Tech

TROY, N.Y. -- In order to earn certification in general surgery, residents in the United States need to demonstrate proficiency in the Fundamentals of Laparoscopic program (FLS), a test that requires manipulation of laparoscopic tools within a physical training unit. Central to that assessment is a quantitative score, known as the FLS score, which is manually calculated using a formula that is time-consuming and labor-intensive.

By combining brain optical imaging, and a deep learning framework they call "Brain-NET," a multidisciplinary team of engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in close collaboration with the Department of Surgery at the Jacobs School of Medicine & Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo, has developed a new methodology that has the potential to transform training and the certification process for surgeons.

In a new article in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, the researchers demonstrated how Brain-NET can accurately predict a person's level of expertise in terms of their surgical motor skills, based solely on neuroimaging data. These results support the future adoption of a new, more efficient method of surgeon certification that the team has developed.

"This is an area of expertise that is really unique to RPI," said Xavier Intes, a professor of biomedical engineering at Rensselaer, who led this research.

According to Intes, Brain-NET not only performed more quickly than the traditional prediction model, but also more accurately, especially as it analyzed larger datasets.

Brain-NET builds upon the research team's earlier work in this area. Researchers led by Suvranu De, the head of the Rensselaer Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering, previously showed that they could accurately assess a doctor's surgical motor skills by analyzing brain activation signals using optical imaging.

In addition to its potential to streamline the surgeon certification process, the development of Brain-NET, combined with that optical imaging analysis, also enables real-time score feedback for surgeons who are training.

"If you can get the measurement of the predicted score, you can give feedback right away," Intes said. "What this opens the door to is to engage in remediation or training."

What if you could solve two of Earth's biggest problems in one stroke? UC Riverside engineers have developed a way to recycle plastic waste, such as soda or water bottles, into a nanomaterial useful for energy storage.

Mihri and Cengiz Ozkan and their students have been working for years on creating improved energy storage materials from sustainable sources, such as glass bottles, beach sand, Silly Putty, and portabella mushrooms. Their latest success could reduce plastic pollution and hasten the transition to 100% clean energy.

"Thirty percent of the global car fleet is expected to be electric by 2040, and high cost of raw battery materials is a challenge," said Mihri Ozkan, a professor of electrical engineering in UCR's Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering. "Using waste from landfill and upcycling plastic bottles could lower the total cost of batteries while making the battery production sustainable on top of eliminating plastic pollution worldwide."

In an open-access article published in Energy Storage, the researchers describe a sustainable, straightforward process for upcycling polyethylene terephthalate plastic waste, or PET, found in soda bottles and many other consumer products, into a porous carbon nanostructure.

They first dissolved pieces of PET plastic bottles in a solvent. Then, using a process called electrospinning, they fabricated microscopic fibers from the polymer and carbonized the plastic threads in a furnace. After mixing with a binder and a conductive agent, the material was then dried and assembled into an electric double-layer supercapacitor within a coin-cell type format.

When tested in the supercapacitor, the material contained the characteristics of both a double-layer capacitor formed by the arrangement of separated ionic and electronic charges, as well as redox reaction pseudo-capacitance that occurs when the ions are electrochemically absorbed onto surfaces of materials.

Though they don't store as much energy as lithium-ion batteries, these supercapacitors can charge much faster, making batteries based on plastic waste a good option for many applications.

By "doping" the electrospun fibers prior to carbonization with various chemicals and minerals such as boron, nitrogen, and phosphorous, the team plans to tune the final material to have improved electrical properties.

"At UCR, we have taken the first steps toward recycling plastic waste into a rechargeable energy storage device," said doctoral student and first author Arash Mirjalili. "We believe that this work has environmental and economic advantages and our approach can present opportunities for future research and development."

The authors believe the process is scalable and marketable, and that it represents major progress toward keeping waste PET out of landfills and the oceans.

"The upcycling of PET plastic waste for energy storage applications could be considered the holy grail for green manufacturing of electrode materials from sustainable waste sources," said mechanical engineering professor Cengiz Ozkan. "This demonstration of a new class of electrodes in the making of supercapacitors will be followed by a new generation of Li-ion batteries in the future, so stay tuned."

The most successful and cost-effective ways to restore coral reefs have been identified by an international group of scientists, after analysing restoration projects in Latin America.

The University of Queensland's Dr Elisa Bayraktarov led the team that investigated 12 coral reef restoration case studies in five countries.

"Coral reefs worldwide are degrading due to climate change, overfishing, pollution, coastal development, coral bleaching and diseases," Dr Bayraktarov said.

"Coral reef restoration - or rebuilding what we have lost - may become critical, especially for coral species that are threatened with extinction.

"Much of this work is led by environmental non-Government organisations (ENGOs), tourism operators, community groups, national resource management groups and governments who rarely publish their great depth of knowledge.

"So we decided to bridge the gap between academia, ENGOs and other groups that restore coral reefs."

The researchers analysed the motivations and techniques used for each project, providing estimates on total annual project cost per unit area of reef restored, project duration and the spatial extent of interventions.

The team found the most successful projects had high coral survival rates or an increase in coral cover, but that they also offered socioeconomic benefits for their surrounding communities.

"Projects that train local fishermen or recreational divers to participate in restoration, or engage with dive operators or hotels to support the maintenance of the coral nurseries, were much more effective and long-lived," Dr Bayraktarov said.

"We also found that coral reef restoration efforts in Latin American countries and territories were cheaper than previously thought - with the median cost of a project around US$93,000 (~AUD$130,000) to restore one hectare of coral reef.

A one-year-old coral"The projects also had run for much longer than assumed, with some active for up to 17 years.

"And best of all, an analysis of all the studied projects revealed a high likelihood of overall project success of 70 per cent."

Co-author Dr Phanor Montoya-Maya, director and founder of the Colombian-based organisation Corales de Paz, said he was excited about the project's collaborative nature.

"Twenty-five Latin-American coral reef restoration scientists and practitioners from 17 institutions in five countries worked on this research," he said.

"We wanted to showcase the efforts of Spanish-speaking countries that depend on their local coral reefs to the global coral reef restoration community.

"And to share the diversity of objectives, techniques, tools used, and methods to measure success in Latin America to encourage others to carry out similar work.

"We're providing critical project information - such as total annual project cost per unit area of reef restored, spatial extent of restored site and duration - on how to best save our degraded reefs.

The study results revolve around the long-established idea that machines within animal and human cells turn the sugars, fats, and proteins we eat into energy used by the body's millions of cells. The molecule most used to store that energy is called adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. Along with this central role in metabolism, adenosine also helps signal other cells and serves as a building block of genetic material, and so is central to the growth of human tissue.

Previous research had shown that maintaining supplies of adenosine, known to nourish the chondrocyte cells that make cartilage, also prevented osteoarthritis in similar animal models of the disease.

In the new NYU Grossman School of Medicine-led study, researchers injected adenosine into the joints of rodents whose limbs had been damaged by inflammation resulting from either traumatic injury, such as a torn ligament, or from massive weight gain placing pressure on joints. The biological damage in these cases is similar, researchers say, to that sustained in human osteoarthritis.

Publishing online in the journal Scientific Reports on Aug. 10, the study rodents received eight weekly injections of adenosine, which prompted regrowth rates of cartilage tissue between 50 percent and 35 percent as measured by standard laboratory scores.

"Our latest study shows that replenishing adenosine stores by injection works well as a treatment for osteoarthritis in animal models of the disease, and with no apparent side effects," says lead study author Carmen Corciulo, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at NYU Langone.

Corciulo says it is too soon to use this experimental model as a therapy in people. Clinical trials must await a test drug that can be safely stored for days if not weeks, and experiments in larger mammals.

Study senior investigator Bruce Cronstein, MD, the Dr. Paul R. Esserman Professor of Medicine at NYU Langone Health, says the team's research is important because the few existing drug therapies for osteoarthritis, such as acetaminophen and COX-2 inhibitor drugs, including naproxen and ibuprofen, only numb joint pain, or like hyaluronic acid, just lubricate its tissues. None stall disease progression or reverse the damage. Painkillers, such as opioids, are often prescribed, but are also highly addictive, he cautions.

"People with osteoarthritis desperately need more treatment options with fewer side effects, and our research advances that effort," says Cronstein, who also serves as the director of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI). He noted that other experimental medications are being developed elsewhere, including parathyroid hormone to stimulate bone growth, WNT inhibitor drugs to block the bone and cartilage degradation, and growth factor chemicals to promote cartilage growth.

Cronstein, Corciulo, and NYU Grossman School of Medicine have a patent application pending for the use of adenosine and other agents that help with its binding to chondrocytes, called A2A receptor agonists, for the treatment of osteoarthritis.

Among the study's other key findings was that a cell-signaling pathway, known as transforming growth factor beta (TGF-beta) and involved in many forms of tissue growth, death and differentiation, was highly active in cartilage tissue damaged by osteoarthritis, as well as in cartilage tissue undergoing repair after being treated with adenosine. Additional testing in lab-grown chondrocytes from people with osteoarthritis showed different chemical profiles of TGF-beta signaling during breakdown than during growth, providing the first evidence that the pathway switched function in the presence of adenosine (from assisting in cartilage breakdown to encouraging its repair.)

Developing treatments to halt or slow the disease is important, Cronstein says, because well over 100 million people worldwide are estimated to have osteoarthritis, which is tied to aging, especially in women. This figure, he says, is only expected to grow as more people live longer and obesity rates climb.

"Right now, the only way to stop osteoarthritis is to have affected joints surgically replaced, which not only comes with pain and risk of infection, but is also quite costly," says Cronstein. "If new therapies can delay or prevent disease onset and progression, then fewer joint replacements will save people from a lot of pain and expense."

The extent of Southeast Michigan's tree canopy and its urban sprawl both increased between 1985 and 2015, according to a new University of Michigan study that used aerial photos and satellite images to map individual buildings and small patches of street trees.

The researchers described the increase in forested area across the region as a positive finding. But their analysis also revealed that the region's forested lands grew increasingly fragmented due mainly to increased urban sprawl, interfering with the ability of plants and animals to disperse across the landscape.

"Our results show that the forested landscapes of Southeast Michigan appear more fragmented and less cohesive in areas experiencing urban sprawl, in accordance with findings worldwide," said study lead author Dimitrios Gounaridis, a postdoctoral research fellow at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability's Urban Sustainability Research Group.

"We found that low-density single-family housing, in particular, had a detrimental effect on the functionality of adjacent forested landscapes," he said. "And the distance to these built-up patches appears to be a factor in determining the magnitude of the impact."

The study was published online July 22 in the journal Landscape Ecology. The other authors are Joshua Newell of the School for Environment and Sustainability and Robert Goodspeed of the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

The study found that the region's tree cover expanded by 246 square miles, or 1.8%, over the three decades, mainly due to the maturing of existing trees in older residential neighborhoods and on public lands.

During the same period, the amount of land covered by buildings and roads grew in the seven-county Southeast Michigan study area by 12%. The newly developed land covered 130 square miles and included an estimated 335,000 new buildings and an estimated 7,000 miles of new roads.

At first glance, these results might seem paradoxical. How can you increase tree cover in a region while simultaneously constructing more roads and thousands of new buildings?

But most of the newly developed land came from former farmland, not from forested areas. The expansion of the tree canopy was attributed to the maturing of existing trees, along with new trees planted in residential neighborhoods and on public lands, as well as land-conservation efforts.

The vast majority of the new development involved the construction of low-density, single-family homes at the urban fringe of the Detroit metropolitan area--exactly the kind of sprawl that previous studies have shown to be most harmful to the healthy functioning of forested landscapes, according to the U-M researchers.

The new analysis used 1-meter-resolution aerial photographs, satellite images, and machine learning to map and measure land-cover changes. The researchers also computed landscape metrics of forest fragmentation and cohesion and investigated the relationship between single-family housing sprawl and forest landscape functionality.

A second phase of the project, led by Goodspeed, will identify the most important areas for forest conservation and tree planting in Southeast Michigan, using a range of ecological and socioeconomic indicators. Those findings are expected to be submitted for publication later this year.

"Few studies have simultaneously examined sprawl at the building level and its relationship to forested landscapes within an urbanizing region," Goodspeed said. "We expect our findings will prove useful to policymakers and planners seeking to prevent or mitigate habitat fragmentation caused by urban expansion."

The researchers described the net increase in forested area across the region as "a positive finding, given that these trees provide habitat for many species as well as valuable ecosystem services for residents, such as improving air quality and mitigating the urban heat-island effect."

However, their analysis also revealed that the region's forested lands grew increasingly fragmented due mainly to urban sprawl, which the researchers defined as development composed primarily of low-density (one to four houses per acre) single-family housing.

Increased fragmentation resulted in a loss of connectivity between forest patches, limiting the ability of plants and animals to disperse across the landscape by using linked forest patches as stepping stones.

The authors note that local decision makers can turn to a variety of land-use planning techniques, such as cluster subdivisions and smart growth, to protect habitats and minimize fragmentation.

"Smaller patches of forest and street trees are often excluded from analyses due to data limitations, overlooking the crucial role these trees play in providing ecological functions and enhancing connectivity," said co-author Newell. "Our results point to the importance of using high-resolution data in landscape analysis."

New residential development was most rapid, between 1985 and 2015, in Oakland, Macomb and Wayne counties. Oakland County, for example, added and estimated 42,000 new buildings during the study period. Seventy-three percent of them were single-family houses, and nearly half of those homes were classified as low density.

The largest increases in tree cover over the 30-year period were seen in Washtenaw (+7%), Macomb (+6.5%) and Oakland (+4.5%) counties. The city of Detroit, which lost significant population over the time period studied, also lost forest cover after 2005.

The seven-county study area (Livingston, Macomb, Monroe, Oakland, St. Clair, Washtenaw and Wayne) covers about 4,600 square miles. In addition to the city of Detroit and its suburbs, the region contains a large exurban area characterized by low-density residential development and agricultural land uses.

New research suggests that although sociodemographic factors have been associated with poor outcomes for patients treated for testicular cancer, guideline-directed, expert care can help to address this issue. The findings are published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society (ACS).

Numerous barriers to optimal treatment for testicular cancer exist in underserved populations, such as individuals from ethnic minorities and lower socioeconomic strata. A team led by Aditya Bagrodia, MD, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, examined whether standardized care may help to overcome these barriers and lead to better health outcomes.

At the investigators' institution, the same group of diverse physicians takes care of patients with testicular cancer at two separate hospitals with different patient populations. One hospital is a safety net hospital for the people of Dallas County (Parkland Memorial Hospital) and the second (UT Southwestern Medical Center's Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center) is an academic tertiary care center and National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center that sees mostly patients with private insurance or Medicare.

For the study, the medical records of all patients undergoing treatment for testicular cancer from 2006 to 2018 were analyzed from both the safety net hospital and the academic center. A total of 106 patients received care at the safety net hospital, and 95 were treated at the academic center. The researchers noted differences between the two groups regarding insurance status, cancer stage at the time of diagnosis, and other factors, but cancer recurrence and mortality rates were similar.

"Despite stark differences in patient demographics that are usually associated with worse clinical outcomes--including lack of health insurance, delayed presentation, lack of primary care physicians, and minority ethnicity status--we found that standardized care with a multidisciplinary team led to no differences in the way patients were managed and equivalent clinical outcomes," said Dr. Bagrodia. "This study illustrates that standardized, expert care can overcome factors generally associated with worse clinical outcomes."

DALLAS - Aug. 10, 2020 - By offering the same level of care and expertise to two very different populations, UT Southwestern physicians were able to eliminate the sociodemographic disparities in survival and cancer recurrence rates typically seen nationally in testicular cancer patients.

A new paper appearing in the journal Cancer reports that men treated for testicular cancer at a public safety net hospital (Parkland Memorial Hospital) and at an academic tertiary care center (UT Southwestern Medical Center) had the same outcomes.

"It was really encouraging to verify that these men are being treated based on their disease characteristics, not on who they are or what hospital they're being treated at," says study leader Aditya Bagrodia, M.D., an assistant professor of urology at UT Southwestern. "It doesn't - and shouldn't - matter if you're Black, white, or Hispanic, rich or poor, insured or uninsured."

Sociodemographic factors that include race, income, health insurance status, immigration status, and education have all been shown to play a role in the detection, treatment, and survivorship of many types of cancer. Testicular cancer, which affects an estimated 9,000 men a year in the United States, is typically diagnosed when patients are in their 30s.

"These young men often get embarrassed about their symptoms, and then they delay coming in to be seen for other reasons - they can't miss work, they don't have insurance, they're worried about being deported," says Bagrodia, a member of UTSW's Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center. Moreover, he says, men from lower socioeconomic groups tend to be treated at smaller safety net hospitals, where doctors might not see many cases of testicular cancer or be as familiar with current treatment guidelines as are physicians at large academic hospitals.

Bagrodia and his colleagues who treat testicular cancer at UT Southwestern also treat patients with testicular cancer at Parkland Memorial Hospital, the public hospital in Dallas County. During multidisciplinary team meetings, the group of doctors - including urologists, oncologists, radiologists, radiation oncologists, and pathologists - review patient cases from both locations simultaneously. The same clinicians rotate between hospitals to provide in-person care and surgeries.

The new study followed 201 patients diagnosed with testicular cancer between 2006 and 2018; 106 were treated at Parkland and 95 at UT Southwestern. On average, the Parkland patients were younger (29 versus 33), more likely to be Hispanic (79 percent versus 11 percent), less likely to be insured (20 percent versus 88 percent), more likely to first be seen in the emergency department rather than by a primary care physician (76 percent versus 8 percent), and had been experiencing symptoms more than twice as long before seeking care (65 days versus 31 days).

Despite these differences, the study showed that the groups were treated similarly. Men at Parkland received an orchiectomy - surgical removal of the testicle that's the first-line treatment for testicular cancer - within an average of one day after diagnosis. This average was four days for UTSW patients. To overcome some of the socioeconomic barriers at Parkland, the team rapidly mobilizes relevant physicians and social workers to make sure the comprehensive needs of the patients are met. And after the initial orchiectomy, patients at Parkland and UTSW were equally likely to receive other chemotherapy and surgery treatments, depending on the stage of their tumor.

"If you have metastatic testicular cancer that isn't fully treated by chemotherapy, the standard of care is to perform a very complex surgery," says Bagrodia. "A lot of smaller hospitals - whether community or safety net - don't do that because they don't have experience with the surgery. So we were happy to show that our patients get that surgery at equal rates between hospitals."

There was no statistical difference between the recurrence rate of cancer in patients initially diagnosed with early stage disease: 4.7 percent of patients at Parkland and 6.3 percent of patients at UTSW experienced recurrence. Four patients at Parkland (4 percent) died during the time period, while none at UTSW died, but the difference was not statistically attributable to the hospital, instead linked to the stage of cancer when patients were diagnosed.

Some factors still differed between the patient groups. Rates of sperm banking and testicular prosthesis (both expensive options for men going through testicular cancer treatment) were lower at Parkland. Compliance rates among men - how likely they were to make follow-up appointments - also were lower in the Parkland group.

Bagrodia says the new data underscore how much of a difference it can make to have experienced clinicians - who see a high volume of rare cases - working at safety net hospitals and with community hospitals that would typically have less experience with these conditions. Many major academic medical centers already have affiliated safety net hospitals, he points out, but there are ways to expand this idea even further.

"Whether it's for cancer, refractory diabetes, or heart failure, I think having mechanisms to make sure you have the right expertise, and committed clinicians, makes a big difference to patients," says Bagrodia, who is also a Dedman Family Scholar in Clinical Care.

Scientists Say: Expect More Rainfall Variability for California
Tropical weather phenomenon likely to bring greater rainfall - and drought - by 2100
By Barbra Rodriguez

California's winter precipitation is expected to become 50% more variable by century's end, based on a Berkeley Lab-led study of the impact of future greenhouse gas emissions on the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), a rainfall pattern that covers a quarter of the globe.

When active, the MJO influences whether precipitation occurs for 30 to 60 days, and is already known to affect North America's weather when it moves eastward from the Indian Ocean (sometimes driving, for example, the Pineapple Express, which brings heavy rainfall to the Pacific coast). To see how much global emissions increase would influence the MJO, Berkeley Lab faculty scientist Da Yang and postdoctoral fellow Wenyu Zhou, and colleagues at UC San Diego and Nanjing University used the 10 computer models that best capture MJO behavior to study the emissions' impact on it. By averaging the models' results in the paper published recently in Nature Climate Change, the researchers identified the 50% increase in winter precipitation variability throughout California by century's end.

"I was quite surprised to see such a huge effect, knowing that even a small change in rainfall statewide could have a significant impact," said Yang, who is also an assistant professor of atmospheric sciences at UC Davis. "This may have substantial implications for agriculture, flood control, and water resource management."

Moreover, their analysis suggests that the MJO is able to transfer its precipitation-related atmospheric conditions to the West Coast of the United States via changes in strong, high-atmosphere winds of the subtropical jet stream.

For more, click here .

Pioneering Work Modeling How Electric Vehicles Interact with the Electric Grid
A Q&A with scientist Bin Wang on how Berkeley Lab is helping cities prepare for a major shift in our transportation and grid sectors
By Kiran Julin

As the rate of electric vehicle (EV) adoption in the U.S. rises, the transportation sector will put additional pressure on the power grid. California expects more than 50% zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs), which includes battery EV, plug-in hybrid EV and fuel cell EV, in new vehicle sales by 2030 to achieve statewide emission and pollution reduction goals. This added pressure on the grid could be very disruptive, but transportation and power grid researchers at Berkeley Lab are working on solutions to help city planners prepare.

Berkeley Lab scientist Bin Wang knows that coming up with solutions is going to require an interdisciplinary approach, and in many ways Wang's background represents the perfect intersection of expertise required. He has experience working on the electric grid and transportation and vehicle engineering, all of which are key domains needed to solve for EV growth.

Researchers really only started looking at the integration of grid and transportation research in the last couple of years, due to the growth of EVs, grid modernization, ride-sharing, and autonomous vehicles on the road. Wang is focused on developing scalable solutions to analyze EV impacts on the grid as well as maximize the benefits of EV adoption. Wang's vision is to develop these algorithms on a large metropolitan-scale model, such as the San Francisco Bay Area. The combination of doing this analysis on a large-scale -- as well as optimizing for both the transportation and electric grid -- makes this more complex than many other computational transportation projects.

Click here to read the Q&A at the Energy Technologies Area website.

Berkeley Lab Founder Ernest Lawrence to Be Honored With Memorial Highway in South Dakota
Cyclotron inventor was born in Canton, South Dakota, in 1901
By Glenn Roberts Jr.

Nobel laureate Ernest Lawrence - founder of Berkeley Lab, inventor of the cyclotron, and a native of Canton, South Dakota - will be honored with a memorial highway in his home state.

Mike Headley, executive director of the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in Lead, South Dakota, and Ben Jones, the state education secretary, had applied for the renaming of the highway segment, a stretch of Highway 18 that runs through Canton. Berkeley Lab has played a critical role in establishing, developing, and operating SURF, and participates in several experiments at the site.

It was in 1931 that Lawrence designed and built the first successful cyclotron, a small round particle accelerator for which Lawrence would receive the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics. Also in 1931, Lawrence founded the UC Radiation Laboratory, which is now known as Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, or Berkeley Lab. He served as the Lab's director until his death in 1958.

"Not only did Lawrence invent the cyclotron, but he also changed the way scientists do research," said Berkeley Lab Director Michael Witherell. "He showed how large teams of scientists working together could make breakthroughs that were otherwise unimaginable."

For more information:

Section of US Hwy 18 named for South Dakota Nobel Laureate , Sanford Lab, July 28, 2020.

The built environment, where someone lives (private) or works (public), influences a person's daily life and can help, or hinder, their mental health. This is especially true for those with mental health conditions such as PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder.

Researchers in the Wm Michael Barnes '64 Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Texas A&M University are working to determine which elements of built environments affect veterans with PTSD the most, and how they can be altered to help veterans thrive.

"We have already established collaborations with veteran support groups to develop veteran-centered tools for monitoring and self-management of PTSD," said Dr. Farzan Sasangohar, assistant professor and principal investigator of the project. "Through interactions with hundreds of veterans diagnosed with PTSD, we realized the need to also investigate the context in which these tools are used and became interested in the design of built environments."

The researchers looked at three themes: architectural design features, interior design features and ambient features. As part of the project, researchers interviewed veterans with PTSD about their triggers in public and private spaces. From their interviews, the researchers categorized and provided suggestions for each theme area that would provide the greatest positive impact for veterans.

"Alarmingly, we learned there is a general gap in built environments' design guidelines for mental health habitants in general, and PTSD patients in particular, so we leveraged our wide network of veterans to study their preferences," Sasangohar said.

Architectural design features

Architectural design features are permanent features of a building or space that would be difficult or expensive to change after construction is completed, like the entrance and exit locations.

In the study, veterans identified six areas that made a difference toward their comfort:

Windows - large windows located closer to the ground made veterans feel safer in a space. They also preferred to have multiple windows in a space so they could see what was going on outside.

Entrance and exit location - veterans liked to easily see the entrance and exit to a room or building. This helped keep them from feeling trapped in a space.

Walkways/hallways - larger hallways that allowed for increased maneuverability and reduced the chance of touching other people were preferred by veterans.

Open floor plans - open spaces allowed veterans to see their surroundings and provided them with feelings of security. Sharp turns and blind corners caused stress due to the inability to see what was around the bend.

Green space - open spaces with vegetation made the veterans feel calmer and gave them more visibility

Interior design features

Interior design features are parts of a built environment that are easier to change and could be accommodated in spaces that are already built. Veterans preferred spaces with fewer pieces of furniture and walls that were painted in brighter, more vivid colors instead of muted colors.

Ambient design features

Ambient design features are the easiest features to change in a space and include lighting and air quality. Overall, veterans preferred natural light. Some said that poor light, including too much artificial lighting, could trigger stress. Air and sound quality was important also, including ventilation, odor and noise levels. Many veterans said that certain odors could trigger fear or bad memories and that loud, unexpected noises were particularly startling for them. They felt that soundproofing was important in spaces they visited or lived in.

What can be done?

While this research addressed an important gap in research and practice, the research team identified the need for more work to understand issues related to the design of built environments for those with PTSD. Further research should include a wide range of stakeholders including veterans, Veterans Affairs, architecture and housing regulatory bodies.

"We hope that this research contributes to the curriculum, codes and standards, regulatory documents, and general practice of designing built environments, including health care facilities, which are sensitive to the needs of veterans who are affected by PTSD and others with mental health conditions," Sasangohar said.

BROOKLYN, New York, Monday, August 10, 2020 - The proliferation and miniaturization of electronics in devices, wearables medical implants and other applications has made technologies for blocking electromagnetic interference (EMI) especially important, while making their implementation more challenging. While EMI can cause disruptions in communication in critical applications, resulting in potentially disastrous consequences, traditional EMI shields require large thicknesses to be effective, hampering design flexibility.

One solution resides in MXenes, a family of 2D transition metal carbides, nitrides, and carbonitrides with potential for blocking EMI demonstrate high conductivity and excellent EMI shielding properties. The key to the commercialization of these materials is industry-scale manufacturing.

A multi-institution research team led by Andre ? D. Taylor, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering demonstrated a novel approach to MXene fabrication that could lead to methods for at-scale production of MXene freestanding films: drop-casting onto prepatterned hydrophobic substrates. Their method led to a 38% enhancement of EMI shielding efficiency over conventional methods. The work, "Scalable, Highly Conductive, and Micropatternable MXene Films for Enhanced Electromagnetic Interference Shielding" in the first-anniversary issue of the Cell Press publication Matter, suggests that micropatterned MXene films, prepared using a method that is scalable and allows for high throughput, can be readily used in EMI shielding, energy storage, and optoelectronics applications.

The team, including lead author Jason Lipton, a Ph.D. candidate under the guidance of Taylor, as well as Elisa Riedo of NYU Tandon and researchers from Drexel University and the Brookhaven National Laboratory, cast aqueous dispersions of MXene nanosheets (with the formula Ti3C2Tx) on hydrophobic polystyrene substrates and dried them. After drying, the resulting free-standing films could be easily peeled off, a method demonstrating a variety of advantages over the conventional vacuum-assisted filtration method with regards to time efficiency, operation simplicity, and surface smoothness.

Taylor said the beauty of the drop-casting method lies in its ability to allow for modulation of micrometer-scale 3D patterns on the film surface by utilizing pre-patterned substrates (such as a vinyl record, retroreflective packaging, and retroreflective tape). He added that the research leads toward more sustainable production.

"Our work illustrates how MXene nanoflakes can be manufactured into free-standing films without the need for complicated and energy-consuming instruments."

Lipton added that a critical benefit of the process is that allows for better control the thin film configuration of Ti3C2Tx (including the lateral size and the thickness).

"The conventional wisdom for making MXene films is that you should match a hydrophilic material with a hydrophilic substrate to get a smooth coating," said Lipton. "We found that if you instead try to use a hydrophobic surface it results in simple, scalable production of freestanding films because the MXenes prefer to stick together than interact with the surface. Because there are many commercially available microstructured plastics, there are a lot of options to make a 3D-patterned MXene film, and we find that choosing the right pattern can dramatically improve EMI shielding effectiveness. This opens up a lot of opportunities to study different micro-structured MXene composites for wide-ranging applications"

"The proof of concept marks an essential step towards the massive production of Ti3C2Tx films, which opens a bright venue to accelerate the commercialization of MXene products," added Taylor.

A combination of genetic and emotional differences may lead to post-traumatic stress (PTS) in police officers, a new study finds.

Based on biological studies of officers in major cities, the study showed that the most significant PTS predictors are the tendency to startle at sudden sounds, early career displays of mental health symptoms (e.g., anxiety and depression), and certain genetic differences, including some known to influence a person's immune system.

"If we can identify major risk factors that cause PTS and treat them before they have the chance to develop into full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, we can improve the quality of life for police officers and perhaps other emergency responders, and better help them deal with the stressors of their work," says senior study author Charles Marmar, MD, the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Psychiatry at NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

Publishing online Aug. 10 in the journal Translational Psychiatry, the study authors employed a mathematical computer program developed by scientists at NYU Langone Health and the University of Minnesota. They used a combination of statistical analyses to test which of a large number of features linked by past studies to PTSD were the best at predicting its occurrence in police officers.

Some of this winnowing that determined the best predictors was accomplished using machine learning, mathematical models trained with data to find patterns. These algorithms enabled researchers to track how experiences, situations, and characteristics may have interacted over time to lead to PTS symptoms, and represent the first use of such techniques in PTS research in police officers, the authors say.

"Based on these techniques, our study identified specific causes of PTS, rather than possible links," says Marmar, also chair of the Department of Psychiatry at NYU Langone.

He adds that the need for better information is urgent. An estimated eight out of every 100 people experience PTS in their lifetimes, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Police officers are particularly vulnerable, he says, facing an average of three traumatic experiences for every sixth months of service. Common symptoms include nightmares, aggression, and distressing flashbacks of the traumatic event, which can lead to poor sleep, anxiety, depression, and increased risk of suicide.

In the new study, the investigators analyzed data collected on 207 police officers from departments in New York City, San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose who had PTS. All officers had experienced at least one life-threatening event during their first year on the job.

Using the computer program, the investigators searched for patterns in 148 different characteristics previously thought to be involved in PTS. They mapped out 83 different possible combinations of factors, or pathways, which could have influenced the officers as they developed the condition.

Then, they identified factors which appeared most frequently, and found that every pathway to PTS shared one of five causes. Besides the tendency to startle easily, severe distress following a traumatic experience, and a set of emotional health problems, such as anxiety and depression, played a key role in PTS. Genetic causes included mutations in the HDC gene, which is linked to problems in the immune system and mutations in the MR gene, which is involved in the body's immediate reaction to threats, known as the fight-or-flight response. If all five factors were eliminated, researchers say, the officers would not be expected to develop PTS.

"Because the factors we identified are causal, they should be actionable as well," says lead study investigator Glenn Saxe, MD, a professor in NYU Langone's Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. "Several of the causal factors we identified - the HDC gene, the MR gene, and the startle response - point to well-mapped nerve circuits, which should allow us to find drugs and behavioral therapies that might help. Down the road, we see the possibility of using information collected from patients about causal factors to select the interventions that would provide the most benefit to them."

Saxe says other future interventions might target factors that may not cause PTS on their own, but frequently contribute to its development. For example, the study found that difficulty adjusting to work contributed to PTS development in 60 percent of the causal pathways. Therefore, a straightforward solution, like giving more support to new police officers who are having difficulty adjusting to police work, may reduce their risk of getting PTS, according to Saxe.

Moving forward, the researchers plan to apply the same algorithm technique in a much larger group of traumatized adults and children, focusing on a more extensive set of characteristics and experiences.

Irina Shtangeeva is a researcher at the Department of Soil Science and Soil Ecology, St Petersburg University. She has studied the ability of wheat and couch grass to accumulate toxic substances. Both plants were capable of absorbing various chemical elements from contaminated soils. Although the plants were able to accumulate high concentrations of toxicants, they could survive under negative environmental conditions. Interestingly, the plants accumulated toxicants in the aerial parts thus removing them from contaminated soils. This ability of couch grass and wheat to phytoextract toxic metals can be used for effective cleaning of soils.

At present, ecologists often use phytoremediation method for soil decontamination and wastewater treatment. It is a complex of remedial measures in which the key role is played by green plants. Phytoextraction is one of the directions of this method, which makes it possible to remove certain toxic trace elements from contaminated soils using plants-hyperaccumulators. This method is relatively inexpensive. It also does not destroy the soil. However, usually one such a plant is able to accumulate only one element in its aerial parts.

'In my opinion, the search for new plants that can accumulate one metal is a dead-end job,' says Irina Shtangeeva, researcher at the Department of Soil Science and Soil Ecology, St Petersburg University. 'Soil is usually contaminated with more than one toxic trace element. For the successful use of the phytoremediation method, it is therefore important to find such plants that will accumulate a large amount of various toxic elements in the aerial parts without significant damage to plant development.'

The experiments have shown that wheat and couch grass can be promising candidates for the aims of soil remediation. Irina Shtangeeva found that wheat is able to survive in the most adverse conditions and it also efficiently accumulates various substances from the soil. Couch grass is one of the most common weeds in vegetable gardens. It also grows well near the streets with heavy traffic. It is distinguished by its vitality and the ability to accumulate a large amount of different trace elements.

'Nowadays, you can find a lot of research about the plants capable of accumulating cadmium, nickel, selenium and some other trace elements, the so-called heavy metals. However, many other potentially toxic metals and metalloids are not well-studied,' says Irina Shtangeeva. 'That is why I have chosen for my work "unpopular" trace elements that are still little known in the context of phytoremediation: bromine, europium, scandium, thorium, and uranium. Wheat and couch grass have shown the ability to efficiently accumulate all these trace elements simultaneously. As a result, their content in the contaminated soil decreases.'

What happens to the plants after they have absorbed metals from the soil? As Irina Shtangeeva explains, they can be used in the future. In Germany, Switzerland, the USA and some other countries, there are commercial companies that accept these plants for processing and extract the trace elements from them for use in industry.

The scientist emphasises that it is also important to take into account the specific time of cutting the plants. As her other studies show, plants are affected by the circadian rhythm. The concentration of metals in plants can change with the time of day. For example, plants that were collected at noon can contain more contaminants than plants collected in the morning or evening.

Another important factor that helps to make the phytoextraction process more efficient is the use of bacteria. Experiments of Irina Shtangeeva demonstrated that seeds treated with Cellulomonas bacteria allow plants accumulating more metals from contaminated soils. It is quite likely that the bacteria are able to transfer metals into a more available for plants form.

A new theoretical method paves the way to modelling the interior of the ice giants Uranus and Neptune, thanks to computer simulations on the water contained within them. The tool, developed by scientists from SISSA in Trieste and the University of California at Los Angeles and recently published in Nature Communications, allows one to analyse thermal and electric processes occurring at physical conditions that are often impossible to reproduce experimentally, with a much easier and low-cost approach. In this research, the scholars have analysed the conduction of electricity and heat of water under extreme temperature and pressure conditions, such as those that occur inside ice-giant planets as well as in many exo-planets outside of it. Investigating the phenomena that occur under their surface, in fact, is key to understand the evolution of these celestial bodies, to establish their age, and to shed light onto the geometry and evolution of their magnetic fields.

Microscopic scales to tell stories of billions of years

"Hydrogen and oxygen are the most common elements in the Universe, together with helium. It is easy to deduce that water is one of the major constituents of many celestial bodies. Ganymede and Europe, satellites of Jupiter, and Enceladus, satellite of Saturn, present icy surfaces beneath which oceans of water lie. Neptune and Uranus are also probably composed primarily of water", Federico Grasselli and Stefano Baroni, first and last author, explain. "Our knowledge of planetary interiors" - the scholars say - "is based on the features of the planet's surface and magnetic field, which are themselves influenced by the physical characteristics of their internal structure, like the transport of energy, mass and charge through the internal intermediate layers. That is why we have developed a theoretical and computational method to compute the thermal and electrical conductivity of water, in the phases and conditions occurring in such celestial bodies, starting from cutting-edge simulations on the microscopic dynamics of some hundreds of atoms and incorporating the quantum nature of electrons without any further ad-hoc approximation. By simulating the atomic scale for fractions of a nanosecond, we are able to understand what has happened to enormous masses on time scales of billions of years.

Ice, liquid or superionic: a totally different water

The scholars analysed three different phases of water: ice, liquid, and superionic, under the extreme temperature-and-pressure conditions typical of the internal layers of these planets. Grasselli and Baroni explain: "In such exotic physical conditions, we cannot think of ice as we are used to. Even water is actually different, denser, with several molecules dissociated into positive and negative ions, thus carrying an electrical charge. Superionic water lies somewhere between the liquid and solid phases: the oxygen atoms of the H2O molecule are organised in a crystalline lattice, while hydrogen atoms diffuse freely like in a charged fluid". The study of thermal and electrical currents generated by the water in these three different forms is essential to shed light on many unsolved issues.

Transport of heat and electricity to understand the past and present

The two scientists also state that "internal electrical currents are at the base of the Planet's magnetic field. If we understand how the former flow, we can learn a lot more about the latter". And not only that. "The thermal and electrical transport coefficients dictate the planet's history, how and when it was formed, how it cooled down. It is therefore crucial to analyse them with the appropriate tools, like the one we have developed. In particular, the heat conduction properties that emerge from our study allow us to hypothesise that the existence of a frozen core may explain the anomalously low luminosity of Uranus as due to an extremely low heat flux from its interior towards the surface." Furthermore, the electrical conductivity found for the superionic phase is far larger than assumed in previous models of magnetic field generation in Uranus and Neptune. Since superionic water is thought to dominate the dense and sluggish planetary layers below the convective fluid region where their magnetic field is generated, this new evidence could have a great impact on the study of the geometry and evolution of the magnetic fields of the two planets.

Magnetic hyperthermia therapy (MHT) as a noninvasive local treatment strategy is able to ablate tumors using an alternating magnetic field (AMF) to heat up magnetocaloric agents (e.g., magnetic nanoparticles) administered into the tumors. For clinical applications, there is still a demand to find new magnetocaloric agents with strong AMF-induced heating performance and excellent biocompatibility. In addition to magnetic nanoparticles, whose AMF induced heating mechanism is mainly due to the heating power of relaxation loss, bulk conductors such as metals can also be heated under an AMF by the eddy current effect, in which an induced current is generated when a bulk conductor is placed in an AMF. Therefore, it would be significant and interesting to use the eddy thermal effect of bulk metal for tumor ablation. As a kind of biocompatible and biodegradable material, magnesium (Mg) and its alloys have been extensively used in the clinic as an implanted metal.

Recently, the eddy thermal effect of the magnesium alloy (MgA) could be employed for MHT to effectively ablate tumors was reported by Profs. Zhuang Liu and Liang Cheng from Soochow University. Under low-field-intensity AMFs, MgA rods could be rapidly heated, resulting in a temperature increase in nearby tissues. Such AMF-induced eddy thermal heating of MgA could not only be used to kill tumor cells in vitro, but also be employed for effective and accurate ablation of tumors in vivo. In addition to killing tumor tissue in mice, VX2 tumors of much larger sizes growing in rabbits after implantation of MgA rods could also be eliminated after exposure to an AMF, illustrating the ability of MgA-based MHT to kill large-sized tumors. Moreover, the implanted MgA rods showed excellent biocompatibility and ?20% of their mass was degraded within three months. This work not only broadens the application of MgA in biomedicine, but also provides a new strategy for accurate and effective tumor treatment under a low-field-intensity AMF in a minimally invasive manner, applicable even for deep-set and large tumors. Considering the wide clinical use of implantable MgA devices, such a strategy holds great promise in clinical translation.

Corals precipitate their calcareous skeletons (calcium carbonate) from seawater. Over thousands of years, vast coral reefs form due to the deposition of this calcium carbonate. During precipitation, corals prefer carbonate groups containing specific variants of oxygen (chemical symbol: O). For example, the lower the water temperature, the higher the abundance of a heavy oxygen variant, known as isotope 18O, within the precipitated carbonate. Unfortunately, the 18O abundance of the seawater also influences the abundance of 18O in the calcium carbonate - and the contribution of 18O from seawater cannot be resolved when determining temperatures based on carbonate 18O abundances alone.

A great step forward was the discovery that the isotopic composition of the precipitated carbonate allows temperature determinations independent of the composition of the water if the abundance of a specific, very rare carbonate group is measured. This carbonate group contains two heavy isotopes, a heavy carbon isotope (13C) and a heavy oxygen isotope (18O) which are referred to as "clumped isotopes". Clumped isotopes are more abundant at lower temperatures.

However, even with this method there was still a problem: The mineralization process itself can affect the incorporation of heavy isotopes in the calcium carbonate (kinetic effects). If unidentified, the bias introduced by such kinetic effects leads to inaccurate temperature determinations. This particularly applies for climatic archives like corals and cave carbonates.

An international research group led by Professor Jens Fiebig at the Department of Geosciences at Goethe University Frankfurt has now found a solution to this problem. They have developed a highly sensitive method by which - in addition to the carbonate group containing 13C and 18O - the abundance of another, even rarer carbonate group can be determined with very high precision. This group also contains two heavy isotopes, namely two heavy oxygen isotopes (18O).

If the theoretical abundances of these two rare carbonate groups are plotted against each other in a graph, the influence of the temperature is represented by a straight line. If, for a given sample, the measured abundances of the two heavy carbonate groups produce a point away from the straight line, this deviation is due to the influence of the mineralization process.

David Bajnai, Fiebig's former PhD student, applied this method to various climatic archives. Among others, he examined various coral species, cave carbonates and the fossil skeleton of a squid-like cephalopod (belemnite).

Today, Dr. Bajnai is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Cologne. He explains: "We were able to show that - in addition to temperature - the mechanisms of mineralization also greatly affect the composition of many of the carbonates that we examined. In the case of cave carbonates and corals, the observed deviations from the exclusive temperature control confirm model calculations of the respective mineralization processes conducted by Dr. Weifu Guo, our collaborator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the USA. The new method, for the first time, makes it possible to quantitatively assess the influence of the mineralization process itself. This way, the exact temperature of carbonate formation can be determined."

Professor Jens Fiebig is convinced that the new method holds great potential: "We will further validate our new method and identify climatic archives that are particularly suitable for an accurate and highly precise reconstruction of past Earth surface temperatures. We also intend to use our method to study the effect that anthropogenic ocean acidification has on carbonate mineralization, for instance in corals. The new method might even allow us to estimate the pH values of earlier oceans." If all this succeeds, the reconstruction of environmental conditions that prevailed throughout Earth's history could be greatly improved, he adds.