Tech

Cancer deploys a vast array of resources to grow: from instability in its genome to inflammation, as well as the creation of new blood vessels, the microenvironment surrounding the tumour, and the use of mechanisms that allow it to be immortal, among others. At the National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), the Metabolism and Cell Signalling Group, led by Alejo Efeyan, is studying how cancer uses one of these resources, nutrients, for its own advantage, focusing on an important metabolic pathway coordinated by the mTOR gene. Now, in the journal Nature Metabolism, this team has identified the role played by this pathway as the origin of follicular lymphoma and proposes the exploration in future studies of a possible therapeutic strategy using a drug that is already being used in clinical practice to treat other tumours.

Follicular lymphoma is a type of cancer that appears in the white blood cells of the lymphatic system, resulting from the uncontrolled growth and proliferation of these cells in the immune system. It affects 5-7 people out of every 100,000, making it the second most common type of lymphoma, and its prevalence is on the rise. This form of cancer has a long survival period, owing to its slow progression, but there is not yet any cure: over time, patients stop responding to the limited treatment options available.

Its cause and origin are found in the immune system. In order to respond to the attack of a pathogen (a virus or bacteria, for example), the different cells that make up this system (B cells, T cells, macrophages) multiply and organise themselves into an army to attack the pathogen. This army sets up a communication architecture between the cells that breaks apart when the pathogen has been eliminated and the immune response needs to be shut down/eliminated. However, in some anomalous cases, this architecture stays in place, the growth of the B cells involved in this response gets out of control, and gives rise to a tumour, follicular lymphoma. The genetic causes for this phenomenon are still unclear.

Misleading signals from nutrient availability

Researchers have previously observed that one in every six patients with follicular lymphoma presents mutations in RagC, a gene on the mTOR signalling pathway. mTOR can be defined as an orchestra conductor of cells, because it integrates molecular signals via different informants to dictate and coordinate cell growth. One of the informants on the mTOR signalling pathway is RagC, which acts as an on/off switch, enabling mTOR to trigger cell growth only in the presence of the nutrients and energy required to supply the growth of the battalion of B cells. To know whether RagC mutations were behind the origin of follicular lymphoma and were not simply a consequence of the genetic chaos inherent in tumours with multiple mutations, CNIO researchers worked with two mouse models: the first was a classic model for the study of this disease, which shows a chromosome translocation found in the immense majority of cases of follicular lymphoma. The second was created using the new CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique, in which they induced the mutation in RagC.

"What we have seen is that, with the mutation we have induced in RagC, the protein encoded by this gene is always switched to the on state", explains Efeyan, leader of the Group and principal author on the study. "As a result, the B cells involved in an immune response believe they have nutrients to grow and they do so without control. Our study confirms that mutations in RagC are at the origin of the disease, and, therefore, this is the first in vivo evidence of the role played by RagC in promoting tumours, alongside the genes that inform mTOR of the presence of nutrients for growth".

Therapies against the 'deafness' caused by mutations in RagC

Exploration of this pathway is interesting for researchers, because it has a pharmacological intervention that, if confirmed through future studies, could be transferred over to clinical practice fairly swiftly: mTOR inhibitors such as rapamycin, already approved for other types of tumours, such as kidney cancer, which, by switching this pathway off, controls its anomalous growth. "When we used rapamycin to treat mice with RagC mutations, they had a prolonged positive response, living for longer and with less aggressive lymphomas", said Ana Ortega-Molina, the lead author on this paper. "Although these treatments do not offer a complete cure, the delay in the progression of a tumour that is already slow-growing in itself could have major implications for the survival of patients".

Although only lymphomas with RagC mutation displayed a long-lasting response, the mice that only contained chromosome translocation also responded positively to the therapy, which indicates that the mTOR pathway is important in all types of follicular lymphoma, regardless of their origin.

The researchers believe that the fact that this anomaly particularly affects the B cells involved in an immune response could be due to the accelerated proliferation capacity characteristic of these types of cells, which need to increase their army as quickly as possible when the body is under threat, making them more sensitive to the lack of nutrients and mutations in these genes.

The researchers were particularly surprised that, when there is a mutation in RagC, these cells appear to become deaf to other kinds of cell communication signals, not only the ones that make them believe there are nutrients available for growth, but also others, such as those that warn that the pathogen they think they are responding to is already under control and that the army should stand down. "If we want to attack them with therapies that eliminate the signals from their surroundings so that they stop proliferating, we would have to identify the ones that are indifferent to this strategy and try to remedy that deafness so that therapies can take effect", concludes Efeyan.

In future research, the researchers seek to determine the importance of the mTOR pathway for other tumours and whether dietary interventions could help to improve the response, since the function of RagC is to activate when there are nutrients available and to switch off in the absence of such nutrients.

"Seeing the pictures appear on the computer screen was the best day at work I've ever had," says Simen Ådnøy Ellingsen, an associate professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Department of Energy and Process Engineering.

That was the day that PhD candidate Benjamin Keeler Smeltzer and master's student Eirik Æsøy had shown in the lab that Ellingsen was right and sent him the photos from the experiment.

Five years ago, Ellingsen had challenged accepted knowledge from 1887, armed with a pen and paper, and won.

He solved a problem regarding the so-called Kelvin angle in boat wakes, which has been unchallenged for 127 years.

The boat wake is the v-shaped pattern that a boat or canoe makes when moving through the water. You've undoubtedly seen one at some point.

It has long been assumed that the angle of the v-shaped wake behind a boat should always be just below 39 degrees, as long as the water isn't too shallow. Regardless whether it's behind a supertanker or a duck, this should always be true. Or not.

For like so many accepted facts, this turns out to be wrong, or at least not always the case. Ellingsen was able to prove this.

"For me, it was a totally new field, and nobody told me it was hard," Ellingsen explained when he first made his discovery.

Boat wakes can actually have a completely different angle under certain circumstances, and can even be off-centred with respect to the direction of the boat. This can happen when there are different currents in different layers of water, known as shear flow.

For shear flow, Kelvin's theory on boat wakes isn't applicable.

"It took the genius of people like Cauchy, Poisson and Kelvin to solve these wave problems for the first time, even for the simplest case of still water without currents. It's far easier for us to figure out the more general cases later, like we've done here, " Ellingsen explains.

Ring waves also act funny under certain circumstances. If you throw a pebble in a lake on a peaceful summer's day, the wave pattern will be perfect, concentric circles. But not if there's shear flow. Then, the rings might turn into ovals.

Ellingsen also predicted this, expanding Cauchy and Poisson's theory from 1815.

"After I did the first calculations, I was on a beach in the Netherlands watching the water flow back out after a wave. I made some rings in the water and took some photos. Looking at them later, the rings looked oblong to me, and I got pretty excited. That wasn't science, of course, but now it is!" says Ellingsen.

That was how Ellingsen ended up on the cover of the prestigious publication Journal of Fluid Mechanics. But all of his calculations had been done on paper, and had yet to be observed empirically.

Now, however, there's lab research to back up his work, thanks to the PhD candidate and master's student who were able to conduct experiments in a specially developed research tank, with Ellingsen as their supervisor.

Eirik Æsøy has a background as a technician, which saved time and money in building the lab. It took about six months to get everything up and running.

"Æsøy and I set up all the equipment to create the currents we needed," Smeltzer explains.Their results have also been published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics."It's pretty remarkable that the experiments from our little wave basin are being published there," says Smeltzer.

The results from their research on the Kelvin angle might have real practical consequences, such as potentially helping reduce fuel consumption in ships. A large portion of fuel on ships actually goes into making waves.

"Fuel consumption can double if the vessel is travelling downstream compared to upstream," Ellingsen said.

These calculations are made based on currents at the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon in the USA. Here the currents are strong and the boats many.

So research on boats and ships in different currents is important for anyone interested in reducing fuel consumption and consequently, emissions.

Ellingsen insists their results do not disprove Kelvin's theory, only extend it. Kelvin's angle still holds true as long as there are no current layers under the surface when the water is deep.

But as soon as there's movement between layers of water, so that different layers move at different speeds, the angle changes. Sometimes by a lot.

In theory, with extremely strong currents moving perpendicular to the direction of the boat, the wake can actually end up in front of the boat on one side.

"Then you should probably go sailing somewhere else," says Ellingsen.

The precision rotary sample table designed at the HZB rotates around its axis at several hundred revolutions per second with extreme precision. The HZB team headed Dr. Francisco García-Moreno combined the rotary sample table with precision optics and achieved a world record of over 25 tomographic images per second using the BESSY II EDDI beamline in 2018.

Now the team, together with the group headed by Prof. Marco Stampanoni from the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), has achieved a new world record at SLS. To accomplish this, they set up the rotary sample table together with improved optics, and used ultra-fast image acquisition & data transfer rates at the SLS's TOMCAT instrument. "Over 200 tomographic images per second can now be acquired - and that during measurement intervals of only several minutes", says García-Moreno. The term tomoscopy was coined for this new imaging method.

-Tomoscopy: new imaging method-

Dr. Christian Schlepütz of PSI emphasises: "The enormous volume of data packets generated during each tomoscopy has to be transmitted and stored at the extremely high data rate of eight gigabytes per second."

Each individual image must be calculated from the measurement data. The images then receive additional automatic processing that facilitates quantitative analysis. In order to handle the processing of several terabytes of data from each experiment, Dr. Paul Kamm from the HZB has developed and implemented unique dedicated processing software.

The partners in this collaboration have used the new imaging method to observe dynamic processes in great detail at high temporal resolution that occur during the foaming of liquid aluminium. In this way, processes taking place during the formation of foam in molten metals can be investigated and better understood. This is important in order to achieve optimum material distribution and uniform pore formation in the foam, which is later cured, so that the foam can be used in lightweight construction.

-Metal foams for lightweight construction-

Metal foams are an important class of materials for lightweight construction, and they are an advantageous subject of investigation for the newly developed imaging method, since liquid metal is largely insensitive to radiation damage, and the imaging speeds achieved are extremely well-suited to foaming phenomena.

Ultrafast computer tomoscopy could also provide interesting insights into many other processes. For example, it could be used to investigate how materials change during laser welding or what happens when batteries overheat due to short circuits (thermal runaway).

The researchers at the HZB and PSI are now working on increasing the rotational speed in order to further increase the temporal resolution of the measurements.

Despite years of research, the brain still contains broad areas of unchartered territory. A team of scientists, led by neuroscientists from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and University of Sydney, recently found new evidence revising the traditional view of the primate brain's visual system organization using data from marmosets. This remapping of the brain could serve as a future reference for understanding how the highly complex visual system works, and potentially influence the design of artificial neural networks for machine vision.

In the quest of the whole-brain connectivity in marmosets, the team found that parts of the primate visual system may work differently than previously thought. Mapping out how distinct types of cells connect can help researchers understand how groups of cells play in concert to relay and process sensory information from the outside environment to the brain.

For their research, the team looked at the thalamus, a brain structure located above the brainstem that consists of different nuclei (groups of cells or neurons that are packed together) thought to relay and coordinate sensory information to the cerebral cortex, typically conceived of as the seat of higher cognitive function.

Researchers have traditionally categorized different thalamic nuclei as either relay nuclei or association nuclei. The visual thalamus, for example, contains the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), considered to be a relay of information from the retina to the visual cortex, and the visual pulvinar, which is thought to be responsible for multisensory coordination and attention.

The new study found that the same type of cells exist in specific regions of the LGN and the visual pulvinar. These cells, the researchers discovered, form the same kind of connectivity with the cortex, implying that these sub-compartments of the LGN and pulvinar may share the same function, and collaborate in a way that wasn't previously expected.

The research is also important because it's the first time this type of brain mapping was conducted on primates, which have brain structures similar to humans.

"The pulvinar is not well defined in rodent models, that's the value of this particular research in primates, that would be transferable to humans," said Bingxing Huo, a computational science manager in CSHL professor Partha Mitra's lab and the first author on the study. Their findings are published in the European Journal of Neuroscience.

This study is the second piece of data analysis the group has published on this marmoset dataset. This series of research show that in analyzing data about the whole brain in finer detail, "we may have to redraw some of the traditional boundaries that people have drawn, or reclassify functions that people have attributed to parts of the brain," said Mitra, the senior author on the study.

Outside of basic science implications of the findings, Mitra also suggested possible applications in artificial intelligence.

"People are basing the algorithms that they develop on a dated view of the visual system's anatomy," Mitra said. "As we understand it better, maybe that will allow for new thinking about network algorithms for machine vision."

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. -- Researchers at Binghamton University, State University of New York researchers have found a way to improve the performance of tiny sensors that could have wide-reaching implications for electronic devices we use every day.

The study finds a more reliable way to use actuators that control MEMS (microelectromechanical systems), which are microscopic devices with moving parts that are often produced in the same way as electronics.

The Binghamton team found that combining two methods for electrostatic actuation - parallel-plate and levitation actuators - led to a predictable linearity that neither of those systems offered on its own.

This investigation is funded by a $480,958 grant from the National Science Foundation mainly conducted by PhD student Mark Pallay under the supervision of principal investigator Shahrzad (Sherry) Towfighian and co-principal investigator Ronald N. Miles, associate professor and distinguished professor of mechanical engineering, respectively.

The team's findings could be revolutionary for microphone manufacturing, because with this design the signal can be boosted high enough that the background noise from the electronics is no longer an issue. More than 2 billion microphones are made around the world each year, and that number is growing as more devices feature vocal interaction.

"The electronic noise is really hard to get rid of," Miles said. "You hear this hiss in the background. When you make really small microphones - which is what we want to do - the noise is a bigger and bigger issue. It's more and more of a challenge. This is one path toward avoiding that and getting the noise down."

Towfighian, who has studied MEMS extensively, explained that actuators in the micro-devices are normally just two plates with a gap between. Those plates close and the device activates when it receives a certain voltage.

It is difficult to fine-tune that kind of actuator, but adding two electrodes on the sides of the plates creates a levitation effect that simultaneously pushes them apart and allows better control over the device.

"Combining the two systems, we can get rid of nonlinearity," she said. "If you give it some voltage, it stands at some distance and maintains that over a large range of motion."

Miles said that predictability is crucial when building actuators for microphones, which have been the focus of his recent research.

"In a sensor, life is much easier if it moves one unit and the output voltage increases in one unit, or something in proportion as you go," he said. "In an actuator, you're trying to push things, so if you're giving it twice as much voltage, you want it to go twice as far and not four times as far.

"It's like if you had a ruler where the inches varied in length as you moved up. With capacitive sensors, you have these strange variations with sensitivity and output as you move up the scale. That's a massive headache."

When the Binghamton researchers began their study, they didn't know that combining the two ideas would provide as desirable an outcome as it has.

"The magic - the dumb luck - is that the nonlinearities cancel each other out," Miles said. "They tend to be in opposite directions. We're able to show that over a significant range, they're linear.

"By having both of these electrode configurations, it gives you more knobs to turn and more adjustments you can make with applying voltages to different electrodes. With a simple parallel plate, you have one voltage across them and you don't have much design freedom. With this, there are more electrodes and you get much more control over the design."

In addition to the possibilities for microphone manufacture - making them smaller, better and cheaper - Towfighian sees how the new actuator design can be used in her line of study, which includes gyroscopes, accelerometers, pressure sensors and other kinds of switches.

"We showed this concept at a basic level, but it has wide applications," she said. "It can improve the function of many devices, so the impact could be huge."

More than 200,000 people are employed as truck drivers in Australia and while their role in transporting goods across our wide brown land is critical, they are among the nation's most unhealthy.

Dr Marguerite Sendall from QUT's School of Public Health and Social Work at the Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, led a survey of 231 truck drivers aged between 20 and 71 and discovered around two thirds of them are classified as obese, compared to one third of the Australian population.

On a more positive note though, the majority recognised the importance of improving their health, are motivated to do so and believe workplace health promotion is the most effective tool for that.

"Truck drivers' work environments generally consist of long sedentary hours, erratic schedules and tight deadlines," Dr Sendall said.

"They have limited access to healthy food options or physical activity and are therefore considered to be at a far greater risk of life-threatening conditions like cardio-vascular disease, diabetes and some cancers."

Dr Sendall and colleagues Laura McCosker, Rahma Ahmed and Associate Professor Phil Crane, gave a multiple choice, short response survey to drivers at an Australian truck show in Brisbane. They asked them about self-reported health, their sources for health information, how much fruit and vegetables they ate, how much unhealthy food and how much moderate intensity physical exercise they did each week.

Their paper on the findings - Truckies' Nutrition and Physical Activity: A Cross-sectional Survey in Queensland, Australia, has just been published in the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

"Our previous research has suggested the use of social media and digital technologies as a health promotion intervention for truck drivers has potential," said Dr Sendall.

"Truck drivers work long hours, are a highly mobile, pressured and hard-to-reach group so traditional health promotion strategies, such as television campaigns, can easily be missed. However, transport industry workplaces, including truck cabs, depots and truck stops, are seen as settings where health messages can be promoted effectively.

"It has been shown that workplace health promotion can generate improvements in drivers' health knowledge, behaviours and self-reported health outcomes, as well as ease the burden on our public health system. Our research demonstrates a need for industry-wide adoption of this approach, along with some government incentives to encourage that Australia-wide."

Dr Sendall said she was collaborating with Brisbane-based Team Transport and Logistics to continue her push to help drivers make better choices about their health behaviour.

The research backs up a 12-year Monash University-led Driving Health Study published in 2018 which revealed truck drivers had a 13 fold higher risk of dying at work than other Australian workers, making it among the most dangerous occupations in the country.

It found truck driving was a job with many health risks - long working hours, lots of sitting, poor nutrition, social isolation, shift work, time pressure, elevated risk of chronic disease and musculoskeletal conditions, low levels of job control, and a high risk of road crashes.

The Earth's subsurface is an extremely active place, where the movements and friction of plates deep underground shape our landscape and govern the intensity of hazards above. While the Earth's movements during earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have been recorded by delicate instruments, analyzed by researchers and constrained by mathematical equations, they don't tell the whole story of the shifting plates beneath our feet.

Over the past two decades, the advent of the global positioning system - including receivers with extremely sensitive sensors that capture millimeters of movement - has made scientists aware of earthquake-like phenomena that have been challenging to untangle. Among them are so-called slow slip events, or slow-moving earthquakes - sliding that occurs over weeks at a time unbeknownst to humans on the surface.

These slow slip events occur all over the world and possibly help trigger larger earthquakes. The largest slow slip events occur in subduction zones, where one tectonic plate dives beneath another, eventually forming mountains and volcanoes over millions of years. New computer simulations produced by researchers at Stanford University and published online June 15 in the Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids may explain these hidden movements.

"Slow slip is such an intriguing phenomenon. Slow slip events are both so widespread and really so unexplained that they're a puzzle that dangles before us as scientists that we all want to solve," said study co-author Eric Dunham, an associate professor of geophysics in Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). "We've known about slow slip for almost 20 years and there's still not a great understanding of why it happens."

Stealthy but strong

These events are especially challenging to explain because of their unstable but sluggish nature. The fault does not slide steadily but instead, sliding periodically, accelerates, yet never reaches the point where it sends out seismic waves large enough for humans to detect.

Despite their stealthy nature, slow slip events can add up. In an ice stream in Antarctica, the slow slip events occur twice daily, last 30 minutes and are equivalent to magnitude 7.0 earthquakes, Dunham said.

Researchers think changes in friction explain how quickly rock on either side of the fault slips. With that in mind, they assumed slow slip events started as earthquakes, with a type of friction known as rate-weakening that makes sliding fundamentally unstable. But many laboratory friction experiments contradicted that idea. Instead, they had found that rocks from slow slip regions display a more stable kind of friction known as rate-strengthening, widely thought to produce stable sliding. The new computer simulations resolved this inconsistency by showing how slow slip can arise with contrary-seeming rate-strengthening friction.

"A handful of studies had shown that there are ways to destabilize rate-strengthening friction. However, until our paper, no one had realized that if you simulated these instabilities, they actually turn into slow slip, they don't turn into earthquakes," according to lead author Elias Heimisson, a doctoral candidate at Stanford Earth. "We also identified a new mechanism for generating slow slip instabilities."

Laws of physics

Dunham's research group approaches unanswered questions about the Earth by considering all the possible physical processes that might be at play. In this case, faults occur in rocks that are saturated in fluid, giving them what's known as a poroelastic nature in which the pores allow the rock to expand and contract, which changes the fluid pressure. The group was curious about how those changes in pressure can change the frictional resistance on faults.

"In this case, we did not start on this project to explain slow slip events - we started on it because we knew that rocks have this poroelastic nature and we wanted to see what consequences it had," Dunham said. "We never thought it would give rise to slow slip events and we never thought it would destabilize faults with this type of friction."

With these new simulations that account for the rock's porous nature, the group found that as rocks get squeezed and fluids cannot escape, the pressure increases. That pressure increase reduces friction, leading to a slow slip event.

"The theory is high-level," Heimisson said. "We see these interesting things when you account for poroelasticity and people might want to use it more broadly in models of seismic cycles or specific earthquakes."

Heimisson will be creating a 3D simulation based on this theory as a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology.

Martin Almquist, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Geophysics, is a co-author on the study.

The research was supported by the Stanford Consortium for Induced and Triggered Seismicity, the Southern California Earthquake Center, NASA Headquarters under the NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship Program and the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.

"In our immune system, antibodies recognize viruses, bacteria and even cancer cells through their Fab arms, initiating recruitment of leucocytes for the destruction of these invaders. The recruitment is mediated by receptors on the leucocytes which, to date, have been supposed to bind the Fc portion of the antibody and have therefore been termed Fc receptors. This textbook view has been established based on cumulative data obtained primarily using Fab and Fc fragments cleaved from antibody molecules.

The collaborative groups including researchers at Nagoya City University, National Institutes of Natural Sciences, and Osaka University reassessed this paradigm employing modern biophysical techniques. Using high-speed atomic force microscopy and hydrogen-deuterium exchange mass spectrometry, they revealed that, in addition to the canonical Fc-mediated contact, the Fab portion of the antibody is directly involved in binding to a cognate Fc receptor.

Enhancement of Fc receptor binding by molecular engineering is a promising strategy to improve the functional efficacy of therapeutic antibodies for cancer treatments. Such attempts have thus far mainly focused on the Fc trunk of the antibody. The groups' findings will open up a new avenue for developing therapeutic antibodies with enhanced binding properties to the Fc receptor by engineering approaches targeting the previously unknown contact sites in their Fab arms."

Finnish StopDia study yielded promising preliminary results in reducing the risk of type 2 diabetes. Lifestyle guidance in a group and application that supports the adoption of healthy lifestyle habits helped StopDia participants to reduce their waist circumference and improve their dietary habits. For example, their fruit and vegetable consumption increased.

"Using the BitHabit application that supports the adoption of healthy lifestyles for a year combined with group guidance improved the diets of the participants and narrowed their waist circumference. These preliminary results are promising and encourage us to continue the development and use of the model," says Professor Timo Lakka, Co-Principal Investigator of the StopDia study, from University of Eastern Finland.

The purpose of the BitHabit application is to automate the adoption of new habits and to generate a sustainable behaviour change. The application allowed the participants to make healthy choices that suited them and tick them as accomplished.

The new habit may be e.g. taking healthy snacks to eat between meals at work, so that hunger in the afternoon does not cause fatigue and unhealthy choices.

"Surprisingly, the application was used more actively by the older participants. In other words, it is worthwhile to offer digital alternatives to people in an unprejudiced manner, regardless of their age," explains Marja Harjumaa, Senior Scientist at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, who is involved in the development of the application.

The study showed that the Finnish Diabetes Risk Score (FINDRISC), the most widely used risk test for type 2 diabetes in the world, effectively identified people at increased risk without laboratory testing.

More than half of the StopDia participants with an elevated FINDRISC score in the digital screening already had a glucose metabolism disorder. In addition, five per cent were diagnosed with previously undetected diabetes. The study also revealed that healthcare reaches only a small proportion of people who would benefit from preventive activities.

The best way to reach people and get them involved in the study was through social media and the editorial content of newspapers. In particular, journalistic articles with personal interviews brought vast numbers of people to the risk screening website. The visibility acquired through social media, on the other hand, is mostly subject to a charge. In any case, to be successful, informing still requires contents that the target group finds interesting.

"Men traditionally are less interested to take part in health promotion campaigns and studies. Their participation was most effectively promoted by a word from a friend or a relative. Many men pointed out that 'the wife urged me to come," says Jaana Lindström, Research Manager and developer of the FINDRISC test.

In StopDia, the information disseminated in workplaces reached women in particular.

The StopDia study examined how to reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes not only by providing individual lifestyle support but also by targeting the living environment and at the level of society. Environment has a powerful impact on decision-making and behaviour. Decisions are only partly based on conscious deliberation. A great deal of daily choices occur automatically - often unnoticed.

The StopDia at Work study aimed at altering the choice architecture of working environments to facilitate healthy dietary choices and physical activity at the workplace. This approach, also known as nudging, differs from the more conventional methods used for promoting wellbeing at work, such as campaigns and sports benefits.

Preliminary results suggest that the consumption of vegetables, fruit and nuts during working hours among the employees of participating workplaces was greater at the end of the study compared to the beginning of the study. No difference was observed in the consumption of savoury and sweet delicacies. Performing restoring break exercise, such as stretching, was also more common at the end of the study.

The Stop Diabetes (StopDia) study is funded by the Strategic Research Council (SRC), operating in conjunction with the Academy of Finland. The project is part of the Health, Welfare and Lifestyles (HEALTH) programme that ended this year. The study was conducted by the University of Eastern Finland, the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) and VTT in collaboration with local and regional authorities, and regional healthcare operators. There were also more than 20 societal operators involved in the activities, including such organisations as the Finnish Diabetes Association and the Finnish Heart Association, as well as approximately 40 employers.

These preliminary results of the study are published at StopDia National Seminar on 21 August.

Long term exposure to pollutants from vehicle exhaust is linked to a heightened risk of the common eye condition age-related macular degeneration, or AMD for short, suggests research published online in the Journal of Investigative Medicine.

Exposure to the highest levels of air pollutants was associated with an almost doubling in risk among those aged 50 and older, the findings show.

AMD is a neurodegenerative condition that affects the middle part of the retina, known as the macula. It is one of the most common causes of poor vision in older people, and is most likely caused by an interplay between genetic and environmental risk factors.

Long term exposure to air pollution has been linked to a heightened risk of several conditions, including respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. But less is known about its potential effects on eye health.

To explore this further, the Taiwanese researchers analysed national health insurance and air quality data from 1998 to 2010 to see if there might be a link between long term exposure to the pollutants nitrogen dioxide (NO?) and carbon monoxide (CO) and a heightened risk of AMD.

As the condition is more common among older age groups, the researchers focused only on 39,819 people aged 50 and above, most of whom lived in either highly (30%) or moderately (32.5%) urbanised areas.

Because there are seasonal variations in air pollutant levels, the researchers calculated an average annual exposure, which was categorised into four different levels.

During the monitoring period, 1442 people developed AMD.

After taking account of potentially influential factors, such as age, sex, household income, and underlying illnesses, those with the highest level of exposure to NO? (more than 9825.5 ppb) were nearly twice (91%) as likely to develop AMD as those exposed to the lowest level (less than 6563.2 ppb).

And people who were exposed to the highest level of CO (more than 297.1 ppm) were 84% more likely to develop AMD than those exposed to the lowest level (less than 195.7 ppm).

The highest rate (5.8%) of newly diagnosed AMD was among people living in the area with the highest level of CO exposure.

This is an observational study, and as such, can't establish cause. And the authors emphasise that the data didn't include information on other risk factors, such as smoking, genetics, and inflammation.

This is the first study of its kind to "demonstrate a significant association between AMD and high levels of ambient NO? and CO," they write.

Recent research has implicated NO? in cardiovascular and neurological ill health, and as the retina is part of the central nervous system, there is a plausible biological explanation for its vulnerability to this pollutant, they add.

For the first time scientists have been able to reconstruct the chemical composition of rainwater from 300 million year old minerals, allowing them to unpick some of the history of Brittany and Western France since the rain fell in the late Carboniferous period, just before the time of the dinosaurs. The results point to the area being mountainous and originally located close to the Equator. This work is presented at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry congress* in Barcelona.

The results come from isotopic analysis of rain which fell on the ancient Variscan belt mountain range. As lead researcher, Dr Camille Dusséaux (University of Plymouth, UK) said:

"Once we realised that the water in the sample was from rainfall, it meant that we could use standard geochemistry techniques to look back into history. This means that the rainfall can tell us about the altitude, the latitude of the mountains where it fell, and hints at why some radioactive minerals are found in the area".

The scientists analysed granite samples found today between Brest and Nantes. They also took samples from the Western part of the French Massif Central (Limousin). During the late Carboniferous period, these areas were located near the Equator, and were part of the Variscan Belt mountain chain that extended into Spain, Germany, and Southern England. Violent mountain building processes caused these areas to be deformed and cracked, forming major fault zones. This allowed rainwater to sink to ?15km below the surface.

Camille Dusséaux, commented: "We've managed to reconstruct the isotope composition of rainwater from minerals it interacted with while the continents were undergoing deformation. We've found that this interaction took place 15 km underground thanks to deep faults that dissected this mountainous area and played the role of conduits for rainfall to go down into the Earth.

"We used mass spectrometry to accurately identify the elements in the samples. We were able to measure the hydrogen isotope ratios in muscovite, which is a mineral found in granite that contains about 4% water in its structure. The amount of one type of hydrogen isotope was low enough to suggest a simple answer: rainwater had interacted with the mineral during its formation. This is not the oldest rainwater ever found, but the oldest where scientists have been able to isotopically reconstruct its composition and history".

They dated the samples by measuring the radioactive decay of Argon, and this confirmed they were around 300 million years old. Comparing the relative ratios of oxygen and hydrogen isotopes showed that the Variscan samples matched those which came from moderate to high altitude, indicating that the rain fell on a mountain range.

"This may help resolve a question which has been puzzling geologists for some time" said Dr Dusséaux. "The underlying geology has shown that it was likely that the Variscan Belt was a mountain range, but finding proof has been difficult".

"This study suggests, in combination with earlier studies, that the circulation of rainwater in the Variscan mountain range had an impact on uranium mineralization. Between 320 and 300 million years ago, the oxidising rainwater leached the uranium ore out of the granites, and transported this uranium within the continents where it was precipitated in rocks called black schists. This created the uranium deposits which have been mined until recently in France and triggered the precipitation of uranium oxide that can have an impact on our health. This can break down to form radon gas, which has been causing problems for people living in granite houses built over the last centuries, not only in France but also in other granite-rich areas of the ancient Variscan belt, such as South-West England and elsewhere".

Commenting, Dr Catriona Menzies (University of Aberdeen) said:

"This study is a nice example highlighting how traditional isotope geochemistry and careful petrography of minerals formed deep in the Earth can shed light on surface conditions, even before dinosaurs roamed the Earth. The infiltration of rainwater deep into mountain belts is now being found in many ancient and modern regions, and suggests that rainwater may be responsible for controlling important processes, such as seismicity and the distribution of mineral resources, even deep within our Earth".

Dr Menzies was not involved in this work, this is an independent comment.

Scientists have found that increasing oxygen levels are linked to the rise of North American dinosaurs around 215 M years ago. A new technique for measuring oxygen levels in ancient rocks shows that oxygen levels in North American rocks leapt by nearly a third in just a couple of million years, possibly setting the scene for a dinosaur expansion into the tropics of North America and elsewhere. This is presented in a Keynote talk at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry conference, in Barcelona.

The US-based scientists have developed a new technique for releasing tiny amounts of gas trapped inside ancient carbonate minerals. The gases are then channelled directly into a mass spectrometer, which measures their composition.

Lead researcher, Professor Morgan Schaller (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York) said:
"We tested rocks from the Colorado Plateau and the Newark Basin that formed at the same time about 1000 km apart on the supercontinent of Pangea. Our results show that over a period of around 3 million years - which is very rapid in geological terms - the oxygen levels in the atmosphere jumped from around 15% to around 19%. For comparison, there is 21% oxygen in today's atmosphere. We really don't know what might have caused this increase, but we also see a drop in CO2 levels at that time."

"We expect that this change in oxygen concentration would have been global change, and in fact we found the change in samples which were 1000km apart. What is remarkable is that right at the oxygen peak we see the first dinosaurs appearing in the North American tropics, the Chindesaurus. The Sauropods followed soon afterwards. Again, we can't yet say if this was a global development, and the dinosaurs don't rise to ecological dominance in the tropics until after the End-Triassic extinction. What we can say is that this shows that the changing environment 215 M years ago was right for their evolutionary diversification, but of course oxygen levels may not have been the only factor".

Chindesaurus was an upright carnivorous dinosaur (around 2m long and nearly 1m high). Found extensively in North America, with origins in the North American Tropics, it was a characteristic late Triassic Dinosaur of the American Southwest. It was originally discovered in the Petrified Forest National Park. The Sauropods, which appeared soon after Chindesaurus, were the largest animals ever to live on land.

Commenting, Professor Mike Benton (University of Bristol) said:
'The first dinosaurs were quite small, but higher oxygen levels in the atmosphere are often associated with a trend to larger size. This new result is interesting as the timing of oxygen rise and dinosaur appearance is good, although dinosaurs had become abundant in South America rather earlier, about 232 million years ago.'
Professor Benton was not involved in this work; this is an independent comment.

At the time the gases were trapped, the Colorado Plateau and the Newark Basin were part of the giant supercontinent, Pangea. Both were located near the equator. The rocks containing the oxygen and carbon dioxide were dated by measuring the radioactive decay of Uranium which was found in the samples.

AMES, Iowa - Jigang Wang can break his research goals into just a few words: "To discover and control quantum states of matter."

But, it takes paragraphs, analogies, illustrations, internet searches and a willingness to decipher talk about "non-equilibrium quantum phase discovery via non-thermal ultrafast quench near quantum critical points" to get a handle on those eight words.

Even though it's a head-scratcher, Wang's work could be a big deal to all of us.

Harnessing quantum physics - the particles and energy down at atomic scales - could lead to better computing, sensing, communicating and data storing technologies. But first researchers such as Wang - a professor of physics and astronomy at Iowa State University and a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory - need to provide more answers about the quantum world.

In Wang's case, many of those answers are coming from quantum terahertz spectroscopy that can visualize and steer electrons.

A three-year, $465,000 grant from the U.S. Army Research Office has supported the spectroscopy studies by Wang and his research group.

Wang and his team have announced three discoveries based on those studies:

The first, reported in Nature Materials, describes how ultrafast pulses of photons - laser flashes at trillions of cycles per second - can switch on a state of matter hidden by superconductivity, the flow of electricity without resistance, usually at super-cold temperatures. The discovery demonstrates a new tuning knob - called "quantum quench" by the physicists - for non-equilibrium materials discovery such as switching on exotic, hidden states without temperature change.

The second, reported in Physical Review Letters, describes how the terahertz instrumentation can trace electron pairings in materials, revealing a new, light-induced, long-lived state of matter.

And the third, reported in Nature Photonics, describes how the ultrafast flashes of light Wang and his collaborators work with can be used like a knob to control and accelerate supercurrents. The flashes break equilibrium symmetry, thus triggering forbidden quantum oscillations that can't be achieved by any known means.

Wang has several collaborators who have contributed to the discoveries: the Ilias E. Perakis group at the University of Alabama at Birmingham contributed theoretical simulations; the Chang-Beom Eom group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Paul Canfield group at Iowa State contributed high-quality superconducting materials and their characterizations.

High-speed potential

The Army Research Office sees potential in quantum technologies:

"Dr. Wang's work is revealing new physics and how we can use light to invoke new properties that are otherwise unavailable," said Marc Ulrich, physics division chief at the Army Research Office, an element of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory. "Light-induced phases may enable technologies such as optical computing, novel sensors or unforeseen ways to control light or electrons."

The research in Wang's lab is mostly unexplored territory in condensed matter physics and materials science, Wang said. And so there's more work ahead to knock down knowledge barriers to help push development of quantum technologies and their high-speed communication capabilities.

"We'd like to use these tools - these fast flashes and high frequencies - to probe smaller scales, 1 to 10 nanometers (that's 1 to 10 billionths of a meter)," Wang said. "We'd also like to develop controls using terahertz light for the quantum computation community."

And how did all of this get started in Wang's lab? Where did these ideas about quantum discovery and control come from?

"I've always been fascinated by the discovery of new states of matter by developing new tools, especially those states that are difficult or even can't be accessed by conventional means," Wang said.

That means minimum changing of temperatures, pressures, chemical compositions or magnetic fields to get to these new states of matter that are typically unstable in equilibrium and often hidden by conventional measurement methods but have been stabilized in his experiments, Wang said.

Nor does he focus on accidental discoveries that sometimes happen by just trying something in the lab. Wang wants to develop and apply precise and powerful laboratory tools in a controlled, rational way to find these new states of matter hidden within superconducting and other complex materials.

By doing that, he said he's learning these intense terahertz flashes produced by his laboratory instruments really can be a control knob for finding, stabilizing, probing and potentially controlling these exotic states and their unique properties.

"We have established a new approach," he said, "to access and potentially control exotic states of matter."

A few summers ago throngs of people began using the Pokemon Go app, the first mass-market augmented reality game, to collect virtual creatures hiding in the physical world.

For now, AR remains mostly a solo activity, but soon people might be using the technology for a variety of group activities, such as playing multi-user games or collaborating on work or creative projects. But how can developers guard against bad actors who try to hijack these experiences, and prevent privacy breaches in environments that span digital and physical space?

University of Washington security researchers have developed ShareAR, a toolkit that lets app developers build in collaborative and interactive features without sacrificing their users' privacy and security. The researchers presented their findings Aug. 14 at the USENIX Security Symposium in Santa Clara, California.

"A key role for computer security and privacy research is to anticipate and address future risks in emerging technologies," said co-author Franziska Roesner, an assistant professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. "It is becoming clear that multi-user AR has a lot of potential, but there has not been a systematic approach to addressing the possible security and privacy issues that will arise."

Sharing virtual objects in AR is in some ways like sharing files on a cloud-based platform like Google Drive -- but there's a big difference.

"AR content isn't confined to a screen like a Google Doc is. It's embedded into the physical world you see around you," said first author Kimberly Ruth, a UW undergraduate student in the Allen School. "That means there are security and privacy considerations that are unique to AR."

For example, people could potentially add virtual inappropriate images to physical public parks, scrawl virtual offensive messages on places of worship or even place a virtual "kick me" sign on an unsuspecting user's back.

"We wanted to think about how the technology should respond when a person tries to harass or spy on others, or tries to steal or vandalize other users' AR content," Ruth said. "But we also don't want to shut down the positive aspects of being able to share content using AR technologies, and we don't want to force developers to choose between functionality and security."

To address these concerns, the team created a prototype toolkit, ShareAR, for the Microsoft HoloLens. ShareAR helps applications create, share and keep track of objects that users share with each other.

Another potential issue with multi-user AR is that developers need a way to signal the physical location of someone's private virtual content to keep other users from accidentally standing in between that person and their work -- like standing between someone and the TV. So the team developed "ghost objects" for ShareAR.

"A ghost object serves as a placeholder for another virtual object. It has the same physical location and rough 3D bulk as the object it stands in for, but it doesn't show any of the sensitive information that the original object contains," Ruth said. "The benefit of this approach over putting up a virtual wall is that, if I'm interacting with a virtual private messaging window, another person in the room can't sneak up behind me and peer over my shoulder to see what I'm typing -- they always see the same placeholder from any angle."

The team tested ShareAR with three case study apps. Creating objects and changing permission settings within the apps were the most computationally expensive actions. But, even when the researchers tried to stress out the system with large numbers of users and shared objects, ShareAR took no longer than 5 milliseconds to complete a task. In most cases, it took less than 1 millisecond.

Developers can now download ShareAR to use for their own HoloLens apps.

"We'll be very interested in hearing feedback from developers on what's working well for them and what they'd like to see improved," Ruth said. "We believe that engaging with technology builders while AR is still in development is the key to tackling these security and privacy challenges before they become widespread."

ATHENS, Ohio (Aug. 20, 2019)--The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences has awarded Ohio University scientists Shiyong Wu and Lingying Tong a five-year $1.7 million grant to advance research on a potential prevention and treatment for non-melanoma skin cancers.

"Non-melanoma skin cancers are by far the most common type of cancer among all types of cancers--it's a huge burden for society," Wu said.

Wu, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry and director of the university's Edison Biotechnology Institute (EBI) and Tong, an assistant investigator at EBI, will study how solar ultraviolet B radiation (UVB) exposure triggers skin cancer and how it can be stopped. Previous research has shown that UVB can impact multiple biological processes--what scientists call "signaling pathways"--in the body.

"The problem with UVB is it affects so many different pathways," complicating scientists' efforts to block it from activating cancer growth, Wu explained.

Previous studies by Wu's lab have found a possible target, constitutive nitric oxide synthase (cNOS), which plays an important role in how the body regulates its response to UVB exposure. The problem with cNOS, Wu found, is that it controls a signaling pathway that triggers cell damage, but also a second pathway that helps the cell survive the attack. Some of the surviving damaged cells eventually could become cancer cells, Wu explained.

The new five-year study will provide a more detailed analysis of the molecular mechanisms behind this cNOS activity. Understanding the biochemical process will allow Wu's team to explore candidates for skin cancer prevention and treatment. The scientists could test the efficacy of existing drugs on the market, as well as various natural products.

Natural products could be safer for personal health and the environment than sunscreens made from synthetic compounds, Wu said, noting that some conventional sun block products have come under scrutiny in recent years.