Tech

New York, NY--August 12, 2019--A novel neck brace, which supports the neck during its natural motion, was designed by Columbia engineers. This is the first device shown to dramatically assist patients suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) in holding their heads and actively supporting them during range of motion. This advance would result in improved quality of life for patients, not only in improving eye contact during conversation, but also in facilitating the use of eyes as a joystick to control movements on a computer, much as scientist Stephen Hawkins famously did.

A team of engineers and neurologists led by Sunil Agrawal, professor of mechanical engineering and of rehabilitation and regenerative medicine, designed a comfortable and wearable robotic neck brace that incorporates both sensors and actuators to adjust the head posture, restoring roughly 70% of the active range of motion of the human head. Using simultaneous measurement of the motion with sensors on the neck brace and surface electromyography (EMG) of the neck muscles, it also becomes a new diagnostic tool for impaired motion of the head-neck. Their pilot study was published August 7 in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology.

The brace also shows promise for clinical use beyond ALS, according to Agrawal, who directs the Robotics and Rehabilitation (ROAR) Laboratory. "The brace would also be useful to modulate rehabilitation for those who have suffered whiplash neck injuries from car accidents or have from poor neck control because of neurological diseases such as cerebral palsy," he said.

"To the best of my knowledge, Professor Agrawal and his team have investigated, for the first time, the muscle mechanisms in the neck muscles of patients with ALS. Their neck brace is such an important step in helping patients with ALS, a devastating and rapidly progressive terminal disease," said Hiroshi Mitsumoto, Wesley J. Howe Professor of neurology at the Eleanor and Lou Gehrig ALS Center at Columbia University Irving Medical Center who, along with Jinsy Andrews, assistant professor of neurology, co-led the study with Agrawal. "We have two medications that have been approved, but they only modestly slow down disease progression. Although we cannot cure the disease at this time, we can improve the patient's quality of life by easing the difficult symptoms with the robotic neck brace."

Commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, ALS is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by progressive loss of muscle functions, leading to paralysis of the limbs and respiratory failure. Dropped head, due to declining neck muscle strength, is a defining feature of the disease. Over the course of their illness, which can range from several months to more than 10 years, patients completely lose mobility of the head, settling in to a chin-on-chest posture that impairs speech, breathing, and swallowing. Current static neck braces become increasingly uncomfortable and ineffective as the disease progresses.

To test this new robotic device, the team recruited 11 ALS patients along with 10 healthy, age-matched subjects. The participants in the study were asked to perform single-plane motions of the head-neck that included flexion-extension, lateral bending, and axial rotation. The experiments showed that patients with ALS, even in the very early stages of the disease, use a different strategy of head-neck coordination compared to age-matched healthy subjects. These features are well correlated with clinical ALS scores routinely used by clinicians. The measurements collected by the device can be used clinically to better assess head drop and the ALS disease progression.

"In the next phase of our research, we will characterize how active assistance from the neck brace will impact ALS subjects with severe head drop to perform activities of daily life," said Agrawal, who is also a member of Columbia University's Data Science Institute. "For example, they can use their eyes as a joystick to move the head-neck to look at loved ones or objects around them."

Irvine, Calif., Aug. 12, 2019 - Hookah waterpipe use has grown in popularity in recent years - 1 in 5 college students in the U.S. and Europe have tried it - but the practice could be more dangerous than other forms of smoking, according to a first-of-its-kind study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, published recently in Aerosol Science and Technology.

Using a custom-built testing apparatus, the UCI chemists analyzed emissions during a typical communal waterpipe session and found that one draw from a pipe can contain as many noxious substances as smoke from an entire cigarette.

"Hookah mainstream smoke - that which is directly inhaled by the user - has many toxic and harmful chemicals, such as nicotine, which can lead to tobacco addiction; irritating carbonyl compounds; and benzine, a known carcinogen," said lead author Veronique Perraud, a UCI assistant project scientist in the Department of Chemistry. "And due to the greater volume inhaled for every puff and the longer duration of a smoking session, the hookah oftentimes delivers a higher dose of those chemicals to the smoker."

The waterpipe also produced an outsized quantity of carbon monoxide, mainly from the burning of charcoal to heat the tobacco or herbal mixture in its bowl. The study refers to several cases in which hookah users have suffered from CO intoxication.

In addition to testing ordinary tobacco, the group studied a nicotine-free herbal mixture, marketed as a healthier alternative, and discovered that it had even higher levels of toxic gases present in the mainstream smoke.

While previous studies have detailed the risks of the hookah habit, the UCI project is the first to characterize ultrafine particles - those with a diameter smaller than 100 nanometers - in the inhaled smoke. Using a pair of mass spectrometers, including a unique instrument designed by the Smith Group at UCI, the scientists measured the chemical composition of both gases and solids emitted during a hookah session in real time, a key differentiation from past studies.

"Typically, researchers would collect samples from a filter capturing smoke and particles from an entire session, rendering one data point," Perraud said. "But through our technique of testing emissions in the beginning, midpoint and end of a smoking session, we were able to show that a smoker is exposed to a higher quantity of ultrafine particles during the first 10 minutes compared to the rest of the time."

She said these miniscule particles can pose significant health risks because they can make their way deep into the pulmonary system, and the smallest ones can readily cross the blood-brain barrier.

"One of the big myths about hookah usage is that the water in the bowl actually filters out the toxic chemicals, providing a shield for the smoker," Perraud noted. "In the study, we show that this is not the case for most of the gases and that, possibly due to its cooling effect, water actually promotes ultrafine particle formation."

Another difference between hookah and cigarette smoking is the temperature at which the tobacco is combusted. The cooler-burning contents of the hookah bowl produced less complex chemical compositions than occur in cigarette smoke but a heightened amount of sugar derivatives, as well as glycerol. When heated, this normally harmless substance that's used as a food additive decomposes, creating small aldehydes that are irritants and potential carcinogens.

In order to understand advanced materials like graphene nanostructures and optimize them for devices in nano-, opto- and quantum-technology it is crucial to understand how phonons - the vibration of atoms in solids - influence the materials' properties. Researchers from the University of Vienna, the Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, the company JEOL and La Sapienza University in Rome have developed a method capable to measure all phonons existing in a nanostructured material. This is a breakthrough in the analysis of nanoscale functional materials and devices. With this pilot experiment using graphene nanostructures these researchers have shown the uniqueness of their approach, which will be published in the latest issue of Nature.

Important thermal, mechanical, optoelectronic and transport characteristics of materials are ruled by phonons: the propagating atomic vibrational waves. It is then inferable that the determination of such extended atomic vibrations is crucial for the optimization of nanoelectronic devices. The current available techniques use optical methods as well as inelastic electron-, x-ray- and neutron scattering. Despite its scientific importance in the last decade, none of these methods has been able to determine all phonons of a freestanding monolayer of two dimensional (2D) materials such as graphene and their local variations within a graphene nanoribbon, which are in turn used as active elements in nano- and optoelectronics.

The new limits of nanospectroscopy

An international research team of leading experts in electron spectroscopy led by Thomas Pichler at the University of Vienna, theoretical spectroscopy led by Francesco Mauri at La Sapienza University in Rome and electron microscopy led by Kazu Suenaga at the AIST Tsukuba in Japan, together with the Japanese company JEOL have presented an original method applying it to graphene nanostructures as model: "high resolution electron spectroscopy inside an electron microscope with enough sensitivity to measure even an atomic monolayer". In this way they could for the first time determine all vibrational modes of freestanding graphene as well as the local extension of different vibrational modes in a graphene nanoribbon. This new method, which they called "large q mapping" opens entirely new possibilities to determine the spatial and momentum extension of phonons in all nanostructured as well as two dimensional advanced materials. These experiments push the limits of nanospectroscopy approaching the limits of Heisenbergs uncertainty principle and demonstrates new possibilities to study local vibration modes at the nanometer scale down to individual monolayers.

New electron nanospectrometer as "table top" synchrotron

"The direct experimental proof of the full spatial and momentum resolved mapping of local vibrations of all materials including even monolayer 2D materials and nanoribbons will enable us to fully disentangle different vibration modes and their momentum transfers at non-perfect structures such as edges or defects, which are extremely important to understand and optimize the local properties of a material", explains one of the leading authors, Ryosuke Senga.

This study of "High q-Mapping Of Vibrations" in the electron microscope opens a new pathway of nanospectroscopy of all materials combining spatial and momentum resolved measurements. This has been the biggest challenge regarding the combination of microscopy and spectroscopy, since the spatial and momentum resolutions are compensated due to the limit of Heisenbergs uncertainty principle. "We believe that our methodology will boost vast research in material science and will push high resolution electron spectroscopy in electron microscopy to the next level, to be envisaged as a true table top synchrotron", says Thomas Pichler from the University of Vienna.

HOUSTON - (Aug. 12, 2019) - Hexagonal-boron nitride is tough, but Rice University scientists are making it easier to get along with.

Two-dimensional h-BN, an insulating material also known as "white graphene," is four times stiffer than steel and an excellent conductor of heat, a benefit for composites that rely on it to enhance their properties.

Those qualities also make h-BN hard to modify. Its tight hexagonal lattice of alternating boron and nitrogen atoms is highly resistant to change, unlike graphene and other 2D materials that can be easily modified -- aka functionalized -- with other elements.

The Rice lab of chemist Angel Martí has published a protocol to enhance h-BN with carbon chains. These turn the 2D tough guy into a material that retains its strength but is more amenable to bonding with polymers or other materials in composites.

The lab's paper in the American Chemical Society's Journal of Physical Chemistry suggests h-BN can be made more dispersible in organic solvents as well. Martí and his team modified the Billups-Birch reaction process they had successfully used to alter boron nitride nanotubes to attack the defenses of h-BN and covalently attach carbons.

Birch reduction, discovered in the 1940s and enhanced in 2004 by Rice Professor Emeritus of Chemistry Edward Billups to functionalize carbon nanotubes, frees electrons to bind with other atoms. In the Rice process, Martí and his team can control the amount of h-BN functionalization by varying the amount of lithium in the reaction.

Lithium is an alkali metal that sheds free electrons when combined with liquefied ammonia. Mixed with h-BN flakes and a carbon source, 1-Bromododecane in this case, the reaction produces an alkyl radical, a chemical species that reacts with h-BN and makes a bond.

Martí said it's the best method found so far to modify h-BN, which resists change even under high temperatures. "You take a little bit of graphite and put it in a furnace at 800 degrees (Celsius), and it will be gone," he said. "You take hexagonal-boron nitride and do the same, and it will still be there smiling at you.

"That gives you an idea of how stable it is, and that's the problem we wanted to address," Martí said. "The material is good for certain applications, but to control its properties for manufacturing, you have to graft different groups onto the surface."

He said a 20-to-1 molar ratio of lithium to h-BN optimized the process of grafting carbon chains to the surface and edges.

Because the base h-BN remains stable under high temperatures, it can be returned to its pristine state by simply burning off the functional chains.

While h-BN is naturally hydrophilic (water-attracting), the functional carbons make them nearly superhydrophobic (water-avoiding), a good property for making protective films, Martí said. But even when enhanced, the flakes remain amenable to dispersion in non-polar solvents.

Martí said his group is exploring what other kinds of molecules can be grafted onto white graphene. "What about benzene groups? What about ethers? What about groups that will make it compatible with other materials?

"There's a lot of interest in making composite materials between h-BN, boron nitride nanotubes and polymers," he said. "Ultimately, we'd like to graft different groups onto h-BN and build a library, kind of a toolbox, of functional groups that can be used with these materials."

Artificial intelligence-powered tools are rapidly becoming more accessible, including for people in the more remote corners of the globe. This is good news for smallholder farmers, who can use handheld technologies to run their farms more efficiently, linking them to markets, extension workers, satellite images, and climate information. The technology is also becoming a first line of defense against crop diseases and pests that can potentially destroy their harvests.

A new smartphone tool developed for banana farmers scans plants for signs of five major diseases and one common pest. In testing in Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India, Benin, China, and Uganda, the tool provided a 90 percent successful detection rate. This work is a step towards creating a satellite-powered, globally connected network to control disease and pest outbreaks, say the researchers who developed the technology. The findings were published this week in the journal Plant Methods.

"Farmers around the world struggle to defend their crops from pests and diseases," said Michael Selvaraj, the lead author, who developed the tool with colleagues from Bioversity International in Africa. "There is very little data on banana pests and diseases for low-income countries, but an AI tool such as this one offers an opportunity to improve crop surveillance, fast-track control and mitigation efforts, and help farmers to prevent production losses."

Co-authors included researchers from India's Imayam Institute of Agriculture and Technology (IIAT), and Texas A&M University.

Bananas are the world's most popular fruit and with the global population set to reach 10 billion in 2050, pressure is mounting to produce sufficient food. Many countries will continue depending on international trade to ensure their food security. It is estimated that by 2050 developing countries' net imports of cereals will more than double from 135 million metric tonnes in 2008/09 to 300 million in 2050. An essential staple food for many families, bananas are a crucial source of nutrition and income. However, pests and diseases - Xanthomanas wilt of banana, Fusarium wilt, black leaf streak (or Black sigatoka), to name a few - threaten to damage the fruit. And when a disease outbreak hits, the effects to smallholder livelihoods can be detrimental.

In the few instances in which losses to the Fusarium Tropical race 4 fungus have been estimated, they amounted to US$121 million in Indonesia, US$253.3 million in Taiwan, and US$14.1 million in Malaysia (Aquino, Bandoles and Lim, 2013). In Africa, where the fungus was first reported in 2013 in a plantation in northern Mozambique, the number of symptomatic plants rose to more than 570,000 in September 2015.

The tool is built into an app called Tumaini - which means "hope" in Swahili - and is designed to help smallholder banana growers quickly detect a disease or pest and prevent a wide outbreak from happening. The app aims to link them to extension workers to quickly stem the outbreak. It can also upload data to a global system for large-scale monitoring and control. The app's goal is to facilitate a robust and easily deployable response to support banana farmers in need of crop disease control.

"The overall high accuracy rates obtained while testing the beta version of the app show that Tumaini has what it takes to become a very useful early disease and pest detection tool," said Guy Blomme, from Bioversity International. "It has great potential for eventual integration into a fully automated mobile app that integrates drone and satellite imagery to help millions of banana farmers in low-income countries have just-in-time access to information on crop diseases."

Deep learning

Rapid improvements in image-recognition technology made the Tumaini app possible. To build it, researchers uploaded 20,000 images that depicted various visible banana disease and pest symptoms. With this information, the app scans photos of parts of the fruit, bunch, or plant to determine the nature of the disease or pest. It then provides the steps necessary to address the specific disease. In addition, the app also records the data, including geographic location, and feeds it into a larger database.

Existing crop disease detection models focus primarily on leaf symptoms and can only accurately function when pictures contain detached leaves on a plain background. The novelty in this app is that it can detect symptoms on any part of the crop, and is trained to be capable of reading images of lower quality, inclusive of background noise, like other plants or leaves, to maximize accuracy.

"This is not just an app," said Selvaraj. "But a tool that contributes to an early warning system that supports farmers directly, enabling better crop protection and development and decision making to address food security."

This study, implemented by the Alliance between Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), has shown the potential of cutting-edge technologies such as AI, IoT (Internet of Things), robotics, satellites, cloud computing, and machine learning for the transformation of agriculture and for helping farmers.

A new study shows that compared to younger adults, older adults are less distracted by negative information -- even in the earliest stages of attention.

USC researchers looked at "emotion-induced blindness," which refers to distractions caused by emotionally arousing stimuli. In four experiments using a quickly presented sequence of images, they examined how older adults prioritize emotional information. They found both younger and older adults demonstrated emotion-induced blindness, but older adults were more distracted by positive information and less distracted by negative information. The results were published today in Emotion.

"What makes our new findings striking is that we found evidence of the positivity effect at such an early, attentional level," said lead author Briana Kennedy, a postdoctoral scholar in the Emotion & Cognition Lab at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology.

"Older and younger adults were distracted differently by the same negative images that appeared for only a fraction of a second," Kennedy explained. "Older adults seem to view their world with a filter that cares less about negative information than younger adults -- to the point that, without even having time to think about and reflect on what they are seeing, they give less attention to it."

The positivity effect in early attention

Studies have shown that compared with younger adults, older adults tend to favor positive information more than negative information in their attention and memory. What has remained unclear about this long-observed "positivity effect" is at which stage it impacts cognitive processing and its influence on processing other stimuli appearing around the same time.

Participants in the USC study were shown a rapidly displayed series of landscape images and given the task to correctly identify the direction of one rotated picture. Those images were punctuated with irrelevant positive or negative images that appeared soon before the rotated picture. The positive images included babies or happy couples while the negative images included disturbing or threatening situations like a man approaching a woman with a knife.

Both older and younger adults were less accurate in identifying the rotated landscape image after these "emotional distractors." However, compared to younger adults, older adults were less distracted by negative and more distracted by positive images, suggesting that a selective bias toward positive information occurs early in older adults' visual processing.

"The exciting thing about this effect is how quickly the images are presented -- it's only hundreds of milliseconds that these images are on the screen," Kennedy said. "This allowed us to measure the early levels of cognition and see how something that's emotional can disrupt our perception and awareness of things that come after it."

In previous studies on emotion, which involved mostly slower-paced attention and memory tasks, older adults saw and remembered positive images better and negative images worse. The researchers wanted to see if that happens in early attention and found that even when images were presented quickly, older adults were more distracted by positive rather than negative images.

"These older adults don't really have time to reflect and think too much about something being positive or negative when they're seeing them flash so quickly on the screen," Kennedy explained. "Older adults have a sort of active filter when they're looking at things--prioritizing things that are positive and deprioritizing things that are negative compared to younger adults."

Research on "distraction by emotion" can help older and younger adults

Researchers say the most obvious implications of the research involve learning how to best communicate information to older adults. Kennedy noted that using positive imagery may lead to more successful advertising campaigns targeting an increasingly aging populace.

"Whereas younger adults may give special attention to information that has a negative spin, older adults may instead reserve their prioritized attention for something more positive," she said. "By understanding how older adults change their priority for emotion, we may better understand the way the brain -- particularly our attention -- changes with age."

The study authors believe their results may aid in understanding what strategies older adults are utilizing to prioritize positive and deprioritize negative, ultimately leading to more effective treatment for people struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or anxiety.

"If we can better understand older adults' filter or priority mechanism for things that are positive--that also cares less about things that are negative--that might eventually help identify strategies that other people can use to overcome negative experiences," Kennedy said.

EAST LANSING, Mich. - Transnational environmental crime - wildlife trafficking, illegal logging, dumping hazardous waste and more - takes an estimated $91 to $259 billion bite out of the global economy and has strong ties to organized crime finance, says a new study from Michigan State University and published in Nature Sustainability.

"Transnational environmental crime, or TEC, has become the largest financial driver of social conflicts in the world," said Meredith Gore, MSU associate professor of fisheries and wildlife and co-lead author on the study. "If it's not addressed in sustainable development frameworks, these serious threats will undermine development in decades to come."

A high-profile example of TEC involved a recent joint customs and police sting called, "Operation Thunderball." The successful endeavor covered 109 countries and arrested 582 suspects. It recovered nearly 10,000 turtles and tortoises, 4,300 birds, 440 pieces of elephant tusks, the equivalent of 74 truckloads of timber and more.

While people and government officials are aware of some these more traditional crimes, they may be surprised to learn about other forms of TEC, and how it connects to peace and security.

"Many of us are unaware of what happens when we throw things away, but in some instances electronic waste is illegally dumped in marginalized countries, and trafficked wildlife that gets past customs can spread zoonotic pathogens," Gore said. "People are aware of drug trafficking, but what they might not know is that it can be a key accelerant of deforestation; 'narco-deforestation' clears forests for covert roads and landing strips."

Other times, TEC rears its head in the form of illegal taxes.

Natural resources that local residents depend on for survival, such as clean water from wells, cooking charcoal and access to fish via docking fees for fishing boats, have become targets for extortion.

While TEC remains a large hurdle to overcome, the researchers point out potential ways to begin dismantling it.

Just as Operation Thunderball demonstrated, cooperation between agencies and sharing data can have positive results. Engaging local communities, reducing corruption, closing gaps in restorative and reparative justice, legislative reform and reviewand capacity building also can help, said Peter Stoett, dean of social science and humanities at Ontario Tech University and co-author.

"We have to evaluate the effectiveness of responses to environmental crime from a variety of perspectives. For example, are militarized responses that punish local communities counter-productive?" he asked. "Are campaigns to educate the public about these crimes too focused on charismatic wildlife species, ignoring corporate criminal activity, such as toxic waste dumping or illegal fisheries? How can countries better cooperate to promote biosecurity while going after those who benefit the most from environmental crime?"

In addition, strategic plans addressing environmental impact assessments can include analyses of potential criminal activity and incorporate measures of potential or actual economic damages related to human security risks.

"There are linkages between environmental security and TEC, and they have serious implications for civil society, governments and international organizations pursuing the 2030 United National Sustainable Development Goals," Gore said. "So, it's vital that all interested parties consider these complexities and mitigate the risks as they tackle their strategic sustainable development planning."

The African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis), an endangered species, is often referred to as a "gardener" in recognition of its role as a disperser of fruit seeds from the large diversity of trees it feeds on as it moves through the continent's tropical forests, contributing to the germination of over 100 species that supply food or shelter to primates, birds, and insects.

However, its importance is even greater than that, according to a new international study. With contributions from Brazilian researchers affiliated with the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and the Agricultural Informatics unit of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA), the study concluded that in addition to its seed dispersal role, the African forest elephant changes the structure of its forest habitat and helps increase carbon storage.

The elephants browse in, push over or scratch themselves against trees located on the forest trails they use for foraging. The chronic thinning of small trees by elephants alleviates competition for water, light and space in the low canopy strata, allowing the surviving trees to attain large diameters and a high wood density.

This increase in biomass entails a corresponding increase in carbon storage. Elephants change the structure of African tropical forests, influencing their composition in terms of tree species and increasing the aboveground biomass over the long term, according to the study.

The study resulted from a project supported by São Paulo Research Foundation - FAPESP and is published in Nature Geoscience.

"We found that at a typical density of 0.5 to 1 animals per square kilometer, elephant disturbances increase aboveground biomass by 26 to 60 tons per hectare," Simone Aparecida Vieira, one of the authors of the study, told.

Vieira is a researcher at UNICAMP's Environmental Research Center (NEPAM). She was a member of the organizing committee for the São Paulo School of Advanced Science on Scenarios and Modeling in Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services to Support Human Well-Being, held on July 1-14, 2019, in São Pedro, São Paulo State (Brazil). The event was supported by FAPESP via its São Paulo School of Advanced Science (SPSAS) program and was attended by 87 students from 20 countries.

The other Brazilian participants in the study were Marcos Longo and Marcos Augusto da Silva Scaranello. Longo is currently a postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the United States. Previously, he conducted postdoctoral research at EMBRAPA Agricultural Informatics with a scholarship from FAPESP. Scaranello, currently a postdoctoral researcher at EMBRAPA, earned his PhD from UNICAMP, also with a scholarship from FAPESP.

According to the authors of the study, although large herbivores such as elephants are known to have profound effects on ecosystems and biogeochemical cycles by consuming biomass, transporting nutrients and affecting plant mortality, the influence of Africa's forest elephants on carbon stocks and on forest structure and productivity, in general, is poorly understood.

"The tropical forests of central Africa hold larger carbon stocks than the Amazon rainforest despite their similarities in climate and soil," Vieira said.

Central African forests have a lower average stem density, larger tree diameters and higher mean aboveground biomass than the Amazon rainforest. "The presence of elephants in central African forests helps explain how these differences emerged over long periods," she added.

The researchers tested this hypothesis using Ecosystem Demography 2 (ED2) software, which tracks down at a fine-scale the dynamics of a tropical lowland forest function and structure. The model simulates the horizontal and vertical heterogeneity of vegetation over long-term forest succession; competition among plants for resources, leading to mortality; and stochastic disturbance events, such as the presence of elephants, that influence forest structure over the short, medium and long term.

The simulations were compared with inventory data for two sites in the Congo Basin. Elephants still live in one but have been wiped out in the other.

In the simulations, the introduction of elephants caused a temporary reduction in aboveground mass lasting 125-250 years due to the increased mortality of small trees. This transient reduction was then reversed, and a new long-term equilibrium was reached between 250 and 1,000 years after elephants were introduced.

"The results support the hypothesis that elephants may have shaped the structure of Africa's tropical forests and probably played a key role in differentiating them from the tropical forests of Amazonia," Vieira said.

Extirpation of elephants

The researchers also simulated the effects of the extirpation of elephants on the aboveground biomass in the entirety of central Africa's forests, totaling some 2.2 million square kilometers. The simulation estimated a loss of approximately 7% in biomass and up to 3 billion tons of carbon if the population of African forest elephants was to disappear completely.

Conservation of the elephants could reverse this trend, representing carbon storage savings estimated by the authors of US$43 billion.

"Our simulations suggest that if elephant loss continues unabated, central African forests may release the equivalent of multiple years of fossil fuel CO2 emissions from most countries, thus potentially accelerating climate change. Therefore, their loss could have a drastic impact both locally and on global climate", said Christopher Doughty of Northern Arizona University (USA) and last author of the study. Doughty is quoted in a press release issued by France's Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory (LSCE-CEA), where lead author Fabio Berzaghi is a researcher.

Forest elephant populations have been in decline since the colonization of West Africa by Europeans owing to unsustainable hunting for ivory and habitat destruction and have collapsed to less than 10% of their original size.

NASA's Terra satellite passed over the Northwestern Pacific Ocean and captured a visible picture of the remnant clouds of deadly former Typhoon Lekima over eastern China.

On Aug. 12, 2019, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite provided a visible image of Lekima's remnant clouds. The remnants blanketed eastern China and the Korean Peninsula, also extending over part of the Yellow Sea.

Typhoon Lekima made landfall early on Aug. 10 in the Zhejiang province. At landfall, Lekima's winds were gusting up to 185 kph (115 mph). Typhoon Lekima made another landfall in coastal regions of Huangdao district, Qingdao, Shandong around 8:50 p.m. local time on August 11. Lekima caused billions of dollars in damage, triggered travel delays and caused fatalities. Reuters reported that 44 people perished from Typhoon Lekima's landfall in China.

On Aug. 12, China's National Meteorological Center (NMC) released a blue warning for a typhoon at 6:00 a.m. local time. NMC noted, "Lekima [will] dwell in neighboring regions of northern Shandong Peninsula and move north by east direction with a dwindling intensity."

The NMC forecast from August 12 to 13 noted that the areas including northern Shandong, northeastern Henan, eastern Tianjin, central-southern Liaoning, and eastern Jilin will be exposed to moderate and heavy rain. NMC's forecast noted, "Heavy downpours (100-200 mm/3.9 to 7.8 inches) will pummel northeastern Hebei, and southwestern Liaoning."

BOSTON - An NIH-funded study published in JAMA Pediatrics has shown pediatricians can help parents quit smoking. The research, led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children (MGHfC), was conducted across five states--North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Ohio and Indiana--and delivered a simple, customizable intervention: Upon check-in at their child's appointment, parents took an electronic questionnaire that asked whether any smokers in the household desired to quit and offered them prescriptions for two FDA-approved cessation products -- nicotine patches and gum, as well as enrollment in the state's free quitline and the national SmokefreeTXT program. All smokers in the practice, whether or not they elected to try quitting, also received motivational messages from their child's pediatricians.

The intervention was a version of the Clinical Effort Against Secondhand Smoke Exposure (CEASE) program, developed by Jonathan P. Winickoff, MD, MPH, the study's principal investigator and MGHfC physician. Compared to control practices in the two-year study, intervention practices showed a 2 percent decline in smoking rate per year in the entire population of parents visiting them -- not just among those who agreed to try quitting.

"Two percent per year doesn't seem like much," said Winickoff, who is also a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School (HMS), "but at the population level, quadrupling the rate of decline in smoking is a phenomenal result. If this program were implemented across the U.S. it would have a profound positive impact on the health of the country."

The effects of tobacco use on health are one of the most well-studied associations in medicine. In adults, smoking can lead to many diseases, from cancer to vision loss. In children, secondhand smoke increases the likelihood of a host of diseases including sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). And finally, when a woman smokes during pregnancy it puts infants at much greater risk of premature birth and low birth weight, which can cause health and learning problems that may follow them throughout their lives.

"The people who are most likely to have another pregnancy are the ones who already have a baby and are coming into the pediatrician's office," said the study's lead author, Emara Nabi-Burza, MS, of the division of General Academic Pediatrics at MGHfC and the Tobacco Research and Treatment Center at MGH. "If we want to prevent smoking during pregnancy, one of the best strategies is to get parents of young children to quit."

The use of tablets rather than paper to administer the questionnaire allowed researchers to deliver motivational videos that were specific to each state and culturally appropriate to the practice's population, as well as to monitor in real time what was happening throughout the day and boost new promotions from each state's free tobacco quitline as soon as they were launched.

The program is now being actively disseminated through the tobacco control programs in the state health departments of Indiana and North Carolina, two of the states where the study was conducted. "We knew the pediatric visit was a teachable moment to help parents quit smoking," said Winickoff, who also directs pediatric research at the MGH Tobacco Research and Treatment Center. "We just didn't know how to operationalize it. This study shows the effectiveness of very simple methods that can be easily employed in any state."

The result of the 2016 US presidential election was, for many, a surprise lesson in social perception bias -- peoples' tendency to assume that others think as we do, and to underestimate the size and influence of a minority party.

Long documented in psychological literature, a panoply of social perception biases play out differently in different contexts. Many psychologists attribute the source of these biases to faulty cognitive processes like "wishful thinking" or "social projection," but according to a study published August 12 in Nature Human Behaviour, the structure of our social networks might offer a simpler explanation.

"There's a fundamental question about how people perceive their environment in an unequal society," says co-lead author Eun Lee, a network scientist based at the University of North Carolina. "[These perception biases] show up [in a devastating way] around contentious issues like gun control and abortion, race, and the distribution of wealth."

Lee became interested in studying perception and social networks in January of 2016, after attending a presentation by co-author Mirta Galesic at the Santa Fe Institute. From Santa Fe, Lee went on to visit her home country, South Korea, which was in political turmoil. What she observed there was that people tended to interact with those who had similar opinions about a divisive presidential impeachment. This tendency, called "homophily," would become a key parameter in her team's model for social perception bias.

With co-lead author Fariba Karimi (GESIS, Germany), Lee applied a network model previously developed by Karimi and her collaborators, for a society consisting of majority and minority groups. In theory, the two groups could be divided by any binary characteristic -- smoking or non-smoking, Democrat or Republican, male or female. Based on the position of an individual node within the network, the researchers predicted different perception biases would arise depending on two network properties: the relative sizes of the majority and minority groups, and their level of homophily (the extent to which like nodes connected to like). They did not account for individual cognitive processes-- an individual's perception was based solely on their surroundings.

Galesic then helped the team develop and administer a survey to ~300 participants in order to test the model's predictions.

The team found that the greatest perception biases emerged when majority and minority groups were disproportionate in size, and when nodes of the same group were highly connected to each other. In these situations, individuals in both groups tended to overestimate their own group and underestimate the other. The team also documented other perception biases, such as the tendency for a majority group to overestimate the presence of a minority group when the two groups are more evenly dispersed within the network (heterophily).

To counter the effects of perception bias, Galesic recommends making an effort to interact with people from different groups, to better sample the broader societal network.

"Whatever group you are in, it certainly helps to be more aware of the outer environment," Galesic says. "In a global, interconnected world we all depend on each other and all changes will eventually come to us."

And, she adds, you won't be blindsided by the results of the next election.

Adelaide, Australia 10 Aug 2019: Areas with a higher number of fast food restaurants have more heart attacks, according to research presented at CSANZ 2019.1 The study also found that for every additional fast food outlet, there were four additional heart attacks per 100,000 people each year.

The 67th Annual Scientific Meeting of the Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand (CSANZ) takes place 8 to 11 August in Adelaide, Australia. The European Society of Cardiology (ESC) and CSANZ are holding joint scientific sessions as part of the ESC Global Activities programme.2

Study author Tarunpreet Saluja of the University of Newcastle, Callaghan, Australia said: "The findings were consistent across rural and metropolitan areas of New South Wales and after adjusting for age, obesity, high blood lipids, high blood pressure, smoking status, and diabetes. The results emphasise the importance of the food environment as a potential contributor towards health."

"Ischaemic heart disease, including heart attack, is one of the leading causes of death worldwide," continued Mr Saluja. "It is known that eating fast foods is linked with a higher likelihood of fatal and nonfatal heart attacks. Despite this, there is rapid growth in the purchase and availability of fast food. This highlights the need to explore the role of food availability in the probability of having a heart attack."

This retrospective cohort study included 3,070 patients admitted to hospital with a heart attack in the Hunter Region between 2011 to 2013. The database contained each patient's home postcode, allowing the researchers to analyse their surrounding fast food environment.

Fast food outlets were defined as the ten most popular quick service food retailers in Australia, based on a population survey conducted in 2018. The researchers recorded the total number of outlets within each local government area and compared different areas to analyse the association between density of fast food restaurants and incidence of heart attack.

"Previous studies have shown that the poor nutritional value, high salt and saturated fat in fast food is connected to heart disease, yet the role of greater access to these restaurants has been less clear," said Mr Saluja.

"The ubiquitous presence of fast food is an important consideration for the ongoing development of rural and metropolitan areas," he added. "The link with poor health adds a community lens to cardiovascular disease management and stresses the need to target this issue in future public health promotion strategies and legislation. This is why ESC guidelines recommend the regulation of fast food outlet density in community settings."3

Professor Tom Marwick, Chair of the CSANZ 2019 Scientific Programme Committee, said: "This is an important paper that documents the association between fast foods and cardiac events, independent of risk factors. It will be crucial to explore whether this association is independent of the social determinants of disease, as we know that fast food outlets are often more common in disadvantaged areas. Nonetheless, the findings are a reminder that the fundamental drivers of cardiovascular disease burden may be altered by changes in public policy. The fact that the appropriate policy steps have not been taken, despite the cost of cardiovascular disease, remains as much a mystery in Australia as elsewhere in the world."

Professor Jeroen Bax, Past President of the ESC and course director of the ESC programme at CSANZ 2019, said: "Tackling heart disease requires individual responsibility and actions at population level. This study highlights the impact of the food environment on health. In addition to regulating the location and density of fast food outlets, local areas should ensure good access to supermarkets with healthy food."

Drones, smartphones and sensors could provide a lifeline to the world's growing elderly population at risk of falls, helping to cut global hospital costs.

A new system has been designed by a team of researchers from Iraq and the University of South Australia to remotely monitor elderly people, detecting abnormalities in their heart rate and temperature which can lead to falls, and provide urgent first aid via a drone if a fall occurs.

UniSA Adjunct Senior Lecturer Dr Ali Al-Naji and Professor Javaan Chahl are working with Dr Sadik Kamel Gharghan and Saif Saad Fakhrulddin from Baghdad's Middle Technical University to develop an advanced fall detection and first aid system for the elderly.

In a new paper published in Sensors, the researchers describe how a wearable device can monitor vital signs using a wireless sensor attached to the upper arm and send a message to an emergency call centre if physiological abnormalities or a fall are detected.

"When a case is critical, first aid supplies can be delivered to the patient via a drone, up to 105 seconds faster than an ambulance," according to Prof Chahl.

"The system not only correctly measures heart rate and falls with 99 per cent accuracy, but also identifies the elderly person's location and delivers first aid much faster."

"We have also designed an advanced smartphone-based program that uses an intelligent autopilot, containing a destination waypoint for planning the path of a drone," says Dr Gharghan.

The fall detection device consists of a microcontroller, two bio-sensors, a GPS module to track the location and a GSM module to send a notification to the smartphones of caregivers. The second part includes a first aid package, a smartphone and a drone to deliver the package.

It is estimated that around 30 per cent of adults over the age of 65 experience at least one fall a year, in many cases fracturing a hip, or sustaining head injuries.

The annual global cost of fall-related acute care for older people has risen dramatically in recent years as the world's population ages. In Australia, the annual cost exceeds $600 million, and this figure blows out to billions of dollars each year in the United States and other parts of the world.

The most recent figures show that falls account for 40 per cent of injury-related deaths and one per cent of total deaths in people aged over 65 years.

Physicians have long suspected that red blood cell transfusions given to premature infants with anemia may put them in danger of developing necrotizing enterocolitis, a potentially lethal inflammatory disease of the intestines. However, solid evidence for the connection has been difficult to obtain in part because of the lack of a practical animal model able to accurately represent what physically occurs when a baby gets NEC.

Now, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine report they have developed that model -- believed to be the first of its kind -- using infant mice, or pups, that are first made anemic and then given blood transfusions from neonates of a different mouse strain. The new method, the researchers say, mimics what happens when blood transfusions are given to human babies from a non-related donor.

A description of the mouse model, along with significant findings and potential benefits from its first uses, is published in a new paper in the journal Nature Communications.

"We needed a working live mouse model in order to learn if a blood transfusion alone leads to NEC or does it only happen if the transfusion is given when anemia is present," says Akhil Maheshwari, M.D., professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, director of neonatology at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center, and senior author of the research paper.

Seen in approximately 10% to 12% of infants weighing less than 3.5 pounds at birth, NEC is a rapidly progressing gastrointestinal emergency in which bacteria invade the wall of the colon, causing inflammation that can ultimately destroy healthy tissue at the site. If enough cells are necrotized (killed) that a hole results in the intestinal wall, fecal material can enter the bloodstream and cause life-threatening sepsis.

Since 2004, Maheshwari says, research studies have repeatedly shown that babies born prematurely who are severely anemic -- those with a proportion of red blood cells to total blood volume between 20% and 24% at birth -- can develop NEC within 48 hours after receiving a red blood cell transfusion. By comparison, the American Academy of Pediatrics says that babies delivered at term normally have red blood cell volumes between 42% and 65%, dropping to between 31% and 41% at age 1.

In search of a useful and practical mouse model, Maheshwari and his colleagues had to overcome a size problem.

"Newborn mouse pups are about the size of a quarter and weigh less than an ounce, so it's extremely difficult to remove enough blood from them for laboratories to analyze," Maheshwari says.

To get past that obstacle, a private medical diagnostic equipment company donated the use of its advanced blood analysis system that only requires a 5 microliter (5 millionths of a liter) sample instead of the 50 microliters -- 60% of a mouse pup's total blood supply -- that most testing labs require.

Next, the researchers designed a procedure to induce severe anemia in the pups by removing about half of their blood volume every other day for 10 days after birth. This dropped their red blood cell counts to levels approximating those in severely anemic newborn babies.

Seven days after birth, the researchers introduced bacteria that had been isolated and cultured from a premature infant with NEC. Finally, red blood cell transfusions were given on the 11th day after birth.

Over the next 48 hours, the researchers looked for development of NEC-like symptoms in their experimental group and three other sets of mouse pups: (1) a control group without any intervention, (2) a group without anemia that received transfusions and (3) a group with anemia but not transfused.

"Only the severely anemic pups who received blood transfusions showed intestinal damage that resembled human NEC with necrosis, inflammation and separation of the tissues supporting the lining of the colon," Maheshwari says. "The next step was to see if we could find a mechanism for why this occurred."

Examining the blood of the pups with NEC-like conditions after they were transfused, the researchers discovered that it contained three components not seen in the blood of the other test mice: (1) a large number of macrophages, the immune cells that engulf and digest cellular debris, bacteria and viruses, (2) freely circulating hemoglobin, the iron-based molecules that normally carry oxygen throughout the body when attached to red blood cells, and (3) elevated levels of inflammation-inducing proteins, indicating that the macrophages had been activated even without a biological threat to the intestine.

The researchers also observed that levels of haptoglobin, a protein that removes free hemoglobin from the blood, were extremely low.

"These findings suggest that anemia reduces the amount of haptoglobin in the neonate, preventing the free hemoglobin that comes in via transfusion from being properly removed as it normally would," Maheshwari says.

What apparently happens, he says, is that free hemoglobin attaches to a protein receptor on the intestinal wall that is the same site where bacterial poisons bind. As a result, the immune system mistakenly believes the intestine is being attacked and activates the macrophages.

Once those immune cells go to work, Maheshwari explains, they trigger release of the inflammatory proteins seen in the blood of the anemic, transfused mice. "That event starts a double whammy on the intestinal wall," he says. "First, the macrophage proteins inflame and weaken the tissues, making them vulnerable, and then, bacteria move in and produce endotoxins that kill the individual cells."

With evidence for a probable mechanism to explain the connection between anemia and transfusion in the development of NEC, the researchers next sought to confirm it by seeing if they could block two of its stages, and perhaps, advance the search for potential therapies.

"In one trial, we gave haptoglobin to our model anemic mice before transfusing them and blocked macrophage activation, so they did not develop NEC-like symptoms," Maheshwari says.

In another test, nanoparticles that Samuel Wickline, M.D., and his colleagues at the University of South Florida developed were used to deliver a genetic interruption -- an RNA molecule known as a small interfering RNA, or siRNA -- that blocks the chemical signal telling macrophages to start producing inflammatory proteins. The nanoparticles were tagged with a fluorescent dye to track their movement and included a non-toxic compound derived from honeybee venom.

Maheshwari says the macrophages in the blood of anemic mouse pups engulfed the nanoparticles and enclosed them within vacuoles. The bee venom derivative, he explains, broke open the vacuoles so that the siRNA could be released inside the macrophages.

The genetic signal blocker worked well, Wickline says, protecting the anemic mouse pups from intestinal inflammation after red blood cell transfusions.

"Because we showed that the inhibitory nanoparticles with siRNAs were able to control a master regulator of inflammation in NEC, perhaps this technology can one day be applied to not only treat or prevent NEC, but other diseases where inflammation plays a key role such as arthritis and atherosclerosis," he says.

Maheshwari says he hopes the new mouse model and the findings from the current study can be used to develop blood biomarkers that could indicate which human newborns are most at risk of developing NEC.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Engineers at the University of Illinois have found a way to redirect misfit light waves to reduce energy loss during optical data transmission. In a study, researchers exploited an interaction between light and sound waves to suppress the scattering of light from material defects - which could lead to improved fiber optic communication. Their findings are published in the journal Optica.

Light waves scatter when they encounter obstacles, be it a crack in a window or a tiny flaw in a fiber optic cable. Much of that light scatters out of the system, but some of it scatters back toward the source in a phenomenon called backscattering, the researchers said.

"There is no such thing as a perfect material," said mechanical science and engineering professor Gaurav Bahl, who led the study. "There is always a little bit of imperfection and a little bit of randomness in the materials that we use in any engineered technology. For instance, the most perfect optical fiber used for long-range data transmission might still have some invisible flaws. These flaws can be a result of manufacturing, or they can appear over time as a result of thermal and mechanical changes to the material. Ultimately, such flaws set the limits of performance for any optical system."

A few previous studies have shown that undesirable backscattering can be suppressed in special materials that have certain magnetic properties. However, these are not viable options for today's optical systems that use transparent, nonmagnetic materials like silicon or silica glass, Bahl said

In the new study, Bahl and graduate student Seunghwi Kim used an interaction of light with sound waves, instead of magnetic fields, to control backscattering.

Light waves travel through most materials at the same speed irrespective of direction, be it forward or backward, Bahl said. "But, by using some direction-sensitive opto-mechanical interactions, we can break that symmetry and effectively shut down backscattering. It is like creating a one-way mirror. By blocking the backward propagation of a light wave, it has nowhere to go when it encounters a scatterer, and no other option than to continue moving forward."

To demonstrate this phenomenon, the team sent light waves into a tiny sphere made of silica glass, called a microresonator. Inside, the light travels along a circular path like a racetrack, encountering defects in the silica over and over again, amplifying the backscattering effect. The team then used a second laser beam to engage the light-sound interaction in the backward direction only, blocking the possibility of light scattering backward. What would have been lost energy continues moving forward, in spite of defects in the resonator.

Being able to stop the backscattering is significant, but some of the light is still lost to side scattering, which scientists have no control over, Bahl said. "The advance is therefore very subtle at this stage and only useful over a narrow bandwidth. However, simply verifying that we can suppress backscattering in a material as common as silica glass suggests that we could produce better fiber optical cable or even continue to use old, damaged cable already in service at the bottom of the world's oceans, instead of having to replace it."

Trying the experiment in fiber optic cable will be the next step in showing that this phenomenon is possible at the bandwidths required in optical fiber communications.

"The principle that we explored has been seen before," Bahl said. "The real story here is that we have confirmed that backscattering can be suppressed in something as simple as glass, using an opto-mechanical interaction that is available in every optical material. We hope that other researchers examine this phenomenon in their optical systems, as well, to further advance the technology."