocytes differentiate into an array of subtypes, including T helper type 17 cells (Th17). These are associated with the development and maintenance of inflammation common to autoimmune diseases.

For poorly understood reasons, in autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, arthritis, and psoriasis, the immune response can spiral out of control and lead T lymphocytes to attack their own organism as if it were a pathogen.

For his project, Damasceno used the model known as experimental immune encephalomyelitis, an inflammatory demyelinating disease of the central nervous system that causes loss of the myelin sheath protecting nerve fibers and allowing electrical impulses to transmit quickly and efficiently along them. The experimental model closely resembles the condition of patients with multiple sclerosis.

Th17 cells have long been known to play a key role in mediating the development of autoimmune disease and progression of the neuroinflammation typical of several autoimmune disorders. The initial auto-reactive response that triggers the disease occurs when Th17 cells mistake antigens present in the central nervous system for a threat, releasing large amounts of a pro-inflammatory protein called interleukin 17 (IL-17) into spinal cord and brain tissue lesions.

In the study, which used cultured cells and the animal model, the CRID researchers found that differentiation of T lymphocytes into Th17 cells and development of the disease depended on metabolic reprogramming and alterations in glycolysis. "The glycolytic enzyme pyruvate kinase M2 [PKM2] mediated Th17 differentiation and autoimmune inflammation," Alves Filho said. "We showed in the study that significant amounts of the enzyme are expressed during differentiation of T lymphocytes into Th17 cells."

When PKM2 specific to T cells was excluded in vitro, Th17 differentiation was impaired and symptoms of the disease were attenuated, reducing the inflammation and demyelination mediated by Th17. "In the tests involving mice modified not to express the enzyme, development of the disease was reduced by over 50%," Alves Filho said.
The researchers also analyzed the use of commercial drugs that inhibit PKM2. "We used a drug that inhibits nuclear translocation of PKM2 so that the enzyme doesn't reach the cell nucleus. The lymphocytes express the enzyme, but it doesn't influence the development of the disease. It's reduced because Th17 differentiation decreases," he said.

Costs and benefits of treatment

The discovery of PKM2's role in autoimmune diseases paves the way for the development of novel strategies to treat them. The immunosuppressants currently available on the market treat these diseases by inhibiting the cytokines that help activate and differentiate the various lymphocyte subtypes.

"An estimated 40% of patients don't respond well to these drugs for one reason or another," Alves Filho said. "They could be put on immunobiological drugs, which are highly beneficial but extremely expensive and unaffordable for many patients."

The enzyme is part of CRID's drug discovery platform. "In the study we used a commercial drug that targets an allosteric site of PKM2, blocking the enzyme's ability to translocate to the Th17 cell nucleus," he said. A new study has begun, in collaboration with the Bioscience National Laboratory (LNBio) at the Brazilian Center for Research in Energy and Materials (CNPEM) in Campinas, state of São Paulo, to develop drugs that target translocation of the enzyme.

"This opens up the prospect of novel treatments for autoimmune diseases or inflammatory diseases that depend on this enzyme," Alves Filho said. "In this next stage, we're aiming to develop drugs that interact with this site and inhibit the enzyme's ability to translocate to the cell nucleus."

About 40% of the U.S. population lives in a coastal area and in Hawai'i, nearly everyone is vulnerable to the effects of tropical storms and hurricanes.

Tropical cyclones, regionally known as hurricanes or typhoons, have been moving across ocean basins faster since 1982, according to a new study published in Environmental Research Letters.

The study, led by Sung-Hun Kim, a post-doctoral researcher in the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at the time of the work, also determined the North Atlantic region has experienced an increase in the frequency of hurricanes and that tropical cyclone activity has shifted toward the poles in both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

The researchers, including Pao-Shin Chu, atmospheric sciences professor in SOEST, focused on tropical cyclones since 1982, when modern, reliable satellite data became available. They assessed the frequency and locations of storms and trends in tropical cyclone movement speed--how quickly a storm moves forward--globally and regionally in each ocean basin.

"For people in Hawai'i, the threat of hurricanes is always there every year," said Chu. "If hurricanes move faster they would pose danger to coastal communities and emergency managers because they would have less time to prepare for evacuation and other measures."

The recent study suggests the reason for the observed changes is a combination of natural variations and human-induced climate change.

The researchers continue the study the trends in and connections between climate variability and tropical cyclone activity.

Like people, cells in the human body protect their personal space. They seem to know how much space they need, and if it gets too tight, most cells prefer to break free. The mechanism enabling cells to evade crowded environments appears to involve an unusual player - the cell nucleus. This is what researchers from St. Anna Children's Cancer Research Institute Vienna, King's College London, Institute Curie Paris, and ETH Zürich in Basel showed in their recent work.

Tissue cells protect their "personal space"

The human body consists of trillions of cells growing in confined volumes, which often leads to cell crowding. The crowding effect is exacerbated when cell growth and proliferation are out of control during tumor formation. This creates a compressive microenvironment for the constituent cells. How do tumor cells cope with the lack of space and compressive stresses? Answering this question, the investigators found that the cells are able to sense environmental compression.

To do so, they utilize their largest and stiffest internal compartment, the nucleus. Squeezing cells to the degree that physically deforms the nucleus causes the nuclear membranes to unfold and stretch. These changes are detected by specialized proteins, activating cellular contractility. The ability to develop contractile forces helps squeezing the cell out of its compressive microenvironment in an "evasion reflex" mechanism. Therefore, the study proposes that the nucleus operates as a ruler (see the accompanying illustration). It allows living cells to measure their personal space and trigger specific responses once the space becomes violated.

Fat restrictions to target metabolic vulnerability in cancer?

As the scientists describe in the paper, Ca2+-dependent phospholipase cPLA2 is a protein, which senses nuclear membrane stretch upon cell compression. The lead author Alexis Lomakin, PhD, emphasizes that cPLA2 represents a druggable target. "Pharmaceutical companies are currently testing small molecule inhibitors of cPLA2. Based on our data, downregulating the activity of cPLA2 in tumor cells might interfere with their ability to escape the primary tumor and metastasize to distant locations", explains Dr. Lomakin.

cPLA2-inhibitors prevent the production of arachidonic acid (ARA), which subsequently affects cell migration, growth, and survival. However, ARA can also be obtained by cells from their environment. The Western diet, for instance, is a potent source of omega-6 fatty acids, such as ARA. Dietary fat restriction and consumption of omega-3 instead of omega-6 fatty acids could synergize with cPLA2 inhibitors to effectively attenuate tumor cell escape from overcrowded areas. "Testing these hypotheses is an exciting direction for future research", concludes Dr. Lomakin.

Potential predictive marker for chemo-resistance

Identifying the cell nucleus as an active player that rapidly converts mechanical inputs into signaling or metabolic outputs is surprising. Until today, the nucleus was considered as a passive storehouse for genetic material. "We are very excited about what comes next", says Dr. Lomakin. According to him, high degrees of nuclear deformation could be predictive of metastatic potential and resistance to chemotherapy and immunotherapy.

"For many years, pathologists have been evaluating changes in the shape of the nucleus to discriminate between different stages of tumor growth; however, how these structural-mechanical alterations of the nucleus functionally impact cancer cells remained completely unexplored", says Dr. Lomakin.