Tech

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. -- Citizens from the island of Aneityum in the Republic of Vanuatu are working with faculty from Binghamton University, State University of New York to test their true value as humans.

Yu Chen, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and J. Koji Lum, professor of anthropology and biological sciences, are using a blockchain-enabled decentralized time banking system (BlendTBS) to measure the worth of humans in terms of societal obligations and assisting others. Time banking is a reciprocity-based work trading system where hours are used as currency. People offer their skills in exchange for hours, instead of traditional monetary payment.

"Time banking runs off blockchain technology, a program that time stamps and records all necessary data in a secure and transparent way," said Chen. "It promotes a trustworthy, communal relationship, and peoples' values are assessed according to how much time they put into activities and contribute services to the community. These values get recorded in the time banking system (TBS), which then allows individuals and organizations to utilize peer-to-peer service exchanges, using TBS time for transaction. This system encourages residents to contribute to the local community, which then helps foster bonds between community members."

Part of the research plan is to run a prototype of the BlendTBS system on the island of Aneityum. This developing region has limited formal education but has access to cell phones, making them a prime field-study spot for the system's intuitive, icon-driven interface. The Vanuatu-BlendTBS system has two primary functions that will allow participants to exchange time for labor, as well as to reward or penalize pro- and antisocial behavior. Data will be recorded by the blockchain technology, and researchers anticipate that participating subjects will be able to provide meaningful data, without altering their daily lives.

Research shows that active involvement in communal life leads to a higher quality of life for individuals, and Chen and Lum believe a decentralized time banking system could be the response to the growing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

"AI and Machine Learning (ML) are reshaping global communications, commercial activities and social relations in industrialized economies," said Chen. "AI can outperform humans and replace them in the workplace, reduce costs for manufacturers and change the way the economy and society are organized. This raises concerns regarding the value of humans and how we can work to fulfill our societal obligations. It also raises the issue of a lack of social cohesion, leading to people becoming strangers and not trusting each other."

According to the researchers, all of these problems can be boiled down to defining the true value of a person.

"This research suggests that the value of a human being lies in fulfilling our obligation to society by serving their fellow citizens," said Chen.

Chen and Lum hope this research will redefine the concept of "work" among mankind and inspire more interest in the roles that blockchain technology can play in modern society.

"As opposed to mental or physical activity to achieve tangible benefits, the majority of people will be engaged in work that meets the psychological, emotional, or spiritual needs of fellow citizens," said Chen. "By that time, the most valuable members in a community are the ones who are able to serve other people."

Strategies to cope with body heat in sports is a pressing issue. The Tokyo Olympics will be held in the hot and muggy Japanese summer where the ambient temperature is expected to be above 33°C. Athletes have to worry about performing under pressure of the high-stakes competition but also now have to deal with a very hot and humid climate. The 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar will also have high temperatures and athletes must use cooling strategies during the competition. Professor Hiroshi Hasegawa of the Graduate School of Integrated Arts and Sciences, Hiroshima University says that this is an increasing problem for athletes due to both competition timing and increased temperatures due to global warming.

Illness due to heat can have serious consequences outlines Hasegawa:

"Because our body temperature is usually around 37°C, if your body temperature increases over 40°C that is a very big problem."

Dehydration, decreased performance and decreased brain function are the dangers faced when our core body temperature climbs too high.

To help combat this, researchers from Hiroshima University collaborated with a Japanese sportswear company Mizuno to test a new type of cooling vest. The cooling vest is filled with ice packs and features a collar that can also cool the neck. The aim of the vest is to cool the athletes' upper-body skin which can decrease heart rate and temperature of their neck and skin.

Hasegawa recruited athletes from the Hiroshima University football team to test the vest. Participants exercised for 30 minutes followed by 15 minutes of rest, with and without the cooling vest, then exercised for a final 30 minutes in a format similar to a soccer match. The athletes who wore the vest at half-time showed increased performance in the second half. They also said that they felt more comfortable in the second half, an important factor as comfort and relaxation during half time is important to avoid stress during a game.

This research is not just applicable to athletes but to people that exercise in hot conditions. If you don't have access to a cooling vest Hasegawa suggests a combination of external and internal cooling:

"Normally to avoid the heat illness it's better not to do any exercise. But if you have to exercise in the heat it's better not to drink water, it's better to drink sports drink because they contain electrolytes and some energy... Cooling your body is very important, especially the upper body." says Hasegawa.

In the future, Hasegawa would like to test this technology with people with disabilities who might find it more difficult to regulate body temperature.

Blood tests that detect inflammation, known as inflammatory marker tests, are not sensitive enough to rule out serious underlying conditions and GPs should not use them for this purpose, according to researchers from the University of Bristol's Centre for Academic Primary Care, University of Exeter and the National Institute for Health Research Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care West (NIHR CLAHRC West).

Many diseases cause inflammation in the body, including infections, autoimmune conditions and cancers. Millions of inflammatory marker tests are done each year and rates of testing are rising. Although many of these tests will be done appropriately for different reasons, GPs are increasingly using them as a non-specific test to rule out serious underlying disease. Until now there has been no evidence about whether this is a good strategy.

The study, published in the British Journal of General Practice today [Tuesday 18 June], found that the tests are not good at ruling out disease and that also false positive results are common, leading to more follow-on consultations, tests and referrals.

Using data from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink, the researchers analysed the records of 160,000 patients who had inflammatory marker tests in 2014 and compared these with the records of 40,000 patients who had not had the test.

Overall, 15 per cent of raised inflammatory markers were caused by disease: 6.3 per cent were the result of infections, 5.6 per cent were caused by autoimmune conditions, and 3.7 per cent were due to cancers. No relevant disease could be found in the remaining 85 per cent of patients with raised inflammatory markers ('false positives').

The researchers calculated that, for every 1,000 inflammatory marker tests performed, there would be 236 false positives. They also calculated that these false positives would lead to 710 GP appointments, 229 blood test appointments and 24 referrals in the following six months.

Half of patients with a relevant disease had normal test results, or a 'false negative', meaning that GPs should not rely on a normal test result as proof of good health or to 'rule out' disease.

In a second paper published in the British Journal of General Practice today [Tuesday 18 June], the team, using the same data set, found that using two inflammatory marker tests does not increase the ability to rule out disease and should generally be avoided.

Dr Jessica Watson, a GP and lead author of the study which she undertook for her NIHR Doctoral Research Fellowship, said: "While inflammatory marker tests can contribute to diagnosing serious conditions and are useful for monitoring and measuring response to treatment, their lack of sensitivity means they are not suitable as a rule-out test. False positives can lead to increased anxiety for patients, as well as increased rates of consultation, testing and referral.

"We recommend that GPs stop using inflammatory markers as a non-specific test to rule out serious underlying disease. We would also like to see a review of NICE guidelines for chronic fatigue and irritable bowel syndrome, which currently promote the use of inflammatory markers to exclude other diagnoses."

Inflammatory markers and cancer diagnosis

In a further study, published in the British Journal of Cancer in April, the team found that patients with raised inflammatory marker levels were at greater risk of cancer. The risk was highest for men over 50 and women over 60, exceeding the three per cent National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) threshold for urgent investigation.

Professor Willie Hamilton, of the University of Exeter Medical School, said: "GPs should consider cancer as a possible diagnosis in patients with raised inflammatory marker levels, especially those over the age of 50, but not, conversely, rule out cancer when marker levels are normal. When we carry out a test in general practice, we have to be clear what we're looking for. Our study shows it's unsafe to use one of these tests as a general rule-out for serious disease. They simply don't do the job."

If you've ever pressed a picture-hanging strip onto the wall only to realize it's slightly off-center, you know the disappointment behind adhesion as we typically experience it: it may be strong, but it's mostly irreversible. While you can un-stick the used strip from the wall, you can't turn its stickiness back on to adjust its placement; you have to start over with a new strip or tolerate your mistake. Beyond its relevance to interior decorating, durable, reversible adhesion could allow for reusable envelopes, gravity-defying boots, and more heavy-duty industrial applications like car assembly.

Such adhesion has eluded scientists for years but is naturally found in snail slime.

A snail's epiphragm--a slimy layer of moisture that can harden to protect its body from dryness--allows the snail to cement itself in place for long periods of time, making it the ultimate model in adhesion that can be switched on and off as needed.

In a new study, Penn Engineers demonstrate a strong, reversible adhesive that uses the same mechanisms that snails do.

Shu Yang, professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, led the study along with Hyesung Cho, a postdoctoral researcher in Yang's lab who is now at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, and Penn Engineering graduate students Gaoxiang Wu and Jason Christopher Jolly. Lab member Yuchong Gao participated in the research as well. The team also included collaborators from Lehigh University: Engineering professor Anand Jagota, postdoctoral researcher Zhenping He, and graduate student Nicole Fortoul.

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Yang and her lab members have a history of translating what nature creates through evolution into the lab setting. Yang has led studies on nanoscale structures inspired by giant clams, butterflies, and pollen, and is the director of AESOP, the Center for Analyzing Evolved Structures as Optimized Products, which aims to apply bioinspired properties to design and architecture.

According to Yang, she and her lab have been interested in adhesives for a while, but the predominant model for reversible adhesives in the natural world, geckos, weren't getting them far enough:

"Geckos can put one hand down and then release it, so the gecko's adhesion is reversible, but it's very low adhesion," Yang says. "A gecko is 50 grams, and a human is at least 50 kilograms. If you want to hold a human on a wall, it's not possible using the same adhesive. You could use a vacuum, but you have to carry a cumbersome vacuum pump. We've been working on this for a long time, and so have other people. And no one could have a better solution to achieve superglue-like adhesion but also be reversible."

The breakthrough came one day when Gaoxiang Wu was working on another project that involved a hydrogel made of a polymer called polyhydroxyethylmethacrylate (PHEMA) and noticed its unusual adhesive properties. PHEMA is rubbery when wet but rigid when dry, a quality that makes it useful for contact lenses but also, as Yang's team discovered, for adhesives.

When PHEMA is wet, it conforms to all of the small grooves on a surface, from a tree trunk's distinct ridges to the invisible microporosity of a seemingly smooth wall. This conformal contact is what allows PHEMA to stick to a surface.

"It's like those childhood toys that you throw on the wall and they stick. That's because they're very soft. Imagine a plastic sheet on a wall; it comes off easily. But squishy things will conform to the cavities," says Yang.

Alone, this ability to conform to cavities is not enough to make a good adhesive. What really matters is what happens when the material begins to dry. As PHEMA dries, it becomes as rigid as a plastic bottle cap, but, uniquely, it doesn't shrink. Instead, the material hardens into the cavities, fastening itself securely to the surface.

"When materials dry, they usually shrink. If it shrinks from the surface, it no longer wants to conform to the microcavities and it'll pop out," says Yang. "Our PHEMA adhesive doesn't pop out. It stays conformal. It remembers the shape even when it's dry and rigid."

These properties that helped Yang's team identify PHEMA as a unique candidate for reversible, strong adhesion are the same properties found in a snail's epiphragm. On a sunny day, a snail's slimy epiphragm, initially wet, conforms to the surface it's on and hardens, barricading the snail from the dry environment and holding the snail firmly in place. At night, when the environment becomes moist, the epiphragm softens, allowing the snail to move freely again.

That reversibility between wet flexibility and dry adhesion is what the researchers wanted to put to the test with PHEMA. The team ran several tests on their PHEMA hydrogel, evaluating its ability to hold weight and the time it takes for water to infiltrate the adhesive and reverse its grip. They found that PHEMA acted remarkably similar to the snail epiphragm. It was 89 times stronger than gecko adhesion, but its hold was easily broken when it got wet.

"When it's conformal and rigid, it's like super glue. You can't pull it off. But, magically, you can rewet it, and it slips off effortlessly," says Yang. "Additionally, PHEMA doesn't lose its strong adhesion when scaled up. Usually, there's a negative correlation between adhesion strength and size. Since PHEMA is not dependent on a fragile structure, it doesn't have that problem."

To demonstrate just how durable their PHEMA adhesive is, one of Yang's lab members and co-first author, Jason Christopher Jolly, volunteered to suspend himself from a harness held up only by a postage-stamp-sized patch of their adhesive; the material easily held the weight of an entire human body. Based on the lab tests, the team determined that, although PHEMA may not be the strongest adhesive in existence, it is currently the strongest known candidate available for reversible adhesion.

With that kind of power, the snail-slime adhesive could have a big impact on the scientific field as well as in industry. Yang sees durable, reversible adhesives like her PHEMA hydrogel as having massive potential for household products, robotics systems, and industrial assembly.

"Car assembly uses adhesives, and, you can imagine, if there are any mistakes putting parts together, the adhesive is set and the parts are ruined," Yang says. "A car is pretty big. Usually they don't glue things together until the last step, and you need a room-sized oven to host the car and cure the adhesives. An adhesive that's strong and reversible like PHEMA could completely change the process of car assembly and save money because mistakes wouldn't be so costly."

Despite its promise in applications like heavy manufacturing, PHEMA is not a fit for most industries because its reversibility is controlled by water. While water is the perfect control mechanism for a snail, you wouldn't want your car to fall apart in the rain. So, although PHEMA is the first of its kind in reversible adhesion, Yang acknowledges that it's just a starting point.

"With a lot of things, you don't want to use water. Water takes time to diffuse. In the future, we want to find the right material that can switch the property like that," says Yang.

The researchers hope to eventually find or engineer adhesives that could respond to cues like pH, specific chemicals, light, heat, or electricity, broadening the potential applications of reversible adhesion.

While stories in the media present automation as having the potential to eliminate large swaths of jobs in the near future, a new study by researchers Maury Gittleman and Kristen Monaco argues otherwise.

These authors found that the employment loss among U.S. truck drivers will be significantly less than the 2-3 million reported by some media accounts. They found that three factors attributed to the inflation of this report:

The count of truck drivers is increased due to a misunderstanding of its occupational classification used in federal statistics

Truck drivers do more than drive and these non-driving tasks will continue to be in demand

Some segments of trucking will be easier to automate than others

Expanding off this last point, their research suggests while autonomous trucks will change how goods travel through the nation's transportation system and impact how trucks and cars interact on major freight corridors, not all trucking will be easily automated. Technology will transform the existing design of the trucking industry but will not eliminate the need for all truck drivers. Long-haul trucking (which constitutes the minority of jobs) will be easier to automate than short-haul trucking (in which the bulk of the employment lies). Their conclusions stress the need for paying close attention to the breadth of tasks performed, as well as certain factors that may impact the ease of automation.

This article, "Truck-Driving Jobs: Are They Headed for Rapid Elimination?" was recently published in ILR Review. You can read the full article here.

A spectacular stack on a ski slope in Canada has led to a University of Queensland researcher determining a simple modification that could improve skier safety on the snow.

UQ's Queensland Brain Institute researcher Dr Will Harrison studied visual perception under different lighting conditions to identify a better method for grooming ski runs.

"Snow at ski resorts is compacted and smoothed in a process called grooming, which has been shown to reduce accidents," Dr Harrison said.

"Grooming results in a pattern of parallel lines in the snow, and researchers know a lot about how the brain processes these patterns.

"I was interested to test if the particular groom pattern at the ski resort I was skiing at made it more difficult to see the snow.

"After analysing the sensitivity of central vision under different lighting conditions, I found on overcast days the ability to see the standard grooming pattern was severely reduced.

"This is due to the lack of contrast which makes it difficult for the brain to process narrowly-spaced lines."

Dr Harrison then investigated alternate grooming patterns that could counteract the issue and potentially improve snow sport safety.

By using computer modelling, he was able to predict how well the brain could process groomed snow at the standard viewing distance of 10 metres.

"I determined a combination of differently sized groom patterns would possibly improve visibility, and therefore safety, of groomed snow in cloudy conditions," he said.

"I've shown a minor modification to the grooming pattern could improve safety in theory, now I'm keen to work with engineers to trial it."

A hair-sized probe that can measure key indicators of tissue damage deep in the lung has been developed by scientists.

The new technology could pave the way for accurate monitoring of tissue in areas where existing technologies cannot reach.

Experts say the probe can pick up tiny changes in tissue health and could improve how patients are assessed and treated, specifically those on ventilators in intensive care.

Lung diseases are one of the leading causes of death and disability in the world. Despite significant advances, little is known about how disease develops in patients suffering from pneumonia or lung injury.

A team of scientists developed the probe, which comprises an optical fibre about 0.2mm in diameter that holds 19 sensors.

Each sensor can measure different indicators in tissues, such as acidity and oxygen levels, which provide important information on the body's reaction to disease processes.

Researchers have designed the technology to offer fast, accurate measurements and the flexibility to add more sensors.

Experts say the technology is widely applicable to other regions of the body and could be used to aid the understanding of inflammatory and bacterial diseases.

The research was supported by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through support of the Proteus consortium, which includes the Universities of Edinburgh and Bath and Heriot-Watt University. It is published in Scientific Reports.

Dr Michael Tanner, Proteus Research Fellow at Heriot-Watt University and the University of Edinburgh, said: "This research is a great example of collaboration across disciplines to tackle healthcare challenges. These new methods, if taken to clinic, will lead to novel insights in disease biology. Our aim now is to expand the number of unique sensors on this miniaturised platform to provide even more information."

Having a child with a developmental disorder can cause parents to worry about the outcome of further pregnancies. In cases where the genetic mutation causing the disorder is not present in either parent it is assumed to be a one-off event with a very small chance of recurrence. But in some families, the risk of having another affected child is as high as 50%. Identifying such high-risk families and providing an accurate assessment of their chances of having a unaffected child is therefore a high priority for clinical geneticists.

At the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics today (Sunday), Dr Ummi Abdullah, a Postdoctoral Researcher in Molecular Genetics at the MRC-Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine (WIMM), University of Oxford, UK, will present her team's PREGCARE study, which aims to provide healthy couples who have a child affected by a developmental disorder with a personalised pre-conception risk evaluation. This will allow the determination of the likelihood that a future child will also be affected by the same condition (the 'recurrence risk').

« Our focus is on families where the disease-causing mutation has been identified in the affected child but not detected in either parent on routine analysis. These are termed 'de novo' mutations or DNMs, and are estimated to affect around one in 295 live births - 0.34% of all births, or about 3,500 births per year in the UK alone, » says Dr Abdullah. « If the mutation is present in multiple gonadal cells (semen or ova) of the parents, a process termed 'gonadal mosaicism', the risk of an affected child is high ».

Currently, most diagnostic genetic services utilise DNA extracted from somatic tissues, for example blood or saliva, where the genetic information is not transmitted to the next generation. Analysis of these tissues alone hinders the obtaining of true recurrence risk estimates for individual families. « This is the situation we set out to remedy, » says Dr Abdullah.

Dr Abdullah will discuss results from the first 20 families to be investigated in PREGCARE. The study stratifies each family into one of seven scenarios that account for the parental origin of the DNM and the developmental time at which the mutation is likely to have occurred. Tissue samples from the mother, father and child are studied. While the researchers detected some mosaicism in these parents, in most cases the DNM was undetectable in their samples. When the mutation has been shown to have originated from the father, this confirms that the risk of recurrence is very low.

« Given our current understanding of mosaicism, we should be able to reassure around three out of every four of these couples that their recurrence risk is negligible, » Dr Abdullah says.
The researchers say that the study shows that there is a clear benefit in analysing the fathers' semen sample for a direct recurrence risk estimate for DNMs of proven paternal origin. « Furthermore, we also aim to show the importance of analysing several different somatic tissues of various embryonic origins to identify cases of mosaicism.

« This should also help us establish whether a given somatic tissue may be a good surrogate for gonadal cells. This will be particularly useful for mutations of maternal origin, as clearly the mothers' ova are not readily accessible for such genetic analysis,» says Dr Abdullah.

Parents who are themselves healthy, but have already had one or more children with a developmental disorder caused by a defined DNM and who wish to have another child, are invited by their local Clinical Genetics team to participate in the study. Ethical approval to conduct this study in families throughout England has been given, so the investigators hope to recruit many more families.

« I was struck to find out that, while our participants understand that this is a research study and not a diagnostic service, many of them have expressed their intention of waiting for our results before they decide on trying for another child," Dr Abdullah says. "This really reflects the anxieties of parents who have already had a child with a serious disorder."

Because children diagnosed with a disorder caused by a DNM often have severe learning disability, serious developmental disorders or birth defects, it is understandable that their parents are frequently concerned by the risk of another child being affected. This can have important consequences for the couple and can result in instances of voluntary but unwarranted childlessness, poorly-justified use of expensive in vitro fertilisation or prenatal diagnostic procedures, and sometimes the avoidable birth of children with a recurrence of serious genetic disorders.

« The ability to provide personalised estimation of transmission risk prior to conception is likely to impact on family planning decisions, but also more generally on clinical practice. I feel that the PREGCARE approach, although conceptually very simple, represents an important step towards so-called 'precision medicine' and should allow parents to make more informed reproductive decisions and reduce both the financial and psychological/emotional costs associated with a new pregnancy, » Dr Abdullah will conclude.

Chair of the ESHG conference, Professor Joris Veltman, Director of the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, said: "Developmental disorders are often caused by mutations in the DNA that are arising before or during the formation of sperm or eggs. By studying DNA mutations in different samples from parents of a child with a developmental disorder, the researchers aim to provide information about the chance that next pregnancies could result in another affected child. This study shows the importance of genetic studies not only to provide a diagnosis but also to provide relevant information for family planning."

When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over the Northern Indian Ocean, it captured an infrared image that revealed Tropical Cyclone Vayu was elongating. That's never a good sign for a tropical cyclone, because they need a circular rotation to maintain strength.

On June 14, warnings remained in effect for India’s Gujarat coast.

Infrared light enables NASA to take the temperatures of clouds and thunderstorms that make up tropical cyclones. The stronger the storms are indicate that they extend high into the troposphere and have cold cloud top temperatures.

An infrared look by NASA’s Aqua satellite on June 14, at 0359 UTC (0859 UTC) revealed strongest storms within Tropical Cyclone Vayu. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder or AIRS instrument aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite analyzed cloud top temperatures and found cloud top temperatures of strongest thunderstorms as cold as or colder than minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 53 degrees Celsius) circling the center and in thunderstorms northwest of the center. Cloud top temperatures that cold indicate strong storms that have the capability to create heavy rain.

On June 14 at 11 a.m. EDT (1500 UTC), the center of Tropical Cyclone Vayu was located near latitude 20.8 degrees south and longitude 68.2 degrees east. Vayu was moving to the southwest and had weakened. Maximum sustained winds were near 75 knots (75 mph/120 kph) making the storm a category one hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. The AIRS imagery showed that the storm appeared more elongated, indicating that vertical wind shear was increasing and having an adverse effect on it, so Vayu was weakening.

The Joint Typhoon Warning Center expects Vayu to turn to the northeast in a day and a half and make landfall near the India/Pakistan border by June 17.

Using a new blood test that's in development, University of North Carolina Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers identified characteristics that could be used to personalize treatment for patients with a type of head and neck cancer linked to HPV infection.

Researchers believe the findings, published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research, could help identify those patients with characteristics linked to improved treatment responses. They hope to tailor therapy for those patients to reduce their exposure to potential toxic side effects.

"Head and neck cancers that are caused by HPV infection tend to have a better overall outcome than head and neck cancers related to other factors like smoking and alcohol," said UNC Lineberger's Gaorav Gupta, MD, PhD, assistant professor in the UNC School of Medicine Department of Radiation Oncology. "There's been a lot of interest in exploring whether we can give less treatment to these patients and still achieve the same level of cure, while reducing the toxicities of treatment. The goal of this study was to investigate whether a blood test for circulating tumor HPV DNA can potentially be used to monitor the response of a patient's cancer to chemotherapy and radiation."

The researchers developed the test to detect levels of DNA in the blood from HPV-linked oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma tumors. Studies are ongoing to see if the test can be used to monitor patients' response to treatment with radiation and chemotherapy. In addition, the test has been licensed for commercial development to the company Naveris Inc.

In their latest work, researchers identified characteristics in patients that could be used to stratify and personalize treatment. They drew their findings from a study of the blood test results from 103 patients who were undergoing chemotherapy and radiation for HPV-linked oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma.

"What this means is that in the future, dynamic, real-time monitoring of circulating tumor HPV DNA in the blood during treatment may help us better personalize and select treatment - especially the level of radiation and chemotherapy we give the patient," said the study's first author, UNC Lineberger's Bhishamjit S. Chera, MD, associate professor in the UNC School of Medicine Department of Radiation Oncology.

One characteristic that emerged from their study as a biomarker of a good outcome was a high level of circulating tumor HPV DNA in the blood before treatment. Since the finding seems counterintuitive, researchers plan to investigate why a high level of initial viral DNA in the blood would be linked to a better outcome.

"It may seem confusing at first, but we think it reflects how addicted the tumor is to HPV biology," Gupta said of the finding.

In addition, they found that patients who then rapidly cleared the circulating tumor DNA from their blood were more likely to have improved outcomes. Patients who were able to clear more than 95 percent of the DNA from their blood by day 28 of treatment were considered to have a favorable clearance rate. For 19 out of 67 patients with those two favorable biomarkers, they found that none had persistent or recurrent disease.

"When we put these two factors together, meaning if someone had a lot of HPV DNA and it cleared quickly, we didn't observe any failures of treatment in our cohort," Gupta said.

Conversely, they found that cancers with low levels of circulating DNA from tumors at the outset -- or less than 200 copies of HPV DNA per milliliter -- and with unfavorable clearance of HPV DNA after treatment had a higher risk of recurrence. That risk was even worse when combined with other risk factors such as an extensive history of smoking.

Researchers at UNC Lineberger are planning to open a clinical trial in which patients are stratified to receive different levels of therapy based on real-time monitoring of circulating tumor HPV DNA. The planned trial, which will be led by Colette Shen, MD, assistant professor in the UNC School of Medicine Department of Radiation Oncology, will include patients with a smoking history and who are currently not eligible for reduced intensity treatment. By using circulating tumor HPV DNA monitoring during treatment, the investigators hope to identify patients who may be safely spared the additional toxicities of full intensity treatment.

UPTON, NY--Scientists seeking to understand the mechanism underlying superconductivity in "stripe-ordered" cuprates--copper-oxide materials with alternating areas of electric charge and magnetism--discovered an unusual metallic state when attempting to turn superconductivity off. They found that under the conditions of their experiment, even after the material loses its ability to carry electrical current with no energy loss, it retains some conductivity--and possibly the electron (or hole) pairs required for its superconducting superpower.

"This work provides circumstantial evidence that the stripe-ordered arrangement of charges and magnetism is good for forming the charge-carrier pairs required for superconductivity to emerge," said John Tranquada, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Tranquada and his co-authors from Brookhaven Lab and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University, where some of the work was done, describe their findings in a paper just published in Science Advances. A related paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by co-author Alexei Tsvelik, a theorist at Brookhaven Lab, provides insight into the theoretical underpinnings for the observations.

The scientists were studying a particular formulation of lanthanum barium copper oxide (LBCO) that exhibits an unusual form of superconductivity at a temperature of 40 Kelvin (-233 degrees Celsius). That's relatively warm in the realm of superconductors. Conventional superconductors must be cooled with liquid helium to temperatures near -273°C (0 Kelvin or absolute zero) to carry current without energy loss. Understanding the mechanism behind such "high-temperature" superconductivity might guide the discovery or strategic design of superconductors that operate at higher temperatures.

"In principle, such superconductors could improve the electrical power infrastructure with zero-energy-loss power transmission lines," Tranquada said, "or be used in powerful electromagnets for applications like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) without the need for costly cooling."

The mystery of high-Tc

LBCO was the first high-temperature (high-Tc) superconductor discovered, some 33 years ago. It consists of layers of copper-oxide separated by layers composed of lanthanum and barium. Barium contributes fewer electrons than lanthanum to the copper-oxide layers, so at a particular ratio, the imbalance leaves vacancies of electrons, known as holes, in the cuprate planes. Those holes can act as charge carriers and pair up, just like electrons, and at temperatures below 30K, current can move through the material with no resistance in three dimensions--both within and between the layers.

An odd characteristic of this material is that, in the copper-oxide layers, at the particular barium concentration, the holes segregate into "stripes" that alternate with areas of magnetic alignment. Since this discovery, in 1995, there has been much debate about the role these stripes play in inducing or inhibiting superconductivity.

In 2007, Tranquada and his team discovered the most unusual form of superconductivity in this material at the higher temperature of 40K. If they altered the amount of barium to be just under the amount that allowed 3-D superconductivity, they observed 2-D superconductivity--meaning just within the copper-oxide layers but not between them.

"The superconducting layers seem to decouple from one another," Tsvelik, the theorist, said. The current can still flow without loss in any direction within the layers, but there is resistivity in the direction perpendicular to the layers. This observation was interpreted as a sign that charge-carrier pairs were forming "pair density waves" with orientations perpendicular to one another in neighboring layers. "That's why the pairs can't jump from layer to another. It would be like trying to merge into traffic moving in a perpendicular direction. They can't merge," Tsvelik said.

Superconducting stripes are hard to kill

In the new experiment, the scientists dove deeper into exploring the origins of the unusual superconductivity in the special formulation of LBCO by trying to destroy it. "Often times we test things by pushing them to failure," Tranquada said. Their method of destruction was exposing the material to powerful magnetic fields generated at Florida State.

"As the external field gets bigger, the current in the superconductor grows larger and larger to try to cancel out the magnetic field," Tranquada explained. "But there's a limit to the current that can flow without resistance. Finding that limit should tell us something about how strong the superconductor is."

For example, if the stripes of charge order and magnetism in LBCO are bad for superconductivity, a modest magnetic field should destroy it. "We thought maybe the charge would get frozen in the stripes so that the material would become an insulator," Tranquada said.

But the superconductivity turned out to be a lot more robust.

Using perfect crystals of LBCO grown by Brookhaven physicist Genda Gu, Yangmu Li, a postdoctoral fellow who works in Tranquada's lab, took measurements of the material's resistance and conductivity under various conditions at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. At a temperature just above absolute zero with no magnetic field present, the material exhibited full, 3-D superconductivity. Keeping the temperature constant, the scientists had to ramp up the external magnetic field significantly to make the 3-D superconductivity disappear. Even more surprising, when they increased the field strength further, the resistance within the copper-oxide planes went down to zero again!

"We saw the same 2-D superconductivity we'd discovered at 40K," Tranquada said.

Ramping up the field further destroyed the 2-D superconductivity, but it never completely destroyed the material's ability to carry ordinary current.

"The resistance grew but then leveled off," Tranquada noted.

Signs of persistent pairs?

Additional measurements made under the highest-magnetic-field indicated that the charge-carriers in the material, though no longer superconducting, may still exist as pairs, Tranquada said.

"The material becomes a metal that no longer deflects the flow of current," Tsvelik said. "Whenever you have a current in a magnetic field, you would expect some deflection of the charges--electrons or holes--in the direction perpendicular to the current [what scientists call the Hall effect]. But that's not what happens. There is no deflection."

In other words, even after the superconductivity is destroyed, the material keeps one of the key signatures of the "pair density wave" that is characteristic of the superconducting state.

"My theory relates the presence of the charge-rich stripes with the existence of magnetic moments between them to the formation of the pair density wave state," Tsvelik said. "The observation of no charge deflection at high field shows that the magnetic field can destroy the coherence needed for superconductivity without necessarily destroying the pair density wave."

"Together these observations provide additional evidence that the stripes are good for pairing," Tranquada said. "We see the 2-D superconductivity reappear at high field and then, at an even higher field, when we lose the 2-D superconductivity, the material doesn't just become an insulator. There's still some current flowing. We may have lost coherent motion of pairs between the stripes, but we may still have pairs within the stripes that can move incoherently and give us an unusual metallic behavior."

Self-cleaning surfaces and laboratories on a chip become even more efficient if we are able to control individual droplets. University of Groningen professor Patrick Onck, together with colleagues from Eindhoven University of Technology, have shown that this is possible by using a technique named mechanowetting. 'We have come up with a way of transporting droplets by using transverse surface waves. This even works on inclined or vertical surfaces'. The research was published in Science Advances on 14 June.

The idea of mechanowetting is basically very simple: put a droplet on a transverse surface wave, and the droplet will move with the wave. 'One of the properties of water droplets is that they always try to stay on top of a wave. If that top runs ahead, the droplet will run with it', Onck explains. It is possible to move the droplets by using mechanical deformation to create surface waves. 'The remarkable thing about this is that it also works on inclined or vertical surfaces: drops can even move upwards against gravity.'

Theory and practice

Edwin de Jong, PhD candidate in Onck's group and first author of the paper, tested the concept of mechanowetting by means of a computer model. 'When it seemed to work in theory, our colleagues from Eindhoven University of Technology devised an experiment to test it. Our model turned out to be right: in practice, the drops moved exactly as we had imagined.'

Lab-on-a-chip

One of the applications of mechanowetting is in lab-on-a-chip systems, complete laboratories the size of a credit card, which are used to analyze biological fluids such as blood or saliva. This allows the samples to be tested outside the lab, e.g. directly at the bedside, with a much faster response rate. 'If we are able to direct each drop separately, it is possible to perform a lot of different tests at high speed with a very small volume of fluid', says Onck. Transporting droplets separately was already possible by means of electrowetting. 'Electrowetting is able to transport droplets by applying electric fields. However, these fields can change the biochemical properties of the sample, and that is something you don't want when doing blood tests.'

Light waves

In the meantime, Onck's group is exploring new possibilities. 'We have performed computer simulations that show that mechanowetting also works by using light-responsive materials to create waves. Light is especially interesting because of its precision and its ability to control the movement of drops remotely.' In addition to lab-on-a-chip systems, mechanowetting has several other interesting applications, such as self-cleaning surfaces, where water droplets actively absorb and remove the dirt. It also offers opportunities for harvesting moisture from the air, by collecting dew drops for use as drinking water.

When massive stars die at the end of their short lives, they light up the cosmos with bright, explosive bursts of light and material known as supernovae. A supernova event is incredibly energetic and intensely luminous -- so much so that it forms what looks like an especially bright new star that slowly fades away over time.

These exploding stars glow so incredibly brightly when they first form that they can be spotted from afar using telescopes such as the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The subject of this image, a spiral galaxy named NGC 4051 -- about 45 million light-years from Earth -- has hosted multiple supernovae in past years. The first was spotted in 1983 (SN 1983I), the second in 2003 (SN 2003ie), and the most recent in 2010 (SN 2010br). These explosive events were seen scattered throughout the center and spiral arms of NGC 4051.

SN 1983I and SN 2010br were both categorized as Type Ic supernovae. This type of supernova is produced by the core collapse of a massive star that has lost its outer layer of hydrogen and helium, either via winds or by mass transfer to a companion star. Because of this, Type Ic -- and also Type Ib -- supernovae are sometimes referred to as stripped core-collapse supernovae.

NGC 4501 sits in the southern part of a cluster of galaxies known as the Ursa Major I Cluster. This cluster is especially rich in spirals such as NGC 4051, and is a subset of the larger Virgo Supercluster, which also houses the Milky Way.

An artificial nose developed at Tampere University, Finland, helps neurosurgeons to identify cancerous tissue during surgery and enables the more precise excision of tumours.

Electrosurgical resection using devices such as an electric knife or diathermy blade is currently a widely used technique in neurosurgery. When tissue is burned, tissue molecules are dispersed in the form of surgical smoke. In the method developed by researchers at Tampere University, the surgical smoke is fed into a new type of measuring system that can identify malignant tissue and distinguish it from healthy tissue.

An article on using surgical smoke to identify brain tumours was recently published in the Journal of Neurosurgery.

"In current clinical practice, frozen section analysis is the gold standard for intraoperative tumour identification. In that method, a small sample of the tumour is given to a pathologist during surgery," says researcher Ilkka Haapala from Tampere University.

The pathologist undertakes a microscopic analysis of the sample and phones the operating theatre to report the results.

"Our new method offers both a promising way to identify malignant tissue in real time and the ability to study several samples from different points of the tumour," Haapala explains.

"The specific advantage of the equipment is that it can be connected to the instrumentation already present in neurosurgical operating theatres," Haapala points out.

The technology is based on differential mobility spectrometry (DMS), wherein flue gas ions are fed into an electric field. The distribution of ions in the electric field is tissue-specific, and the tissue can be identified on the basis of the resulting "odour fingerprint".

The study analysed 694 tissue samples collected from 28 brain tumours and control specimens.

The equipment used was developed specifically for the study. It consists of a machine learning system, which analyses the flue gas with DMS technology, and an electric knife, which is used to produce the flue gas from the tissues.

The system's classification accuracy was 83% when all the samples were analysed. The accuracy improved in more restricted settings. When comparing low malignancy tumours (gliomas) to control samples, the classification accuracy of the system was 94%, reaching to 97% sensitivity and 90% specificity.

Mainstream strategies generally address the challenge of reducing carbon by reviewing consumption, but a complementary approach looks at how people spend their time.

Researchers from Surrey believe that policy-making from a time-use perspective provides facilities for people to be happy while causing less damage to the environment.

A paper published by the Journal of Public Mental Health examines the carbon footprint associated with different types of leisure activities. Researchers found pastimes that generally bring the most gratification involve physical and mental activity as well as socialising, which contributes to personal growth.

By combining information from studies on happiness with those on low carbon lifestyles, researchers found that the ideal activities for both happiness and carbon reduction include goal orientated pastimes such as playing a sport, as well as reading challenging books, singing in a choir and spending time at home with friends and family.

"But many of these activities can be done in low carbon or high carbon ways," warned Angela Druckman, Professor of Sustainable Consumption and Production at the University of Surrey. "For example, as ambitions in competitive activities rise, people may fly abroad to take part in competitions."

"We need a two-pronged approach," explained co-author Dr Birgitta Gatersleben, Reader in Environmental Psychology. "We know that long distance travel should be discouraged and this is tricky due to its international nature. However, it's easier to make progress at a local level. We need to support investment in local infrastructure, such as sports and community centres, and also provide facilities for safer cycling and walking to support more sustainable local travel."

"In this way we can make progress towards a carbon neutral UK whilst also maximising happiness," concluded Druckman.