New research finds that turtles in the wild age slowly and have long lifespans, and identifies several species that essentially don’t age at all.

At 190 years old, Jonathan the Seychelles giant tortoise recently made news for being the “oldest living land animal in the world.” Although, anecdotal evidence like this exists that some species of turtles and other ectotherms—or “cold-blooded” animals—live a long time, evidence is spotty and mostly focused on animals living in zoos or a few individuals living in the wild.

Now, a team of researchers reports the most comprehensive study of aging and longevity to date comprising data collected in the wild from 107 populations of 77 species of reptiles and amphibians worldwide.

Among their many findings, which they report in the journal Science, the researchers document for the first time that turtles, crocodilians, and salamanders have particularly low aging rates and extended lifespans for their sizes. The team also found that protective phenotypes, such as the hard shells of most turtle species, contribute to slower aging, and in some cases even “negligible aging”—or lack of biological aging.

“Anecdotal evidence exists that some reptiles and amphibians age slowly and have long lifespans, but until now no one has actually studied this on a large scale across numerous species in the wild,” says David Miller, senior author and associate professor of wildlife population ecology at Penn State.

“If we can understand what allows some animals to age more slowly, we can better understand aging in humans, and we can also inform conservation strategies for reptiles and amphibians, many of which are threatened or endangered.”

Is it because they’re ‘cold-blooded’?

In their study, the researchers applied comparative phylogenetic methods—which enable investigation of organisms’ evolution—to mark-recapture data—in which animals are captured, tagged, released back into the wild, and observed. Their goal was to analyze variation in ectotherm aging and longevity in the wild compared to endotherms (warm-blooded animals) and explore previous hypotheses related to aging—including mode of body temperature regulation and presence or absence of protective physical traits.

Miller explains that the “thermoregulatory mode hypothesis” suggests that ectotherms—because they require external temperatures to regulate their body temperatures and, therefore, often have lower metabolisms—age more slowly than endotherms, which internally generate their own heat and have higher metabolisms.

“People tend to think, for example, that mice age quickly because they have high metabolisms, whereas turtles age slowly because they have low metabolisms,” says Miller.

The team’s findings, however, reveal that ectotherms’ aging rates and lifespans range both well above and below the known aging rates for similar-sized endotherms, suggesting that the way an animal regulates its temperature—cold-blooded versus warm-blooded—is not necessarily indicative of its aging rate or lifespan.

“We didn’t find support for the idea that a lower metabolic rate means ectotherms are aging slower,” says Miller. “That relationship was only true for turtles, which suggests that turtles are unique among ectotherms.”

What protects turtles from aging?

The protective phenotypes hypothesis suggests that animals with physical or chemical traits that confer protection—such as armor, spines, shells, or venom—have slower aging and greater longevity. The team documented that these protective traits do, indeed, enable animals to age more slowly and, in the case of physical protection, live much longer for their size than those without protective phenotypes.

“It could be that their altered morphology with hard shells provides protection and has contributed to the evolution of their life histories, including negligible aging—or lack of demographic aging—and exceptional longevity,” says Anne Bronikowski, co-senior author and professor of integrative biology at Michigan State.

Beth Reinke, first author and assistant professor of biology at Northeastern Illinois University, further explains, “These various protective mechanisms can reduce animals’ mortality rates because they’re not getting eaten by other animals. Thus, they’re more likely to live longer, and that exerts pressure to age more slowly. We found the biggest support for the protective phenotype hypothesis in turtles. Again, this demonstrates that turtles, as a group, are unique.”

‘Negligible aging’

Interestingly, the team observed negligible aging in at least one species in each of the ectotherm groups, including in frogs and toads, crocodilians, and turtles.

“It sounds dramatic to say that they don’t age at all, but basically their likelihood of dying does not change with age once they’re past reproduction,” says Reinke.

Miller adds, “Negligible aging means that if an animal’s chance of dying in a year is 1% at age 10, if it is alive at 100 years, it’s chance of dying is still 1% (1). By contrast, in adult [human] females in the US, the risk of dying in a year is about 1 in 2,500 at age 10 and 1 in 24 at age 80. When a species exhibits negligible senescence (deterioration), aging just doesn’t happen.”

Reinke notes that the team’s novel study was only possible because of the contributions of a large number of collaborators from across the world studying a wide variety of species.

“Being able to bring these authors together who have all done years and years of work studying their individual species is what made it possible for us to get these more reliable estimates of aging rate and longevity that are based on population data instead of just individual animals,” she says.

Bronikowski adds, “Understanding the comparative landscape of aging across animals can reveal flexible traits that may prove worthy targets for biomedical study related to human aging.”

The National Institutes of Health supported this research.

Source: Penn State

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A new technique uses magnetic fields to align gold nanorods while preserving their underlying optical properties, report researchers.

“Gold nanorods are of interest because they can absorb and scatter specific wavelengths of light, making them attractive for use in applications such as biomedical imaging, sensors, and other technologies,” says Joe Tracy, corresponding author of a paper on the work and a professor of materials science and engineering at North Carolina State University.

It is possible to tune the wavelengths of light absorbed and scattered by engineering the dimensions of the gold nanorods. Magnetically controlling their orientation makes it possible to further control and modulate which wavelengths the nanorods respond to.

“In other words, if you can control the alignment of gold nanorods, you have greater control over their optical properties,” Tracy says. “And using magnetic fields to control that alignment means that you can control the alignment without actually touching the nanorods.”

In their technique, the researchers synthesize separate solutions of gold nanorods and iron oxide nanoparticles. Mixing the solutions drives assembly of the iron oxide nanoparticles onto the surface of the gold nanorods. The resulting “coated” nanorods can then be controlled using a low-strength magnetic field.

“We’ve characterized both what is happening during this process and how well it works,” Tracy says. “We’ve demonstrated that we can bring the nanorods into alignment and that the process does not adversely affect the optical properties of the gold nanorods.”

“In addition, to the best of our knowledge, these nanorods have the smallest aspect ratio of any elongated nanoparticle that has been ‘decorated’ with iron oxide nanoparticles and aligned using magnetic fields,” says Mehedi Rizvi, first author of the paper and a PhD student at NC State.

“In order for this technique to work, we’ve had to optimize many aspects of the system, including the dimensions of the gold nanorods, the size of the iron oxide nanoparticles, and the relative concentrations of both nanorods and nanoparticles in solution,” Rizvi says.

“We are currently in the process of exploring potential applications in imaging based on the multifunctional properties of magnetic-overcoated gold nanorods,” Tracy says.

The paper appears in the journal Advanced Materials. Coauthors are from NC State; the Institute for Physical Chemistry and Polymer Physics; Technische Universität Dresden; and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Support came from the National Science Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft , Fonds der Chemischen Industrie, and the China Scholarship Council.

Source: NC State

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Researchers have developed a wearable textile exomuscle that serves as an extra layer of muscles.

They aim to use it to increase upper body strength and endurance of people with restricted mobility.

“My arms are simply getting weaker,” says Michael Hagmann, who was diagnosed with a rare form of muscular dystrophy known as Bethlem myopathy back in 2016. To compensate for the lack of muscle strength in his arms, Hagmann adjusts his movements in a way that results in poor posture and strain.

Marie Georgarakis, a former doctoral student at ETH Zurich’s Sensory Motor Systems Lab, is familiar with the problem. “Although hospitals have numerous good therapy devices, they are often very expensive and unwieldy. And there are few technical aids that patients can use directly in their everyday lives and draw on for assistance in performing exercises at home. We want to close this gap,” she says.

This idea led to the creation of the Myoshirt: a soft, wearable exomuscle for the upper body. It is a kind of vest with cuffs for the upper arms accompanied by a small box containing all the technology that is not used directly on the body.

Working via sensors embedded in the fabric, a smart algorithm detects the wearer’s intentional movements and the amount of force required. A motor then shortens a cable in the fabric running parallel to the wearer’s muscles—a sort of artificial tendon—and in this way supports the desired movement. This assistance is always in tune with the user’s movements and can be tailored to their individual preferences. The user is always in control and can override the device at any time.

The researchers recently tested the prototype for the first time in a study featuring 12 participants: 10 people without any physical impairments, one person with muscular dystrophy (Michael Hagmann), and one person with a spinal cord injury.

The results were promising: all participants were able to lift their arms and/or objects for much longer thanks to the exomuscle. Endurance increased by about a third in the healthy subjects and by roughly 60% in the participant with muscular dystrophy, while the participant with a spinal cord injury was even able to perform the exercises three times as long.

Nevertheless, it takes time for a product to be market-ready: “In the next phase, we want to test our prototype outside the lab in the natural environment of future wearers and use the results to further improve it,” says Michele Xiloyannis, who also works at the Sensory Motor Systems Lab at ETH Zurich and is conducting research for the Myoshirt project.

To enable the device to be worn unobtrusively and comfortably under a person’s clothing, it has to be reduced even more in size and weight—the actuator and control box currently weigh 4 kg (8.8 pounds).

The researchers want to minimize the product’s size by focusing on a single core function—supporting the user’s shoulders when lifting their arms. They are also working closely with ETH spin-off MyoSwiss AG, which manufactures and markets a soft exoskeleton—a kind of robotic suit.

“What I particularly like is how the researchers are iteratively developing their ideas in collaboration with potential users,” says Hagmann, who has already assisted with the testing of various technical aids at ETH—from prototype through to finished product. One thing is clear: he wants to continue to be active in the future and is aware that supportive technologies are exactly what he will need to accomplish this.

Source: ETH Zurich

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Oils and other chemicals plants release after a rainstorm may explain the feelings of euphoria and the health benefits that follow a storm in the desert, research shows.

“The Sonoran Desert flora is one of the richest in the world in plants that emit fragrant volatile oils, and many of those fragrances confer stress-reducing health benefits to humans, wildlife, and the plants themselves,” says Gary Nabhan, a research social scientist at the University of Arizona Southwest Center and chair in southwestern borderlands food and water security.

Nabhan is the lead author of two new studies—one in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health and the other in Desert Plants—that explain how volatile organic compounds that evolved to protect plants from damaging solar radiation, heat waves, drought stress, and predatory animals may also have health benefits for humans.

Desert monsoon season

Nabhan was inspired to investigate the health benefits of desert fragrances after learning about “forest bathing,” an ancient practice that originated in the coniferous forests of eastern Asia and involves spending time in nature to help reduce stress and improve overall well-being.

At first, he was disappointed by the fact that the nearest forests to him are thousands of feet high in the Catalina Mountains, which reach their highest point about an hour-and-a-half drive from central Tucson.

“But then I thought, some of those same compounds are found in desert plants,” Nabhan says, “and we know we have tremendous fragrances at certain times of the year, especially right after the thunderstorms of the monsoon.”

The Southwest monsoon season typically runs from June 15 to September 30. About half of the region’s average annual rainfall occurs over the course of those three-and-a-half months.

Nabhan and his collaborators, Eric Daugherty, a former intern at the Southwest Center, and Tammi Hartung, a co-owner of Desert Canyon Farm in Canyon City, Colorado, identified 115 volatile organic compounds in 60 species of plants in the Sonoran Desert that are released immediately before, during, and after rain. Of these, 15 have been shown in past studies to offer tangible health benefits.

“The fragrant volatile organic compounds from desert plants may in many ways contribute to improving sleep patterns, stabilizing emotional hormones, enhancing digestion, heightening mental clarity, and reducing depression or anxiety,” Nabhan says.

“Their accumulation in the atmosphere immediately above desert vegetation is what causes the smell of rain that many people report. It also reduces exposure to damaging solar radiation in ways that protect the desert plants themselves, the wildlife that use them as food and shelter, and the humans who dwell among them.”

Many desert plants produce more volatile oils during the summer to protect themselves from harsh conditions, Nabhan says.

“The production of the oily compounds is happening during the extreme droughts and severe heat waves, but they remain on the leaves until we get the onset of the summer rains.

“We used to think that during the summer rains, those oily and gummy substances were washed off and into the air, but now there’s some evidence that with humidity and the fierce winds that we get with the onset of the rain, they’re released into the atmosphere even before the rain actually falls and contribute to that incredible surge of anticipation that you feel right before the first raindrop of a thunderstorm. From there, they travel into our lungs and into our bloodstream within minutes.”

Healing gardens?

The creosote bush is one of the most iconic plants in the Sonoran Desert and is often cited as the plant that gives the desert its familiar smell when it rains. One of the healing compounds that contributes to creosote’s familiar smell is trans-caryophyllene, which actually comes from a fungus that lives inside the plant rather the plant itself, Nabhan says.

Armed with his knowledge of desert plants, Nabhan is part of an initiative to create fragrance gardens to promote healing and well-being around the Southwest.

In March, Nabhan and his colleagues installed one such garden at the Sonoran Desert Inn and Conference Center in Ajo, Arizona. By late fall, they’d like to complete another at the base of Tumamoc Hill, where many people go to exercise outdoors. The hill’s proximity to Carondelet St. Mary’s Hospital makes it an even more strategic location, says Nabhan, who envisions patients and their families reaping the health benefits of the garden.

“I would like to see these fragrance gardens around every hospital, community clinic, and bed and breakfast—wherever anyone comes to heal, relax, and recreate,” Nabhan says. “These public gardens will not only produce nutritious foods, but offer residents, out-of-town guests, and hikers a powerful opportunity to sense how the desert smells like rain.”

Source: University of Arizona

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A virtual reality simulation called Project Shell, lets people take on the body of a loggerhead sea turtle.

Participants in Project Shell don a virtual reality headset and sport flippers instead of arms. During a 15-minute immersive experience, they journey from a hatchling to an adult turtle, dodging hazards like ships and wayward fishing gear.

Participating in the simulation increased people’s empathy and concern for environmental issues, new research shows.

“Embodiment of nonhuman bodies is a powerful tool that environmental storytellers can use,” says Daniel Pimentel, a professor in the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication who led the work. “I hope that this experience can help raise awareness and hopefully engage the public in a way that trickles down to more support.”

He and his collaborator, Sri Kalyanaraman of the University of Florida, report their results in the journal Scientific Reports.

“I want to turn as many people turtle as possible.”

It can be difficult to get humans to empathize with mass animal casualty. Most people don’t feel the emotional weight of a thousand far-away animals dying from warming oceans or pollution the same way they might mourn the death of a beloved pet.

Pimentel wanted to see whether he could make the threats faced by endangered wildlife feel more personal by having people experience the world from a sea turtle’s perspective.

His goal was to elicit a phenomenon called body transfer. Body transfer tricks the brain: People wearing the VR headset feel like sea turtle’s experiences are their own.

In the Project Shell simulation, participants begin by pecking their way out of an egg. Then, they grow up as a sea turtle, facing a variety of potentially deadly hazards. To make the experience even more immersive, participants sat in a special chair that oriented them to mimic a turtle’s paddling posture. And they wore a haptic backpack that sent vibrations to their spine when, for example, a boat zoomed by at close range in the simulation.

In a series of studies at the University of Florida and the Florida Museum of Natural History, Pimentel and Kalyanaraman evaluated the way participating in Project Shell affected people’s attitudes and environmental beliefs.

The body transfer effect was generally strong, especially for younger participants, Pimentel found. People often felt as if the virtual turtle’s body was truly their own.

Transforming into a turtle also affected the way participants viewed and responded to other species in the game.

“When people become sea turtles, they view other sea turtles in the environment differently than they view other animals,” Pimentel says. “You see them as part of your in-group.”

The experience also shaped people’s environmental beliefs. Overall, the experience of body transfer via the simulation increased compassion for the plight of sea turtles, Pimentel’s team found. And it influenced the amount of money people would hypothetically be willing to donate to marine conservation, especially when people played a version of the simulation where they encountered multiple dead sea turtles.

Pimentel is now working to expand Project Shell’s reach beyond museums and universities. With VR headset technology quickly becoming more affordable, he ultimately hopes the simulation could be something people download themselves and experience on their own personal device.

“I want to turn as many people turtle as possible,” he says.

Source: Laural Hamers for University of Oregon

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Astronomers have created a detailed, three-dimensional image of a dying hypergiant star.

The team traced the distribution, directions, and velocities of a variety of molecules surrounding a red hypergiant star known as VY Canis Majoris.

Their findings offer insights, at an unprecedented scale, into the processes that accompany the death of giant stars.

Extreme supergiant stars known as hypergiants are very rare, with only a few known to exist in the Milky Way. Examples include Betelgeuse, the second brightest star in the constellation Orion, and NML Cygni, also known as V1489 Cygni, in the constellation Cygnus.

Unlike stars with lower masses—which are more likely to puff up once they enter the red giant phase but generally retain a spherical shape—hypergiants tend to experience substantial, sporadic mass loss events that form complex, highly irregular structures composed of arcs, clumps, and knots.

Located about 3,009 light-years from Earth, VY Canis Majoris—or VY CMa, for short—is a pulsating variable star in the slightly southern constellation of Canis Major. Spanning anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 astronomical units (with 1 AU being the average distance between Earth and the sun) VY CMa is possibly the most massive star in the Milky Way, says Lucy Ziurys, a professor with joint appointments in the University of Arizona chemistry and biochemistry department and Steward Observatory, both part of the College of Science.

“Think of it as Betelgeuse on steroids,” Ziurys says. “It is much larger, much more massive, and undergoes violent mass eruptions every 200 years or so.”

The team chose to study VY CMa because it is one of the best examples of these types of stars.

“We are particularly interested in what hypergiant stars do at end of their lives,” says Ambesh Singh, a fourth-year doctoral student in Ziurys’ lab. “People used to think these massive stars simply evolve into supernovae explosions, but we are no longer sure about that.”

“If that were the case, we should see many more supernovae explosions across the sky,” Ziurys adds. “We now think they might quietly collapse into black holes, but we don’t know which ones end their lives like that, or why that happens, and how.”

Previous imaging of VY CMa with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and spectroscopy showed the presence of distinct arcs and other clumps and knots, many extending thousands of AU from the central star. To uncover more details of the processes by which hypergiant stars end their lives, the team set out to trace certain molecules around the hypergiant and map them to preexisting images of the dust, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

“Nobody has been able to make a complete image of this star,” Ziurys says, explaining that her team set out to understand the mechanisms by which the star sheds mass, which appear to be different from those of smaller stars entering their red giant phase at the end of their lives.

“You don’t see this nice, symmetrical mass loss, but rather convection cells that blow through the star’s photosphere like giant bullets and eject mass in different directions,” Ziurys says. “These are analogous to the coronal arcs seen in the sun, but a billion times larger.”

The team used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile to trace a variety of molecules in material ejected from the stellar surface. While some observations are still in progress, the telescope obtained preliminary maps of sulfur oxide, sulfur dioxide, silicon oxide, phosphorous oxide, and sodium chloride. From these data, the group constructed an image of the global molecular outflow structure of VY CMa on scales that encompassed all ejected material from the star.

“The molecules trace the arcs in the envelope, which tells us molecules and dust are well-mixed,” Singh says. “The nice thing about emissions of molecules at radio wavelengths is that they provide us with velocity information, as opposed to the dust emission, which is static.”

By moving ALMA’s 48 radio dishes into different configurations, the researchers were able to obtain information about the directions and velocities of the molecules and map them across the different regions of the hypergiant’s envelope in considerable detail, even correlating them to different mass ejection events over time.

Processing the data required some heavy lifting in terms of computing power, Singh says.

“So far, we have processed almost a terabyte from ALMA, and we still receive data that we have to go through to get the best resolution possible,” he says. “Just calibrating and cleaning the data requires up to 20,000 iterations, which takes a day or two for each molecule.”

“With these observations, we can now put these on maps on the sky,” Ziurys says. “Until now, only small portions of this enormous structure had been studied, but you can’t understand the mass loss and how these big stars die unless you look at the entire region. That’s why we wanted to create a complete image.”

The researchers presented their work on June 13 at the 240th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, California.

Additional researchers from the University of Minnesota and the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom contributed to the work. With funding from the National Science Foundation, the team plans to publish its findings in a series of papers.

Source: University of Arizona

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Two education researchers have some insights on the rising rates of teacher resignation and growing concerns for the future of the field.

Teachers have one of the most important roles in society, yet they have always been up against a host of challenges–both inside and outside of their classrooms.

From low wages, to extended hours, to the pressures of meeting the unique needs of each student, the profession demands that teachers not only provide a strong educational foundation, but also bring their whole selves to work each day they arrive at school.

Add in a global pandemic, and the challenges have only continued to grow.

Many educators have spent the last two years navigating online teaching and learning, rising student mental health crises, mounting requests from school administrators, concerns for their own physical wellbeing in the classroom, and much more. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 20% of teachers seek second jobs to compensate for their salaries.

Conversations surrounding teacher burnout are circulating in the news, with more teachers than ever before saying they are considering leaving the field for good. And when tragedy strikes, like the devastating mass shooting that occurred on May 24 at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, educators are often left navigating unthinkable moments of anguish for themselves, their students, and their communities at large.

So, where do we go from here?

Education experts Olivia Chi and Andrew Bacher-Hicks have some ideas about teacher burnout and how to uplift educators in a post-pandemic world. Chi is an assistant professor at Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development where she focuses on the economics of education, educational leadership, and policy studies to reduce educational inequality. Bacher-Hicks is also an assistant professor at Wheelock where he specializes in K-12 education policy in the United States.

The pair recently published a working paper on Massachusetts teacher turnover during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their research, co-written by Wheelock postdoctoral associate Alexis Orellana, examined the obstacles this group of educators faced and improvements that could be made to ensure long-term retention and success in the field.

Here, Chi and Bacher-Hicks expand on some of these pandemic-induced pressures, and the areas where support is needed most:

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Women in science are less likely than their male counterparts to receive authorship credit for their work, a study shows.

Researchers used a large set of administrative data from universities that revealed exactly who was involved with and paid on various research projects.

They linked the data to authorship information on patents and articles published in scientific journals to see which people who worked on individual projects received credit in the patents and journals and who did not.

The results, published in the journal Nature, show that women who worked on a research project were 13% less likely to be named as authors in related scientific articles compared to their male colleagues.

“There is a clear gap between the rate at which women and men are named as coauthors on publications,” says Julia Lane, a coauthor of the study and a professor at New York University. “The gap is strong, persistent, and independent of the research field.”

And there was another, even larger, gap.

Women are not nearly as likely as men to be named on patents related to projects that they both worked on. Even controlling for all factors, the gap was 59%.

Women are less likely to get credit

The administrative data that were key to this study came from the UMETRICS dataset available through the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science, which contains detailed information on sponsored research projects for 52 colleges and universities from 2013 to 2016.

It included information on 128,859 people who worked on 9,778 research teams, including faculty members, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, research staff, and undergraduates.

“We have known for a long time that women publish and patent at a lower rate than men,” says Lane, a professor at NYU Wagner and the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress. “But because previous data never showed who participated in research, no one knew why. There were anecdotes—like that of Rosalind Franklin, who was denied authorship in a famous Nature article by James Watson and Francis Crick despite correctly demonstrating the double helix structure of DNA—but there was no evidence.”

This study shows that at every position level, women were less likely than men to get credit. The gap was particularly evident at earlier stages of their careers. For example, only 15 out of 100 female graduate students were ever named as an author on a document, compared with 21 out of 100 male graduate students.

In addition, in all scientific fields, women were less likely to get credit: from ones where they are the majority (such as health) to those where they are the minority (such as engineering).

Results showed that women were even less likely to be listed as an author on what scientists consider “high-impact” articles.

“This is consistent with the Rosalind Franklin anecdote,” Lane says. “The gap in attribution will have clear negative effects on the career prospects for women in science. I fear that it will deter young women from pursuing science as a career.”

A complementary source of data for the study reinforced the results. A survey of over 2,400 scientists revealed that women and other historically marginalized groups must often put in significantly more effort to get recognition for their scientific contributions. Respondents to the survey noted that “Being a woman [means] that quite often you contribute in one way or another to science but unless you shout or make a strong point, our contributions are often underestimated.” Multiple respondents mentioned that lack of voice could disproportionately affect women, minorities, and foreign-born scientists.

The survey results showed that 43% of women said they had been excluded from a scientific paper to which they had contributed, compared to 38% of men. Women were also more likely than men to report that others underestimated their contributions and that they faced discrimination, stereotyping, and bias.

Look at what’s unseen

The paper showcases a new data infrastructure that can provide insights into the organization of science and could inform evidence-based policies to increase diversity in science.

The infrastructure that the research team developed could enable new insights into the organization of science by capturing the contributions of those who are often unseen—particularly more junior researchers. The work is in the scientific tradition of the study of survivorship bias—made famous by a statistician’s outside-the-box realization that military analysts should use the unseen data—planes that did not return from combat, rather than those that did, to fully understand why planes crashed. Lane and her colleagues have shown how new data on previously unseen contributors can be used to identify the scientists who are not visible on published works to document systematic differences in attribution.

Additional coauthors contributed from Northeastern University, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the Questrom School of Business at Boston University, and Ohio State University.

The NYU work on the study had support from the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Schmidt Futures, and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.

Source: NYU

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People from racial and ethnic minority groups were less likely to obtain prescriptions to treat opioid addiction during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study.

The findings give further weight to the conclusion that the COVID-19 pandemic more negatively affected minority groups, who face more barriers to health care in general.

“Drops in prescribing medication to treat opioid addiction at the onset of the pandemic were significant for Black, Hispanic, and Asian patients, but not for white patients,” says study coauthor Jennifer Miles, a postdoctoral associate in the School of Social Work at Rutgers University.

For the study in JAMA Network Open, researchers examined Symphony Health, a national prescription database with race, ethnicity, and insurance status for 280 million patients and 1.8 million prescribers.

Using this database, the researchers analyzed prescriptions filled by retail, mail order, and specialty pharmacies from May 2019 to June 2021 to compare treatment for opioid addiction before and after the start of the pandemic in the United States.

“We focused on buprenorphine and naltrexone medications, which can be prescribed for use at home,” Miles says. “We studied the numbers of patients prescribed each medication and the length of buprenorphine prescriptions since extended-release naltrexone is effective for about a month.”

Researchers found that, for all racial and ethnic groups, pandemic-related decreases in opioid addiction medication put an end to increasing use before the pandemic. However, declines in prescriptions at the onset of the pandemic were especially pronounced for Black, Hispanic, and Asian patients, in contrast with white patients.

The researchers say the findings provide important information for addressing disparities in public health and grappling with a nationwide opioid epidemic.

“Greater treatment disruptions for racial and ethnic minority groups are particularly concerning in the context of opioid overdoses, since access to medication is critical to reduce risk of death,” says coauthor Hillary Samples, an assistant professor of health systems and policy. “And recent evidence has shown that overdose fatality rates are increasing faster in minority groups.”

For patients seeking treatment with buprenorphine, the most common opioid addiction medication, researchers found that white patients with private insurance had significant increases in prescription fills at the onset of the pandemic. However, Black patients with private insurance did not.

However, there also were some positive trends, researchers note. For one, patients with access to medication received longer-running prescriptions at the onset of the pandemic.

“This was potentially important to keep patients connected to treatment while reducing the risk of COVID infection with frequent in-person visits,” Samples says.

In addition, Medicaid patients did not experience the same treatment disruptions as those with other types of coverage or those who pay directly for their care. Since Medicaid has a key role in access to addiction treatment, the researchers note, this finding suggests programs were effective in protecting against pandemic-related disruptions.

Additional coauthors are from Rutgers and Indiana University.

Source: Rutgers University

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Researchers have created a longer-lasting version of avobenzone, a common ingredient in sunscreen.

Avobenzone breaks down under sunlight, which renders it ineffective in a matter of hours.

“I have two small kids, and I’m always telling them to reapply sunscreen every hour or two because as avobenzone decomposes, it doesn’t do its job anymore,” says Marcus Weck, a professor of chemistry at New York University. “Several years ago, my research group included a graduate student, Elizabeth Kaufman, who was passionate about skin care. We started thinking, what can we do to need less of the active ingredient and reapply it less frequently?”

Weck, a materials chemist, leads a lab that creates support structures out of polymers (materials made up of repeating chains of large molecules). When attached, these polymer structures can stabilize or enhance the active ingredients in everything from drugs to environmental compounds.

Kaufman—at the time, a PhD student in Weck’s lab, and now the head of production chemistry at specialty chemical supplier BYK Wallingford—suggested that they look at the active ingredient in many sunscreens. The result of their investigation: a more stable, long-lasting avobenzone, for which Weck and Kaufman were awarded a patent this spring.

Here, Weck talks about creating a more advanced, longer-lasting sunscreen:

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When microbes don’t get the metals they need, the result may have consequences for the environment.

Microbes need some metals in their diet to stay healthy, as do we. The metals help the microbes fully “digest” food. After a good meal, the microbes that gain energy by chemically reducing nitrate release a harmless byproduct: nitrogen, the gas that makes up 78% of Earth’s atmosphere.

“…adding a little copper, which in small amounts is a nutrient, may actually cut down on emissions of this greenhouse gas from wetlands.”

But if one metal in particular, copper, isn’t available, these microbes can’t complete the biochemical “digestive” process, called denitrification. Instead of releasing nitrogen, they’ll release the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide.

Previous lab studies using pure cultures have shown that copper availability was important for denitrification. Now research from the lab of Daniel Giammar, professor of environmental engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering, and Jeffrey Catalano, professor of earth and planetary sciences, both at Washington University in St. Louis, has shown that in the complex, dynamic aquatic environments these microbes call home, there might not always be enough copper available for denitrification.

The findings appear in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.

“Material in a beaker is not the same as material in the environment,” Giammar says. “A big part of our approach was to take real materials from real environmental systems and bring them to the lab and look at them in controlled ways.”

The findings underscore the outsized role of copper when it comes to the release of nitrous oxide. “At regular, background levels, these systems may not have enough metals to carry out the process,” says Neha Sharma, a PhD student in Giammar’s lab.

That’s important because nitrous oxide is the third most potent greenhouse gas and 50% of it comes from microbes in aquatic ecosystems.

“Neha’s study is the first to show the link between nitrous oxide production and copper in wetlands. This connection had been displayed previously by bacteria in the laboratory but had never been demonstrated to happen in these natural aquatic systems,” Catalano says.

“Her work may suggest that adding a little copper, which in small amounts is a nutrient, may actually cut down on emissions of this greenhouse gas from wetlands.”

Wetland microbes and copper

To better understand how copper affected the gas’s release in these systems, Sharma and Elaine Flynn, a senior scientist in Catalano’s lab, went to the source. Working with three US Department of Energy (DOE) labs—Oak Ridge and Argonne national laboratories and the Savannah River Site—Sharma and Flynn collected microbes from wetlands and riverbeds. When they analyzed how much copper was in the systems, they realized it wasn’t enough to complete denitrification.

“Then we wanted to see, if we manually added copper, would it affect the release of nitrous oxide,” Sharma says. It did. “All of the nitrous oxide was converted into other things,” but no harmful greenhouse gases.

This finding could point to new ways to curb a warming atmosphere, Sharma says. “If we put a bit of metals into the natural systems, it might mitigate the release of N₂O,” she says. It also could have a more immediate effect for researchers who study climate.

“Currently, models that are predicting the release of gases from various systems do not account for these factors,” Sharma says. “They know factors like food availability or temperature might affect greenhouse gas release, but they don’t include the effect of metals on this aspect of greenhouse gases.”

Four different metals

For people to truly understand and make useful predictions about climate, climate models need to incorporate all of the real-world complexity present in specific ecosystems.

Another study, published in the journal ACS Earth & Space Chemistry, analyzes the behaviors of four different metals from riparian wetland soils from the Savannah River Site and stream sediments near the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The research team, including Sharma and Zixuan Wang, a PhD student in the lab of Zhen “Jason” He, professor of energy, environmental, and chemical engineering, wanted to know if the metals’ availability changed when the metals were underwater (and there was little oxygen) versus when they were exposed to the air.

The team had reasons to believe that the four metals—all important for microbes’ biochemical reactions—might all act similarly. To their surprise, however, the metals acted differently in similar situations.

“This means the bioavailability of certain metals changes with seasons,” Sharma says. “It just highlights the extreme complexity of natural systems.”

Capturing that complexity calls for a variety of specialists and partners.

“We’re environmental engineers, we’re always thinking ‘why does this matter? What’s this going to do for the climate? What can be done?'” Giammar says. “But also, we collaborated with primary investigator Jeffrey Catalano,” which gave the work a strong geochemistry perspective.

Along with receiving funding and access to watersheds from the DOE laboratories, this research is also contributing to the DOE’s knowledge base.

It provides one more piece of the puzzle of “watershed function,” the study of the biogeochemical functions or watersheds and their inhabitants. Meanwhile, other researchers in other fields do the same.

Together, knowledge can change the way people understand the watershed’s relationship to climate.

“If anything, we saw the copper limitation was a bigger deal than we thought,” Giammar says. “That’s why I think getting into this environmental complexity is important.”

Support came from the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research, Subsurface Biogeochemical Research program.

Source: Washington University in St. Louis

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Circulating breast cancer cells that later form metastases mainly arise during a person’s sleep phase, a new study shows.

To date, cancer research has not paid much attention to the question of when tumors shed metastatic cells. Researchers previously assumed that tumors release such cells continuously.

Breast cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Each year, around 2.3 million people worldwide contract the disease.

If doctors detect breast cancer early enough, patients usually respond well to treatment. However, things become much more difficult if the cancer has already metastasized.

“When the affected person is asleep, the tumor awakens.”

Metastasis occurs when circulating cancer cells break away from the original tumor, travel through the body via blood vessels, and form new tumors in other organs.

“When the affected person is asleep, the tumor awakens,” says study leader Nicola Aceto, professor of molecular oncology at ETH Zurich.

During their study, which included 30 female cancer patients and mouse models, the researchers found that the tumor generates more circulating cells when the organism is asleep. Cells that leave the tumor at night also divide more quickly and therefore have a higher potential to form metastases, compared to circulating cells that leave the tumor during the day.

“Our research shows that the escape of circulating cancer cells from the original tumor is controlled by hormones such as melatonin, which determine our rhythms of day and night,” says Zoi Diamantopoulou, a postdoctoral researcher and and lead author of the study in Nature.

In addition, the study indicates that the time in which tumor or blood samples are taken for diagnosis may influence the findings of oncologists. It was an accidental finding along these lines that first put the researchers on the right track.

“Some of my colleagues work early in the morning or late in the evening; sometimes they’ll also analyze blood at unusual hours,” Aceto says. The scientists were surprised to find that samples taken at different times of the day had very different levels of circulating cancer cells.

Another clue was the surprisingly high number of cancer cells found per unit of blood in mice compared to humans. The reason was that as nocturnal animals, mice sleep during the day, which is when scientists collect most of their samples.

“In our view, these findings may indicate the need for health care professionals to systematically record the time at which they perform biopsies,” Aceto says. “It may help to make the data truly comparable.”

The researchers’ next step will be to figure out how these findings can be incorporated into existing cancer treatments to optimize therapies. As part of further studies with patients, Aceto wants to investigate whether different types of cancer behave similarly to breast cancer and whether existing therapies can be made more successful if patients are treated at different times.

Source: ETH Zurich

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People of similar desirability are most likely to pair up and have long-lasting and successful relationships, according to new research.

Sean Prall, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri, traveled to northwest Namibia in southern Africa to study the behavior of Himba, a group of semi-nomadic agro-pastoralists. There he found that not only are people who are similarly desirable more likely to enter into a relationship, but they are also more likely to experience success within that relationship.

While in northern Namibia, he interviewed people about the desirability of others in the community. With this information, they estimated everyone’s “mate value,” a metric describing how likely people are to want to be in a relationship with someone. They then analyzed their relationship status.

They found people with similar mate values were more likely to enter into a relationship with each other, and they also had better relationship outcomes. Prall says this is different than most research about desirability as it focuses on people’s actions and less on their stated preference, which social pressures can influence.

“We were interested in this because much of the anthropological work on human mating patterns are based on only people’s preferences,” Prall says. “This research focuses on people’s actions. Sure, you might say you’d prefer someone that’s deemed really desirable, but that’s heavily impacted by societal norms. What do you do in that relationship? How does it actually go? That was what we were looking at.”

Before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019, Prall and his research partner, Brooke Scelza, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, would spend more than a month each summer living with Himba pastoralists to research human behavior.

Prall has spent five years studying the population. During that time, he and his team have analyzed data about marriage, parenting decisions, child health, food insecurity, and even how choosy people are with their partners.

While much of his prior research is specific to this population, Prall says the findings from this study can be applied to a broader context. He says the characteristics of the population were perfect for the type of information they were gathering.

“This was a great population to look at these questions because everyone knows each other and most date and marry within the population,” Prall says.

“You can ask them how much they’d like to be in a relationship with a specific person because they actually know that person. That’s how people have been partnering up for thousands and thousands of years, not online, but with people in your community.”

The research appears in Science Advances.

Source: University of Missouri

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Losing a beloved family member is never easy, but a new study suggests the loss of a grandmother may have repercussions for the loved ones she leaves behind.

The study finds that for up to seven years after the death of their grandmother, adolescent boys have a 50% increase in depression symptoms compared to peers not grieving.

Additionally, this loss also was associated with a higher chance of both adolescent boys’ and girls’ mothers also becoming depressed.

The findings suggest that recognizing these experiences as a risk factor for teen depression could help identify opportunities to intervene and prevent additional detrimental events, such as major depressive disorders, dropping out of school, substance use, and criminal justice system involvement, among others, says Ashton Verdery, professor of sociology, demography, and social data analytics at Penn State.

“As a society, we think such losses are normal, which to some extent they are, as almost everyone loses their grandparents during the first few decades of their lives,” Verdery says. “However, just because such experiences are common does not mean these losses are not a source of great sadness for many people, and possibly a risk factor for worse health outcomes among a subset of them.”

Verdery and colleagues have been studying how bereavement—or experiencing the death of a loved one—has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how those losses affect people’s health.

As the team examined previous research, they noticed that few studies had explored what happens to those who experience the death of a grandparent during their teenage years.

“This was surprising because such deaths are the most common type of bereavement teenagers will face, and there are several reasons that suggest these experiences can be detrimental,” Verdery says. “This might be especially true for those who live with single parents, are lower income, or are from Black and Hispanic populations where co-residing with grandparents and other forms of frequent interactions with grandparents are more common, which is why we focused on this population.”

The group’s prior work estimated that more than 4 million children and adolescents in the US have grandparents who died of COVID-19, a notable increase on top of the 10 million to 12 million that typically lose grandparents annually.

“Not only have youth faced school closures, social distancing, and subsequent isolation since the pandemic started, but millions are also grieving a grandparent,” says coauthor Michelle Livings of the University of Southern California.

With so many families experiencing these losses, Verdery and his coauthors were interested in seeing whether the death of a grandparent has a noticeable toll on such youths as part of their larger initiative to study the social ramifications of bereavement.

For the study, the researchers analyzed data gathered from 4,897 primarily low-income children and their parents at several checkpoints throughout the children’s childhood and adolescence. Of these participants, 3,086 were followed from ages 9 to 15, the period of time the authors examined in this study. Data included information on depressive symptoms in both adolescents and their mothers, the adolescents’ genders, and whether they experienced the death of a grandparent during the study.

More research needs to be done on why the death of a grandmother has this effect, but not the death of a grandfather, Verdery says. He says it’s possible that the death of a grandfather also can affect adolescents, but in different ways.

“We haven’t yet examined whether ‘acting out’ behaviors like school suspension or criminal justice system involvement can be predicted by these deaths, but it’s possible that a grandfather’s death could have a larger role in those outcomes,” Verdery says. “This could especially be true for boys, since grandfathers can sometimes act as male role models, especially in lower-income communities beset by high rates of incarceration and related challenges.”

Gender socialization may explain boys’ unique vulnerability to these losses, notes Emily Smith-Greenaway of the University of Southern California. Even though adolescent girls are more likely to experience depression, they tend to have more peer support and are socialized to grieve in more outward, expressive ways, whereas adolescent boys may feel pressure to internalize their emotions to avoid appearing weak.

Verdery adds that future work could help identify the precise reasons why adolescent boys are especially at-risk.

The study appears in the journal SSM-Mental Health. Additional coauthors are from the University of Southern California, the University of Western Ontario, and Penn State.

The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development helped support this research.

Source: Penn State

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A new electronic tattoo can be worn comfortably on the wrist for hours to deliver continuous blood pressure measurements, a new study shows.

The measurements exceed accuracy levels of nearly all available options on the market today.

Blood pressure is one of the most important indicators of heart health, but it’s tough to frequently and reliably measure outside of a clinical setting. For decades, cuff-based devices that constrict around the arm to give a reading have been the gold standard.

“Blood pressure is the most important vital sign you can measure, but the methods to do it outside of the clinic passively, without a cuff, are very limited,” says Deji Akinwande, a professor in the electrical and computer engineering department at the University of Texas at Austin, and a co-leader of the project, reported in Nature Nanotechnology.

High blood pressure can lead to serious heart conditions if left untreated. It can be hard to capture with a traditional blood pressure check because that only measures a moment in time, a single data point.

“Taking infrequent blood pressure measurements has many limitations, and it does not provide insight into exactly how our body is functioning,” says Roozbeh Jafari, a professor of biomedical engineering, computer science, and electrical engineering at Texas A&M University and the other co-leader of the project.

The continuous monitoring of the e-tattoo allows for blood pressure measurements in all kinds of situations: at times of high stress, while sleeping, exercising, etc. It can deliver thousands of measurements more than any device thus far.

Mobile health monitoring has taken major leaps in recent years, primarily due to technology such as smartwatches. These devices use metallic sensors that get readings based on LED light sources shined through the skin.

However, leading smartwatches are not yet ready for blood pressure monitoring. That’s because the watches slide around on the wrist and might be far from arteries, making it hard to deliver accurate readings. And the light-based measurements can falter in people with darker skin tones and/or larger wrists.

Graphene is one of the strongest and thinnest materials in existence, and it is a key ingredient in the e-tattoo. It is similar to graphite found in pencils, but the atoms are precisely arranged into thin layers.

E-tattoos make sense as a vehicle for mobile blood pressure monitoring because they reside in a sticky, stretchy material encasing the sensors that is comfortable to wear for long periods and does not slide around.

“The sensor for the tattoo is weightless and unobtrusive. You place it there. You don’t even see it, and it doesn’t move,” Jafari says. “You need the sensor to stay in the same place because if you happen to move it around, the measurements are going to be different.”

The device takes its measurements by shooting an electrical current into the skin and then analyzing the body’s response, which is known as bioimpedance. There is a correlation between bioimpedance and changes in blood pressure that has to do with blood volume changes.

However, the correlation is not particularly obvious, so the team had to create a machine learning model to analyze the connection to get accurate blood pressure readings.

In medicine, cuff-less blood pressure monitoring is the “holy grail,” Jafari says, but there isn’t a viable solution on the market yet. It’s part of a larger push in medicine to use technology to untether patients from machines while collecting more data wherever they are, allowing them to go from room to room, clinic to clinic and still get personalized care.

“All this data can help create a digital twin to model the human body, to predict and show how it might react and respond to treatments over time,” Akinwande says.

Additional coauthors are from Texas A&M and UT Austin. The Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health funded the work.

Source: UT Austin

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New research links the amount of carbon dioxide taken in by land ecosystems, such as forests, to the availability of water, which is in short supply during droughts.

Our climate is rapidly warming with rising temperatures affecting the physical environments that support entire ecosystems. Humans and animal species both face daunting challenges for survival because of climate change.

During a PhD trip to an eddy covariance tower in a Canadian forest, gazing at the colorful autumn canopies, climate change ecologist and National University of Singapore assistant professor Luo Xiangzhong realized the tower was monitoring something invisible: the amount of water and carbon dioxide the forest was using and absorbing.

The knowledge that the forest’s carbon dioxide uptake had risen for 10 years for reasons yet unknown crystalized his interest in the links between the visible and invisible, and how climate may affect ecosystems in ways we cannot directly see.

The recent study he led illustrates this relationship clearly. The findings highlight the significant impact droughts have on forests’ ability to take in carbon dioxide (or CO₂)—the main greenhouse gas driving climate change—from the atmosphere.

Here, Luo shares more about importance of climate change ecology, its sister issues of carbon cycle and global photosynthesis, as well as his research:

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Four new designs for shelters to protect firefighters trapped in wildfires could increase survival time compared with the current industry standard, according to a new study.

In lab simulations of wildfire burn-overs—where a wildfire sweeps over a group of trapped firefighters or equipment—temperatures inside the shelters remained within survival limits for longer, and the shelters took longer to break open.

Researchers hope the findings in the International Journal of Wildland Fire, as well as from field tests conducted across North America, could spur the development of new, better shelters. In addition, they hope the findings will inform new standards for shelter design and testing.

“For the wildland firefighter, deploying a shelter is the last thing they want to do—it’s the final resort, the last line of defense,” says coauthor Roger Barker, professor of textile technology at North Carolina State University and the director of the Textile Protection and Comfort Center (TPACC).

“While there’s no such thing as ‘fire-proof,’ what we’re trying to do is to buy more time. We were able to demonstrate our shelters could increase the time to failure—time that could be critical for survival.”

One problem with the industry standard shelter is that the aluminum outer layer will melt in contact with direct flame.

“In light of the failure mechanisms of shelters that we observed during wildland fires, we thought we could develop better shelters that provide enhanced protection by incorporating an inner heat-blocking barrier and additional thermal insulation into the construction,” says lead author Joseph Roise, professor of forestry and environmental resources. “We know we can make a better shelter.”

With that goal in mind, the researchers designed two leading prototypes and two lighter versions weighing less than 5 pounds. They added insulating materials, and experimented with different seam designs to keep them from falling apart.

In the TPACC lab, researchers tested the designs against the industry standard in a test chamber called the PyroDome Turbulent Flame Fire Shelter Test System. They blasted the shelters with direct flame from propane burners for 60 seconds, and measured how long it took the temperature at the floor of the shelters to reach 302 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature threshold for survival. They also set up cameras inside PyroDome to see when the inner layer of the shelters would break open.

All of the prototypes improved survival metrics compared to the standard, which reached the survival limit in less than 40 seconds. Meanwhile, the temperature in one of their designs was nowhere near the survival limit temperature at 60 seconds.

The researchers also tested the shelters’ performance in variety of conditions in controlled burns in Canada, California, North Carolina, and South Dakota. However, they found the field tests were not reliable enough to draw statistically significant conclusions because of wind, fuel, and fire conditions.

“We went all over North America to find different fire conditions that would give different types of fire exposures,” Barker says. “What we found is there is so much variability in the field test, confirming how useful it was for us to have PyroDome.”

The two tests in southern California had the best burn conditions, and researchers saw one of their prototypes performed well in a burn-over. In a test in South Dakota, researchers witnessed shelter failures when grass roots caught fire to spread under the walls inside the shelter. That underscored the importance of fully clearing the area around the shelter, and even scraping down underneath them to remove all organic material.

“If you have a sample of two, you can’t make any statistical comparisons,” Roise says. “But we did see that after the test in California, one of our best-performing prototypes got the full brunt of the fire. It was totally burned on the outside, but the inside was undamaged.”

The findings could give manufacturers and people developing these shelters a new target to shoot for in terms of both how to test them and minimal performance requirements, Barker says.

John Williams, a former research assistant in forestry and environmental resources at NC State, and John Morton-Aslanis, a research assistant in TPACC, are study coauthors. The Department of Homeland Security FEMA Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program funded the work.

Source: NC State

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A team of researchers thinks it’s possible to study human psychiatric illness in plants and have taken the first step toward this goal.

In a study in Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences, they report investigating a gene very similar in both plants and mammals and looking at how it affects behavior in each.

“Years ago, I started to become interested in this idea that every living organism must have some homology, some similarity in how they are or what they do,” says Tamas Horvath, professor of comparative medicine at Yale University and senior author of the study.

As he began to study behavior and mitochondria—specialized structures within cells that generate energy—this idea kept coming back to him. He thought that if someone could alter mitochondrial genes in animals and see what behaviors changed, and then try the same thing to similar genes in plants, it might eventually be possible to better understand human behavior through the study of plants. If you take that idea another step, says Horvath, perhaps it’s possible to, for example, develop a schizophrenic-like plant.

“If you could develop such a model, then that means you would have alternative species, not just mammals, with which to probe aspects of human behavior,” says Horvath, who notes that this is the goal of comparative medicine, to see how non-human models can be used for studying human conditions.

For this study, Horvath and his colleagues studied a mitochondrial gene (Friendly Mitochondria, or FMT) found in a small flowering plant called Arabidopsis thaliana and a very similar gene (Clustered mitochondria homolog, or CLUH) found in mice.

Mitochondria regulate important functions like metabolism and are critical for maintaining health. In both plants and humans, dysfunctional mitochondria can affect development and lead to disease, including neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, and schizophrenia in humans.

For the study, the researchers compared typical plants, plants without FMT, and plants with overactive FMT to better understand the gene’s role. They found that it affects many important characteristics, including germination, or seed sprouting, root length, flowering timing, and leaf growth.

They also looked at two important plant behaviors.

The first was the salt stress response. Too much salt can kill plants, so they’ve developed behaviors to avoid it. When there’s excess salt in their environment, plants tend to halt germination, delay flowering, and disrupt root growth. The researchers found that FMT is critical for these salt-avoiding behaviors.

The second type of plant behavior they investigated is known as hyponastic behavior—movements based on circadian rhythms. “Plants are tremendously impacted by circadian rhythms because light is the critical energy source for them,” says Horvath.

For Arabidopsis, hyponastic behaviors include the way its leaves move throughout the day and night. During the day, its leaves are flatter and more exposed to the sun. At night, when there’s no sunlight to absorb, the leaves angle upwards. Horvath and his colleagues found that FMT plays an important role in this behavior as well, regulating both how much and how quickly the leaves moved.

To start to connect this to mammals, the researchers assessed a variety of mouse behaviors, comparing typical mice to those with reduced CLUH, a gene very similar to FMT. Using a behavioral test in which mice are placed in an open environment, they observed that mice with less CLUH were slower and travelled shorter distances than their counterparts.

“The mice had a similar response as the plants, with altered speed and altered overall locomotive activity,” says Horvath. “It’s rudimentary but it still indicates that you can have mitochondrial-related mechanisms that decode similar functions in plants and animals.”

While there’s more work to do, it’s an exciting first step, he says. Plants like Arabidopsis and mammals share several similar genes and cellular processes, not just FMT and CLUH.

“The long-term goal is to develop a sort of dictionary that catalogues these similarities between plants and animals and to use it to ask research questions more robustly,” says Horvath. “It’s possible this plant can serve as a complementary model organism for behavioral research in the future.”

Source: Mallory Locklear for Yale University

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A new biodegradable, plant-based, spray-on coating may offer an environmentally friendly alternative to plastic food wrap and containers, researchers say.

The coating can guard food against pathogenic and spoilage microorganisms and transportation damage.

The scalable process could potentially reduce the adverse environmental impact of plastic food packaging as well as protect human health.

“Over the past 50 to 60 years… we’ve placed 6 billion metric tons of plastic waste into our environment.”

“We knew we needed to get rid of the petroleum-based food packaging that is out there and replace it with something more sustainable, biodegradable, and nontoxic,” says Philip Demokritou, chair in nanoscience and environmental bioengineering at the Rutgers University School of Public Health and Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute, as well as director of the Nanoscience and Advanced Materials Research Center.

“And we asked ourselves at the same time, ‘Can we design food packaging with a functionality to extend shelf life and reduce food waste while enhancing food safety?’ And what we have come up with is a scalable technology, which enables us to turn biopolymers, which can be derived as part of a circular economy from food waste, into smart fibers that can wrap food directly. This is part of new generation, ‘smart’ and ‘green’ food packaging.”

The study in the journal Nature Food describes the new kind of packaging technology, which use the polysaccharide/biopolymer-based fibers.

Like the webs cast by the Marvel comic book character Spider-Man, the stringy material can be spun from a heating device that resembles a hair dryer and “shrink-wrapped” over foods of various shapes and sizes, such as an avocado or a sirloin steak.

The resulting material that encases food products is sturdy enough to protect bruising and contains antimicrobial agents to fight spoilage and pathogenic microorganisms such as E. coli and listeria.

The research paper includes a description of the technology called focused rotary jet spinning, a process by which the biopolymer is produced. Quantitative assessments show the coating extended the shelf life of avocados by 50%. The coating can be rinsed off with water and degrades in soil within three days, according to the study.

The new packaging is targeted at addressing a serious environmental issue: the proliferation of petroleum-based plastic products in the waste stream. Efforts to curb the use of plastic, such as legislation in states like New Jersey to eliminate plastic shopping bag distribution at grocery stores, can help, Demokritou says. But he wanted to do more.

“I’m not against plastics,” Demokritou says. “I’m against petroleum-based plastics that we keep throwing out there because only a tiny portion of them can be recycled. Over the past 50 to 60 years, during the Age of Plastic, we’ve placed 6 billion metric tons of plastic waste into our environment. They are out there degrading slowly. And these tiny fragments are making it into the water we drink, the food we eat, and the air we breathe.”

Rising evidence from Demokritou’s research team and others point to potential health implications.

The paper describes how the new fibers encapsulating the food are laced with naturally occurring antimicrobial ingredients—thyme oil, citric acid, and nisin.

Researchers in the Demokritou lab can program such smart materials to act as sensors, activating and destroying bacterial strains to ensure food will arrive untainted. This will address growing concern over food-borne illnesses as well as lower the incidence of food spoilage, Demokritou says.

Additional coauthors are from Harvard University and Rutgers. The Harvard-Nanyang Technological University/Singapore Sustainable Nanotechnology Initiative funded the work.

Source: Rutgers University

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Some young and healthy people improve performance on cognitive tasks while walking by changing the use of neural resources, according to a new study.

It has long been thought that when walking is combined with a task—both suffer. The new research finds that this is not always the case.

However, the new findings don’t necessarily mean you should work on a big assignment taking a walk.

“There was no predictor of who would fall into which category before we tested them, we initially thought that everyone would respond similarly,” says first author Eleni Patelaki, a biomedical engineering PhD student at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in the Frederick J. and Marion A. Schindler Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory

The study appears in Cerebral Cortex.

“It was surprising that for some of the subjects it was easier for them to do dual-tasking—do more than one task—compared to single-tasking—doing each task separately. This was interesting and unexpected because most studies in the field show that the more tasks that we have to do concurrently the lower our performance gets.”

Sitting vs. walking

Using the Mobile Brain/Body Imaging system, or MoBI, researchers monitored the brain activity, kinematics, and behavior of 26 healthy 18 to 30-year-olds as they looked at a series of images, either while sitting on a chair or walking on a treadmill. Participants were instructed to click a button each time the image changed. If the same image appeared back-to-back participants were asked to not click.

Performance achieved by each participant in this task while sitting was considered their personal behavioral “baseline.” When walking was added to performing the same task, investigators found that different behaviors appeared, with some people performing worse than their sitting baseline—as expected based on previous studies—but also with some others improving compared to their sitting baseline.

The electroencephalogram, or EEG, data showed that the 14 participants who improved at the task while walking had a change in frontal brain function which was absent in the 12 participants who did not improve. This brain activity change exhibited by those who improved at the task suggests increased flexibility or efficiency in the brain.

“To the naked eye, there were no differences in our participants. It wasn’t until we started analyzing their behavior and brain activity that we found the surprising difference in the group’s neural signature and what makes them handle complex dual-tasking processes differently,” Patelaki says. “These findings have the potential to be expanded and translated to populations where we know that flexibility of neural resources gets compromised.”

A view of the brain in action

Edward Freedman, associate professor of neuroscience at the Del Monte Institute led the research, which continues to expand how the MoBI is helping neuroscientists discover the mechanisms at work when the brain takes on multiple tasks. His previous work has highlighted the flexibility of a healthy brain, showing the more difficult the task the greater the neurophysiological difference between walking and sitting.

“These new findings highlight that the MoBI can show us how the brain responds to walking and how the brain responds to the task,” Freedman says. “This gives us a place to start looking in the brains of older adults, especially healthy ones.”

Expanding this research to older adults could guide scientists to identify a possible marker for “super agers” or people who have a minimal decline in cognitive functions. This marker would be useful in helping better understand what could be going awry in neurodegenerative diseases.

Support for this research came from the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience Pilot Program, the University of Rochester Clinical Translational Science Institute, the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health, and the National Institutes of Health.

Source: University of Rochester

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