Tech

DUBLIN, 2 July, 2019: A study led by researchers at RCSI's Department of Chemistry has the potential to help surgeons more accurately remove tumours and detect cancer in lymph nodes during surgery. The research, led by RCSI Professor of Chemistry Donal O'Shea, has been published in Chemical Science.

Bringing together expertise in chemistry and biotechnology, the research team has identified the potential benefit of fluorescence imaging as a way of detecting cancer cells during surgery, developing a probe that lights up when it detects cancer.

According to Professor O'Shea, "This is a very significant development which has the potential to transform the surgical management of cancer, improving outcomes for patients. Almost 60% of all cancer patients will undergo surgery as part of their treatment."

"A new technology that could improve surgical outcomes by giving the surgical team real-time, informative images during the surgical procedure would have a wide-ranging and sustained impact on the care of cancer patients."

Addressing the next steps, Professor O'Shea said, "At the moment, this is science. A clinical trial is our next goal and that would allow the full potential of this discovery to be realised for patients, enhancing detection of life-threatening diseases and improving outcomes of surgical procedures."

The team has recently secured funding for a project on colorectal cancer diagnosis and treatment under the Project Ireland 2040 Disruptive Technology Innovation Fund in collaboration with leading cancer surgeon Professor Ronan Cahill in the Mater University Hospital, UCD and Dublin based industry partners IBM-research and Deciphex.

The project will look at combining tissues responsive probes, artificial intelligence and machine learning to transform medical care for colorectal cancer patients.

The brain appears to implement a GPS system for spatial navigation; however, it is not yet fully understood how it works. In the journal Science Advances, researchers from Freiburg, Bochum and Beijing now suggest that rhythmic fluctuations in brain activity, so-called theta oscillations, may play a role in this process. These brainwaves might help remember the locations to which a person is navigating. This is the result of the researchers' study conducted with epilepsy patients who had electrodes implanted in the brain for the purpose of surgical planning. With the aid of these electrodes, the researchers recorded neuronal activity during a navigation task in a virtual reality setting.

A team headed by Dr. Lukas Kunz, Universitätsklinikum Freiburg, and Professor Nikolai Axmacher, Head of the Department of Neuropsychology at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, published their findings on 3 July 2019.

Experiments in virtual reality

Previous studies had demonstrated that brain oscillations show a characteristic pattern during navigation. Theta oscillations, during which brain activity changes at a frequency of approximately four hertz, appear to play a crucial role in this process. But it had not been fully understood how, exactly, they support spatial navigation.

In the experiments, the epilepsy patients learned to associate individual objects with specific locations in a virtual environment. For each of the acquired object-location associations, the researchers identified a characteristic brain activity pattern.

Subsequently, the participants had to remember which object was associated with which location. While they navigated to that location in the virtual environment, the brain reactivated the location-specific activity patterns. The reactivation of brain activity for different object-location pairs occurred at different points of time during the theta cycles. "Accordingly, theta oscillations may coordinate the reactivation of different memories and, moreover, may help distinguish between competing memories," says Lukas Kunz.

Searching for a biomarker for Alzheimer's

"Many disorders are associated with disorientation and memory loss; it is therefore vitally important to gain an understanding of the underlying neuronal mechanisms," explains Nikolai Axmacher. The Bochum-based researcher and his colleagues are hoping that these studies may help identify novel biomarkers for such neurological disorders.

For a robot to be able to "learn" sign language, it is necessary to combine different areas of engineering such as artificial intelligence, neural networks and artificial vision, as well as underactuated robotic hands. "One of the main new developments of this research is that we united two major areas of Robotics: complex systems (such as robotic hands) and social interaction and communication," explains Juan Víctores, one of the researchers from the Robotics Lab in the Department of Systems Engineering and Automation of the UC3M.

The first thing the scientists did as part of their research was to indicate, through a simulation, the specific position of each phalanx in order to depict particular signs from the Spanish Sign Language. They then attempted to reproduce this position with the robotic hand, trying to make the movements similar to those a human hand could make. "The objective is for them to be similar and, above all, natural. Various types of neural networks were tested to model this adaptation, and this allowed us to choose the one that could perform the gestures in a way that is comprehensible to people who communicate with sign language," the researchers explain.

Finally, the scientists verified that the system worked by interacting with potential end-users. "The deaf people who have been in contact with the robot have reported 80 percent satisfaction, so the response has been very positive," says another of the researchers from the Robotics Lab, Jennifer J. Gago. The experiments were carried out with TEO (Task Environment Operator), a humanoid robot for home use developed in the Robotics Lab of the UC3M.

To date, TEO has mastered the fingerspelling alphabet of sign language, as well as a very basic vocabulary related to household tasks, this researcher explains. One of the challenges the scientists now face in order to continue developing this system is "the rendering of more complex gestures, using complete sentences", says another member of the Robotics Lab team, Bartek Lukawski. The robot could then be used by the approximately 13,300 people in Spain who use sign language to communicate.

The broader objective is for robots of this type to become household assistants that are able to help with ironing (TEO also does this), folding clothes, serving food, and interacting with users in domestic environments. In addition, "these robotic hands could be implemented in other humanoids and they could be used in other environments and circumstances," says Jennifer J. Gago. "The really important thing is that all of these technologies, all of these developments that we contribute to, are geared towards including all members of society. It is a way of envisaging technology as an aid to inclusion, both of minorities and of majorities, within a democracy", Juan Víctores emphasises.

Researchers at the University of Toronto have uncovered an immune mechanism by which host cells combat bacterial infection, and at the same time found that a protein crucial to that process can sense and respond to misfolded proteins in all mammalian cells.

The protein is called heme-regulated inhibitor or HRI, and the researchers showed that during bacterial infection it triggers and coordinates a chain reaction among other proteins that form a larger complex. That larger group or 'signalosome' amplifies inflammation and leads to an anti-bacterial response.

But HRI can also regulate protein folding in other cell types, the researchers showed. Protein folding, which helps determine the 3-D shape of a protein and is essential for its function, is implicated in non-infectious diseases including the neurodegenerative disorders Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and ALS.

"The innate immune function that we discovered is essentially a mechanism of protein scaffolding, which is important because you want a quick and orderly response to bacterial infection," says Stephen Girardin, a professor of laboratory medicine and pathobiology and of immunology at U of T. "But we also found that same pathway is important for protein scaffolding and aggregation in other cells, which opens promising research angles for neurodegenerative and other diseases."

The journal Science published the findings today.

Researchers have studied HRI for over three decades, but mostly in the context of red blood cell disorders. "This protein appears in all cells in the mammalian body and was recognized as a broad or promiscuous sensor," says Mena Abdel-Nour, lead author on the paper who completed his doctorate in Girardin's lab earlier this year. "But it was overlooked relative to pattern recognition molecules and the formation of amyloid-like structures. We had to test its role in several different pathways before we believed what we saw."

Abdel-Nour and his colleagues developed a novel technique to study the effects of HRI. They adapted a biochemistry assay from the lab of Jeffrey Lee -- a professor of laboratory medicine and pathobiology at U of T whose team works beside their own -- which helped them distinguish between folded and misfolded proteins when looking at protein aggregates. Scientists have struggled to make that distinction in part because most available tests only work in test tubes and are not adaptable to cells.

The researchers have early pre-clinical data that shows HRI could protect against the type of neurodegeneration seen in Parkinson's. "Speculatively, it might be possible to find molecules that produce HRI's protective effects, which could lead to a bona fide therapy," says Abdel-Nour, who plans to pursue a career as a biotechnology and health-care consultant. Current therapies for Parkinson's focus on finding and clearing out protein aggregates, rather than fixing cellular defects before those clusters accumulate.

Girardin says he is committed to pursuing that research in collaboration with neuroscientists, and he just received funding to support that work. "We are focused on Parkinson's because it's a very important disease for human health, and because its hallmark is protein aggregation inside cells, so it may be a perfect model to test this new pathway."

Next steps include biochemical investigations of HRI and related complexes during protein misfolding, and animal studies of neurodegenerative disease to further validate the new pathway, which shares many features with a similar pathway in humans.

Scientists at McMaster University have identified new biomarkers for Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) in urine, which could lead to better treatments and reduce the need for costly and invasive colonoscopy procedures currently used for diagnosis.

Little is known about the causes of IBS, a chronic and often debilitating gastrointestinal disorder which affects hundreds of thousands of Canadians in which diagnosis is complicated, patients experience a vast spectrum of symptoms and treatment options are limited.

"Diagnostic testing for IBS involves a long process of excluding other related gut disorders, such as inflammatory bowel disease," explains Philip Britz-McKibbin, lead author of the study and a professor in McMaster's Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology.

"We were interested in finding if there is a better way to detect and monitor IBS that avoids invasive colonoscopy procedures while also giving us better insights into its underlying mechanisms," he says.

Researchers performed metabolite profiling studies comparing urine samples from a cohort of IBS patients with a control group of healthy adults. They discovered for the first time distinctive metabolic signatures that were elevated in the IBS patients. Several metabolites were related to collagen degradation, which researchers believe is derived from the gut, suggesting there is an impairment of the elastic lining in the colon impacting its normal function.

Researchers believe the findings might also allow for routine treatment monitoring of IBS patients that can also be used to validate the efficacy of dietary and/or pharmacological interventions.

Currently, they are expanding their work to discover new biomarkers in urine that can differentiate Crohn's disease from ulcerative colitis in children, hoping they can avoid future colonoscopies altogether. This may allow for rapid screening and early detection of various chronic gut disorders more accurately and at a lower cost.

Autistic adults are vulnerable to many types of negative life experience, including employment difficulties, financial hardship, domestic abuse and 'mate-crime', according to new research published today in the journal Autism Research.

These negative life experiences could partially explain higher rates of anxiety and depression symptoms and lower life satisfaction in autistic adults compared to non-autistic adults.

Mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression, are extremely common in autistic adults. Negative life experiences increase the risk of anxiety and depression in the general population, yet few studies have investigated whether vulnerability to these types of experiences might be responsible for higher rates of depression and anxiety and autistic adults.

One barrier to investigating vulnerability in autism is the lack of suitable measures. The research team, based at the University of Cambridge, Autism Research Centre, therefore developed a new measure called the Vulnerability Experiences Quotient (VEQ).

The team worked with an advisory group of autistic adults to develop the measure to ensure that it included experiences that autistic people felt were relevant to them. The VEQ asks participants whether they have experienced 60 negative life events, across a wide variety of settings, and including both adulthood and childhood experiences.

426 autistic adults and 268 non-autistic adults completed the VEQ via an online survey. The two groups had similar levels of educational attainment and the majority of autistic adults did not have intellectual disability. The autistic participants reported higher rates of 52 of the experiences in the VEQ.

This included items relating to financial hardship: 45% of autistic adults said they had had a period of life without enough money to meet basic needs, compared to 25% of the non-autistic adults; domestic abuse: 20% of autistic adults that had been in a relationship had been sexual abused by their partner, compared to 9% of the non-autistic adults, and 'mate-crime': 70% said they had been bullied by someone they considered to be a friend, compared to 31% of the non-autistic adults.

Participants also completed measures of anxiety and depression symptoms and a brief life-satisfaction scale. Autistic adults reported higher levels of depression and anxiety symptoms and lower levels of life satisfaction. Those individuals with the highest number of negative life experiences on the VEQ also experienced the highest number of current anxiety and depression symptoms and the lowest current life satisfaction.

Although this study cannot prove that these negative experiences cause depression, anxiety or lower life satisfaction, as these are just associations, these findings are consistent with the idea that vulnerability to negative life experiences is partially responsible for higher rates of anxiety and depression and lower life satisfaction in autistic adults.

Lead author Dr Sarah Griffiths, said: "This research highlights the challenges that autistic adults face in our society. With the right support many of these events are preventable. We need to ensure that all autistic adults have appropriate support to reduce their vulnerability and to improve their mental health outcomes."

Dr Carrie Allison, one of the Cambridge research team said: "The results of this study are a wake-up call indicating the serious extent of negative experiences that autistic adults suffer in most areas of their lives. This study focused on intellectually able autistic adults due to the online survey method. Future work will focus on adults with intellectual disability who may have a different set of vulnerabilities."

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, said: "This research is vital to inform Government policy makers worldwide about the appalling violations of autistic people's human rights. Our next step will be working hard to translate these findings into new policies, such as the need for every autistic person to have a life-long support worker to whom they can turn to help them navigate the world".

Clara, an autistic adult from London commented on the study: "This research is so important to me. Despite being intelligent and good with people, I've had too many negative challenging situations in my life - with work, close relationships, access to health, social services, and education. It has affected, and continues to affect my mental health."

A theoretical-experimental collaboration across two FLEET nodes has discovered new magnetic properties within 2D structures, with exciting potential for researchers in the emerging field of 'spintronics'.

Spintronic devices use a quantum property known as 'spin', in addition to the electronic charge of conventional electronics.

Spintronics thus promise ultra-high speed low-energy electronic devices with significantly enhanced functionality.

The RMIT-UNSW study discovered never-before-seen magnetic properties in devices known as vdW hetero-structures comprising several layers of novel, 2D materials.

The latest results show that vdW spintronics could provide devices with more functionality, comparing with the traditional spintronic approaches. Further research could generate devices with significant industrial applications.

BACKGROUND

Two-dimensional (2D) ferromagnetic van-der-Waals (vdW) materials have recently emerged as effective building blocks for a new generation of 'spintronic' devices.

When layered with non-magnetic vdW materials, such as graphene and/or topological insulators, vdW hetero-structures can be assembled to provide otherwise unattainable device structures and functionalities.

The material studied was 2D Fe3GeTe2 (FGT), a metal found to display promising ferromagnetic properties for spintronic devices in a previous FLEET study.

SURPRISING DISCOVERIES

"We discovered a previously unseen mode of giant magneto-resistance (GMR) in the material, says FLEET PhD and study co-author Sultan Albarakati.

Unlike the conventional, previously-known two GMR states (ie, high resistance and low resistance) that occur in thin-film hetero-structures, the researchers also measured antisymmetric GMR with an additional, distinct intermediate resistance state.

"This reveals that vdW ferromagnetic hetero-structures exhibit substantially different properties from similar structures," says Sultan.

This surprising result is contrary to previously held beliefs regarding GMR. It is suggestive of different underlying physical mechanisms in vdW hetero-structures, with potential for improved magnetic information storage.

Theoretical calculations indicate that the three levels of resistance are the result of spin-momentum-locking induced spin-polarised current at the graphite/FGT interface.

"This work has significant interest for researchers in 2D materials, spintronics, and magnetism," says co-author FLEET PhD Cheng Tan. "It means that 'traditional' tunnelling magnetoresistance devices, spin-orbit torque devices and spin transistors may reward re-investigated using similar vdW hetero-structures to reveal similarly surprising characteristics."

A diverse set of experiments supported by simulations were able to rationalize the effect of specific electrostatic forces exerted by the molecular building blocks on charge carriers. The study was published recently in Nature Communications.

In electronic devices based on organic semiconductors such as solar cells, light-emitting diodes, photodetectors or transistors, electronic excitations and charge transport levels are important concepts to describe their operation principles and performances. The corresponding energetics, however, are more difficult to access and to tune than in conventional inorganic semiconductors like silicon chips, which stands as a general challenge. This applies both to the measurement and to the controlled influence from outside.

One tuning knob exploits the long-range Coulomb interactions, which is enhanced in organic materials. In the present study, the dependence of the energies of charge transport levels and of excitonic states on blend composition and molecular orientation in the organic material is explored. Excitons are bound pairs of an electron and a hole that are formed in the semiconductor material by light absorption. Scientists refer to blend composition when the components consist of different organic semiconducting materials. The findings demonstrate that the energetics in organic films can be tuned by adjusting a single molecular parameter, namely the molecular quadrupole moment in the pi-stacking direction of the molecules. An electric quadrupole can consist of two positive and two equally strong negative charges which form two oppositely equal dipoles. In the simplest case, the four charges are alternately arranged at the corners of a square.

The authors further link device parameters of organic solar cells such as the photovoltage or the photocurrent to this quadrupole moment. The results help to explain recent breakthroughs of device efficiency in organic solar cells, which are based on a new class of organic materials. As the observed electrostatic effect is a general property of organic materials, including so-called "small molecules" and polymers, it can help to improve the performance of all types of organic devices.

A group of Chinese scientists have recently developed a new synthetic consortium for efficient pentose-hexose co-utilization that could improve bio-manufacturing.
Converting biomass into valuable fuels and chemicals using microbes is a hot topic in bio-manufacturing. However, inefficient pentose-hexose co-utilization has hindered the conversion process.

Professor LI Yin and his team at the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IMCAS) proposed using a Y-shaped consortium to solve this problem. They took butanol as the target product and developed a Y-shaped synthetic consortium using systematically engineered E. coli strains.

The "Y-shaped" synthetic consortium is composed of two engineering strains derived from the same original strain. The two separate "heads" represent the pentose and hextose metabolic pathways, while the unitary "body" represents the synthetic pathway of the target product.

In batch fermentation of mixed sugars, this Y-shaped synthetic consortium has achieved a yield of ~21 g/L butanol. This represents 85% of the theoretical value, the highest percentage yield ever reported, according to LI's team.

Further analysis has shown that efficient simultaneous utilization of sugar mixtures with different pentose/hexose ratios and different aeration conditions can be achieved by adjusting the initial structure of the Y-shaped consortium.

"This further indicates the adaptability and stability of the Y-shaped consortium, which may be used in industrial production," said LI.

This work provides new insights into efficient pentose-hextose co-utilization by a synthetic microbiome. It also lays a foundation for further reducing the cost of producing biobutanol.

If we want to get rid of fossil fuels nationwide, there is a lot to do. It will be a generation project, that much is clear. Empa researchers Martin Rüdisüli, Sinan Teske and Urs Elber have now calculated how long and steep the road to a sustainable energy system might be; their study was published at the end of June in the journal Energies.

The researchers chose a conservative approach and initially collected real data on electricity consumption, heating requirements and hot water consumption in Switzerland. These data then served as the basis for a thought experiment. Switzerland's electricity requirements are still quite easy to determine: The Swiss grid operator Swissgrid provides detailed values for every quarter of an hour on every day of the year. Heating energy and hot water requirements are becoming more difficult. The Empa experts used data from the district heating supplier REFUNA, which supplies several communities in the lower Aare Valley with waste heat from the Beznau nuclear power plant. A data analysis showed that the heat requirement of the connected houses correlates quite well with the outside temperature - and at nights warmer than 18 degrees Celsius, the heat is therefore only used for process water and shower water.

Electrifying heating systems and cars

For their thought experiment, the researchers made various presumptions. Firstly, most Swiss residents behave like people in the lower Aare Valley and live in similar buildings. Secondly, in order to get away from heating oil and natural gas, the heating requirements of all buildings will first be reduced by around 42% through renovation measures; then 3/4 of the remaining heating requirements in houses and apartments renovated in this way will be realised with electric heat pumps. And thirdly: Mobility will be electrified to the extent that approximately 2/3 of all private car journeys can take place electrically, which corresponds to approximately 20% of all kilometres driven. Freight traffic and long-haul journeys, on the other hand, are not so easy to convert, which is why they were excluded from the electrification of mobility in the study.

Nuclear power plants no longer play a role in the Empa study - because the phase-out of nuclear power has been decided since the referendum on the Energy Act of May 2017. Therefore, the researchers expected a strong expansion of photovoltaics; half of all roof surfaces in Switzerland rated as good to outstandingly suitable within the framework of the http://www.sonnendach.ch project are equipped with solar cells. This corresponds to about one third of all roof areas in Switzerland.

How much does the demand for electricity increase?

Next, the researchers determined the resulting electricity consumption, which is likely to rise by around 13.7 terawatt hours per year due to heat pumps and electric vehicles - i.e. by around 25 percent compared to today. Even more alarming than this significant increase in consumption, however, was the temporal gap between electricity generation and demand: solar cells produce the most electricity in summer - but heat pumps and heated cars require a particularly large amount of electricity in winter. This results in a seasonal supply gap.

This could be compensated for by importing electricity from neighbouring countries, as is already the case today in the case of shortages. But our CO2 balance will probably suffer as a result - because electricity from Europe often massively worsens the CO2 balance of Switzerland, which has been so carefully electrified. Heat pumps and electric cars therefore benefit the climate the most if the electricity required for them is also renewable.

What do the researchers suggest?

However, the Empa study also provides some valuable information on how to implement a low-CO2 energy system. Firstly, it makes most sense to replace oil-fired heating systems with heat pumps if the buildings are insulated using state-of-the-art technology. Because a heat pump without appropriate insulation is significantly less efficient. Secondly, each nuclear power plant must be replaced with about eight times the photovoltaic output. Why? A nuclear power plant delivers around 8,000 hours of electricity per year - a solar cell, however, only 1,000 hours. This means a large number of solar panels - on all available surfaces. Thirdly, we need as much storage capacity as possible for solar energy - both local battery storage facilities and pumped storage facilities as well as other storage technologies, in particular (geothermal) heat storage facilities, but also technologies for converting electricity into chemical energy sources. This is because the sun shines strong enough only a few hours a day to fill the storages. For the rest of the time, the stored energy has to last.

Fourthly, we must create seasonal heat storage facilities so that the electricity requirements of the heat pumps can be reduced in winter. Fifthly, we need to better match energy supply and demand. There will be plenty of solar power and heat in summer, but in winter renewable energy in particular will be a rare (and therefore expensive) commodity in the future. Sixthly - and this is the good news: electromobility does not make the balance tilt. Under the assumptions made, the daily charging of electric vehicles at home, at work or when shopping generates only relatively low peaks in electricity demand compared with the electrical heat supply. A prerequisite for this, however, is appropriate networks with sufficient capacity.

If further renewable energies such as wind power, geothermal energy, more biomass and a little more hydropower are realised in winter in the future, the coverage gap will shrink, however, it will probably not be possible to close it completely. The electrification of heat and mobility alone will therefore not solve the problem. "For the sustainable conversion of our energy system to succeed, we need both short- and long-term - i.e. seasonal - energy storage technologies. That is why we should not play off energy sectors against each other, but keep all technical options open," says Martin Rüdisüli. And Sinan Teske adds: "We must learn from nature how to deal with solar energy, which is not available all year round. We could store as much as possible in summer and limit our needs in winter. Or we could look for partners in the southern hemisphere of the earth who can harvest solar energy and deliver it to Switzerland when winter is here, and vice versa".

Scientists at the University of Sheffield have discovered how climate change and deforestation interact to push species towards extinction

Between 2000 - 2012 an area of tropical forest bigger than India lost its ability to link tropical wildlife with a habitat that would protect them from rising temperatures

The study is the first to investigate the interaction between habitat loss and climate change over time and at such a large scale

Findings urgently demonstrate the need to fund ways to stop tropical forest loss and invest in reforestation

Only 38 per cent of tropical forest is 'wildlife friendly' as a result of deforestation, increasing the likelihood that vulnerable species will go extinct, say scientists.

Researchers from the University of Sheffield and University of York have discovered how deforestation and climate change - two of the biggest drivers of species' extinction - interact with each other to magnify their effects.

For millennia, wildlife around the world has moved up and down mountains and towards or away from the equator to cope with changes in the Earth's temperature. The deforestation of tropical forests is creating a patchwork landscape where natural habitat is disconnected and confined to smaller spaces between a mass of farmland.

The research found that most tropical forest habitat is currently too disconnected to provide pathways to cooler climates, meaning wildlife will struggle to escape the impacts of climate change.

Tropical deforestation between 2000 - 2012 led to a vast amount of forest area, bigger than India, losing its ability to link tropical wildlife with a habitat that would protect them from rising temperatures. Today, only 38 per cent of tropical forest allows resident wildlife to avoid climate warming by moving uphill or towards the poles.

Senior author of the study, Professor David Edwards from the University of Sheffield, said: "The speed and severity with which the ability of plants and wildlife to track their optimal climates has been severed is truly shocking.

"In considering what we can do to solve this problem, we urgently need to fund mechanisms to stop tropical forest loss whilst also investing in reforestation in places where deforestation has already been most severe.

"The time to act is now and failure to do so will have catastrophic effects for tropical biodiversity over the coming century."

This loss of forest means that if species move as far as possible to the coldest places along connected temperature gradients, then under severe warming scenarios species would still, on average, suffer 2.6 degrees Celsius in warming.

Dr Rebecca Senior, who carried out this work whilst at the University of Sheffield's Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, said: "Our findings are cause for concern. We know that a huge amount of tropical rainforest has been and continues to be converted, but also that habitat loss is not the only threat to the natural world.

"Our research is the first to investigate this interaction between habitat loss and climate change at such a large scale and over time. Almost everywhere is getting warmer and for tropical species sensitive to these increasing temperatures, the lack of escape routes to cooler habitats means that warming will likely result in national and global extinctions of vulnerable species."

Scientists from Peter the Great St.Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU) with their colleagues developed multifunctional metal alloys that emit and absorb heat at the same time and change their size and volume under the influence of a magnetic field. This effect is caused by changes in the structure of the substance. The alloys may be used in medicine and industry. The results of the study were published in the Key Engineering Materials journal. The project was supported by the Russian Foundation For Basic Research and carried out as a part of the state assignments of the Federal Agency for Scientific Organizations and the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation.

When magnetized, certain bodies change their volume and linear dimensions. This phenomenon is called magnetostriction. The shape changes depend both on the properties of the magnetic field and on the substance structure. The biggest changes usually occur in strongly magnetic materials such as nickel, iron, and cobalt oxide alloys. However, the magnetic properties of rare metals require additional studies and are of great interest today.

A team of scientists from Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University calculated the combination of components in an alloy that would allow for heat absorption and emission and shape and size changes within a wide variety of temperatures including those close to human body temperature. In such an alloy terbium, dysprosium, gadolinium, and cobalt should be combined as 0.2:0.8-x:x:2, and aluminium should be added to them to reach the ratio of 0.2:0.8-x:x:0.9:0.1 (where x is a variable). The alloys were manufactured in the Institute of Electrical Engineering at Leibniz University Hannover.

The obtained material may be used to develop magnetostrictive transducers. They serve as sensors, filters, and resonators that transform the magnetic field into mechanical oscillations and vice versa. This is an important function for various devices, such as material integrity controllers that help find air bubbles within constructions. If such bubbles are not identified and removed, they may cause cracks and damage. Moreover, a transducer can serve as a basis for developing sensitive vibration gauges used to register earthquake shocks, as well as a source and a receiver of sound waves for underwater works.

A team of specialists from the Institute of Metallurgy and Material Science of the Russian Academy of Sciences studied the effect of the magnetic field on the alloy. The surface of the substance was probed with a thin needle able to detect every indent or mount. The system worked a lot like a phonograph, but the data was transformed not in music, but in an image. The scientists demonstrated that the surface of the alloy is covered in stripes and that their layout changes under the influence of the magnetic field. Thus, they were able to see the restructuring of the metal that explains the magnetostriction effect.

"Transducers based on our alloys are going to be more durable and long-lasting than the existing analogs and will work in a wide range of magnetic fields. Moreover, the alloys may be used in medicine as they can change their shape under the influence of magnetic fields that are safe for human health. For example, one can develop arterial stents that would flow in the bloodstream in a compact form and then unfold in a given place. This is possible because the operating temperature range of our materials is close to human body temperature," said Alexey Filimonov, the head of the Department of Physical Electronics at Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU).

A tiny fibre-optic sensor has the potential to save lives in open heart surgery, and even during surgery on pre-term babies.

The new micro-medical device could surpass traditional methods used to monitor blood flow through the aorta during prolonged and often dangerous intensive care and surgical procedures - even in the tiniest of patients.

The continuous cardiac flow monitoring probe, under development at Flinders University, is a safe way to give a real-time measurement of blood flow.

"The minimally invasive device is suitable for neonates right through to adults," says research leader Strategic Professor John Arkwright, an expert in using fibre-optic technologies in medical diagnostics.

Professor Arkwright says the device has the potential to be a game-changer - particularly for very young babies, which are particularly susceptible to sudden drops in blood pressure and oxygen delivery to their vital organs.

"It's a far more responsive measurement compared to traditional blood flow monitoring - and without life-threatening delays in the period 'snapshot' provided by current blood flow practices using ultrasound or thermo-dilution."

Neonatal expert and co-investigator Dr Scott Morris, from the Flinders Medical Centre Neonatal Unit and Flinders University College of Medicine and Public Health, says the new sensor-catheter device promises to deliver accurate blood flow information in critically ill patients, from pre-term babies to cardiac bypass patients.

"This tiny device, which could even be used in pre-term infants, has the potential to be far superior to the intermittent measure of averaged blood flow delivered by traditional methods which generally only show time averaged flow every 30 minutes or so," Dr Morris says.

A provision patent has been filed for the device, which is seeking industry partners for further development.

Chief investigator Albert Ruiz-Vargas hopes the device will be picked up for further development, and introduction into regular intensive care and surgical procedures.

"The proof-of-concept prototype is potentially a low-cost device which has passed initial testing in a heart-lung machine," Dr Ruiz-Vargas says.

"It can be inserted through a small keyhole aperture in the skin into the femoral artery in individuals where heart function is compromised and is so small it can even measure small changes in flow in the tiny blood vessels of infants.

"It's a simple design, which can give readouts similar to a pulsating heartbeat response on a laptop or nearby screen."

For the first time, the Flinders researchers have found an effective model to continuously measure intra-pulse blood flow using a fibre-optic sensor which has the potential to advance monitoring in a medical setting.

They say more research is now required to determine how the sensor will behave under more physiological conditions and to examine different encapsulations to
comply with human safety.

The tumor microenvironment (TME) is a mix of fluids, immune cells and blood vessels which envelops the tumors. Interactions between tumor cells and the TME determine the progression and fate of tumors. Therefore, understanding the composition and functions of the TME is thus very important for keeping cancer in check. Although several genetic mutations can result in the incidence of cancer, not much is known about their effects on the TME. A research team led by Chiaki Takahashi at Kanazawa University has recently reported the role of one such cancer gene, RB, in this regard.

Retinoblastoma (RB) is a tumor-suppressing gene, mutations in which promote the growth of tumors. Therefore, the team first inactivated RB in mice with sarcoma, a type of cancer, and observed the ensuing effects on tumor growth. The tumors in these mice were indeed enlarged. Further analysis of their TME revealed the presence of new blood vessels which usually nourish cancer cells. Newly recruited immunosuppressive cells, which overpower the body's natural defense system, were also found in the TME. Inactivation of RB thus made the TME conducive for cancer progression.

The researchers then dug deeper to investigate molecular changes in the TME. The secretion of Ccl2, a molecule that attracts immunosuppressive cells, was found to be greatly increased. Alterations in the TME, however, were not seen in mice without the Ccl2 gene, suggesting its increase as the primary culprit for the RB-mediated TME changes. To establish the relevance of these findings to human cancer, breast cancer cell lines were used. As expected, enhanced secretion of Ccl2 was also observed in the breast tumor cells with inactivated RB. In previous reports, the research team has disclosed imbalances in certain mitochondrial metabolites in RB-associated cancer. Mitochondrial superoxide (MS) is one such metabolite. To build on those findings, they examined whether altered Ccl2 secretion was related to MS imbalance in RB-associated cancer. When breast cancer cells were treated with antioxidants, which prevent the accumulation of MS, Ccl2 secretion was greatly decreased. The two were thus closely linked.

This study elucidated detailed mechanisms by which mutations in the RB gene induce changes in the TME and promote tumor growth. A deeper understanding of this dynamic will help devise tumor-suppressing strategies in cancer patients with RB mutations. Preventing mitochondrial imbalances or directly targeting Ccl2 in the TME of such patients warrant further investigation as therapeutic approaches.

The transition to retirement changes the way people use their time and how actively they exercise. Evaluating a person's daily sedentary time using questionnaires is difficult. Therefore, the study measured changes in the sedentary time of aging workers with the help of a motion sensor attached to the wrist.

Doctoral Candidate Kristin Suorsa discovered that the daily sedentary time increased by more than one hour in women when they made the transition from working life to retirement. The most substantial change was observed in women who retired from the service sector and physical work.

- No similar change was observed in men, but they did spend more time sitting down each day than women: two hours more before retirement, and approximately one hour more after retirement. The most time was spent sitting in the evenings. In fact, both men and women should reduce their amount of sitting time especially in the evenings, says Suorsa.

Sitting exposes to illnesses

Spending prolonged time sitting down, lying or reclining causes exposure to cardiovascular diseases and type 2 diabetes. Even intensive exercise does not seem to reverse the harmful effects of extensive sedentary time.

- Based on our study, retiring persons should try to reduce their sedentary time and replace it with light exercise, for example. Attention should be paid to increasing the exercise activity of retiring men in particular, as the men in our study were sedentary for almost ten hours each day, Suorsa says.

The research results are based on a sample in which 478 municipality workers wore a wrist motion sensor for, at minimum, four days before retirement and four days after it. The motion sensor measures acceleration and allows for the accurate measuring of the total sedentary time for each day, hour by hour.