Culture

Research confirms what a lot of folks have guessed: as we age, motivation wanes and getting off the couch and out the door becomes more challenging.

A new research article looks at the correlation between passion, grit and a positive mindset in people aged 14 to 77. This is the first study that addresses these links across such a broad age group.

The article suggests that passion and grit are strongly correlated early in life, especially in boys. Young people who are passionate about something are willing to go the distance to achieve it.

"Our passion controls the direction of the arrow, what we're fired up about and want to achieve. Grit drives our strength, how much effort we are willing to put in to achieve something," says Professor Hermundur Sigmundsson at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's (NTNU) Department of Psychology.

This is exactly the correlation that researchers believe is extra important for a person to get really good at something. Truly passionate individuals are willing to work the hardest to become the best. And they persevere. Men, more than women, depend on passion for doing something, but otherwise the links between these qualities are pretty much the same between the sexes.

The connection between passion and a positive mindset enables you to believe that you will indeed get good at what you are passionate about. Encouragement and positive mindset show a similar pattern. Everything is connected to everything - at least while you're young.

But this correlation fades as we get older.

The survey includes 917 participants who were divided into several age groups.

"The correlations remain pretty similar from age 14 to 53," says Sigmundsson.

But as soon as you end up in your 50s, a shift happens. The connection between passion and grit becomes almost non-existent. In theory, it takes a lot more for us to actually do something.

So lazier people in their 50s can be full of good intentions and in theory be enthusiastic about doing something. But when it comes right down to it, should this be interpreted to mean that older people rarely stick with things unless they find something they're really interested in?

Sigmundsson confirms that yes, we could say that.

People 50 years and up can be very passionate, but tend to have less grit. Or vice versa.

"What this means is that it's more difficult to mobilize our grit and willpower, even if we have the passion. Or we may have the grit and willpower but aren't quite as fired up about it," the professor says.

Positive mindset works the same way. Maybe you're still passionate about something, but you've lost faith that you'll actually be able to achieve your goals. Or you think you can handle the activity, but you just don't have that fire in the belly for it anymore.

"The correlation between grit and the right mindset diminishes with increasing age. The willpower and belief that we're getting better aren't as closely linked anymore," says Sigmundsson.

So what can we do about this decline in get-up-and-go?

"You have to work to find meaningful activities and interests that you can follow up with grit and willpower. Igniting the spark is important, regardless of age," says Sigmundsson.

You simply have to actively seek what you are passionate about if you haven't already done that. There are no shortcuts.

You need to find and develop your interests. In addition, you have to recognize the important connections between passion, grit and a positive mindset. You have to keep at it, train and feel free to ally yourself with others who inspire and help you.

This applies to getting better at an activity but also to maintaining what we have already achieved. And that is true not only for our physical fitness, but also for our mental acuity.

"'Use it or lose it' is the mantra, and this aligns with neuropsychology as well," says Sigmundsson.

"Use it or lose it. This aligns with neuropsychology as well."

Sigmundsson quotes an 85-year-old world champion for old boys skating: "You can never stop."

"Keeping at your chosen activity is the key," says the professor.

Leukemia frequently originates from the so-called leukemic stem cell, which resides in a tumor promoting and protecting niche within the bone marrow. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany, have found a new way to make these cells vulnerable by specifically dislodging these cells from their niches.

Since blood cells have a limited lifespan, are lost during bleeding or are used up during infections, they must be replaced continuously. This supply is ensured by the so-called hematopoietic stem cells in the bone marrow. These cells can develop into any type of blood cell.

Since blood cells have a limited lifespan, are lost during bleeding or are used up during infections, they must be replaced continuously. This supply is ensured by the so-called hematopoietic stem cells in the bone marrow. These cells can develop into any type of blood cell.

In chronic myeloid leukemia, the hematopoietic stem cell undergoes a genetic mutation by recombining chromosome 9 and 22. As a result, gene building blocks fuse that would otherwise not be in contact with each other. The incorrectly assembled chromosome is called Philadelphia chromosome and harbors the construction manual for the so-called BCR-ABL oncogene. This causes the leukemic stem cell to behave selfishly and divide at the expense of healthy blood stem cells.

Without Kindlin-3 no leukemia

A leukemic stem cell creates an environment termed the malignant niche that ensure its survival and proliferation. To remain in this tumor-promoting niche, the leukemic stem cell uses so-called integrins to attach itself to a scaffold of extracellular proteins, the so-called extracellular matrix, and to neighboring cells. In the leukemic stem cell, the activity and function of the integrins is facilitated by an intracellular protein called Kindlin.

Peter Krenn, first author of the study, explains: "The isoform Kindlin-3 is only used by blood cells. If mice harbor leukemic stem cells that lack Kindlin-3, they do not develop leukemia. Without Kindlin-3 and active integrins, the leukemic stem cells cannot attach themselves to their niche environment and are released from the bone marrow into the blood. Since they cannot home elsewhere either, they remain in the blood. There the leukemic stem cells lack the urgently needed support, which they usually receive from the niche, and die."

New therapeutic approach: Kindlin-3 and CTLA-4

The new finding that the leukemic stem cells express a protein called CTLA-4 on their surface, which is absent from healthy blood stem cells, allowed the researchers to distinguish a leukemic blood stem cell from a healthy blood stem cell. The scientists used the CTLA-4 receptor as a shuttle to deliver a Kindlin-3 destroying compound, into leukemic stem cells. Peter Krenn explains: "CTLA-4 is only briefly present on the cell surface and is then rapidly recycled back into the cell and then back to the cell surface again. This enabled us to introduce a Kindlin-3 degrading siRNA into the cell by coupling it to a CTLA-4-binding RNA sequence, which is called aptamer. The leukemic stem cell without Kindlin-3 is flushed from the bone marrow and the leukemia loses its origin and runs out of fuel".

Peter Krenn summarizes: "In our current study we have developed a new therapeutic approach to treat chronic myeloid leukemia in mice. However, the principle of the therapy is universally valid. The inhibited Kindlin-3 production and consequent loss of integrin function prevents the cancer cells from being able to adhere and settle in tumor-promoting niches. I assume that this method will also prevent the cancer cells of other types of leukemia from settling and that these diseases could thus become much more treatable".

It may seem a bit contradictory at first glance, but increased flexibility in our workday may have given us less flexibility in the work itself.

The daily press and the nascent research literature on COVID-19 speculate on the long-term consequences of the coronavirus situation. These could change the way we think about the methods we employ in our working life, especially with regard to home offices and digital collaboration.

Several large companies, both internationally and nationally, have announced that they plan to continue the option of working from home for anyone who also wishes after the pandemic. The arguments for this include:

Greater flexibility in organizing work and family life situations seems to significantly reduce stress for many people.

Time that was previously used for commuting or travelling between meetings can now be used for other things, which in turn may lead to higher productivity.

One common argument is that a home office situation provides fewer distractions and can make us more efficient.

Employers, for their part, see an opportunity for reduced travel costs and less need for office space.

Working from home is also happening in academia, and several universities have said that the home office option will continue.

On the other hand, it has been pointed out that people cannot work exclusively in physically separate environments. We need opportunities to meet with colleagues and experience the social cohesion and replenishment this provides.

The consequences of this kind of distributed work situation for workplace practices constitute an important aspect that has received less attention so far. How does working from home affect collaborative efforts and the quality of work, both in smaller teams and in larger work communities?

The article "Learning of academics in the time of the Coronavirus pandemic," describes how academic practices changed, quite significantly, under the conditions we have worked under since March.

One conclusions is that we cannot expect work practices to remain the same when we move them. As conditions change around practices, so do the practices themselves.

In two parallel projects, an international coalition of researchers led by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) collected data from students and academic staff. They focused on their work and study situations during the corona pandemic.

The data includes 1600 students and 16 lecturers in a course called Experts in Teamwork offered at NTNU. Students provided feedback through questionnaires, written exam reports and in-depth interviews. The lecturers represented different faculties and departments and were also interviewed in depth.

The preliminary findings show great variations in the consequences that the new work and study situations have had for individuals and for groups.

Some people became more efficient in their new work setting, for example because they had fewer distractions and work became easier to prioritize. But others became less efficient, for example due to lower motivation and lack of daily structure.

Some individuals thought it was beneficial to have more peace and flexibility in their daily life, while others felt lonelier and less motivated due to the lack of social and physical contact with fellow students and colleagues.

A number of the academic staff also had a much busier schedule due to home schooling their children. This factor is less relevant in a situation without a pandemic.

The study also found many of the positive elements of distributed teamwork and working digitally that are mentioned at the beginning of our article.

However, one finding stands out as a paradox.

While working from a home office, or as a distributed team, provides significantly increased flexibility for the work situation, it could provide less flexibility in carrying out the work, both in terms of meeting colleagues, collaborating and teaching.

This flexibility issue, or paradox, is largely related to a much greater need for structure, planning and clear communication in the digital modality. Meetings and teaching need to be planned in much more detail, and the digital form makes it difficult to deviate from the plan.

We lose the ability to pick up cues from the room, like we do when we are in a physical space together. Several communication-related aspects of working digitally also make it difficult to achieve a good flow, as well as to make spontaneous and necessary changes.

The researchers also found that the threshold for making small and necessary clarifications with collaborators is significantly higher in the digital realm. The flexibility to complete a task is therefore reduced and can affect the quality of what we do.

For example, people risk working alone with a task for too long, assuming rather than clarifying along the way. We don't want to disturb people, and we don't know what they are doing right now. Researchers found this to be the case both for students who worked synchronously, and for academics who mostly worked asynchronously.

Home offices may offer benefits for many, but it is hardly advantageous for everyone. More people will probably choose to work from home more than they did before, even when the pandemic has subsided. But having the opportunity to convene physically is still important, not only for each of us to meet our social needs, but also for the employer and for the quality of the work.

Research Assistant Professor Dr Michael PITTMAN (Vertebrate Palaeontology Laboratory, Division of Earth and Planetary Science & Department of Earth Sciences) at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), recently showed that powered flight potential evolved at least three times and that many ancestors of close bird relatives neared the thresholds of powered flight potential, suggesting broad experimentation with wing-assisted locomotion before flight evolved (see Notes). In a new study, Dr Pittman and Dr Thomas DECECCHI, Assistant Professor of Biology at Mount Marty University, broadened their collaboration on flight origins research to the scansoriopterygids, a rare group of theropod dinosaurs believed to glide using strange bat-like wings. Living around 160 million years ago in what is now northern China, they weighed about 1kg and probably feed on insects, seeds, and other plants. For the first time, Dr Dececchi, Dr Pittman and the rest of the international team tested this gliding hypothesis through quantitatively reconstructions of scansoriopterygid flight capabilities. If confirmed, this bat-winged gliding lifestyle will be unique to scansoriopterygids as it is not found in any other dinosaurs. It would also make scansoriopterygids the most distantly related theropod dinosaurs to birds that could glide. Thus, testing this gliding hypothesis is important for understanding how flight evolved among theropod dinosaurs.

Scansoriopterygids were an evolutionary dead-end

To do this, fossils were scanned using Laser-Stimulated Fluorescence (LSF), a laser-based imaging technique co-developed at HKU, which can reveal bone and soft tissue details that can't be seen under standard white light. The team then used mathematical models to predict how scansoriopterygids might have flown, testing many different variables, including weight, wingspan, and muscle placement. They found that scansoriopterygids did not have powered flight potential but were capable of clumsy gliding. "They could glide, but they weren't very good at it. If I were them I would have been particularly worried about predators!" says Dr Pittman. Scansoriopterygids were not part of the independent originations of powered flight in dinosaurs, which happened at least three times: once in birds and twice in dromaeosaurid 'raptors'. Their poor gliding capabilities and existence in a short interval of time suggests that they were an evolutionary dead-end. But what exactly doomed this strange experiment? "The two scansoriopterygid species we studied were so poorly capable of being in the air that they just got squeezed out," says Dr Thomas Dececchi. "Maybe you can survive a few million years underperforming, but with birds, pterosaurs, gliding mammals all around, scansoriopterygids were simply squeezed out until they disappeared."

Gliding is not an efficient form of flight as it can only be done if the scansoriopterygids are already at a high point. However, it did help keep them out of danger. "If an animal needs to travel long distances, gliding costs a bit more energy at the start, but it's faster. It can also be used as an escape hatch. It's not a great thing to do, but sometimes it's a choice between losing a bit of energy and being eaten," says Dececchi. "Once scansoriopterygids were put under pressure, they just lost their space. They couldn't win on the ground. They couldn't win in the air. They were done." The new findings support the emerging picture that dinosaurs evolved flight in several different ways before modern birds evolved. Asked about future plans, Pittman added, "Our team continues to uncover a greater sense of the breadth of experimentation involved in getting dinosaurs into the air. We plan to reveal even more details moving forward, particularly the different routes taken by dinosaurs to occupy the skies."

A team of leading environmental experts, spearheaded by the University of Nottingham, have warned that the current war on plastic is detracting from the bigger threats to the environment.

In an article published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs) Water, the 13 experts* say that while plastic waste is an issue, its prominence in the general public's concern for the environment is overshadowing greater threats, for example, climate change and biodiversity loss.

The interdisciplinary team argue that much of the discourse around plastic waste is based on data that is not always representative of the environments that have been sampled. The aversion to plastic associated with this could encourage the use of alternative materials with potentially greater harmful effects.

The authors warn that plastic pollution dominates the public's concern for the environment and has been exploited politically, after capturing the attention of the world, for example through emotive imagery of wildlife caught in plastic waste and alarmist headlines. They say small political gestures such as legislation banning cosmetic microplastics, taxing plastic bags, and financial incentives for using reusable containers, as well as the promotion of products as 'green' for containing less plastic than alternatives, risks instilling a complacency in society towards other environmental problems that are not as tangible as plastic pollution.

The article's authors call on the media and others to ensure that the realities of plastic pollution are not misrepresented, particularly in the public dissemination of the issue, and urges government to minimise the environmental impact of over-consumption, however inconvenient, through product design, truly circular waste-management, and considered rather than reactionary policy.

Dr Tom Stanton, a co-author who led the work while in the University of Nottingham's School of Geography and Food, Water, Waste Research Group, said: "We are seeing unprecedented engagement with environmental issues, particularly plastic pollution, from the public and we believe this presents a once in a generation opportunity to promote other, potentially greater environmental issues.

"This is a key moment in which to highlight and address areas such as 'throw-away' culture in society and overhaul waste management. However, if there is a continuation in prioritising plastic, this opportunity will be missed - and at great cost to our environment."

The article also highlights that plastics are not the only type of polluting material originating from human activity that contaminates the environment. Other examples include natural textile fibres such as cotton and wool, Spheroidal Carbonaceous Particles (remnants of fossil fuels), and brake-wear particles from vehicles - all of which are present in different places, where they may have adverse environmental effects. The authors note that these materials are often much more abundant than microplastics and some, such as glass, aluminium, paper, and natural fibres, are associated with 'plastic alternatives' that are marketed as solutions to plastic pollution, but in reality side-step the inconvenience of changing the consumption practices at the root of the problem. The eco-toxicological impacts of some of these materials are less well known than plastic and microplastic pollution, yet they could have significant impacts.

The authors conclude that that a behavioural science approach should be taken to assess society's relationship with single-use items and throw-away culture, and to overhaul waste mismanagement.

They say there is an understandable desire to minimise the global plastic debris in the environment which should not be discouraged, but positive action to minimise plastic pollution needs to be well informed and should not exacerbate or overshadow other forms of environmental degradation associated with alternative materials.

The article states that solutions are likely to come from a greater focus on designing materials and products that can be recycled, that have their end-of-life built in, and that markets and facilities exist to recycle all plastic waste.

Our eyes are sensitive to only three spectral color bands (red, green, blue), and we all know that we can no longer distinguish colors if it becomes very dark. Spectroscopists can identify many more colors by the frequencies of the light waves, so that they can distinguish atoms and molecules by their spectral fingerprints. In a proof-of-principle experiment, Nathalie Picqué and Theodor Hänsch from the Max-Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) and the Ludwig-Maximilian University (LMU) have now recorded broad spectra with close to one hundred thousand colors in almost complete darkness. The experiment employs two mode-locked femtosecond laser and a single photon counting detector. The results have just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

A mode-locked femtosecond laser emits hundreds of thousands of sharp spectral lines which are spaced precisely evenly in frequency. Such laser frequency combs are now widely used to count the oscillations of a laser wave and they serve as clockworks in optical atomic clocks. The frequency comb technique has been highlighted when the 2005 Physics Nobel Prize was awarded to Theodor Hänsch and John L. Hall.

During the past fifteen years, Nathalie Picqué at the MPQ has harnessed frequency combs for new approaches to broadband optical spectroscopy. In her technique of "dual-comb spectroscopy", all the comb lines of one laser interrogate a sample simultaneously over a broad spectral range, and the comb lines of a second laser with slightly different spacing interfere on a fast photodetector for read-out. Pairs of comb lines, one from each laser, produce radiofrequency beat notes in the detector signal. These radiofrequency signals can be digitized and processed by a computer. Any optical spectral structure in the sample reappears as a corresponding pattern in the comb of radio-frequency signals. Optical signals are effectively slowed down by a large factor equal to the laser repetition frequency divided by the difference in repetition frequencies. The unique advantages of this powerful spectroscopic tool include virtually unlimited spectral resolution, possible calibration with an atomic clock, and highly consistent acquisition of complex spectra without any need of scanning or mechanically moving parts.

Picqué and Hänsch have now demonstrated that dual-comb spectroscopy can be extended to extremely low light intensities in the photon counting regime. The interference signals can be observed in the statistics of the clicks of the photon counting detector, even if the power is so low, that only one click is registered over the time of 2000 laser pulses, on average. Under such circumstances it is extremely unlikely that two photons, one from each laser, are present in the detection path at the same time. The experiment cannot be explained intuitively if one assumes that a photon exists before detection.

The ability to work at light intensities a billion-fold lower than usually employed opens intriguing new prospects for dual-comb spectroscopy. Nathalie Picqué explains: "The method can now be extended to spectral regions where at most feeble frequency comb sources are available, such as the extreme ultraviolet or soft x-ray region. Spectroscopic signals can be acquired through highly attenuating materials or through backscattering over large distances. And it becomes feasible to extract dual comb spectra from nanoscopic samples down to single atoms or molecules, which produce only feeble fluorescence signals."

Theodor Hänsch remembers the moment in the laboratory when an interference pattern first emerged in the statistics of detector clicks: "I felt thrilled. Even after working in laser spectroscopy for more than 50 years, it seemed quite counter-intuitive to me that single detected photons could be "aware" of the two lasers with their large number of comb lines and of the complex spectrum of a sample."

There has never been a more dangerous time than the COVID-19 pandemic for people with non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as diabetes, cancer, respiratory problems or cardiovascular conditions, new UNSW Sydney research has found.

Among the adverse impacts of the pandemic for people with NCDs, the study found they are more vulnerable to catching and dying from COVID-19, while their exposure to NCD risk factors - such as substance abuse, social isolation and unhealthy diets - has increased during the pandemic.

The researchers also found COVID-19 disrupted essential public health services which people with NCDs rely on to manage their conditions.

The study, published in Frontiers in Public Health recently, reviewed the literature on the synergistic impact of COVID-19 on people with NCDs in low and middle-income countries such as Brazil, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Nigeria.

The paper, which analysed almost 50 studies, was a collaboration between UNSW and public health researchers in Nepal, Bangladesh and India.

Lead author Uday Yadav, PhD candidate under Scientia Professor Mark Harris of UNSW Medicine, said the interaction between NCDs and COVID-19 was important to study because global data showed COVID-19-related deaths were disproportionally high among people with NCDs - as the UNSW researchers confirmed.

"This illustrates the negative effect of the COVID-19 'syndemic' - also known as a 'synergistic epidemic' - a term coined by medical anthropologist Merrill Singer in the 1990s to describe the relationship between HIV/AIDS, substance abuse and violence," Mr Yadav said.

"We applied this term to describe the interrelationship between COVID-19 and the various biological and socio-ecological factors behind NCDs.

"So, people are familiar with COVID-19 as a pandemic, but we analysed it through a syndemic lens in order to determine the impact of both COVID-19 and future pandemics on people with NCDs."

Mr Yadav said the COVID-19 syndemic would persist, just as NCDs affected people in the long-term.

"NCDs are the result of a combination of genetic, physiological, environmental and behavioural factors and there is no quick fix, such as a vaccine or cure," he said.

"So, it's no surprise we found that NCD patients' exposure to NCD risk factors has increased amid the pandemic, and they are more vulnerable to catching COVID-19 because of the syndemic interaction between biological and socio-ecological factors.

"The evidence we analysed also showed there was poor self-management of NCDs at a community level and COVID-19 has disrupted essential public health services which people with NCDs rely on."

Tackling NCDs in the COVID-19 era

Mr Yadav said the researchers' findings led them to recommend a series of strategies for healthcare stakeholders - such as decision-makers, policymakers and frontline health workers - to better manage people with NCDs in light of the COVID-19 syndemic.

"Healthcare systems - such as Australia's - do have some of these strategies in place, but they need improvement," he said.

Highlights from the recommended strategies include:

Develop plans for how to best provide health services to people with NCDs, from the moment they are assessed through to their treatment and palliation.

Develop digital campaigns to disseminate information on how to make positive behaviour changes and better self-manage NCDs and COVID-19.

Decentralise healthcare delivery for people with NCDs: involving local health districts and investing in community health worker programs could help to mitigate future outbreaks. In addition, tailor self-management interventions for people with NCDs.

Ensure effective social and economic support for people with NCDs who are vulnerable to catching COVID-19, particularly Indigenous, rural, Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) and refugee communities, as well as people with severe mental illness.

Evaluate technology-assisted medical interventions to improve healthcare services, because complex case management, assessment and support is increasingly being done via telehealth appointments or other technology.

Why healthcare must focus on prevention

Mr Yadav said high-income countries could also learn from the researchers' findings.

"COVID-19 has been a major threat to people with NCDs in developed countries - for example, new statistics from Britain show that in 2020, high numbers of people in England and Wales died from NCDs at home after shunning the healthcare system because of the pandemic," he said.

"In Australia, COVID-19 will increase inequality and poses a risk to some high and middle-income earners, but it's a double threat to others such as Indigenous, rural, CALD and refugee communities, as well as people with severe mental illness - as reflected in our paper."

Mr Yadav said in Australia in 2018, the most recent data available, 89 per cent of deaths were associated with 10 chronic diseases.

"The Australian healthcare system needs a bigger focus on preventive healthcare, to improve outcomes for patients with NCDs and prevent more people from developing these diseases amid the COVID-19 pandemic," he said.

Mr Yadav said putting serious preventive healthcare investment on the backburner could lead to individual, societal and economic upheaval in the long-term.

"If this trend continues, Australia will struggle to achieve Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 3.4, which is to reduce premature mortality from NCDs by a third by 2030 - relative to 2015 levels and to promote mental health and wellbeing," he said.

"Investment in prevention today will help save healthcare costs in the long-term, help reduce the incidence of NCDs and enhance our resilience against future pandemics."

(Boston)--The field of forensic anthropology is a relatively homogenous discipline in terms of diversity (people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, people with mental and physical disabilities, etc.) and this is highly problematic for the field of study and for most forensic anthropologists.

At the core of the forensic sciences are basic sciences and the STEM fields, which have struggled with increasing diversity and inclusion. The lack of diversity in the STEM fields and the forensic sciences is concerning because it can limit the types of questions being asked in research.

"As forensic practitioners, we do not reflect the demographics of the highly dynamic populations that we serve across the country. Relevant and successful research relies on a diversity of ideas, perspectives and experiences, and without such diversity, the field stagnates and does not keep up with important issues that are relevant to society," explained corresponding author Sean Tallman, PhD, RPA, assistant professor of anatomy and neurobiology at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM).

In order to explore the demographics of the forensic anthropological community and perceptions of diversity and inclusion, an anonymous survey was sent out to the Anthropology Section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (AAFS), which included more than 500 individuals. The survey consisted of 48 questions that asked about demographic information; whether participants believe that diversity exists in various educational contexts; their experience with diversity, inclusion, and harassment at the AAFS annual meetings; and what the field could do to increase diversity and inclusion.

The data then was analyzed for trends in order to propose actionable measures that could produce meaningful change that positively impacts diversity and inclusion in forensic anthropology. According to the researchers they found many forensic anthropologists had experienced or witnessed discriminatory behavior within the AAFS, which is the scientific society that most forensic practitioners maintain membership in the U.S. "Problematically, many individuals in forensic anthropology do not know how to report incidents of discrimination or harassment that occur at the AAFS," added Tallman.

While the discipline has been slow to address issues of diversity, inclusion and discrimination, Tallman believes the field can mitigate these issues through regular tracking of membership demographics by the AAFS, reassessing graduate admission requirements and indicators of success, creating mechanisms for reporting discrimination and harassment, targeted outreach, and developing mentorship opportunities.

"Striving for a culture of diversity through inclusion in forensic anthropology helps to reflect the greater populations that we serve and encourages us to challenge our own assumptions and inherent biases that can complicate the analysis of skeletal remains in forensic casework. Diversity and inclusion initiatives should be substantial and well-supported, rather than merely token gestures to increase the number of minorities or underrepresented groups."

The critically endangered vaquita has survived in low numbers in its native Gulf of California for hundreds of thousands of years, a new genetic analysis has found. The study found little sign of inbreeding or other risks often associated with small populations.

Gillnet fisheries have entangled and killed thousands of vaquitas in recent years and scientists believe that fewer than 20 of the small porpoises survive today. The new analysis demonstrates that the species’ small numbers do not doom it to extinction, however, and so gives hope for the small remaining population. Vaquitas have long survived and even thrived without falling into an “extinction vortex,” the new study showed. That’s a scenario in which their limited genetic diversity makes it impossible to recover.

“The species, even now, is probably capable of surviving,” said Phil Morin, research geneticist at NOAA Fisheries’ Southwest Fisheries Science Center and lead author of the new study published this week in Molecular Ecology Resources. “We can now see that genetic factors are not its downfall. There’s a very good chance it could recover fully if we can get the nets out of the water.”

Small but Stable Populations

An increasing number of species in addition to the vaquita have maintained small but stable populations for long periods without suffering from inbreeding depression. Other species include the narwhal, mountain gorilla, and native foxes in California’s Channel Islands. Long periods of small population sizes may have given them time to purge harmful mutations that might otherwise jeopardize the health of their populations.

“It’s appearing to be more common than we thought that species can survive at low numbers over long periods,” said Morin, who credited the vaquita findings to genetic experts around the world who contributed to the research.

The idea that vaquitas could sustain themselves in low numbers is not new. Some scientists suspected that more than 20 years ago. Now advanced genetic tools that have emerged with the rapidly increasing power of new computer technology helped them prove the point.

“They’ve survived like this for at least 250,000 years,” said Barbara Taylor, research scientist at the Southwest Fisheries Science Center. “Knowing that gives us a lot more confidence that, in the immediate future, genetic issues are the least of our concerns.”

Sequencing the Vaquita Genome

The new analysis examined living tissue from a vaquita captured as part of a last-ditch international 2017 effort to save the fast-disappearing species. The female vaquita tragically died, but its living cells revealed the most complete and high-quality genome sequence of any dolphin, porpoise, or whale to date, generated in collaboration with the Vertebrate Genomes Project. Sequencing was led by Olivier Fedrigo, Jacquelyn Mountcastle, and Erich Jarvis at the Rockefeller University. “We felt it our moral duty to generate a high-quality reference of this species on the brink of extinction”, said Jarvis. Only in recent years have advances in sequencing technologies and high-powered computers made such detailed reconstruction possible.

While the vaquita genome is not diverse, the animals are healthy. The most recent field effort in fall 2019 spotted about nine individuals, including three calves, within their core habitat. The robust calves suggest that inbreeding depression is not harming the health of these last vaquita. “These examples and others indicate that, contrary to the paradigm of an ‘extinction vortex’ that may doom species with low diversity, some species have persisted with low genomic diversity and small population size,” scientists wrote in the new study.

The genetic data suggest that the vaquita’s isolated habitat in the far northern Gulf of California has sustained roughly 5,000 vaquitas for around 250,000 years. The advent of gillnetting for fish and shrimp only a few decades ago drove vaquitas towards extinction, as they are incidentally caught in the nets.

More recently, Illegal gillnetting for totoaba, a fish about the same size and found in the same habitat as the vaquita, has compounded the losses. The practice has caused a catastrophic decline that is estimated as cutting the remaining population in half each year.

“Small numbers do not necessarily mean the end of a species, if they have the protection they need,” Taylor said. “In conservation biology, we’re always looking for risk. We shouldn’t be so pessimistic. The sight of those three healthy calves in the water with their survivor mothers should inspire the protection they need to truly recover.”

Moving around in the half-light is difficult but not impossible. To help us in this undertaking we have the rods, a type of light-sensitive cells (photoreceptors) present in the retina of vertebrates, capable of detecting very low lights which allow to move about even in poorly lit cellars or caves. They are biological wonders capable of detecting even a single quantum of light, but they need continuous maintenance. They are the protagonists of the new study published in PNAS by a team of researchers of SISSA - Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati and the Istituto officina dei materiali of the National research council CNR-Iom which reveals new and essential details of how the retina works and in particular photoreceptors.

These consist of two segments: the outer segment (OS) and the inner segment (IS). The OS of the rods is the one where the biological machine capable of capturing the light is located, while the IS is responsible for the information to be transferred to the brain. "We have understood that the outer segment is more fragile than what was thought", comments Vincent Torre, neuroscientist of SISSA leading the team that conducted the research, adding "The OS consists of a stack of lipid discs containing the proteins responsible for phototransduction. New discs are generated at the base of the OS while used discs are removed at the tip of the OS. Traditionally, it was thought that in a stack of about 1000 discs there was almost perfect uniformity. However, our work shows that only the first 200 or 300 discs at the base of the OS are those effectively capable of detecting the single photon of light, characteristic from which comes the great sensitivity of the rods. The other discs positioned close to the tip gradually lose effectiveness and sensitivity and for this reason they must be disposed of and replaced with new discs in perfect condition".

It was the Calcium, an ion present in large numbers in biological processes that allowed the understanding of this mechanism. Its concentration in the OS is an excellent indicator of the functionality and integrity of phototransduction, the process with which the photoreceptors convert light into nerve signals. "With new optical probes we measured the concentration and the distribution of calcium in the OS. Using advanced optical microscopy instruments, we were able to study the distribution of this metal with unprecedented resolution and accuracy." Dan Cojoc of Cnr-Iom explains "what has emerged from the analyses is that there is greater concentration of calcium at the base of the outer segment with respect to the tip, which helps to understand the structure of the rod showing its non-homogeneity, as was thought until now.

A second and no less important result is the discovery of spontaneous calcium flares, i.e. rapid increases in calcium. These flares are not evenly distributed but located in the tips of the OS, which shows the existence of a functional gradient along the OS, a fundamental property for photoreceptor transduction of all vertebrates." Cojoc concludes. Like a warning light, the Calcium flares indicate that the discs start to stop working at their best and need turnover. The article was also recommended to Faculty Opinions by the editor of PNAS -something reserved only for the most important contributions - for the following reasons: "This interesting article uses a new Calcium measurement method to show that light-dependent changes of Calcium in the outer segment of the rods are greater at the base than at the tip".

Neuroscientist Gordon Fain of the University of California continues, "These differences can reflect an energy gradient that originates from the mitochondria of the inner segment. The authors of the study also make the amazing observation that Calcium increases spontaneously both at the tip and at the base (but more often at the tip), as well as more rarely in the inner segment. These increases produce sudden flares, i.e. peaks of Calcium concentration, which decrease slowly for several seconds and which remain local without propagating inside the outer segment or between the inner and outer segment."

URBANA, Ill. - Extrusion is the norm in the pet and aqua feed industries, yet it remains unusual for swine feed in the United States. But the technology can improve energy and protein digestibility in pigs, according to research from the University of Illinois.

"We're not doing this much in the U.S., partly because the extrusion equipment typically is not installed in feed mills producing pig feeds. If a feed company decided they wanted to extrude diets or extrude grain by itself, as we did in this case, it would add cost. So the only way it would be economical would be if the pigs performed better with extruded grains," says Hans H. Stein, professor in the Department of Animal Sciences and the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Illinois and co-author on a study in Animal Feed Science and Technology.

Stein and his research team compared pig diets containing either extruded or unprocessed corn, wheat, and sorghum to determine ileal starch and amino acid digestibility, as well as total tract digestibility of energy and fiber. One source of each grain was ground and then divided in two batches, with one batch left as is and the other extruded in a single-screw extruder with an exit temperature of 100 degrees Celsius. Grains were ground and extruded at Kansas State University, but extrusion equipment at the new Feed Technology Center at Illinois will facilitate future research to help meet the growing global demand for animal protein.

"In extruded corn and wheat, we saw a nice improvement in amino acid digestibility. Corn in particular," Stein says. "And we observed increases for energy in extruded corn and sorghum, but not in wheat."

Starch digestibility also increased in extruded grains, compared with unprocessed grains.

"Starch is already well digested by pigs, but by extruding it, we increase its digestibility even more. And we have seen in quite a few other experiments, every time we increase starch digestibility, we increase energy digestibility," Stein says. "There's a very, very close relationship between the two."

The mechanical process of extrusion, which involves heat, pressure, and steam, leads to gelatinization of starch, which explains the link between starch and energy digestibility.

"In the extruded grains, 90% of the starch was gelatinized," Stein says. "Gelatinization opens the starch molecule, making it easier for enzymes to break down every bond within the starch. That leads to greater energy digestibility and absorption."

Fiber digestibility didn't change markedly in extruded grains versus unprocessed grains, but more of the fiber content became soluble with extrusion. "That means some of the insoluble fibers were solubilized. But because fiber digestibility didn't increase overall, that didn't have as much of an impact as we had expected," Stein says.

With pigs extracting more energy and protein from extruded grains, Stein sees a potential economic benefit that could justify the cost of adding extruding equipment to feed mills.

"If feed manufacturers can increase the energy as much as we did in our study, then there certainly is value in extruding grain for pig diets," he says.

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have studied a population of women in rural Poland for the past four years to understand how their lifestyle affects their bone density. The age group and lifestyle of these women are often overlooked in such studies.

The study "Bone density and frame size in adult women: effects of body size, habitual use, and life history" was published in the American Journal of Human Biology.

"My work focuses on understanding how our activities shape our skeleton and what it means for the modern population," said Katharine Lee, a recent graduate of the Clancy group, which is affiliated with the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

The study focused on a population of farmers whose lifestyles involve substantial farm and domestic labor, such as growing fruits and vegetables, churning butter, beating rugs, washing windows, and caring for children. "We made some basic body measurements and looked at the physical activity patterns of these women," Lee said. "We also used a bone sonometer, which was provided through Beckman's Biomedical Imaging Center. It is a portable device that can be conveniently used to carry out bone density measurements."

Previous studies in the field have looked at bone density measurements in menopausal women. The researchers wanted to focus on women between the ages of 18 and 46, an age group that is not often looked at in bone density studies. "We wondered why there was so little research on premenopausal women, since presumably their bone density and activity predicts postmenopausal osteoporosis," said Kathryn Clancy, an associate professor of anthropology at Illinois and a part-time Beckman faculty member.

"We saw that measures such as grip strength and lean mass are associated with the bone density and frame size of these premenopausal women. We also saw that the bone density of the radius, which is the bone at the base of your thumb, is very high compared to an average white woman of European descent," Lee said. "Interestingly, we don't see this increased bone density in Polish American women. We don't fully understand what factors are causing it."

The researchers believe that this study sheds light on the specific contexts of this lifestyle. "A lot of these measures have looked at large populations and averaged, so they have missed many of these details," Lee said. "It is also important to think about which populations are not represented in the literature and look at lifestyles that are different to the modern, sedentary lifestyle that most people in the U.S. have."

Moving forward, the researchers are interested in understanding whether the childhood environment has helped shape the bone health of the women. "We have interviewed them about the different types of work they did when they were growing up. We asked whether they grew up on a farm, whether they had farm animals, or whether they tended a garden. Those activities, rather than the ones they are doing now, might be associated with the bone health measures," Lee said.

Water tainted with even a small concentration of human hormones can have profound effects on fish, according to a University of Cincinnati biologist.

UC assistant professor Latonya Jackson conducted experiments with North American freshwater fish called least killifish. She found that fish exposed to estrogen in concentrations of 5 nanograms per liter in controlled lab conditions had fewer males and produced fewer offspring.

Scientists have found estrogen at as much as 16 times that concentration in streams adjacent to sewage treatment plants.

The study suggests that even this small dose of estrogen could have significant consequences for wild fish populations living downstream from sewage treatment plants.

The study was published this week in the journal Aquatic Toxicology.

What's special about least killifish is they have a placenta and give birth to live young, Jackson said. It's uncommon among fish, who more typically lay eggs.

Jackson studied a synthetic estrogen called 17α-ethinylestradiol, an active ingredient in oral contraceptives also used in hormone replacement therapy. Estrogen been found in streams adjacent to sewage treatment plants in concentrations of as high as 60 nanograms or more per liter.

"Anything you flush down the toilet or put in the sink will get in the water supply," she said. 

This includes not only medicine people flush (never do that) but also unmetabolized chemicals that get flushed when people use the bathroom.

"Our wastewater treatment systems are good at removing a lot of things, but they weren't designed to remove pharmaceuticals," Jackson said. "So when women on birth control or hormone therapy go to the bathroom, it gets flushed into wastewater treatment plants."

Chronic exposure of fish to estrogen led to smaller populations and a gender ratio imbalance with more females than males.

Now Jackson wants to know how the exposure to hormones such as estrogen and androgen in a female fish affects her offspring. She is collaborating with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to examine local waters in southwestern Ohio.

Jackson said the impacts on streams are not limited to fish. Hormones and other chemicals that are not removed during treatment can bioaccumulate in the food chain or end up in our drinking water.

"Our drinking water is not a renewable resource. When we run out of clean drinking water, it's gone," Jackson said. "It's very important that we keep this resource clean."

HOUSTON - (Oct. 23, 2020) - Researchers at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine have developed a new method to isolate specific cells, and in the process found a more robust fluorescent protein.

Both the platform and the protein could be highly useful to synthetic biologists and biomedical researchers. They often need to single out cells with specific visual phenotypes like shape or activity determined by their genetic or epigenetic makeup or their developmental history.

Rice graduate student Jihwan (James) Lee and François St-Pierre, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine and an adjunct assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice, and their team reported their results in Science Advances.

Lee and his colleagues dubbed their platform SPOTlight, short for Single-cell Phenotypic Observation and Tagging with Light. It addresses the limitations of existing sorting techniques to isolate single live cells with unique profiles from heterogenous populations.

They then leveraged the method for protein engineering to develop the most photostable yellow fluorescent protein reported to date.

"We basically developed a platform that allows one to screen for spatial and temporal properties of individual cells," said Lee, the first author and a student in Rice's Systems, Synthetic and Physical Biology program working in St-Pierre's Baylor lab.

"This is done by first observing the cells under a microscope," he said. "The cells express a special protein so that shining a spot of light on desired cells make them go red. We can then easily separate red cells from the rest using a common device called a flow cytometer."

That "special" photoactivatable fluorescent protein irreversibly transitions from dark to bright after being zapped by violet light. Photoactivatable dyes can also be used instead of proteins. In effect, cells are left with a long-lasting tag.

To only tag cells of interest, the team used a digital micromirror device, an array of tiny motor-driven mirrors also used in digital projectors, to give it the ability to light up single cells. "These micromirrors rotate and turn to define a region of your sample, down to single cells," Lee said. "This is all automated. There's a motorized microscope stage that moves the cells on an imaging plate around a predefined zone, and the DMD will shine light only on a particular cell."

Through SPOTlight, a researcher can observe a population of hundreds of thousands of human or yeast cells over time to find those with desirable cellular dynamics, subcellular structures or shapes. Custom software can then be used to identify all cells with the desired profile, and instruct the light source and the DMD to photoactivate them with violet light.

"Then we use a flow cytometer or cell-sorting machine that can detect and recover the cells we tagged while throwing away the rest," Lee said. "After we've recovered our cells of interest, we can send them for sequencing or conduct further studies."

Lee said the prototype tags individual cells in 45 seconds to a minute. "That depends on the power of the light," he said. "With a stronger light source, we should be able to do this even faster, maybe down to a few seconds per cell."

To demonstrate the utility of SPOTlight, Lee and his colleagues used it to screen 3 million mutant cells expressing a library of fluorescent proteins, ultimately identifying and refining a yellow fluorescent protein they call mGold.

"It's a variant of an existing fluorescent probe called mVenus," Lee said. "The problem with mVenus is that it photobleaches very fast. It becomes dimmer and dimmer as you keep shining light on it. If you're monitoring cells expressing mVenus for a long time, there comes a time where the fluorescent protein is no longer detectable. So we decided to screen for mVenus mutants with better fluorescent stability."

He said researchers typically engineer fluorescent proteins by shining light on bacterial colonies expressing the proteins to see which one is brightest. With SPOTlight, "we can screen for brightness and photostability at the same time," Lee said. "This isn't something people commonly did, but biology isn't static. It's moving in time and space, so it's important to have these temporal properties as well.

"Compared with commonly used yellow fluorescent proteins, mGold was four to five times more stable," he said.

"Important developmental events and behaviors require monitoring for many minutes, hours or days and it's frustrating when the probes we use to image these processes go dark before we've been able to capture the whole story," St-Pierre said.

"It's like having a power outage in the middle of watching a good movie," he said. "Building on our work with mGold, we now want to use SPOTlight to develop probes that will enable us to watch full movies.

"Similarly, SPOTlight can enable synthetic biologists to engineer new proteins, nucleic acids or cells," St-Pierre said. "More broadly, this method can help any researcher seeking to unravel the genetic or epigenetic determinants of an interesting cellular phenotype, including such clinically relevant properties as resistance to disease or treatment."

Stress is present everywhere, even bacteria and plant cells have to cope with it. They express various specific stress proteins, but how exactly this line of defense works is often not clear. A group of scientists headed by Professor Dirk Schneider of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has now discovered a protective mechanism in cyanobacteria as well as in chloroplasts of plant cells: Complex ring structures formed by a protein attach to cell membranes and dissociate. Thereafter, the individual proteins spread out on the membrane surface and form a carpet structure. "Via formation of such a shield, bacteria and chloroplasts protect their membranes under certain stress conditions," stated Professor Dirk Schneider, head of the Membrane Biochemistry section at the JGU Department of Chemistry.

The biochemist and his team have examined the protein IM30, i.e., the inner membrane-associated protein having a mass of approximately 30 kilodaltons. Previous studies have already shown that the IM30 protein is involved in the formation and preservation of membranes in photosynthetic cells. Without IM30, the amount of thylakoid membranes, in which the photosynthetic light reaction occurs, decreases, ultimately resulting in cell death. The hitherto unknown molecular mechanism of membrane stabilization has now been observed and revealed in detail. The results of this collaborative research project have recently been published in the Nature journal Communications Biology.

Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) reveals ring disassembly and carpet formation

"For quite some time now, we were well aware that IM30 is somehow related to stress. However, we did not know how exactly these proteins manage to protect the cells on a molecular level", explained Schneider. Employing biochemical and biophysical methods in cooperation especially with Professor Stefan Weber of the Max Planck Institute of Polymer Research in Mainz and Professor Eva Wolf of the Institute of Molecular Biology (IMB), the mystery was finally solved. Using atomic force microscopy, the scientists were able to observe how the ring structures disassemble and form carpets on membrane surfaces. "For the very first time we were able to visualize the neat IM30 structure on the surface of membranes," said Schneider.

Intrinsically disordered proteins have important functions

IM30 belongs to the group of intrinsically disordered proteins, which have shifted into the focus of science in recent years. When IM30 binds to the membrane, it unfolds in half - which makes it particularly complicated to study. The traditional understanding of proteins has been based on the assumption that their function is associated with its structure and that disordered structures more or less take over no function. "It is now becoming increasingly clear that disordered protein regions can be involved in defined interactions", stated Schneider as to the classification of the results in a large-scale context.

The study defines the thus far enigmatic structural basis for the physiological function of IM30 and related proteins, including the phage shock protein A (PspA), the main representative of the protein family to which IM30 belongs. It also "highlights a hitherto unrecognized concept of membrane stabilization by intrinsically disordered proteins," stated the authors in the Communications Biology paper. In fact, self-organization of proteins on membrane surfaces, resulting in membrane-covering protein structures, has already been observed before, for example in Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease. In these cases, however, the result is membrane destabilization. In contrast, the protective protein carpet formed by IM30 results in membrane stabilization.

"Our discovery now answers the long-standing question as to how exactly the protein protects the membrane. This, however, raises new questions, for example how the individual proteins exactly interact on the membrane surface and form the carpet," said Schneider about the research now planned.