Tech

COLUMBUS, Ohio--Researchers have built a more efficient, more reliable potassium-oxygen battery, a step toward a potential solution for energy storage on the nation's power grid and longer-lasting batteries in cell phones and laptops.

In a study published Friday in the journal Batteries and Supercaps, researchers from The Ohio State University detailed their findings centering around the construction of the battery's cathode, which stores the energy produced by a chemical reaction in a metal-oxygen or metal-air battery. The finding, the researchers say, could make renewable energy sources like solar and wind more viable options for the power grid through cheaper, more efficient energy storage.

"If you want to go to an all-renewable option for the power grid, you need economical energy storage devices that can store excess power and give that power back out when you don't have the source ready or working," said Vishnu-Baba Sundaresan, co-author of the study and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State. "Technology like this is key, because it is cheap, it doesn't use any exotic materials, and it can be made anywhere and promote the local economy."

Renewable energy sources don't emit carbon dioxide, so they don't contribute to global warming--but they provide energy only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. In order for them to be reliable sources of power for a region's energy grid, there needs to be a way to store excess energy gathered from sunshine and wind.

Companies, scientists and governments around the world are working on storage solutions, ranging from lithium-ion batteries--bigger versions of those in many electric vehicles--to giant batteries the size of a big-box store made using the metal vanadium.

Potassium-oxygen batteries have been a potential alternative for energy storage since they were invented in 2013. A team of researchers from Ohio State, led by chemistry professor Yiying Wu, showed that the batteries could be more efficient than lithium-oxygen batteries while simultaneously storing about twice the energy as existing lithium-ion batteries. But potassium-oxygen batteries have not been widely used for energy storage because, so far, they haven't been able to recharge enough times to be cost-effective.

As teams tried to create a potassium-oxygen battery that could be a viable storage solution, they kept running into a roadblock: The battery degraded with each charge, never lasting longer than five or 10 charging cycles--far from enough to make the battery a cost-effective solution for storing power. That degradation happened because oxygen crept into the battery's anode--the place that allows electrons to charge a device, be it a cell phone or a power grid. The oxygen caused the anode to break down, making it so the battery itself could no longer supply a charge.

Paul Gilmore, a doctoral candidate in Sundaresan's lab, began incorporating polymers into the cathode to see if he might be able to protect the anode from oxygen. If he could find a way to do that, he thought, it would give potassium-oxygen batteries a shot at longer lives. It turned out he was right: The team realized that swelling in the polymer played a vital role in its performance. The key, Gilmore said, was finding a way to bring oxygen into the battery--necessary for it to work--without allowing oxygen to seep into the anode.

This design works a bit like human lungs: Air comes in to the battery through a fibrous carbon layer, then meets a second layer that is slightly less porous and finally ends at a third layer, which is barely porous at all. That third layer, made of the conducting polymer, allows potassium ions to travel throughout the cathode, but restricts molecular oxygen from getting to the anode. The design means that the battery can be charged at least 125 times--giving potassium-oxygen batteries more than 12 times the longevity they previously had with low-cost electrolytes.

The finding shows that this is possible, but the team's tests haven't proven that the batteries can be made on the scale necessary for power-grid storage, Sundaresan said. However, it does show potential.

Gilmore said potential may also exist for potassium-oxygen batteries to be useful in other applications.

"Oxygen batteries have higher energy density, which means they can improve the range of electric vehicles and battery life of portable electronics, for example, though other challenges must be overcome before potassium-oxygen batteries are viable for these applications," he said.

And the finding offers an alternative to lithium-ion batteries and others that rely on cobalt, a material that has been called "the blood diamond of batteries." The mining of the material is so troubling that major companies, including TESLA, have announced their plans to eliminate it from batteries entirely.

"It is very important that batteries intended for large-scale applications do not use cobalt," Sundaresan said.

And it is also important that the battery can be made cheaply. Lithium-oxygen batteries--a possible energy storage solution that is widely considered one of the most viable options--can be expensive, and many rely on scarce resources, including cobalt. The lithium-ion batteries that power many electric cars cost around $100 per kilowatt hour at the materials level.

The researchers estimated that this potassium-oxygen battery will cost about $44 per kilowatt hour.

"When it comes to batteries, one size does not fit all," Sundaresan said. "For potassium-oxygen and lithium-oxygen batteries, the cost has been prohibitive to use them as grid power backup. But now that we've shown that we can make a battery this cheap and this stable, then it makes it compete with other technologies for grid power backup.

"If you have a smallish battery that is cheap, then you can talk about scaling it up. If you have a smallish battery that is $1,000 a pop, then scaling it up is just not possible. This opens the door for scaling it up."

A drug used in the treatment of overactive bladder can accelerate atheroclerosis in mice, researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden report in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). According to the researchers, the results suggest that in some cases the drug might potentially increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke in humans.

Drugs developed to treat a particular disease can have other pathophysiological effects. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and their colleagues at Shandong University in China now show that a drug used to treat overactive bladder can be linked to atherosclerosis.

The substance is called mirabegron and relaxes the muscles of the bladder by stimulating the sympathetic nerve system in the brain. In their study, which is published in PNAS, the researchers show that the substance also affects fat tissue in mice, activating the brown fat and triggering the conversion of white fat to brown-like fat. The animals received doses corresponding to those given to humans.

The drug was given to mice lacking certain transport molecules for the blood lipid cholesterol and that thus serve as an animal model for atherosclerosis (the mice had modifications in the gene for the protein ApoE or in the receptor for the lipoprotein LDL). It was found that mirabegron accelerated the growth of atherosclerotic plaque, which is a common cause of cause heart attack and stroke. The plaque also became less stable.

Treatment with mirabegron increased the blood levels of the lipoproteins LDL and VLDL, which often are referred to as "bad" cholesterols for causing atherosclerotic plaques in arteries. These changes were dependent on the lipolysis (the breakdown of fat) and thermogenesis (heat generation) that occur when brown fat is activated.

"We link this drug, via the mechanism in brown fat, to atherosclerosis and from there to the potentially higher risk of cardiovascular disease or of conditions such as stoke that affect the flow of blood to the brain," says professor Yihai Cao at the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology Karolinska Institutet, who led the study.

Since the study was conducted on mice, the results are not directly transferrable to humans. But in light of a recently published study showing that mirabegron can activate brown fat in people, Yihai Cao believes that there is already reason to raise a warning finger.

"Patients with cardiovascular disease or atherosclerosis should be careful when using this drug as it could accelerate the growth of plaque and make it less stable," he says. "People with mutations that make it difficult for the body to get rid of LDL can be particularly sensitive since the drug increases levels of LDL in the blood."

He points out, however, that this hypothesis must be validated in clinical studies on humans. Roughly 1 in every 300 to 500 people have mutations of the LDLR gene that codes for the LDL receptor protein, which normally removes LDL from the bloodstream.

Lisbon, Portugal - 12 May 2019: Machine learning is overtaking humans in predicting death or heart attack. That's the main message of a study presented today at ICNC 2019.1

The International Conference on Nuclear Cardiology and Cardiac CT (ICNC) is co-organised by the American Society of Nuclear Cardiology (ASNC), the European Association of Cardiovascular Imaging (EACVI) of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), and the European Association of Nuclear Medicine (EANM).

By repeatedly analysing 85 variables in 950 patients with known six-year outcomes, an algorithm "learned" how imaging data interacts. It then identified patterns correlating the variables to death and heart attack with more than 90% accuracy.

Machine learning, the modern bedrock of artificial intelligence (AI), is used every day. Google's search engine, face recognition on smartphones, self-driving cars, Netflix and Spotify recommendation systems all use machine learning algorithms to adapt to the individual user.

Study author Dr Luis Eduardo Juarez-Orozco, of the Turku PET Centre, Finland, said: "These advances are far beyond what has been done in medicine, where we need to be cautious about how we evaluate risk and outcomes. We have the data but we are not using it to its full potential yet."

Doctors use risk scores to make treatment decisions. But these scores are based on just a handful of variables and often have modest accuracy in individual patients. Through repetition and adjustment, machine learning can exploit large amounts of data and identify complex patterns that may not be evident to humans.

Dr Juarez-Orozco explained: "Humans have a very hard time thinking further than three dimensions (a cube) or four dimensions (a cube through time). The moment we jump into the fifth dimension we're lost. Our study shows that very high dimensional patterns are more useful than single dimensional patterns to predict outcomes in individuals and for that we need machine learning."

The study enrolled 950 patients with chest pain who underwent the centre's usual protocol to look for coronary artery disease. A coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) scan yielded 58 pieces of data on presence of coronary plaque, vessel narrowing, and calcification. Those with scans suggestive of disease underwent a positron emission tomography (PET) scan which produced 17 variables on blood flow. Ten clinical variables were obtained from medical records including sex, age, smoking and diabetes.

During an average six-year follow-up there were 24 heart attacks and 49 deaths from any cause. The 85 variables were entered into a machine learning algorithm called LogitBoost, which analysed them over and over again until it found the best structure to predict who had a heart attack or died.

Dr Juarez-Orozco said: "The algorithm progressively learns from the data and after numerous rounds of analyses, it figures out the high dimensional patterns that should be used to efficiently identify patients who have the event. The result is a score of individual risk."

The predictive performance using the ten clinical variables alone (similar to current clinical practice) was modest, with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.65 (where 1.0 is a perfect test and 0.5 is a random result). When PET data were added, AUC increased to 0.69. The predictive performance increased significantly (p=0.005) when CCTA data were added to clinical and PET data, giving an AUC 0.82 and more than 90% accuracy.

Dr Juarez-Orozco said: "Doctors already collect a lot of information about patients - for example those with chest pain. We found that machine learning can integrate these data and accurately predict individual risk. This should allow us to personalise treatment and ultimately lead to better outcomes for patients."

The smallest pixels yet created - a million times smaller than those in smartphones, made by trapping particles of light under tiny rocks of gold - could be used for new types of large-scale flexible displays, big enough to cover entire buildings.

The colour pixels, developed by a team of scientists led by the University of Cambridge, are compatible with roll-to-roll fabrication on flexible plastic films, dramatically reducing their production cost. The results are reported in the journal Science Advances.

It has been a long-held dream to mimic the colour-changing skin of octopus or squid, allowing people or objects to disappear into the natural background, but making large-area flexible display screens is still prohibitively expensive because they are constructed from highly precise multiple layers.

At the centre of the pixels developed by the Cambridge scientists is a tiny particle of gold a few billionths of a metre across. The grain sits on top of a reflective surface, trapping light in the gap in between. Surrounding each grain is a thin sticky coating which changes chemically when electrically switched, causing the pixel to change colour across the spectrum.

The team of scientists, from different disciplines including physics, chemistry and manufacturing, made the pixels by coating vats of golden grains with an active polymer called polyaniline and then spraying them onto flexible mirror-coated plastic, to dramatically drive down production cost.

The pixels are the smallest yet created, a million times smaller than typical smartphone pixels. They can be seen in bright sunlight and because they do not need constant power to keep their set colour, have an energy performance that make large areas feasible and sustainable. "We started by washing them over aluminized food packets, but then found aerosol spraying is faster," said co-lead author Hyeon-Ho Jeong from Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory.

"These are not the normal tools of nanotechnology, but this sort of radical approach is needed to make sustainable technologies feasible," said Professor Jeremy J Baumberg of the NanoPhotonics Centre at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory, who led the research. "The strange physics of light on the nanoscale allows it to be switched, even if less than a tenth of the film is coated with our active pixels. That's because the apparent size of each pixel for light is many times larger than their physical area when using these resonant gold architectures."

The pixels could enable a host of new application possibilities such as building-sized display screens, architecture which can switch off solar heat load, active camouflage clothing and coatings, as well as tiny indicators for coming internet-of-things devices.

The team are currently working at improving the colour range and are looking for partners to develop the technology further.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Children living in food-insecure households are more likely to attend school on Fridays if they're participating in a food-distribution program that provides them with backpacks of meals for the weekend, researchers at the University of Illinois found in a new study.

Students participating in the BackPack food program missed one Friday on average during the school year, about the same rate as the 155 children in the comparison group, said Barbara H. Fiese, the first author of the study and the director of the U. of I.'s Family Resiliency Center.

The study included 444 students at 16 schools in east central Illinois. Of these students, 289 were participants in Feeding America's BackPack Program, a national initiative that provides children in food-insecure households with backpacks containing nutritious, easy-to-prepare meals to eat over the weekend.

Children in the program, who received their backpacks of weekend meals at school on Fridays, had fewer absences on Fridays than other school days.

BackPack students' rates of perfect attendance on Fridays were similar to those of students in the comparison group, at 26% and 27%, respectively.

"Given that children in the BackPack program were more likely to miss school than children in the comparison group, we consider this effect noteworthy for academic engagement. Even if these children attend just a few more days per school year, over time that may improve their academic progress," Fiese said.

"Thus, the simple act of distributing food on a Friday may have educational benefits for a particularly vulnerable group of children," she said.

Improved attendance as a result of participating in the food program may have spillover benefits for these children's classmates as well, since chronic absenteeism has been found to negatively affect classmates' academic performance too, the researchers wrote.

Eastern Illinois Foodbank identified prospective schools to participate in the program based upon the rate of free and reduced lunches provided in the community and school administrators' willingness to participate in the project.

The participating elementary schools signed partnership agreements with the local food bank and appointed a staff member such as a principal, social worker or secretary to coordinate the BackPack program and select students from kindergarten to fifth grade to participate.

Eastern Illinois Foodbank provided a one-hour training session for the coordinators to teach them how to identify children from food-insecure households, based upon physical and behavioral indicators such as extreme thinness or students rushing the school lunch line.

Families of students at each school were mailed a six-item questionnaire that assessed whether they were food-insecure, based upon their using a food pantry or receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits during the prior 30 days.

Of the parents who returned the survey, about 44% were employed and about 20% were unemployed but seeking work, according to the study.

Among households whose children were selected for the BackPack program, 72% were food insecure versus 50% of families on the wait list, the researchers found.

The rates of food insecurity among these families were more than double and triple the national and county rates, which were both around 19% when the study was conducted during the 2011-12 school year, the researchers noted.

When assessing students' families for food programs, it's important for school officials to look beyond any income-based criteria and recognize that families may be struggling with multiple demands and limited resources, the researchers wrote.

"Although food insecurity is associated with poverty and lack of economic resources, it is not equivalent to poverty, as some poor families are not food insecure and some food-insecure families may have incomes above the threshold to participate in some or all of the federal nutrition programs," Fiese said. "In some cases, food insecurity may be associated with being a single parent with a low-paying job, or with being a married couple who had a recent job loss and have multiple mouths to feed."

CHAPEL HILL, NC - Results from a study published in the Journal of the National Medical Association show that a pragmatic system-based intervention within cancer treatment centers can nearly eliminate existing disparities in treatment and outcomes for black patients with early-stage lung and breast cancer. The treatment completion rates before this intervention were 87.3 percent for white patients versus 79.8 percent for black patients. With the intervention in place, treatment completion climbed to 89.5 percent for white patients and 88.4 percent for black patients.

"These results show promise for all cancer treatment centers," said Samuel Cykert, MD, professor of medicine at the UNC School of Medicine and co-principal investigator of the trial.

This trial is similar to another led by Cykert that reduced treatment disparities for patients with early-stage lung cancer, while this study focuses more on breast cancer patients. The results of the previous work were published in the journal Cancer Medicine in February.

Leading up to these trials, Cykert and his colleagues conducted studies in 2005 and 2009 to find out why race disparities in cancer treatment exist. They found multiple reasons that contribute to the overall reduction in treatment.

"We found what seems to be implicit bias with some clinicians that made them less willing to take the same risks with patients that were different from them," Cykert said. "A black and a white patient of the same age could require the same surgery, have the same comorbidities, have the same income and insurance, yet white patients were more likely to receive the surgery and get their cancer treated."

Cykert says they additionally found that black cancer patients who did not have a regular source of care, as a result of poor clinical communication, did not end up pursuing adequate diagnosis or treatment. This finding highlights the need for systems that fully follow the trajectory of patient care. Rather than blaming the patient for incomplete care, recognition of these barriers allows for the cancer team to be accountable for re-engagement and full communication to promote completion of standard treatments.

"With that knowledge, we wanted to build a system that pointed out these lapses in care or communication in real time to help us keep track of patients who would otherwise drop off the grid," said Cykert.

The intervention consisted of multiple parts: a real-time warning system derived from electronic health records, race-specific feedback to clinical teams on treatment completion rates, optional health equity training sessions for staff, and a nurse navigator specially trained in racial equity to engage with patients throughout treatment.

The real-time warning system notified nurse navigators when a patient missed an appointment or treatment milestone. The navigator then reached out to the patient to reengage and bring them back into care. The nurse navigators were encouraged to become familiar with patients and build trust in case of a missed appointment, miscommunication between doctor and patient, or other circumstance that created a potential barrier to care.

Cykert, who is a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, says he and colleagues came up with the intervention model in partnership with the Greensboro Health Disparities Collaborative, an academic-community partnership experienced in community-based participatory research. Their goals were to create elements of real-time transparency, race-specific accountability, and enhanced patient-centered communication.

"I think it is revolutionary that we have devised an intervention to address the way that the health care system creates disparities," said Kari Thatcher, co-chair of Greensboro Health Disparities Collaborative. "We have made systemic changes that close the disparity gap and have improved health care for all races involved."
Terence "TC" Muhammad, fellow co-chair of the Collaborative, said, "This is a result of real collaboration amongst researchers, health care providers and community members that helped shape an action plan to make real change."

One of the participating institutions, Cone Health Cancer Center in Greensboro, NC, is now working towards permanently implementing this intervention into its cancer care for all patients.

"This treatment model can be applied to most any chronic disease," said Matthew Manning, MD, interim chief of oncology for Cone Health, who helped support the ACCURE trial. "It builds a more culturally competent care delivery system that would benefit all chronic diseases."

The study team recruited 302 patients aged 18-85 from Cone Health and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Hillman Cancer Center in this prospective trial sponsored by the National Cancer Institute. Cykert was a co- principal investigator along with Geni Eng, DrPH, in UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, a national expert in community participatory research.

Researchers are in the process of submitting a grant proposal with the National Cancer Institute to implement this intervention to cover whole cancer center populations rather than study patients alone.

CHICAGO -- A common chronic skin condition affecting 125 million people worldwide, psoriasis is an autoimmune disease, a class of disorders in which the immune system attacks the body's own healthy cells. In recent years, new medications -- known as biologics -- that inhibit the overactive immune system by targeting specific inflammatory pathways, have revolutionized the treatment of psoriasis and other autoimmune diseases. However, until now, few studies have documented the comparative safety of these various biologics.

In the largest study of its kind, clinician-researchers compared the risk of serious infection -- a side-effect of concern given the immune altering effects of these treatments -- across seven systemic medications used for the treatment of psoriasis. Lead author Erica D. Dommasch, MD, MPH, a dermatologist in the Department of Dermatology at BIDMC, and colleagues found a decreased risk of infection in patients with psoriasis using some of the newer, more targeted medications compared to those taking methotrexate, a drug widely used since the 1960s as a first line treatment for moderate-to-severe psoriasis. The findings were presented today at the Society for Investigative Dermatology meeting in Chicago and published concurrently in JAMA Dermatology.

"In addition to being potentially more effective than methotrexate, some of the newer targeted treatments for psoriasis may also be safer for patients in terms of risk of infection," said Dommasch, who is also Instructor of Dermatology, Harvard Medical School. "Doctors and patients may want to consider the risks of infection when choosing a systemic treatment for patients with moderate to severe psoriasis."

In psoriasis, skin cells proliferate too quickly -- about ten times faster than normal -- and the excess cells build up into scaly thick patches of itchy dry skin, especially on the scalp, elbows and knees. Methotrexate - an anti-inflammatory that blocks cells' ability to grow - has been an effective treatment option for psoriasis patients with more severe disease. But because methotrexate acts on all cells of the body, its use has the potential to result in unwanted side effects, including serious infection.

Certain immune system proteins, called cytokines, are important in causing psoriasis. Newer treatments, such as the biologics, work by inhibiting different types of cytokines. Some of the earliest biologics, including adalimumab, etanercept, and infliximab, work by inhibiting tumor necrosis (TNF)-alpha, a protein broadly involved in inflammation. Newer biologics are more targeted to the inflammatory pathways involved in psoriasis, including ustekinumab, which works by blocking two proteins -- interleukin-17 and -23. These newer agents have been shown to be more effective in treating psoriasis and could also be safer given their more specific action on the immune system. Apremilast, a newer non-biologic systemic treatment for psoriasis, does not directly inhibit inflammatory cytokines and is thought to have no increased risk of infection; however, it is generally less effective in treating psoriasis.

To conduct this large, retroactive observational comparative cohort study, Dommasch and colleagues used two large insurance claims databases that included more than 250 million people in the U.S. The dermatologists tracked the incidence of serious infection requiring hospitalization in approximately 107,000 patients with psoriasis who had a prescription claim for one of seven systemic medications FDA-approved for the treatment of moderate-to-severe psoriasis including older systemic medications (acitretin and methotrexate), biologics (adalimumab, etanercept, infliximab, and ustekinumab) and a small-molecule inhibitor (apremilast).

The researchers found that the most common types of serious infection were cellulitis, pneumonia, and bacteremia/sepsis among patients taking any systemic medications. The team found a significantly decreased risk of serious infection with apremilast, etanercept and ustekinumab compared to methotrexate. They did not find a different rate of overall infection among users of acitretin, adalimumab and infliximab compared to methotrexate. The finding that ustekinumab had a decreased risk of serious infection is suggestive that biologics more specifically targeted to inflammatory pathways in psoriasis may be both more effective and safer when it comes to risk of infection.

"This information should be considered when prescribing therapies for individual patients," said Dommasch. "This study demonstrates how researchers can use 'big data' to help compare the safety of different medications for patients with psoriasis."

Bottom Line: The time of day of a primary care appointment was associated with the likelihood of a physician ordering cancer screenings and of patients completing those screenings in this study of 33 practices with patients eligible for breast or colorectal cancer screening. The likelihood of physicians ordering cancer screenings decreased as the clinic day progressed and so did the likelihood of patients completing those screenings within one year of the office visit. This observational study cannot explain the cause behind these associations but clinician and patient factors may explain it, such as shorter interactions with patients if physicians fall behind and cancer screenings not being discussed. Screening test order rates were highest at 8 a.m. and lowest at 5 p.m. The results of this study may not be generalizable because it was conducted at a single health system and variation in screening orders and patient completion may be related to factors unaccounted for in this study. Future interventions that aim to increase cancer screenings should consider how the timing of primary care visits might influence physician and patient behavior.

Authors: Mitesh S. Patel, M.D., M.B.A., M.S., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and coauthors

(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.3403)

Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.

Collaborating scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Princeton University have discovered a new layered ferromagnetic semiconductor, a rare type of material that holds great promise for next-generation electronic technologies.

As the name implies, semiconductors are the Goldilocks of electrically conductive materials-- not a metal, and not an insulator, but a "just-right" in-between whose conducting properties can be altered and customized in ways that create the basis for the world's modern electronic capabilities. Especially rare are the ones closer to an insulator than to a metal.

The recent discovery of ferromagnetism in semiconducting materials has been limited to a handful of mostly chromium-based compounds. But here, the researchers discovered ferromagnetism in a vanadium-iodine semiconductor, a material which has long been known but ignored; and which scientist Tai Kong compared to finding a "hidden treasure in our own backyard." Now a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Robert J. Cava, the Russell Wellman Moore Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University, Kong completed PhD research at the Ames Laboratory under supervision of Paul C. Canfield. And when new material could have ferromagnetic response, Kong turned to Ames Laboratory for the magneto-optical visualization of magnetic domains that serves as the definitive proof of ferromagnetism.

"Being able to exfoliate these materials down into 2D layers gives us new opportunities to find unusual properties that are potentially useful to electronic technology advances," said Kong. "It's sort of like getting a new shape of Lego bricks. The more unique pieces you have, the cooler the stuff you can build."

The advantage of ferromagnetism in a semiconductor is that electronic properties become spin-dependent. Electrons align their spins along internal magnetization.

"This creates an additional control knob to manipulate currents flowing through a semiconductor by manipulating magnetization, either by changing the magnetic field or by other more complex means, while the amount of current that can be carried may be controlled by doping (adding small amount of other materials)," said Ames Laboratory Scientist Ruslan Prozorov. "These additional ways to control behavior and the potential to discover novel effects are the reason for such high interest in finding insulators and semiconductors that are also ferromagnets."

The research is further discussed in the paper, "VI3--a New Layered Ferromagnetic Semiconductor," authored by Tai Kong, Karoline Stolze, Erik I. Timmons, Jing Tao, Danrui Ni, Shu Guo, Zoë Yang, Ruslan Prozorov, and Robert J. Cava; and featured on the back cover of Advanced Materials.

Newly identified subsets of cell types present in joint tissue in people with rheumatoid arthritis and how they interact may explain why only some people respond to existing medications, according to two studies by co-senior author Laura Donlin, PhD, Co-Director of the Derfner Foundation Precision Medicine Laboratory at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) and collaborating colleagues. The findings suggest exciting new targets for developing precision medicine strategies in the future.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune disease that affects the joints. The immune system mistakenly perceives joint tissue as a harmful invader, like a bacteria or virus, and attacks it, causing inflammation, pain and swelling. RA affects an estimated 1.3 million Americans, about 1% of the population. Critical unmet needs in RA treatment are medications that effectively treat all people with RA, especially those who do not respond to disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) or biologics.

RA involves a complex interplay between many different types of cells--including T cells, B cells, monocytes and fibroblasts--but the specific subtypes that drive disease progression are largely undefined. Understanding these cell types more precisely may hold valuable information in developing new treatments.

"Right now, the standard approach for treating patients is a trial and error approach. We try the first-line of medication for three months and if it does not work, we try the next one," says Dr. Donlin. "Sometimes it can take a year or more to find an effective treatment. Meanwhile, the disease progresses to the extent of irreversible damage in some of the cases."

For the first paper, published in the May 6, 2019 issue of Nature Immunology, co-senior author Dr. Donlin collaborated within the Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP) in Rheumatoid Arthritis and Lupus Network (AMP RA/SLE consortium) to create a comprehensive "map" of the cells found in RA joint tissue using advanced sequencing technologies. The AMP RA/SLE consortium is a unique public-private partnership that was created to find new ways to identify and validate promising biological targets for diagnostics and drug development.

The researchers identified 18 unique cell populations in synovial tissue provided by 36 patients with RA. Several of the cell types were present in higher amounts in people with RA compared to control samples from patients with osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease that results from deterioration of cartilage due to injury or wear over time. For example, Dr. Donlin and colleagues identified a subset of fibroblasts, cells that make connective tissue, in 15 times greater quantities in RA tissues compared to OA tissues. This fibroblast subset is a major producer of the pro-inflammatory cytokine called interleukin-6 and thereby represents a cell type that may be important to focus on in the development of medications for RA patients.

Dr. Donlin and colleagues were also the first to identify the presence of a subset of autoimmune-associated B cells in synovial tissue. These too were found in large quantities in the RA samples, indicating that this subtype may also be a promising target for future drug development.

"Cutting-edge single-cell RNA sequencing technology allowed us to see the complexity of the cell populations in RA tissue for the first time," says Dr. Donlin. "However, determining whether these expanded cell populations are a cause or an effect of the disease, will require further research."

For the second paper, published May 8, 2019 in the journal Science Translational Medicine, co-senior author Dr. Donlin and HSS colleagues conducted additional research using results from the AMP consortium to home in on a particular disease-associating cell type. They discovered an abundant subset of macrophages they referred to as HBEGF+ inflammatory macrophages in the RA tissue samples. Macrophages are white blood cells that readily tailor their actions to signals from other cells. In chronically inflamed RA tissue, macrophages are a known source of tumor necrosis factor (TNF), a small protein or cytokine that is involved in inflammatory responses in RA.

Next, the researchers tested how clinically-effective RA medications impacted the HBEGF+ inflammatory macrophages and thereby disrupt the disease at the cellular level. They were surprised to discover that COX inhibitors known as nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) did significantly alter these macrophages, but they did not stop TNF responses. "This finding may explain why NSAIDs treat pain but are not disease-modifying in RA," says Dr. Donlin. "A better approach may be to use NSAIDs in combination with anti-TNF medications to shut down both inflammatory pathways."

An experimental drug developed for cancer treatment, an epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) inhibitor called AG-1478, was able to successfully reverse the activity of the HBEGF+ inflammatory macrophages in cell studies. "Our experiment demonstrated that it is possible to target activity of these cells, but this drug has significant systemic side effects in people," says Dr. Donlin. "Our work sets the stage for developing better drugs in the future that could target the same mechanism but in a more specific fashion."

"Overall, our work to date on these two papers has identified previously unknown subsets of cells and provided new insights about how some of these cell types interact with each other to drive RA," says Dr. Donlin. "We hope that through a better understanding of the cell populations in individual patients we can provide a means by which we can treat them with precision medicine strategies at the earliest stages of disease."

A new study revealed an increased risk of cancer and early death in individuals who developed inflammatory bowel disease-including ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn's disease (CD)--during childhood.

For the Alimentary Pharmacology & Therapeutics study, researchers in Denmark and Finland followed 6,689 patients diagnosed with UC or CD before 18 years of age. Over a median follow-up of 9.6 years (when patients had a median age of 22.3 years), 72 patients developed cancer and 65 died. Most cancers were in the small or large intestine, but there were also cases of lymphomas and skin melanomas.

Patients diagnosed with UC during childhood had a 2.5-times higher risk of developing cancer and a 3.7-times higher risk of dying during follow-up compared with the general population. For CD, the risk was 2.6-times higher for cancer and 2.2-times higher for death compared with the general population. The main causes of death were cancer, suicide, and infections.

The findings stress the importance of cancer surveillance for young patients with UC or CD. Also, the increased risk of suicide found in the study points to the need to assess patients' mental health.

Interactions between a mother and her child have been linked to cognitive outcomes in childhood, but little work has looked at farther-reaching effects.

In a Journal of Marriage & Family study that examined data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, more positive mother-child interactions during the first 16 years of life predicted higher education in adulthood, which predicted less decline in episodic memory, or the memory of autobiographical events. Additionally, more positive mother-child interactions were associated with better episodic memory through higher marital satisfaction.

The results provide evidence for the broad and enduring effects of early life maternal relationships on later life developmental processes.

"The findings highlight the importance of taking a more integrative and lifespan perspective to assess how early life experiences affect socioemotional and cognitive development," the authors wrote.

What is the genetic basis for eucalyptus trees to produce that fragrant oil many of us associate with trips to the spa? Carsten Külheim, associate professor in Michigan Technological University's School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science, has spent the past 10 years of his career studying eucalyptus. They are diverse, fast-growing species that includes scrubby bushes and 300-foot-tall flowering trees -- mostly indigenous to Australia, but also New Guinea and Indonesia.

In particular, Külheim studies terpenes, organic compounds found in the plant's leaves. Terpenes enable certain species (mostly plants, but also some insects) that produce them to give off strong odors that deter pests or attract pollinators. For example, hops, a primary ingredient in beer, contain terpenes, which gives the hops their piney smell. Certain varieties of eucalyptus and tea tree produce great quantities of just the right terpenes, which can be used for essential oils or biofuel distillation.

It is said that Australia's Blue Mountains take their name from the smog-like mist eucalyptus trees emit, particularly on hot days; this mist is composed of terpenes vaporizing in the heat. Külheim and his fellow researchers want to know what, at the genetic level, causes production of about 50 different terpenes so they can crank it up to use the oil as a renewable fuel.

In the article "High marker density GWAS provides novel insights into the genomic architecture of terpene oil yield in Eucalyptus" in the journal New Phytologist (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.15887), Külheim and his coauthors investigate the genetic basis of variation in oil yield in blue mallee, a eucalyptus native to Australia. This will allow for a faster and more efficient domestication, making the production of renewable fuels from eucalypt plantations more feasible.

One reason for the interest in eucalyptus oil is because bioethanol (typically made from corn) and biodiesel (typically made with vegetable and soybean oils) do not have sufficient energy density to be useful for the aviation industry. Eucalyptus oil, however, can be converted into high-energy biofuel that can be used for jet fuel and even tactical missile fuel (JP-10).

However, many eucalypts currently have not been domesticated and vary greatly in their oil yield. Using genome-wide association studies (GWAS), Külheim has identified the genes that produce the components of eucalyptus oil that may be used for jet fuel, and the aspects that may be used for the production of biodiesel.

"This enables us to select for trees that mostly produce useful oil components for our purposes; we can use biotechnology to remove the genes for unwanted components or enhance the desired ones," Külheim said. "We hope to provide eucalyptus farmers with genetic marker information to select trees at an earlier stage in their growth for higher terpene production. By choosing to cultivate new trees from power terpene producers, farmers are able to create new generations of the plants that naturally produce more oils."

But beyond the promise of eucalyptus oil for biofuels and the beauty and wellness industries, the species could also prove an excellent cash crop for farmers in arid regions. The trees grow well in hot, dry regions, don't need to be irrigated, and thus do not compete with food production on arable land.

A cheaper, cleaner and more sustainable way of making hydrogen fuel from water using sunlight is step closer thanks to new research from the University of Bath's Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies.

With the pressure on global leaders to reduce carbon emissions significantly to solve a climate change emergency, there is an urgent need to develop cleaner energy alternatives to burning fossil fuels. Hydrogen is a zero carbon emission fuel alternative that can be used to power cars, producing only water as a waste product.

It can be made by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, however the process requires large amounts of electricity. Most electricity is made by burning methane so researchers at the University of Bath are developing new solar cells that use light energy directly to split water.

Most solar cells currently on the market are made of silicon, however they are expensive to make and require a lot of very pure silicon to manufacture. They are also quite thick and heavy, which limits their applications.

Perovskite solar cells, using materials with the same 3D structure as calcium titanium oxide, are cheaper to make, thinner and can be easily printed onto surfaces. They also work in low light conditions and can produce a higher voltage than silicon cells, meaning they could be used indoors to power devices without the need to plug into the mains.

The downside is they are unstable in water which presents a huge obstacle in their development and also limits their use for the direct generation of clean hydrogen fuels.

The team of scientists and chemical engineers, from the University of Bath's Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies, has solved this problem by using a waterproof coating from graphite, the material used in pencil leads.

They tested the waterproofing by submerging the coated perovskite cells in water and using the harvested solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The coated cells worked underwater for 30 hours - ten hours longer than the previous record.

After this period, the glue sandwiching the coat to the cells failed; the scientists anticipate that using a stronger glue could stabilise the cells for even longer.

Previously, alloys containing indium were used to protect the solar cells for water splitting, however indium is a rare metal and is therefore expensive and the mining process to obtain it is not sustainable.

The Bath team instead used commercially available graphite, which is very cheap and much more sustainable than indium.

Dr Petra Cameron, Senior Lecturer in Chemistry, said: "Perovskite solar cell technology could make solar energy much more affordable for people and allow solar cells to be printed onto roof tiles. However at the moment they are really unstable in water - solar cells are not much use if they dissolve in the rain!'

"We've developed a coating that could effectively waterproof the cells for a range of applications. The most exciting thing about this is that we used commercially available graphite, which is much cheaper and more sustainable than the materials previously tried."

Perovskite solar cells produce a higher voltage than silicon based cells, but still not enough needed to split water using solar cells alone. To solve this challenge, the team is adding catalysts to reduce the energy requirement needed to drive the reaction.

Isabella Poli, Marie Curie FIRE Fellow and PhD student from the Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies, said: "Currently hydrogen fuel is made by burning methane, which is neither clean nor sustainable.

"But we hope that in the future we can create clean hydrogen and oxygen fuels from solar energy using perovskite cells."

A new, open-road test of adaptive cruise control demonstrated that the feature, designed to make driving easier by continuously adjusting a vehicle's speed in response to the car ahead, doesn't yet solve the problem of phantom traffic jams.

Because human drivers are responsible for the creation of this type of jam - which occurs without an obvious cause - the widespread use of these types of driver-assist technologies holds promise to eliminate these jams, if designed appropriately.

"Our experiments show that today's driver-assist systems are not yet able to overcome the worst driving behaviors of humans that lead to extremely frustrating traffic jams," said Dan Work, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Vanderbilt University, who helped lead the research.

The details of the multi-university team's latest experiments on ACC vehicles were presented in April at Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet-of-Things Week and were released more broadly on May 7.

Their work builds on earlier research that showed adding even a small fraction of specially designed autonomous vehicles could eliminate phantom jams by keeping an optimal separation between cars and avoiding sudden stops.

As vehicles with driver-assist systems such as adaptive cruise control become more prevalent, it is critical to understand how they influence traffic, said Work. While they potentially react faster and more gracefully to vehicles ahead than humans can, their sensors are not able to see beyond the vehicle immediately in front. That limits their ability to outperform human drivers, who anticipate changes by looking multiple vehicles ahead.

Work and his collaborators tested seven different cars from two manufacturers on a remote, rural roadway in Arizona. They simulated various driving conditions with a pace car changing its speed, followed by a vehicle using adaptive cruise control. The team measured how quickly and aggressively the ACC system responded to the pace car speed changes.

They drove the cars at varying speeds over more than 1,000 miles of testing, with the results always the same.

"In each test, the following vehicle slowed down more than the leader, which is a signature of the creation of phantom traffic jams," said Benjamin Seibold, associate professor of mathematics at Temple University and another lead researcher.

In one experiment, the team filled a lane of traffic with seven identical vehicles - all running the same ACC system - with a pace vehicle in front. Once all vehicles achieved a cruising speed of 50 miles per hour, the pace vehicle quickly reduced its speed by 6 miles per hour. In a domino effect, each of the following vehicles slowed down more and more dramatically so that, by the seventh car, its speed dropped below the minimum required for the ACC system to operate.

“The systems are currently designed for safety and comfort, but many research groups have been interested in designing ACC systems that have benefits to traffic flow,” Piccoli said. “A good ACC system for traffic is one that doesn’t slow down any more than the vehicle ahead of it. But that’s not what happened. Right now, the very best drivers are quicker at realizing what the car ahead is doing,” said Delle Monache.

“Because 16 of the 20 best-selling vehicles in America already offer ACC, these technologies could help alleviate jams in the short term, decades before cars become fully autonomous,” said Lysecky.

“We don’t have to wait until the distant future to see traffic benefits from these systems if they are designed with traffic flow impacts in mind,” Sprinkle said. “It’s achievable now with the right design, the right sensing, and the right communication among vehicles.”

Team members said they hope manufacturers ultimately will design vehicle automation systems that make traffic a concern in addition to safety, comfort and fuel efficiency. Sixteen of the 20 best-selling vehicles in America already offer ACC, which demonstrates their potential for impacting traffic decades before vehicles become fully autonomous.

They said the next step is to design and demonstrate effective driver-assist features in real freeway traffic, paving the way for the next generation of vehicle automation technologies.