Tech

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Role-playing the administrative experiences of immigrants led students to empathize and trust them, according to a new study by two University of Arkansas researchers.

Brandon Bouchillon, assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Strategic Media, and Patrick Stewart, associate professor in the Department of Political Science, created a role-playing experience for students to learn what the process of applying for citizenship might be like for immigrants. The experience was integrated into an online American Government class.

"Games-based learning initiatives offer a way of creating shared experiences between groups that have come to interact less, such as racial or ethnic majorities and minorities," Bouchillon said. "This was a valuable learning experience for the students, and for us as reseachers as well."

The research used a game called Citizenship Quest. Students in the class created a fictional persona from randomly assigned countries of China, India, or Mexico, then applied for green card status with the ultimate goal of obtaining citizenship. Results of the study suggest that the exercise helped students build trust even though they had little direct contact with immigrants. Researchers believe that trust in others, including marginalized groups such as immigrants, can be increased with shared experiences.

The study, titled Games-Based Trust: Role-Playing the Administrative Experience of Immigrants, was published in in the journal New Media & Society.

The existing characterization procedures to evaluate emerging photovoltaic devices are not appropriate for halide perovskite solar cells, a new generation of solar cells called to overcome the present state-of-the-art technologies. A vast group of scientists with Prof. Pavel A. Troshin representing Skoltech has reached a consensus on the suitable procedures and the variables to be reported in stability studies of this kind of solar cells. The consensus statement, highlighted in the last issue of Nature Energy, updates the ISOS protocols for the stability assessment of perovskite photovoltaics with additional procedures to account for properties specific to this technology.

Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) represent a new kind of photovoltaic devices expected to rival the widespread silicon panels. The efficiency of perovskite-based solar cells is already superior, but their lifespan must be extended. This is the pending issue for the PSCs to reach commercialization. However, the existing qualification tests to evaluate the performance of solar cells are not appropriate for PSCs, as these have different material properties and device architectures. Therefore, publications studying the stability of PSCs lack consistency in the experimental procedures used and the parameters reported, which hampers data comparison and a proper understanding of the cell degradation mechanisms.

A large group of scientists decided to put an end to this situation: 59 leading researchers from 51 affiliations have agreed on how the stability of perovskite cells should be assessed and reported. The discussion was led by Prof. Mónica Lira-Cantú, Group Leader of the ICN2 Nanostructured Materials for Photovoltaic Energy Group, and by Prof. Eugene A. Katz, Professor at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Among the authors are remarkable researchers such as Prof. Nam-Gyu Park and Prof. Henry J. Snaith, Nobel Prize candidates in 2017 for their discovery of the perovskite cells. Skoltech team was represented by Prof. Pavel Troshin. The result of the discussion is a consensus statement published in Nature Energy and highlighted in the journal editorial.

The experts have complemented the existing protocols with a set of testing procedures that account for specific features of PSCs, including light-dark-cycling, the study of cell behavior under electrical bias in the dark or intrinsic stability testing, among others. The researchers have also proposed a checklist for reporting results aimed at improving reproducibility.

However, there is still work to be done. A technical report is a next step to pave the way for standardization, which would be the last station in this journey from lab to industry. In the context of a society demanding green solutions for energy production, the efforts devoted to standardizing the study of perovskites facilitate the advance towards a new generation of enhanced solar cells.

There is plenty of data showing that police brutality leads to mistrust of police and law enforcement. Researchers from Lehigh University and the University of Minnesota set out to see if experience with police brutality might affect health by causing mistrust in medical institutions.

Through an analysis of data gleaned from a survey of 4,000 people living in urban areas about their experiences with police brutality, they found that there is a relationship between police brutality and mistrust in medical institutions.

The study results were published online earlier this week in the Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities in an article called: "Police Brutality and Mistrust in Medical Institutions."(Authors: Sirry Alang and Donna D. McAlpine, Lehigh University and Rachel Hardeman, University of Minnesota.)

The authors conclude that experiences with one institution, the police, do shape relationships with other institutions?in this case, the medical system.

"We found that when people have a negative encounter with the police, such as the police cursing at them or shoving them, that they are less likely to think medical institutions have their best interests," says the study's lead author, Sirry Alang, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, as well as in Health, Medicine and Society at Lehigh University.

How respondents perceived their encounters with the police also matters, adds Alang.

"For example, if I think that it was simply unnecessary for the police to use an electroshock weapon on me, I am more likely to mistrust medical institutions than if I thought that the police needed to use a taser on me," she says.

The study showed that people from all racial minority groups had higher levels of medical mistrust compared to Whites. This was true among those who had no negative police encounters, those who had negative but what they perceived as necessary police encounters, and those who had negative and what they viewed as unnecessary police encounters.

Mistrust increased significantly among Native Americans who had unnecessary negative encounters compared to Native Americans who had necessary medical encounters. The difference in mistrust between these two categories of respondents was greater among Native Americans than any other racial group.

"It didn't matter whether the respondents thought the police were justified in their negative actions towards them," says Alang. "It still increased the chances of mistrust toward medical institutions compared to not having any negative encounter with the police. However, if a respondent thought police actions were unfair, medical mistrust increased significantly."

EAST LANSING, Mich. - While political polarization in the United States is the worst it has been in years, new research from Michigan State University and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research suggests that having a partisan - and sometimes divisive - Congress might be more productive than if bipartisan groups were the norm.

The research, published in Scientific Reports, used new mathematical programming models to uncover how U.S. Senators and Representatives work together in groups, or coalitions. Looking at these coalitions allows a deeper understanding of Congress than analyzing congresspeople solely based on their parties.

"We usually think of the Congress as organized around political parties, but we found that it makes more sense to think about coalitions," said Zachary Neal, associate professor of psychology and co-author of the study. "Coalitions are often partisan, with their members all coming from the same political party. But, coalitions can be bipartisan too. There are cases of left-leaning coalitions composed mostly of Democrats but that include some Republicans, and some cases of right-leaning coalitions composed mostly of Republicans but that include some Democrats."

Samin Aref, research area chair in the Laboratory for Digital and Computational Demography at the Max Planck Institute, explained that coalitions aren't quite as simple as political parties because members can be from either political party. These new models help find these coalitions of legislators that consistently work together by co-sponsoring bills, even if the legislators come from different parties.

"Most people think of all Republican legislators working together and all Democratic legislators working together," Aref said. "We used our new optimization models to identify coalitions and then asked, 'Does thinking about coalitions tell us more about how Congress works than thinking about parties?' And for the House of Representatives, it does."

The researchers applied their new models to U.S. Congresses between 1979 and 2015 to show levels of polarization and partisanship. They then compared those findings against the effectiveness of getting bills passed.

"Congress passes fewer bills each year - you might say they're getting worse at their most basic task - and some may argue that this is due to polarization," Neal said. "However, partisan coalitions have actually helped the work get done in the U.S. House of Representatives. In fact, the House would be even more ineffective at passing bills if it weren't for the high levels of partisanship."

Aref explained that their new models are important for political researchers because up until now, identifying political coalitions with such accuracy was cumbersome and nearly impossible. Now, they can identify groups much more efficiently and faster than what was theoretically expected.

Looking ahead - to the 2020 election and beyond - the researchers weigh the pros and cons of partisan polarization and its long-term effect.

"Partisanship may help Congress pass bills into law, but that doesn't mean future Congresses with different views won't overturn them," Aref said. "So, partisan polarization may only have short-term benefits; still, the trends in our data suggest the current trend toward a divide along party lines is likely to continue."

Billions of cardiac muscle cells are lost during a heart attack. The human heart cannot replenish these lost cells, so the default mechanism of repair is to form a cardiac scar. While this scar works well initially to avoid ventricular rupture, the scar is permanent, so it will eventually lead to heart failure and the heart will not be able to pump as efficiently as before the damage caused by heart attack.

Zebrafish, a freshwater fish native to South Asia, is known to be able to fully regenerate its heart after damage due to the formation of a temporary scar as new cardiac muscle cells are formed. Professor Paul Riley and his team at the University of Oxford have been striving to understand and compare the composition of the cardiac scar in different animals as part of ongoing efforts to investigate whether it can be modulated to become a more transient scar like that of the zebrafish, and therefore potentially avoid heart failure in heart attack patients.

To do so, the researchers used three different models of studying heart repair and regeneration; the adult mouse heart, which behaves in a similar way to the human heart, the neonate mouse heart, which can regenerate up to 7 days after being born before losing that ability as the mouse ages, and the zebrafish which can regenerate the heart up to adulthood through forming a transient scar.

Professor Paul Riley said: "Efforts to treat heart attack with cell replacement strategies to-date have largely failed with disappointing clinical trial results. One reason for this is the local environment into which the new cells emerge: a cytotoxic mixture of inflammation and fibrosis which prevents their engraftment and integration with survived heart tissue. Consequently there is an urgent unmet clinical need to condition the local injury environment for efficient replacement of lost tissue. Major targets for this are the immune cells which invade the heart after injury causing inflammation, and the process of scar formation itself (fibrosis) during which immune cells signal to myofibroblasts to deposit collagen."

The team focused their efforts on studying the behaviour of macrophages, cells normally associated with inflammation and fighting infection in the body, when exposed to the three post-injury environments. They extracted macrophages from each model to examine their gene expression. In both mouse and fish macrophages, they found that they were showing signs of being directly involved in the creation of the molecules that form part of the cardiac scar, and particularly collagen, which is the main protein involved.

BHF CRE Intermediate Transition Research Fellow and Lead Researcher Dr Filipa Simões said "This information is important and quite striking because up to today, only cardiac myofibroblasts have been implicated in directly forming a scar in the heart."

"To further investigate whether macrophages were in fact directly contributing to the scar, we transplanted these macrophages into both fish and mouse hearts that had been previously injured, where collagens have been tagged with Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) as a way of tracking gene expression. We looked 3 weeks later, the time point where the scar has been deposited, and we were very surprised to see that part of the scar formed was green in its composition, which really showed that macrophages can upregulate collagens, export them to the extracellular matrix and deposit into the scar."

"We have identified a new evolutionarily conserved role for macrophages that is really challenging the current dogma that myofibroblasts are the sole cells contributing to the cardiac scar, that we believe could also be applied to the human heart."

"To effectively repair the heart, broadly speaking you need two things: one, you need to modulate the permanent scar into a transient scar and two, you need to replenish all the heart muscle cells and blood vessels that have been lost through injury. Our study helps to address the first part of the problem as we identified macrophages as a new player in depositing the scar. However, before we are able to move to clinical trials and help heart attack patients, we need to carry out more fundamental basic research to try and deeply understand the mechanism by which macrophages can contribute to the scar."

The study is funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF). Professor Jeremy Pearson, Associate Medical Director at the BHF, said: "Our hearts struggle to repair themselves following the damage caused from a heart attack. This can lead to heart failure, an incurable condition with worse survival rates than many cancers. We urgently need to find ways to repair the heart when it's damaged.

"Macrophages are an important part of our immune system, removing dead and dying cells and helping to repair damaged tissue. By showing that macrophages produce collagen, a key part of scar tissue, this research could lead to new ways to enhance repair after a heart attack."

New clinical guidelines call strongly for providing psychosocial supports for children and adolescents with complex attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Developed by the Society for Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics (SDBP), the guideline provides a framework for diagnosing and treating complex ADHD in these age groups. Its recommendations complement existing ADHD guidelines from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The new guideline is published in a supplemental issue of SDBP's Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.

"The time has come for us to take a determined step forward to improve the care and outcomes for people affected by ADHD," says William Barbaresi, MD, chief of the Division of Developmental Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital and chair of the SDBP Complex ADHD Guidance Panel. "ADHD is not just an annoying childhood behavior problem. It is a neurodevelopmental disorder that can have lifelong impact in key areas including mental health, educational and vocational outcomes, and relationships."

Approximately 7.5 percent of children and adolescents in the U.S. have ADHD, and about two-thirds of them have one or more co-existing conditions such as learning disorders or mental health problems.

Complex ADHD is characterized by the presence of other conditions along with ADHD. These can include moderate to severe learning disabilities; intellectual disability; anxiety, depression, and other mental health problems; poor responses to treatment; and initial diagnosis of ADHD before age 4 or after age 12.

The new guideline focuses on identifying and treating more than 'typical' core ADHD symptoms. It breaks new ground by recommending psychosocial treatment as an essential foundation for treatment of children and teens with ADHD, in addition to medications.

"Treatment for children and adolescents with complex ADHD should focus on improvement in function -- behaviorally, socially, academically -- over the patient's life, not just improving ADHD symptoms," says Barbaresi.

Psychosocial interventions to improve function may include:

classroom-based management tools like positive reinforcement tools, daily report card, and posted expectations and consequences

parent education

organizational skills training

approaches to improve appropriate peer interactions

school services, such as 504 plans and special education individualized education plans (IEPs).

Five key action statements

The expert panel that developed the guideline found that the need for a dual approach -- psychosocial intervention and medications -- is supported by available research. "Psychosocial interventions are not consistently provided to patients in practice," says Barbaresi, who explains that the lack of psychosocial supports has largely been driven by a lack of availability.

"One challenge has been the absence of emphatic, evidence-based recommendations by a professional organization," he says. "This guideline is intended to provide those evidence-based recommendations."

Specifically, the guideline focuses on five key action statements:

Children under 19 with suspected or diagnosed complex ADHD should receive a comprehensive assessment by a clinician with specialized training or expertise, who should develop a multi-faceted treatment plan. The plan should be designed to diagnose and treat ADHD and other coexisting disorders and complicating factors including other neurodevelopmental disorders, learning disorders, mental health disorders, genetic disorders and psychosocial factors like trauma and poverty.

The evaluation should verify previous diagnoses and assess for other conditions; it should include a psychological assessment based on a child's functional disabilities, and intellectual and developmental level.

All children with complex ADHD should receive behavioral and educational interventions addressing behavioral, educational, and social success.

Treatment of complex ADHD should also include coexisting conditions, such as autism spectrum disorder or substance abuse disorder, and focus on areas of impairment, not just reducing symptoms.

Monitoring and treatment of complex ADHD should continue throughout life.

The guideline includes one-page summary diagnostic and treatment flowcharts for:

behavioral/education treatment for children 6 years and older

medication treatment for children 6 years and older

treatment of ADHD plus a coexisting disorder including autism spectrum disorder, tics, substance use disorder, anxiety, depression, or disruptive behavior disorders

preschool general medication treatment for children age 3 up to 6 years.

Three-year review process

"The SDBP guideline is an important first step toward a more systematic approach to the diagnosis and treatment of children and adolescents with complex ADHD," says Barbaresi. "We believe it has great potential to improve the treatment and long-term outcomes for these patients."

The new SDBP guideline - the first-ever clinical practice guideline from the group - complements existing ADHD practice guidelines from the AAP, most recently updated in October 2019. It is intended to provide a framework for assessing and treating complex ADHD in children and adolescents by clinicians with specialized training.

The guideline was developed by an expert panel over three years, with panel members including developmental behavioral pediatricians, child psychologists, and a representative of CHADD, the national nonprofit family support organization for ADHD. The panel reviewed all previous ADHD treatment guidelines from the AAP and others, as well as a large body of published research related to each action statement.

The human brain's ability to recall a single movement is significantly affected by the characteristics of previous actions it was learned with, a new study has shown.

Research led by the University of Plymouth explored how distinct prior actions affected a person's ability to perform certain simple movements, corresponding to, for example, reaching to catch a ball or drinking a cup of coffee.

It showed that prior visual and physical motions exert different influences on the effectiveness of a particular action, but that the strength of influence depends on their similarity to the condition in which it was learned.

As such, actual physical movement had a far greater influence on the success of any given action than mere observation of movement, which the authors suggest is because of the longer time taken for the brain to process a visual as opposed to a physical movement.

Scientists believe it is an important step in understanding how the brain controls motor functions, which could be particularly important for those working in rehabilitation and helping people to recover after neurological conditions.

In particular, it demonstrates that very consistent lead-in movements with the same distance and duration are required to get the best possible recall of a skilled action.

The research, published in the journal PLOS ONE, saw two groups of people asked to complete a movement task after being subjected to a series of different physical and visual triggers.

It was led by Dr Ian Howard, Associate Professor in Computational Neuroscience in the University of Plymouth's School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics, with colleagues Professor David Franklin and Dr Sae Franklin at the Technical University of Munich, Germany.

Dr Howard has previously carried out research showing that a consistent backswing is crucial in helping sports people produce optimum results, while the follow-through performed after completing an action has significant influence on the extent to which new skills are acquired.

Speaking about the latest research, he said: "In our daily lives we often make what seem like simple actions but are in fact comprised of complex and connected movements. Drinking a cup of coffee, for example, involves the brain knowing where the cup is, reaching for it, bringing it to our mouths and then drinking it in a controlled way. Our brains become trained to do this over time but understanding how, and what might influence their ability to do this, is something scientists have been trying to figure out for many years.

"Our findings suggest that the distance, speed and duration of movements significantly affect how we recall different motions. We believe it is important for those trying to understand how the brain functions. However, it is particularly significant for those working in rehabilitation and other similar fields helping people to recover from neurological conditions. It indicated that lead-in during training must be consistent and similar to lead-in during later use."

For the study, participants learned to compensate a curl force field using a two-part point-to-point movement task. The first part was either a passive lead-in movement or a visual lead-in movement (observation of a moving cursor).

Participants made the second movement themselves and did so in a curl field. The curl field pushed their hand in a direction perpendicular to movement, proportional to their speed of movement. After they learned to move normally again in the curl field, the duration and distance of the lead-in movement were occasionally changed.

This significantly affected their performance in the curl field, and indeed, some lead-in durations and distances almost removed the effect of the previous training.

The southern Red Sea is more readily connected with the Indian Ocean than with the northern Red Sea, according to simulations carried out at KAUST. This helps explain genetic patterns seen in the Red Sea and highlights the need for a collaborative regional approach to marine conservation.

The Red Sea is home to one of the longest coral reef systems on the planet and a wide diversity of marine life. Previous studies have identified a clear genetic break in the Red Sea between northern and southern parts of the sea. While this could be partially explained by the north-south environmental gradient in the Red Sea, the contribution of physical connectivity within the Red Sea remained unclear.

An international team led by KAUST researchers used particle tracking simulations to investigate the physical connectivity within the Red Sea and with nearby regions. They simulated the release of millions of particles in the southern Red Sea using a circulation-based particle tracking model to trace the movement of the particles back in time to figure out where they had come from.

The simulations showed that the southern Red Sea is more connected with regions in the Indian Ocean than with the northern Red Sea. Influx through the Bab-El-Mandeb strait is a major transport stream into the southern Red Sea, connecting it strongly with the Gulf of Aden. "By revealing the dynamic linkages between the southern Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, our research provides a possible explanation for the genetic separation in the Red Sea from a physical connectivity perspective," says Ph.D. student Yixin Wang, first author of the study.

The connectivity pattern proved to be seasonal, with stronger links during the winter and a weaker connection in the summer. "This could affect the genetic distribution of different species because species that spawn in the winter in the Gulf of Aden would have a stronger genetic connection with the southern Red Sea than those that spawn in summer," says Ibrahim Hoteit, who led the study.

The simulations also showed links between the southern Red Sea with more distant regions, such as the coast of Somalia, Oman and Socotra, and even as far as Kenya, Tanzania and Madagascar. "We expected to see some connections with these remote areas, but our results revealed stronger (for example, Somalia) and further (for example, Madagascar) connections than we expected," says Wang. "Marine conservation should be conducted under a co-operative framework between the countries involved, and ocean management units should transcend jurisdictional boundaries."

Lawmakers have focused a great deal of attention on alleviating the opioid public health crisis, while at the same time addressing across-the-board concerns regarding affordability of healthcare. State level Medicaid expansion through the Affordable Care Act is one of those efforts, which targets low-income non-elderly adult populations, who tend to be more at risk of substance use disorders.

While Medicaid expansion has led to substantial increases in Medicaid reimbursement for substance use treatment, it has not specifically led to a detectable increase in hiring attempts to increase the substance use disorder and behavioral health treatment workforce, according to a study by Indiana University researchers.

"Effective treatment strategies exist and continue to improve for substance use disorder, but there are still severe hurdles in ensuring an adequate workforce in substance use disorder treatment," said Olga Scrivner, co-author of the study and research scientist at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering. "While policies such as Medicaid expansion have increased access to treatment, it is still unclear whether such actions are large enough to expand the workforce in a robust way."

"A lack of an increased workforce means people in need of substance use disorder treatment are not receiving it," said Thuy Nguyen, another author of the study and post-doctoral researcher at the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

The study, published today in Plos One and part of IU's Responding to the Addiction Crisis Grand Challenge, examined hiring attempts in the substance use disorder and behavioral health treatment sector from 2010-2018. Using a novel database, Burning Glass Technologies, covering 174 million job ads -- virtually all U.S. online job postings by employers -- researchers compared U.S. job postings in this sector in Medicaid expansion and non-expansion states, testing for changes after expansion.

Nationally, researchers found little growth in job postings in the field -- which for this study included outpatient, residential and hospital inpatient services in the substance use disorder and behavioral health treatment sector.

However, they detected some changes in the hiring landscape over the study period: a shift from registered nurses, psychiatric aides and surgeons to mental health counselors and assistants in outpatient and residential facilities, and from nursing assistants and human resources assistants to psychiatrics, sales managers and pharmacy technicians.

Overall, the five most frequent occupations that organizations attempted hiring in this sector were mental health counselors, registered nurses, medical and health service managers, psychiatric technicians, and clinical, counseling, and school psychologists. The highest spike in workforce needs was detected for mental health counselors during the years of 2016-2018.

"The health care workforce has been growing tremendously in the recent decades," said co-author Kosali Simon, the Herman B Wells Endowed Professor at the O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs. "Health care is now the nation's largest employer, surpassing retail and manufacturing. But there are still important deficits in the workforce, especially in behavioral health areas."

The team's next steps are to continue to look into the effect of policies, such as insurance reimbursement and scope of practice prescription laws, on the substance use disorder treatment workforce to better understand how policies affect workforce demand and contribute to creating a workforce that can meet the needs of people with substance use disorder.

"Understanding, managing and reducing substance use disorders requires expertise from different areas of research," said co-author Katy Börner, the Victor H. Yngve Distinguished Professor of Information Science at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering. "This project brings together students, faculty and industry experts who analyzed and visualized large-scale datasets to increase our understanding of the impact of policy changes on hiring practices related to substance use disorder treatment."

A newly published study reports a successful, first-ever open-field release of a self-limiting, genetically engineered diamondback moth, stating that it paves the way for an effective and sustainable approach to pest control.

The diamondback moth, also known as Plutella xylostella, is highly damaging to brassica crops such as cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and canola. This new strain of diamondback moth, developed by Oxitec Ltd, is modified to control pest diamondback moth in a targeted manner. The study showed the engineered strain had similar field behaviors to unmodified diamondback moths, with results offering promise for future protection of farmers' brassica crops.

The Cornell study was led by Professor Anthony Shelton in the Department of Entomology at Cornell University's AgriTech in New York and has been published in Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology.

Oxitec's self-limiting diamondback moth is modified to control its pest counterparts in the field. After release of males of this strain, they find and mate with pest females, but the self-limiting gene passed to offspring prevents female caterpillars from surviving. With sustained releases, the pest population is suppressed in a targeted, ecologically sustainable way. After releases stop, the self-limiting insects decline and disappear from the environment within a few generations.

The field test builds on previously published work in greenhouses by Professor Shelton and colleagues that demonstrated sustained releases of the self-limiting strain effectively suppressed the pest population and prevented resistance developing to an insecticide, a win-win situation for pest control.

"Our research builds on the sterile insect technique for managing insects that was developed back in the 1950s and celebrated by Rachel Carson in her book, Silent Spring," reports Professor Shelton. "Using genetic engineering is simply a more effiecient method to get to the same end."

Male moths as a crop protection solution

Employing field and laboratory testing, as well as mathematical modelling, the researchers gathered relevant information on the genetically engineered strain of diamondback moth, whose wild counterparts cause billions of dollars in damage. The study was the first in the world to release self-limiting agricultural insects into an open field.

"For the field study, we used the "mark-release-recapture" method, which has been used for decades to study insect movement in fields. Each strain was dusted with a fluorescent powder to mark each group before release, then captured in pheromone traps and identified by the powder color and a molecular marker in the engineered strain," explains Shelton.

Moth-proof results

The researchers were very pleased with the results of this comprehensive study.

"When released into a field, the self-limiting male insects behaved similarly to their non-modified counterparts in terms of factors that are relevant to their future application in crop protection, such as survival and distance travelled. In laboratory studies they competed equally well for female mates" reports Shelton. "Our mathematical models indicate that releasing the self-limiting strain would control a pest population without the use of supplementary insecticides, as was demonstrated in our greenhouse studies."

"This study demonstrates the immense potential of this exciting technology as a highly effective pest management tool, which can protect crops in an environmentally sustainable way and is self-limiting in the environment," says Dr Neil Morrison, Oxitec's agriculture lead and study co-author.

For hundreds of years, practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine have used an herb called Stemona sessilifolia as a remedy for parasitic infections, such as those caused by pinworms and lice. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry have identified 10 compounds that might be responsible for the herb's effectiveness. But there's a twist: The insecticides are produced by symbiotic microbes that live within the plant's cells -- not by S. sessilifolia itself.

Endophytes are microorganisms that live inside plant cells but do not cause apparent disease. Instead, some endophytes help plants survive by enhancing growth, nutrient acquisition, or resistance to drought or pests. Therefore, scientists are investigating endophytes as potential sources of new medicines and agrichemicals. Xiachang Wang, Lihong Hu and colleagues wanted to screen endophytes from S. sessilifolia for insecticidal activity.

To isolate endophytes, the researchers spread fresh, cut-up pieces of S. sessilifolia on agar plates. They then collected the bacteria that grew on the plates, analyzed the DNA and identified the microbes as Streptomyces clavuligerus. Using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and mass spectrometry, the team purified 10 new compounds from the bacteria with structures similar to a class of insecticides known as pyrroles. Testing the substances on insects revealed that they were strongly toxic to aphids and moderately toxic to spider mites. A bacterial extract containing all of the compounds had greater lethal activity than any compound alone. These substances, or the bacteria that produce them, could be promising new natural pesticides, the researchers say.

Microplastic pollution in the world's oceans is a growing problem, and most studies of the issue have focused on land-based sources, such as discarded plastic bags or water bottles. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology have linked microplastics in China's Beibu Gulf with heavy fishing activities. Surprisingly, many of the particles were hidden in deep sediments on the ocean floor, which could have led scientists to underestimate the extent of the contamination.

Fishing gear, such as nets, ropes and pots, is a potential sea-based source of microplastics. The tiny particles could be worn away from fishing gear during use, or they might arise when the gear is lost or discarded in the ocean. Yinghui Wang and colleagues wanted to measure microplastics in surface sediment samples from different sites in Beibu Gulf, a traditional fishing ground of China and the China-Indo peninsula that lacks substantial industrialization and urbanization. They also wanted to look for this type of contamination in deep sediments, up to 2 feet below the surface, which have not been well studied with respect to microplastic pollution.

The researchers collected 52 sediment samples from Beibu Gulf and adjacent rivers in July 2017. Microplastics were separated from sediment samples and counted under a microscope. Most of the particles were made of polypropylene (PP) or polyethylene (PE), which are materials widely used in fishing nets and rope. The team found a strong correlation between the intensity of fishing activities, such as capture fishing or mariculture, and the abundance of PP and PE fibers. Unexpectedly, microplastics were detected even one foot below the surface, which corresponds to about the year 1913 (before the observed plastics were invented). The particles could have been transported to deep sediment layers by marine worms. Because most previous studies have considered only microplastics in surface sediment, this type of pollution in ocean sediments worldwide could be greatly underestimated, the researchers say.

La Jolla, Calif. (January 29, 2019) -- Can a smart device help you quit drinking, smoking, vaping, or taking opioids?

As it turns out, the leading smart device conversational agents, including Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, and Samsung Bixby, fail to help but they can play a big role in the future, according to an article published by NPJ Digital Medicine led by Dr. Alicia L. Nobles and Dr. John W. Ayers of the Center for Data Driven Health at the Qualcomm Institute within the University of California San Diego.

Voice-Enabled Tech is the Future for Health Information But Is Presently Falling Short

Already half of US adults use intelligent virtual assistants, like Amazon Alexa. Moreover, many of the makers of intelligent virtual assistants are poised to roll out health care advice, including personalized wellness strategies. Yet, the study asks do intelligent virtual assistants provide actionable health support now?

"One of the dominant health issues of the decade is the nation's ongoing addiction crisis, notably opioids, alcohol, and vaping. As a result, it is an ideal case study to begin exploring the ability of intelligent virtual assistants to provide actionable answers for obvious health questions," said Dr. Ayers.

The study team asked Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, and Samsung Bixby to "help me quit..." followed by drugs and various substances including alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, or opioids (e.g., "help me quit drinking"). Among seventy different help-seeking queries, the intelligent virtual assistants returned actionable responses only four times with the most common response being confusion (e.g., "did I say something wrong?"). Of those that returned a response, "help me quit drugs" on Alexa returned a definition for drugs, "help me quit smoking" and "help me quit tobacco" on Google Assistant returned Dr. QuitNow (a smoking cessation app), while "help me quit pot" on Siri returned a promotion for a marijuana retailer.

One Small Change Can Make Voice-Enabled Tech a Lifesaver

While the treatment of substance misuse is extremely complex, intelligent virtual assistants have the potential to provide meaningful help. "Thanks to free federally-managed remote substance misuse treatment or treatment referral services, like 1-800-662-HELP for alcohol or drugs and 1-800-QUIT-NOW for smoking or vaping, we can encourage people to take the first step towards treatment by having intelligent virtual assistants promote 1-800 helplines," said Dr. Nobles.

"1-800 helplines are central to the national strategy for addressing substance misuse," added Dr. Eric C. Leas, a study coauthor also with the Center. "For instance, calling 1-800-Quit-Now when you're thinking about quitting smoking is the gold-standard advice an intelligent virtual assistant can instantaneously provide at the moment someone is asking for help."

The team notes there is evidence of capacity among the makers of intelligent virtual assistants to build in these resources quickly. "Alexa can already fart on demand, why can't it and other intelligent virtual assistants also provide life saving substance use treatment referrals for those desperately seeking help? Many of these same people likely have no one else to turn to except the smart device in their pocket," added Dr. Ayers.

Of course the team recognizes that there is substantial challenges ahead for technology companies to address health issues, but still they are optimistic that their findings on help-seeking for substance misuse will prove actionable.

"Only 10% of Americans that need treatment for substance misuse receive it. Because intelligent virtual assistants return the optimal answer to a query, they can provide a huge advantage in disseminating resources to the public. Updating intelligent virtual assistants to accommodate help-seeking for substance misuse could become a core and immensely successful mission for how tech companies address health in the future," concluded Dr. Nobles.

Radioactive iodine is to be recommended as the frontline treatment for patients with thyroid gland overactivity caused by conditions such as Graves' disease, following an evidence review led by University of Birmingham researchers.

Hyperthyroidism is a condition in which the thyroid gland produces excess amounts of thyroid hormones. Affecting more than 1.5 million people in the UK, it can lead to a range of symptoms including weight loss, nervousness, irritability, heat intolerance, heart racing, tremor and muscular weakness. The most common type of hyperthyroidism is Graves' disease, a condition where the body's immune system mistakenly attacks the thyroid gland, triggering over-production of thyroid hormones.

A team of researchers in the University's Institute of Applied Health Research have been working with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) to review the evidence on current treatment guidelines for the disease.

Current recommendations are to treat patients with antithyroid drugs called thionamides, and in the UK and Europe radioactive iodine is often only given if they suffer a relapse after this treatment. This is due to safety concerns over potential adverse effects of radioactive iodine such as worsening eye disease, and development of secondary cancers.

Research led by the Birmingham researchers has shown that radioiodine is a safe treatment and results in improved cardiovascular outcomes for patients with hyperthyroidism.

The NICE independent guideline committee surveyed clinical and economic evidence to conclude that radioactive iodine was the most effective treatment for the condition, curing 90 per cent of cases. They also concluded there was no evidence of a clinically important increase in cancer diagnoses or deaths between people treated with radioactive iodine and healthy controls.

Dr Kristien Boelaert, who led the guideline committee, says: "There has been uncertainty in the UK about the best treatment for hyperthyroidism despite radioactive iodine being the most common first line treatment for this condition in the US. We are very pleased to have been able to work with NICE to provide clear new guidance which we hope will improve outcomes for patients with this condition."

Patients treated with radioactive iodine take single tablet which contains iodine and a low dose of radiation, which is absorbed by the thyroid. After taking the treatment patients are advised to avoid prolonged close contact with children and pregnant women for a few days or weeks and avoid getting pregnant or fathering a child for several months. The treatment is likely to lead to an underactive thyroid gland which will require ongoing treatment with thyroid hormone tablets.

TEL AVIV...January 29, 2020 - BGN Technologies, the technology-transfer company of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), Israel, is introducing the first all-optical "stealth" encryption technology that will be significantly more secure and private for highly sensitive cloud-computing and data center network transmission.
The new all-optical encryption innovation will be introduced at the Cybertech Global Tel Aviv conference taking place January 28-30, 2020 in Tel Aviv, Israel.

"Today, information is still encrypted using digital techniques, although most data is transmitted over distance using light spectrum on fiber optic networks," says Prof. Dan Sadot, Director of the Optical Communications Research Laboratory,who heads the team that developed the groundbreaking technology.

"Time is running out on security and privacy of digital encryption technology, which can be read offline if recorded and code-broken using intensive computing power. We've developed an end-to-end solution providing encryption, transmission, decryption, and detection optically instead of digitally."

Using standard optical equipment, the research team essentially renders the fiber-optic light transmission invisible or stealthy. Instead of using one color of the light spectrum to send one large data stream, this method spreads the transmission across many colors in the optical spectrum bandwidth (1,000 x wider than digital) and intentionally creates multiple weaker data streams that are hidden under noise and elude detection.

Every transmission -- electronic, digital or fiber -- has a certain amount of "noise." The researchers demonstrated that they can transmit weaker encrypted data under a stronger inherent noise level that cannot be detected.

The solution also employs a commercially available phase mask, which changes the phase of each wavelength (color). That process also appears as noise, which destroys the "coherence" or ability to recompile the data without the correct encryption key. The optical phase mask cannot be recorded offline, so the data is destroyed if a hacker tries to decode it.

"Basically, the innovative breakthrough is that if you can't detect it, you can't steal it," Prof. Sadot says. "Because an eavesdropper can neither read the data nor even detect the existence of the transmitted signal, our optical stealth transmission provides the highest level of privacy and security for sensitive data applications."

Zafrir Levy, senior vice president for exact sciences and engineering at BGN, says, "The novel, patented method invented by Prof. Sadot and his team is highly useful for multiple applications, such as high-speed communication, sensitive transmission of financial, medical or social media-related information without the risk of eavesdropping or jamming data flow. In fact, with this method, an eavesdropper will require years to break the encryption key. BGN is now seeking an industry partner to implement and commercialize this game-changing technology."

"Every data center has 100G and 400G lines, and part of those lines are encrypted end-to-end," Prof. Sadot adds. "There is the need for non-digital encryption for customers who require the most advanced security possible."

This all-optical technology is an extension of the digital optical encryption method originally invented by Prof. Sadot and his team in collaboration with Prof. Zalevsky at Bar Ilan University.