Culture

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (Oct. 22, 2020) -- Can COVID-19 infection increase the risk of developing Parkinson's disease?

That's the question posed by a new commentary published in the journal Trends in Neurosciences, which explores three known case studies of people developing Parkinson's-like symptoms in the weeks following infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. While rare, these cases provide important insights into potential long-term implications of infections.

The commentary was co-authored by Patrik Brundin, M.D., Ph.D., of Van Andel Institute, Avindra Nath, M.D., of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health, and J. David Beckham, M.D., of University of Colorado.

"As we continue to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic today, we also must consider its implications for the future," Brundin said. "Evidence is mounting that the side effects of COVID-19 infection, such as inflammation and damage to the vascular system, could lay the foundation for development of Parkinson's disease. COVID-19 is clearly a major and ongoing public health threat, but the consequences of infection may end up being with us for years and decades to come."

Parkinson's disease is a multi-system disorder that begins years or even decades before its hallmark movement-related symptoms appear. Growing evidence suggests Parkinson's arises from a complex mix of factors that vary from person to person, including age, genetic predisposition, history of infections and exposure to certain environmental factors such as pollution or pesticides.

Viral infections in particular may play a role in triggering the earliest stages of Parkinson's by setting off a cascade that results in the death of brain cells that produce dopamine, a vital chemical messenger whose absence leads to movement issues such as freezing and tremor.

The three cases referenced in the commentary occurred in people without a family history of Parkinson's and without any known early Parkinson's symptoms. Two saw an improvement in their Parkinson's-like symptoms following treatment with traditional Parkinson's medications that replenish dopamine; the third recovered spontaneously. Although these medications treat symptoms, they often have challenging side effects and do not slow or stop Parkinson's progression.

"SARS-CoV-2 is considered a respiratory virus, however, its virulence and pathogenic potential particularly for neurological complications continues to surprise us," Nath said. "Some patients can develop severe neurological manifestations despite mild respiratory symptoms."

Based on evidence from the case studies and what is known about the mechanisms underpinning Parkinson's, Brundin, Nath and Beckham suggest three possible ways that COVID-19 infection could contribute to Parkinson's onset:

COVID-19 is linked to blood clots and other problems with the vascular system, including in the brain. These vascular insults could cause damage to the area of the brain that produces
dopamine, which subsequently could result in a loss of dopamine that mirrors Parkinson's.

There is a demonstrated link between chronic inflammation and Parkinson's. It is possible that severe inflammation resulting from COVID-19 could trigger brain inflammation and cell death
associated with Parkinson's.

SARS-CoV-2 may be a neurotropic virus, meaning that it attacks the nervous system. Because of this, COVID-19 and Parkinson's share some early symptoms such as loss of sense of smell and is-sues with the gut. Additionally, infection with SARS-CoV-2 could lead to an increase in alpha-synuclein, a protein associated with Parkinson's (this has been seen in other viral infections).

Although these cases do not prove that COVID-19 infection causes Parkinson's, they do suggest a troubling possible relationship between the virus and subsequent neurodegenerative disorders.

"The large number of respiratory cases due to SARS-CoV2 has allowed us to understand and analyze important neurologic complications of severe respiratory virus infections," Beckham said. "It is important that we continue our scientific investigations into this new virus so we understand all of the short and long-term complications of the COVID-19 pandemic."

Going forward, the authors call for long-term studies that follow people who were infected with COVID-19 to monitor them for Parkinson's development.

Today, the Energy Futures Initiative (EFI) and Stanford University released "An Action Plan for Carbon Capture and Storage in California: Opportunities, Challenges, and Solutions," a report providing policymakers with options for near-term actions to deploy carbon capture and storage (CCS) to meet the state's climate goals.

The study, six months in the making, concludes that CCS offers a clean technology pathway for rapidly reducing emissions from economically vital sectors that have few other options to decarbonize. It can also support clean, firm power, an essential enabler of intermittent renewable generation. The report will be introduced in a virtual briefing led by Ernest J. Moniz, former U.S. Secretary of Energy and founder of EFI and Franklin Orr, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. They will be joined by the report's co-leads, EFI's Melanie Kenderdine and Sally Benson, Professor at the Department of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford University.

"California has the most ambitious carbon reduction goals in the nation," said Benson. "Our study outlines the vital role that CCS could play in achieving carbon neutrality by 2045."

EFI, a nonprofit think tank established by former U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest J. Moniz, previously published "Optionality, Flexibility, and Innovation: Pathways for Deep Decarbonization in California," which concluded that the targeted use of CCS could be one of the single largest contributors to California's decarbonization by 2030.

"California has a strong economic base, a skilled workforce, and enviable innovation capacity at its laboratories, universities, and tech companies," said Kenderdine. "The state is well placed to accelerate its progress on developing the clean energy technologies that will decarbonize industry and the power sector, create jobs, and new industries enabled by CCS, such as a hydrogen economy, and become a global leader in deploying CCS technologies."

CCS, like all other emission reduction technologies, is not a "silver bullet" technology for decarbonization. Carbon capture paired with permanent geologic storage (i.e. deep saline reservoir) is a viable and important option for reducing emissions from the industrial and electricity sectors that are key contributors to California's economy and the reliability of its grid.

Technoeconomic analysis done for this study identified 76 existing electricity generation and industrial facilities as candidates for CCS, in total representing nearly 15 percent of the state's current greenhouse gas emissions.

Successful policy pathways for achieving California's ambitious emission reduction targets are critical. Additional and accelerated actions are needed to ensure that the state successfully transitions to a carbon neutral economy both economically and equitably. California's economy would be the fifth largest in the world as a stand-alone entity, so the state's success in meeting its emissions targets and as a technology leader have significant implications for the global climate solutions.

Some key takeaways from the report:

California's economy would see rapid near-term emissions reduction benefits from CCS;

The state has a strong foundation for supporting CCS projects, and the study has identified 76 facilities suitable for carbon capture;

California's geology makes it well suited for safe, permanent CO2 storage; and

California could prioritize CCS projects that have demonstrable local air quality benefits and local job opportunities in line with the state's climate and equity goals

CAMBRIDGE, MA - October 22, 2020--Rapid Reviews: COVID-19 (RR:C19), an open-access overlay journal published by the MIT Press that accelerates peer review of COVID-19-related research preprints, is currently soliciting reviews of the following COVID-19 preprints. These preprints have been selected for review because they have the potential to enhance our understanding of SARS-CoV-2 or have been flagged as potentially misleading. Preprints with two finished reviews should be published within 10-14 days. Additional information or early access to these peer-reviews is available upon request.

Highlights from Rapid Reviews editorial team:

"Measuring the missing: greater racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 burden after accounting for missing race/ethnicity data" by Katie Labgold, et al.

Preprint Summary: After bias-adjustment, the magnitude of the absolute racial/ethnic disparity, measured as the difference in infection rates between classified Black and Hispanic persons compared to classified White persons, increased 1.3-fold and 1.6-fold respectively.
 

"Seroprevalence of SARS-COV-2 antibodies in Scottish healthcare workers" by Hani Abo-Leyah, et al.

Preprint Summary: Serological testing can be used to determine the prevalence and incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection. 299/2062 had positive antibody test against spike protein (Seroprev = 14.5%). 11/231 control tested sera positive (seroprev 4.8%). Healthcare worker's odds of having a positive test was 3.4 greater than control. Dentists most frequently associated with detected antibodies (26%) followed by health care assistants (23.3%) and porters (22.2%).
 

"Quantifying the impact of quarantine duration on COVID-19 transmission" by Peter Ashcroft, et al.

Preprint Summary: Asserts that there are greatly diminished returns in terms of avoided transmission with quarantine duration greater than 10 days. Also, the ratio of (prevented transmission):(days spent in quarantine) would decrease further when coupled with test-and-release strategies and hygiene reinforcement post-release. Lastly, they find that a pure test-and-release strategy performs almost as well as a 10-day quarantine, with far lower costs compared to lost productivity due to quarantine.

Physical Sciences/Engineering

"Ultrasensitive and selective detection of SARS-CoV-2 using thermotropic liquid crystals and image-based machine learning" by Yang Xu, et al.

Preprint Summary: This study developed a novel diagnostic strategy that uses liquid crystal-conjugated nucleic acid probes to detect SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences and show 3-base pair mismatches reduce signal by log 7. The authors also develop a diagnostic kit, including machine learning algorithm and diagnostic app to facilitate use in a Point of Care setting.
 

"A sew-free origami mask for improvised respiratory protection" by Jonathan Realmuto, et al.

Preprint Summary: An origami mask with adequate filtration efficiency can be made by non-experts using two elastic straps, square piece of filter material, nose clip material (twist tie, paper clip, etc.), and stapler. These masks can be made easily with minimal materials while providing appropriate filtration as tested using a mannequin based test for air flow and filtration.
 

"Hitting the diagnostic sweet spot: Point-of-care SARS-CoV-2 salivary antigen testing with an off-the-shelf glucometer" by Naveen Singh, et al.

Preprint Summary: A SARS-CoV-2 salivary antigen assay that uses a glucometer as readout for point-of-care diagnosis. The test is based on low-cost($3.20/test) reagents and off-the-shelf glucometer, and was able to deliver 100% sensitivity and 100% specificity within one hour as benchmarked by RT-qPCR.
 

"SARS-CoV-2 viral budding and entry can be modeled using virus-like particles" by Caroline Plescia, et al.

Preprint Summary: This study documents purification and assembly of SARS-CoV-2 Virus-like particles (VLPs). They study viral budding and entry in the presence of potential inhibitory drugs, in BSL-2 conditions.

Biological/Chemical Sciences

"SARS-CoV-2 cell entry gene ACE2 expression in immune cells that infiltrate the placenta in infection-associated preterm birth" by Phatcharawan Lye, et al.

Preprint Summary: This study claims placental tissue affected by chorioamnioitis or stimulated with pro-inflammatory bacterial components (LPS) show marked ACE2 upregulation in the synctiotrophoblast, tissue-resident myeloid cells, villous stroma, and fetal blood vessels. The authors claim COVID19+ patients in ChA-afflicted patients are at increased risk of SARS-CoV-2 vertical transmission.
 

"Landscape of public T cell receptors associated with recovery from COVID-19" by Donjete Simnica, et al.

Preprint Summary: This paper identifies TCR sequences overrepresented in recovered COVID19 patients relative to samples from deceased patients. The study also finds these clonal populations present in samples obtained prior to the pandemic and find these clones are less prevalent in more high-risk demographics (older and cancer-afflicted individuals).
 

"SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein promotes hyper-inflammatory response that can be ameliorated by Spike-antagonistic peptide and FDA-approved ER stress and MAP kinase inhibitors in vitro" by Alan C-Y. Hsu, et al.

Preprint Summary: SARS-Cov-2 causes a damaging pro-inflammatory response by activating NF-kB signaling, downstream of ACE2 binding, MAPK signaling, and the ER stress response machinery. This response can pathway can be targeted with an inhibitory peptide against Spike or FDA-approved ER stress and MAPK inhibitors. 

Public Health

"Comparison of infection control strategies to reduce COVID-19 outbreaks in homeless shelters in the United States: a simulation study" by Lloyd A.C. Chapman, et al.

Preprint Summary: A combined strategy involving daily symptom screening, universal mask wearing, twice-weekly PCR testing and re-location of high-risk individuals was simulated to have a 68% probability of averting an outbreak in low-risk settings. Weaknesses in methodology include assumption of 1-day turnaround for test results and that previous cases become immune. Methods also limited by lack of contact tracing in model.
 

"Projected HIV and bacterial STI incidence following COVID-related sexual distancing and clinical service interruption" by Samuel Jenness, et al.

Preprint Summary: Relative decrease in sexual partnerships and clinical services of STI during pandemic would lead to a decrease in HIV and STI infections. Greater relative reduction to clinical services and longer service interruptions leads to increase in HIV and STI infection rates. Modelling suggests that sexual distancing lasting 3 months while clinical services interruption lasting 18 moths, would lead to an additional 890 HIV cases and 57.5K STI cases in the studied city (Atlanta) during the following 5yrs.
 

"COVID-19 is feminine: grammatical gender influences future danger perceptions and precautionary behavior"

Preprint Summary: Following surveys to French and Spanish speaking individuals, the authors show that the virus is considered less likely to be dangerous in the future when thoughts of the concept are activated with the feminine grammatical gender than when they are activated with the masculine grammatical gender, which in turn reduces intentions to engage in behaviors to reduce the chances of contracting the disease or spreading the virus in potential consumption episodes.

Medical Sciences

"SARS-CoV-2 antibody responses in patients with aggressive haematological malignancies" by Jenny O'Nions, et al.

Preprint Summary: The majority (8/9) of Patients with Hematologic Malignancy (PHM) with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection seroconverted and developed antibodies to the major SARS-CoV-2 antigens (S1 and N) with most (6/8) produced neutralizing antibody responses. Furthermore, the dynamics of antibody responses were broadly similar to that reported for the general population, except for a possible delay to seroconversion.
 

"COVID-19 classification of x-ray images using deep neural networks" by Elisha Goldstein, et al.

Preprint Summary: Deep Neural Networks can be used to reliably classify CXR images as COVID-19 positive or negative. The model achieved 89.7% accuracy and 87.1% sensitivity (testing 15% of images) in classification of COVID-19 and area under receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.95. This could be a tool used to rapidly identify and isolate positive COVID-19 patients, which would contribute to contain the disease.
 

"COVID-19 infection may cause thyroid dysfunction" by Hongmei Zhang.

Preprint Summary: Relative to the control, COVID+ patients had lower serum levels of T3 and TSH and higher levels of T4. Thyroid dysfunction in COVID+ patients manifested often as non-thyroidal illness syndrome (NTIS). The FT3/FT4 ratio was negatively correlated with COVID-19 death in the multivariate logistic regression analysis. AUC for the FT3/FT4 ratio was 0·716 (p =0·000, 95%CI=0·633-0·799).
 

Hospitalized COVID-19 patients who were taking a daily low-dose aspirin to protect against cardiovascular disease had a significantly lower risk of complications and death compared to those who were not taking aspirin, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM). Aspirin takers were less likely to be placed in the intensive care unit (ICU) or hooked up to a mechanical ventilator, and they were more likely to survive the infection compared to hospitalized patients who were not taking aspirin, The study, published today in the journal Anesthesia and Analgesia, provides "cautious optimism," the researchers say, for an inexpensive, accessible medication with a well-known safety profile that could help prevent severe complications.

"This is a critical finding that needs to be confirmed through a randomized clinical trial," said study leader Jonathan Chow, MD, Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at UMSOM. "If our finding is confirmed, it would make aspirin the first widely available, over-the-counter medication to reduce mortality in COVID-19 patients."

To conduct the study, Dr. Chow and his colleagues culled through the medical records of 412 COVID-19 patients, age of 55 on average, who were hospitalized over the past few months due to complications of their infection. They were treated at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore and three other hospitals along the East Coast. About a quarter of the patients were taking a daily low-dose aspirin (usually 81 milligrams) before they were admitted or right after admission to manage their cardiovascular disease.

The researchers found aspirin use was associated with a 44 percent reduction in the risk of being put on a mechanical ventilator, a 43 percent decrease in the risk of ICU admission and - most importantly - a 47 percent decrease in the risk of dying in the hospital compared to those who were not taking aspirin. The patients in the aspirin group did not experience a significant increase in adverse events such as major bleeding while hospitalized.

The researchers controlled for several factors that may have played a role in a patient's prognosis including age, gender, body mass index, race, hypertension and diabetes. They also accounted for heart disease, kidney disease, liver disease and the use of beta blockers to control blood pressure.

COVID-19 infections increase the risk of dangerous blood clots that can form in the heart, lungs, blood vessels and other organs. Complications from blood clots can, in rare cases, cause heart attacks, strokes and multiple organ failure as well as death.

Doctors often recommend a daily low-dose aspirin for patients who have previously had a heart attack or stroke caused by a blood clot to prevent future blood clots. Daily use, however, can increase the risk of major bleeding or peptic ulcer disease.

"We believe that the blood thinning effects of aspirin provides benefits for COVID-19 patients by preventing microclot formation," said study co-author Michael A. Mazzeffi, MD, Associate Professor of Anesthesiology at UMSOM. "Patients diagnosed with COVID-19 may want to consider taking a daily aspirin as long as they check with their doctor first." Those at increased bleeding risk due to chronic kidney disease, for example, or because they regularly use certain medications, like steroids or blood thinners, may not be able to safely take aspirin, he added.

Researchers from Wake Forest School of Medicine, George Washington University School of Medicine, Northeast Georgia Health System, and Walter Reed National Military Medical Center also participated in this study.

"This study adds to the tremendous work our researchers are doing in the School of Medicine to help find new treatments against COVID-19 and save patients' lives," said E. Albert Reece, MD, PhD, MBA, Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs, UM Baltimore, and the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor and Dean, University of Maryland School of Medicine. "While confirmatory studies are needed to prove that aspirin use leads to better outcomes in COVID-19, the evidence thus far suggests that patients may want to discuss with their doctor whether it is safe for them to take aspirin to manage potentially prevent serious complications."

Women who compete in martial arts and combat sports challenge gender norms in their profession but often embrace them wholeheartedly and even overdo them in their personal lives, finds a UC Riverside study published in Sociology of Sport Journal.

The findings underscore the need for caution when assigning a feminist label to an organization or activity simply because it features women in powerful positions.

"Because the sport of women's mixed martial arts, or WMMA, allows women to participate in activities that have traditionally been reserved for men, many have prematurely concluded that WMMA is actually a feminist enterprise," said author Justen Hamilton, a doctoral candidate in sociology. "My research revealed, however, that a feminist consciousness -- critical to any feminist enterprise -- is sorely lacking in the sport."

Hamilton, who has also been an MMA competitor and coach, noticed a discrepancy between how women fighters perform gender in their sport and in their personal lives. MMA is a full-contact, "no holds barred" combat sport in which athletes can use techniques adapted from a wide range of martial arts to seek victory by knockout, submission, referee intervention, or judges' decision. Many women who were physically powerful, highly aggressive competitors seemed to be involved in personal relationships with men even stronger and more assertive than themselves.

Hamilton interviewed 40 WMMA athletes about their relationships and feelings about femininity. Almost all of the heterosexual women, who were the majority of his sample, said although they loved being strong and able to defend themselves, they preferred to be with a man who could protect them. They subscribed to the masculine ideal of a man who is willing to risk his own safety to protect his family. The ability to provide physical protection was the essential quality of being a man.

"I don't wanna' be the one that's protecting 'cause then I'd be the one who was the masculine one," said an interviewee.

Being smaller and weaker than a man also made the women feel more desirable. One participant said being with a man smaller than her made her feel even bigger, which made her feel fatter, less feminine, and undesirable.

Differences of size and strength are perhaps even more important to the gender and sexual dynamics of heterosexuality for these MMA fighters than they are for other straight women, according to the study. They looked for men who were taller, heavier, and even able to pick them up and carry them. Some pointed to relationships that had failed because the men felt insufficiently masculine around them, or because they felt unattracted to a man less masculine than them.

"If I could beat your ass, I'm always gonna' look at you like a little brother. I'm never gonna' look at you like this guy that I could potentially date," said another interviewee. "It's like you kinda' want someone who is able to beat you up but will never do it."

The paper states that in their MMA careers, all of the women worked tirelessly to ensure that they were bigger, stronger, and more physically capable than their opponents. In their intimate relationships, however, most of the straight women sought to be smaller, weaker, and less physically capable than their partners to combat feelings of feminine insecurity. Because of this gender insecurity, most of the heterosexual women, regardless of race or ethnicity, exclusively dated hypermasculine MMA fighters.

"I like to be able to give my partner a good run for their money, physically, but I don't really like to win," explained one interviewee. "Because ... biologically ... I think I'm just attracted to masculine men. They have to be more masculine than me because I am a woman and there is supposed to be a difference."

Hamilton said statements such as this one stood out because they suggest these women athletes' commitment to a hetero-feminine identity take precedent over their desire for athletic success, perhaps to their own professional and personal detriment.

"What is important to remember, however, is that these desires don't exist in a vacuum, and they directly speak to our patriarchal system that encourages women to show deference to men," Hamilton said.

Many of these relationships also revolved around other conventional gender norms, such as the belief that women are more nurturing and should make a comfortable and supportive home while the man provides economic and physical security. The word "alpha" came up often in interviews, with women preferring a man who would be the dominant alpha to their submissive beta.

To the handful of lesbians in Hamilton's sample, none of these things mattered as much. In fact, the ability to protect a partner was important to some. The paper concludes that this complicated picture needs further investigation, particularly with regard to queer identities and other aspects of the women's lives, such as friendships.

Wisdom has gained increasing interest among researchers over the last few decades as a biologically based personality trait relevant to physical well-being and mental health. Previous studies have identified six common, measurable components of wisdom: pro-social behaviors (empathy, compassion, altruism and a sense of fairness), emotional regulation, self-reflection or insight, acceptance of divergent perspectives, decisiveness and social decision-making.

In a study published in the October 22, 2020 online edition of the Journal of Psychiatric Research, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine add a seventh component of wisdom: spirituality.

"There has historically been controversy about whether spirituality is a marker of wisdom," said Dilip V. Jeste, MD, co-first author of the study, senior associate dean for the Center of Healthy Aging and Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at UC San Diego School of Medicine. "Our findings show that spirituality is significantly associated with better mental health and well-being and may add to an individual's overall wisdom."

Data for the study was collected from a national sample of 1,786 adults ages 20 to 82 living in the United States. Participants completed the original 24-item San Diego Wisdom Scale, as well as other validated measures of spirituality/religiosity, well-being, resilience, happiness, depression, anxiety, loneliness and strength of social network.

"All of the components included in our self-report-based measure correlated with the overall wisdom score, but to varying degrees," said Michael Thomas, PhD, co-first author of the study and assistant professor of psychology at Colorado State University. "The overall wisdom score had a much stronger association with pro-social behaviors than with spirituality. But still, spirituality was a significant indicator of wisdom."

The researchers also found that spirituality correlated positively with age: older people tended to be more spiritual. And women scored higher in spirituality than men.

"Spirituality does not require religious faith but is characterized by humility and ever-present connectedness to oneself or to others or to an entity that is transcendent, such as Mother Nature or God or the soul," said Jeste. "It helps reduce stress in many people and allows them to be more at peace, happier and healthier."

"Feeling connected to something makes you feel less lonely. Loneliness and wisdom also have a strong connection in the opposite direction -- that is, more wisdom would connote less loneliness."

A limitation of the study, the authors note, is that it was cross-sectional. "Longitudinal studies of more diverse samples are needed to explore mediation effects of these components on well-being and health," said Thomas. "It is important to study whether interventions that target wisdom and its components improve overall well-being and quality of life. Having evidence-based measures of wisdom, including spirituality, can help us objectively test these ideas."

WASHINGTON (Oct. 22, 2020)--A "safety net" made up of multiple ambitious and interlinked goals is needed to tackle nature's alarming decline, according to an international team of researchers analyzing the new goals for biodiversity being drafted by the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

The scientific advice comes at a critical time: The CBD recently announced that none of its 20 biodiversity targets for 2020, which were set in 2010, has been fully reached. Policymakers, scientists and other experts are now preparing for the next generation of biodiversity goals, which will be unveiled at the CBD's Convention of the Parties in 2021.

"To curb the many threats to our biological world, we need biodiversity targets that are distinct, manifold and appreciate different facets of biodiversity," Amy Zanne, associate professor of biological sciences at the George Washington University and a member of the international team of researchers who analyzed the new biodiversity goals, said. "Evolutionary diversity, for example, may be a harder concept to neatly portray in a simple biodiversity target but it is critical that we acknowledge that some species are evolutionarily distinct -- they hold a unique and irreplaceable position within the Tree of Life and their preservation should be prioritized."

On August 17, 2020, the CBD released a draft of their post-2020 biodiversity goals. The research team, which included more than 60 leading biodiversity experts from 26 countries, assessed the goals and asked a number of questions, including what scientific evidence supported them, how the goals reinforced or undermined each other, and whether one aspect of nature could serve as a shortcut for others. Their independent assessment was published today in the journal Science.

"We hope this is a useful tool in the CBD negotiations on a new strategy for nature and people," Sandra Díaz, a professor at the National University of Córdoba and lead author of the paper, said.

According to the researchers, member nations of the CBD should consider three critical points when setting new biodiversity goals:

Goals based on a single facet, such as species or ecosystems in isolation, are risky. Multiple, intertwined goals containing different facets, such as genes, populations, species, deep evolutionary history, ecosystems and more, are needed because of nature's complexity.

Goals should be defined and developed holistically rather than in isolation, with potential to advance multiple goals simultaneously and minimize trade-offs among them.

Only the highest level of ambition in setting each goal, and implementing all goals in an integrated manner, will provide a realistic chance of stopping--and beginning to reverse--biodiversity loss by 2050.

"Building a sufficiently ambitious safety net for nature will be a major global challenge," Díaz said. "But unless we do it, we are leaving huge problems for every future generation."

The researchers note they explicitly focused on the biological aspects of the draft goals and did not evaluate the economic or political consequences. They say, however, that not considering social and political issues when implementing new goals would be a recipe for failure.

In the new paper, GW's Zanne urged that different kinds of diversity be considered when setting biodiversity targets, which is reflected in the paper's supplement under "Species extinctions--risks, roles and history."

By expanding on existing designs for electrodes of ultra-thin solar panels, Stanford researchers and collaborators in Korea have developed a new architecture for OLED - organic light-emitting diode - displays that could enable televisions, smartphones and virtual or augmented reality devices with resolutions of up to 10,000 pixels per inch (PPI). (For comparison, the resolutions of new smartphones are around 400 to 500 PPI.)

Such high-pixel-density displays will be able to provide stunning images with true-to-life detail - something that will be even more important for headset displays designed to sit just centimeters from our faces.

The advance is based on research by Stanford University materials scientist Mark Brongersma in collaboration with the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT). Brongersma was initially put on this research path because he wanted to create an ultra-thin solar panel design.

"We've taken advantage of the fact that, on the nanoscale, light can flow around objects like water," said Brongersma, who is a professor of materials science and engineering and senior author of the Oct. 22 Science paper detailing this research. "The field of nanoscale photonics keeps bringing new surprises and now we're starting to impact real technologies. Our designs worked really well for solar cells and now we have a chance to impact next generation displays."

In addition to having a record-setting pixel density the new "metaphotonic" OLED displays would also be brighter and have better color accuracy than existing versions, and they'd be much easier and cost-effective to produce as well.

Hidden gems

At the heart of an OLED are organic, light-emitting materials. These are sandwiched between highly-reflective and semi-transparent electrodes that enable current injection into the device. When electricity flows through an OLED, the emitters give off red, green or blue light. Each pixel in an OLED display is composed of smaller sub-pixels that produce these primary colors. When the resolution is sufficiently high, the pixels are perceived as one color by the human eye. OLEDs are an attractive technology because they are thin, light and flexible and produce brighter and more colorful images than other kinds of displays.

This research aims to offer an alternative to the two types of OLED displays that are currently commercially available. One type - called a red-green-blue OLED - has individual sub-pixels that each contain only one color of emitter. These OLEDs are fabricated by spraying each layer of materials through a fine metal mesh to control the composition of each pixel. They can only be produced on a small scale, however, like what would be used for a smartphone.

Larger devices like TVs employ white OLED displays. Each of these sub-pixels contains a stack of all three emitters and then relies on filters to determine the final sub-pixel color, which is simpler to fabricate. Since the filters reduce the overall output of light, white OLED displays are more power-hungry and prone to having images burn into the screen.

OLED displays were on the mind of Won-Jae Joo, a SAIT scientist, when he visited Stanford from 2016 to 2018. During that time, Joo listened to a presentation by Stanford graduate student Majid Esfandyarpour about an ultrathin solar cell technology he was developing in Brongersma's lab and realized it had applications beyond renewable energy.

"Professor Brongersma's research themes were all very academically profound and were like hidden gems for me as an engineer and researcher at Samsung Electronics," said Joo, who is lead author of the Science paper.

Joo approached Esfandyarpour after the presentation with his idea, which led to a collaboration between researchers at Stanford, SAI and Hanyang University in Korea.

"It was quite exciting to see that a problem that we have already thought about in a different context can have such an important impact on OLED displays," said Esfandyarpour.

A fundamental foundation

The crucial innovation behind both the solar panel and the new OLED is a base layer of reflective metal with nanoscale (smaller than microscopic) corrugations, called an optical metasurface. The metasurface can manipulate the reflective properties of light and thereby allow the different colors to resonate in the pixels. These resonances are key to facilitating effective light extraction from the OLEDs.

"This is akin to the way musical instruments use acoustic resonances to produce beautiful and easily audible tones," said Brongersma, who conducted this research as part of the Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials at Stanford.

For example, red emitters have a longer wavelength of light than blue emitters, which, in conventional RGB-OLEDs, translates to sub-pixels of different heights. In order to create a flat screen overall, the materials deposited above the emitters have to be laid down in unequal thicknesses. By contrast, in the proposed OLEDs, the base layer corrugations allow each pixel to be the same height and this facilitates a simpler process for large-scale as well as micro-scale fabrication.

In lab tests, the researchers successfully produced miniature proof-of-concept pixels. Compared with color-filtered white-OLEDs (which are used in OLED televisions) these pixels had a higher color purity and a twofold increase in luminescence efficiency - a measure of how bright the screen is compared to how much energy it uses. They also allow for an ultrahigh pixel density of 10,000 pixels-per-inch.

The next steps for integrating this work into a full-size display is being pursued by Samsung, and Brongersma eagerly awaits the results, hoping to be among the first people to see the meta-OLED display in action.

Ancient Maya in the once-bustling city of Tikal built sophisticated water filters using natural materials they imported from miles away, according to the University of Cincinnati.

UC researchers discovered evidence of a filter system at the Corriental reservoir, an important source of drinking water for the ancient Maya in what is now northern Guatemala.

A multidisciplinary team of UC anthropologists, geographers and biologists identified crystalline quartz and zeolite imported miles from the city. The quartz found in the coarse sand along with zeolite, a crystalline compound consisting of silicon and aluminum, create a natural molecular sieve. Both minerals are used in modern water filtration.

The filters would have removed harmful microbes, nitrogen-rich compounds, heavy metals such as mercury and other toxins from the water, said Kenneth Barnett Tankersley, associate professor of anthropology and lead author of the study.

"What's interesting is this system would still be effective today and the Maya discovered it more than 2,000 years ago," Tankersley said.

UC's discovery was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The Maya created this water filtration system nearly 2,000 years before similar systems were used in Europe, making it one of the oldest water treatment systems of its kind in the world, Tankersley said.

Researchers from UC's College of Arts and Sciences traced the zeolite and quartz to steep ridges around the Bajo de Azúcar about 18 miles northeast of Tikal. They used X-ray diffraction analysis to identify zeolite and crystalline quartz in the reservoir sediments.

At Tikal, zeolite was found exclusively in the Corriental reservoir. 

For the ancient Maya, finding ways to collect and store clean water was of critical importance. Tikal and other Maya cities were built atop porous limestone that made ready access to drinking water difficult to obtain for much of the year during seasonal droughts.

UC geography professor and co-author Nicholas Dunning, who has studied ancient civilizations most of his career, found a likely source of the quartz and zeolite about 10 years ago while conducting fieldwork in Guatemala.

"It was an exposed, weathered volcanic tuff of quartz grains and zeolite. It was bleeding water at a good rate," he said. "Workers refilled their water bottles with it. It was locally famous for how clean and sweet the water was."

Dunning took samples of the material. UC researchers later determined the quartz and zeolite closely matched the minerals found at Tikal. 

UC assistant research professor Christopher Carr, an expert in geographic information system mapping, also conducted work on the UC projects at Bajo de Azúcar and Corriental.

"It was probably through very clever empirical observation that the ancient Maya saw this particular material was associated with clean water and made some effort to carry it back," Dunning said.

UC anthropology professor emeritus Vernon Scarborough, another co-author, said most research on ancient water management has tried to explain how civilizations conserved, collected or diverted water. 

"The quality of water put to potable ends has remained difficult to address," Scarborough said. "This study by our UC team has opened the research agenda by way of identifying the quality of a water source and how that might have been established and maintained."

Of course, reconstructing the lives, habits and motivations of a civilization 1,000 years ago is tricky.

"We don't have absolute proof, but we have strong circumstantial evidence," Dunning said. "Our explanation makes logical sense."

"This is what you have to do as an archaeologist," UC biologist and co-author David Lentz said. "You have to put together a puzzle with some of the pieces missing."

Lentz said the filtration system would have protected the ancient Maya from harmful cyanobacteria and other toxins that might otherwise have made people who drank from the reservoir sick.

"The ancient Maya figured out that this material produced pools of clear water," he said.

Complex water filtration systems have been observed in other ancient civilizations from Greece to Egypt to South Asia, but this is the first observed in the ancient New World, Tankersley said.

"The ancient Maya lived in a tropical environment and had to be innovators. This is a remarkable innovation," Tankersley said. "A lot of people look at Native Americans in the Western Hemisphere as not having the same engineering or technological muscle of places like Greece, Rome, India or China. But when it comes to water management, the Maya were millennia ahead."

Couples that pray together stay together. It's a common religious saying, but a new study from the University of Georgia is giving the proverb some scientific credence.

Churches, mosques and synagogues provide a kind of built-in social life for their members, with religious services, classes and various other gatherings. Going to those types of events with your partner can help strengthen your marriage, especially as you and your partner age, according to the study published by the American Psychological Association's Journal of Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. The researchers also found that partners who didn't originally identify as very religious but frequently engaged in common hobbies or activities together saw their participation in religion grow as a couple over the duration of the study.

"I see this with many retirees--they're sitting in retirement and sometimes it seems as though they get stuck in a rut. At times it can seem like they don't know what to do with all this time they have now. This can be damaging not only to their own well-being, but it can take a toll on their relationship with their spouse," said lead author Victoria King, a postdoctoral researcher at UGA's Center for Family Research. "Engaging in joint hobbies and finding things that they can do together is important and can help strengthen their relationship. Perhaps that hobby might be getting more involved in church. I know that my grandparents look forward to their church related activities that they do together."

The researchers followed 371 couples, most of whom had been married for about 30 years.

The study measured partners' levels of religiosity by gauging how important religion is to them and how often they attended religious services. They also examined how often couples participated in joint activities, such as going on walks or bike rides, taking weekend trips without their children and spending time on hobbies together, among other things. Additionally, study participants were asked how happy they were with their marital relationship and their overall satisfaction with the state of their marriage.

Previous research has shown that as individuals age, the importance of religion in their lives often increases. Because most religions emphasize the sanctity of marriage and the family unit, it makes sense that religious involvement would encourage couples to place an added value on doing things together and keeping their families strong, King said.

"Families and couples now are always pulled in so many different directions, with jam-packed schedules, and family time is often pushed aside," King said. "It is important to find those little times where families or couples can engage in some sort of joint activity together that they can enjoy."

The findings also showed that the driving factor appeared to be the wives. They were the ones who reported being more religious or spending more time with their husbands, meaning that women may spend more time engaging in relationship maintenance than their spouses. Because of that, they may have been more likely to suggest doing things as a couple or becoming more involved in church.

Ivan Smirnov, Leading Research Fellow of the Laboratory of Computational Social Sciences at the Institute of Education of HSE University, has created a computer model that can distinguish high academic achievers from lower ones based on their social media posts. The prediction model uses a mathematical textual analysis that registers users' vocabulary (its range and the semantic fields from which concepts are taken), characters and symbols, post length, and word length.

Every word has its own rating (a kind of IQ). Scientific and cultural topics, English words, and words and posts that are longer in length rank highly and serve as indicators of good academic performance. An abundance of emojis, words or whole phrases written in capital letters, and vocabulary related to horoscopes, driving, and military service indicate lower grades in school. At the same time, posts can be quite short--even tweets are quite informative. The study was supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (RSF), and an article detailing the study's results was published in EPJ Data Science.

Smirnov's study used a representative sample of data from HSE University's longitudinal cohort panel study, 'Educational and Career Trajectories' (TrEC). The study traces the career paths of 4,400 students in 42 Russian regions from high schools participating in PISA (the Programme for International Students Assessment). The study data also includes data about the students' VK accounts (3,483 of the student participants consented to provide this information).

'Since this kind of data, in combination with digital traces, is difficult to obtain, it is almost never used,' Smirnov says. Meanwhile, this kind of dataset allows you to develop a reliable model that can be applied to other settings. And the results can be extrapolated to all other students--high school students and middle school students.

Posts from publicly viewable VK pages were used as a training sample--this included a total of 130,575 posts from 2,468 subjects who took the PISA test in 2012. The test allowed the researcher to assess a student's academic aptitude as well as their ability to apply their knowledge in practice. The study included only publicly visible VK posts from consenting participants.

When developing and testing the model from the PISA test, only students' reading scores were used an indicator of academic aptitude, although there are three tests in total: reading, mathematics, and science. PISA defines reading literacy as 'understanding, using, reflecting on and engaging with written texts in order to achieve one's goals, to develop one's knowledge and potential, and to participate in society.' The exam has six proficiency levels. Students who score a 2 are considered to meet only the basic, minimum level, while those who score a 5 or 6 are considered to be strong students.

In the study, unsupervised machine learning with word vector representations was performed on VK post corpus (totaling 1.9 billion words, with 2.5 million unique words). It was combined with a simpler supervised machine learning model that was trained in individual positions and taught to predict PISA scores.

'We represented each post as a 300-dimensional vector by averaging over vector representations of all its constituent words,' Smirnov writes. 'These post representations were used to train a linear regression model to predict the PISA scores of the posts' authors.'

By 'predict', the researcher does not refer to future forecasting, but rather the correlation between the calculated results and the real scores students earned on the PISA exam, as well as their USE scores (which are publicly available online in aggregated form--i.e., average scores per school). In the preliminary phase, the model learned how to predict the PISA data. In the final model, the calculations were checked against the USE results of high school graduates and university entrants.

The final model was supposed to be able to reliably recognize whether a strong student or a weak student had written a particular social media post, or in other words, differentiate the subjects according to their academic performance. After the training period, the model was able to distinguish posts written by students who scored highly or poorly on PISA (levels 5-6 and levels 0-1) with an accuracy of 93.7%. As for the comparability of PISA and the USE, although these two tests differ, studies have shown that students' scores for the two tests strongly correlate with each other.

'The model was trained using PISA data, and we looked at the correlation between the predicted and the real PISA scores (which are available in the TrEC study),' Smirnov explains. 'With the USE things gets more complicated: since the model does not know anything about the unified exams, it predicted the PISA scores as before. But if we assume that the USE and PISA measure the same thing -- academic performance -- then the higher the predicted PISA results are, the higher the USE results should be.' And the fact that the model learned to predict one thing and can predict another is quite interesting in itself, Smirnov notes.

However, this also needed to be verified, so the model was then applied to 914 Russian high schools (located in St. Petersburg, Samara and Tomsk; this set included almost 39,000 users who created 1.1 million posts) and one hundred of Russia's largest universities (115,800 people; 6.5 million posts) to measure the academic performance of students at these institutions.

It turned out that 'predicted academic performance is closely related to USE scores,' says Smirnov. 'The correlation coefficient is between 0.49 and 0.6. And in the case of universities, when the predicted academic performance and USE scores of applicants were compared (the information is available in HSE's ongoing University Admissions Quality Monitoring study), then the results also demonstrated a strong connection. The correlation coefficient is 0.83, which is significantly higher than for high schools, because there is more data.'

But can the model be applied to other social media sites? 'I checked what would happen if, instead of posts on VK, we gave the model tweets written by the same users,' Smirnov says. 'It turned out that the quality of the model does not significantly decrease.' But since a sufficient number of twitter accounts were available only for the university dataset (2,836), the analysis was performed only on this set.

It is important that the model worked successfully on datasets of different social media sites, such as VK and Twitter, thereby proving that is can be effective in different contexts. This means that it can be applied widely. In addition, the model can be used to predict very different characteristics, from student academic performance to income or depression.

Smirnov's study used a representative sample of data from HSE University's longitudinal cohort panel study, 'Educational and Career Trajectories' (TrEC). The study traces the career paths of 4,400 students in 42 Russian regions from high schools participating in PISA (the Programme for International Students Assessment). The study data also includes data about the students' VK accounts (3,483 of the student participants consented to provide this information).

'Since this kind of data, in combination with digital traces, is difficult to obtain, it is almost never used,' Smirnov says. Meanwhile, this kind of dataset allows you to develop a reliable model that can be applied to other settings. And the results can be extrapolated to all other students--high school students and middle school students.

Posts from publicly viewable VK pages were used as a training sample--this included a total of 130,575 posts from 2,468 subjects who took the PISA test in 2012. The test allowed the researcher to assess a student's academic aptitude as well as their ability to apply their knowledge in practice. The study included only publicly visible VK posts from consenting participants.

It is important that the scores on the standardized PISA and USE tests were used as an academic aptitude metric. This gives a more objective picture than assessment mechanisms that are school-specific (such as grades).

When developing and testing the model from the PISA test, only students' reading scores were used an indicator of academic aptitude, although there are three tests in total: reading, mathematics, and science. PISA defines reading literacy as 'understanding, using, reflecting on and engaging with written texts in order to achieve one's goals, to develop one's knowledge and potential, and to participate in society.' The exam has six proficiency levels. Students who score a 2 are considered to meet only the basic, minimum level, while those who score a 5 or 6 are considered to be strong students.

In the study, unsupervised machine learning with word vector representations was performed on VK post corpus (totaling 1.9 billion words, with 2.5 million unique words). It was combined with a simpler supervised machine learning model that was trained in individual positions and taught to predict PISA scores.

Word vector representations, or word embedding, is a numeric vector of a fixed size that describes some features of a word or their sequence. Embedding is often used for automated word processing. In Smirnov's research, the fastText system was used since it is particularly conducive to working with Russian-language text.

'We represented each post as a 300-dimensional vector by averaging over vector representations of all its constituent words,' Smirnov writes. 'These post representations were used to train a linear regression model to predict the PISA scores of the posts' authors.'

By 'predict', the researcher does not refer to future forecasting, but rather the correlation between the calculated results and the real scores students earned on the PISA exam, as well as their USE scores (which are publicly available online in aggregated form--i.e., average scores per school). In the preliminary phase, the model learned how to predict the PISA data. In the final model, the calculations were checked against the USE results of high school graduates and university entrants.

Results

First, Smirnov highlighted the general textual features of posts in relation to the academic performance of their authors (Fig. 1). The use of capitalized words (-0.08), emojis (-0.06), and exclamations (-0.04) were found to be negatively correlated with academic performance. The use of the Latin characters, average post and word length, vocabulary size, and entropy of users' texts on the other hand, were found to positively correlate with academic performance (from 0.07 to 0.16, respectively).

It was also confirmed that students with different levels of academic performance have different vocabulary ranges. Smirnov explored the resulting model by selecting 400 words with the highest and lowest scores that appear at least 5 times in the training corpus. Thematic clusters were identified and visualized (Fig. 2).

The clusters with the highest scores (in orange) include:

English words (above, saying, yours, must);

Words related to literature (Bradbury, Fahrenheit, Orwell, Huxley, Faulkner, Nabokov, Brodsky, Camus, Mann);

Concepts related to reading (read, publish, book, volume);

Terms and names related to physics (Universe, quantum, theory, Einstein, Newton, Hawking);
Words related to thought processes (thinking, memorizing).

Clusters with low scores (in green) include misspelled words, names of popular computer games, concepts related to military service (army, oath, etc.), horoscope terms (Aries, Sagittarius), and words related to driving and car accidents (collision, traffic police, wheels, tuning).

Smirnov calculated the coefficients for all 2.5 million words of the vector model and made them available for further study. Interestingly, even words that are rarely found in a training dataset can predict academic performance. For example, even if the name 'Newt' (as in the Harry Potter character, Newt Scamander) never appears in the training dataset, the model might assign a higher rating to posts that contain it. This will happen if the model learns that words from novel series are used by high-achieving students, and, through unsupervised learning, 'intuit' that that the name 'Newt' belongs to this category (that is, the word is closely situated to other concepts from Harry Potter in the vector space).

Only 4 percent of all cancer therapeutic drugs under development earn final approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

"That's because right now we can't match the right combination of drugs to the right patients in a smart way," said Trey Ideker, PhD, professor at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center. "And especially for cancer, where we can't always predict which drugs will work best given the unique, complex inner workings of a person's tumor cells."

In a paper published October 20, 2020 in Cancer Cell, Ideker and Brent Kuenzi, PhD, and Jisoo Park, PhD, postdoctoral researchers in his lab, describe DrugCell, a new artificial intelligence (AI) system they created that not only matches tumors to the best drug combinations, but does so in a way that makes sense to humans.

"Most AI systems are 'black boxes' -- they can be very predictive, but we don't actually know all that much about how they work," said Ideker, who is also co-director of the Cancer Cell Map Initiative and the National Resource for Network Biology.

He gave the example of the way an internet image search for "cat" works. AI systems working behind the scenes are trained on existing cat images, but how they actually label a new image as "cat" and not "rat" or something else is unknown.

For AI to be useful in health care, Ideker said, we have to be able to see inside the black box to understand how the system comes to its conclusions. "We need to know why that decision is made, what pathways those recommended drugs are targeting and the reasons for a positive drug response or for its rejection."

The team's work on DrugCell began several years ago in yeast. In a previous study , they built an AI system called DCell using information about a yeast cell's genes and mutations. DCell predicted cellular behaviors, such as growth, all outside the "black box."

DrugCell, a next-generation version of DCell, was trained on more than 1,200 tumor cell lines and their responses to nearly 700 FDA-approved and experimental therapeutic drugs -- a total of more than 500,000 cell line/drug pairings. The researchers also validated some of DrugCell's conclusions in laboratory experiments.

With DrugCell, the team can input data about a tumor and the system returns the best known drug, the biological pathways that control response to that drug, and combinations of drugs to best treat the malignancy.

Precision cancer therapy is already available at Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health, where patients may have a biopsy of their tumor sequenced for mutations and assessed by the Molecular Tumor Board, an interdisciplinary group of experts. The board recommends personalized therapies based on the patient's unique genomic alterations and other information. A recent study showed these patients have better outcomes. In a way, DrugCell simulates the human Molecular Tumor Board.

"We were surprised by how well DrugCell was able to translate from laboratory cell lines, which is what we trained the model on, to tumors in mice and patients, as well as clinical trial data," Kuenzi said.

The team's ultimate goal is to get DrugCell into clinics for the benefit of patients, but the study authors caution there's still a lot of work to do.

"While 1,200 cell lines is a good start, it's of course not representative of the full heterogeneity of cancer," Park said. "Our team is now adding more single-cell data and trying different drug structures. We also hope to partner with existing clinical studies to embed DrugCell as a diagnostic tool, testing it prospectively in the real world."

Poop is full of secrets. For scientists, digging into feces provides insights into animal diets and is particularly useful for understanding nocturnal or rare species. When animals eat, prey DNA travels all the way through animal digestive tracts and comes out again. Poop contains very precise information about the prey species consumed. At the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), a team explored the eating habits of the fringe-lipped bat (Trachops cirrhosus) by examining its poop.

Bats hunt at night. This makes it challenging to observe their foraging behavior in nature. Analyzing DNA traces in bat guano offers a more specific way to explore how bats feed in the wild and to study how bat behavior changes depending on their eating habits.

"Because bats forage at night, and in the dense forest, you can't observe what they are eating the way you can with a diurnal bird or mammal," said Patricia Jones, former STRI fellow, assistant professor of biology at Bowdoin College and main author of the study. "It feels so momentous, therefore, to have a glimpse into the diet of this species that we thought we knew so much about, to discover they are eating prey we had no idea were part of their diet."

The fringe-lipped bat, also known as the frog-eating bat, is well adjusted to hunting frogs. The bats' hearing is adapted to their low-frequency mating calls, and their salivary glands may neutralize the toxins in the skin of poisonous prey. Fringed-lipped bats also feed on insects, small reptiles or birds and other bats. Researchers knew that these bats often find their prey by eavesdropping on mating calls, but it was unknown if they could find prey that was silent.

As expected, most of the DNA recovered from the poop samples in the study belonged to frog species and plenty of lizards, but researchers also found evidence that the bats were eating other bats and even a hummingbird. In additional experiments, wild-caught fringe-lipped bats exposed to recordings of prey sounds and stationary prey models were able to detect silent, motionless prey, as well as prey that made sounds. This led researchers to conclude that the fringe-lipped bat is more capable of locating prey by echolocation than previously thought.

"This is interesting because we didn't know that these bats were able to detect silent, still prey," said May Dixon, STRI fellow, doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the study. "Detecting silent, still prey in the cluttered jungle is thought to be a really hard task for echolocation. This is because when the bats echolocate in the jungle, the echoes of all the leaves and branches bounce back along with the echoes of their prey, and they 'mask' the prey."

These results may offer a new line of research on the sensory abilities and foraging ecology of T. cirrhosus. It also adds to a growing body of work that suggests that, in the tropics, bats may be important nocturnal predators on sleeping animals like birds. The team also found unexpected frog species among its common prey.

"We found T. cirrhosus were often eating frogs in the genus Pristimantis," Jones said. "I think this will open new avenues of research with T. cirrhosus, because Pristimantis call from the canopy and their calls are hard to localize, so if T. cirrhosus are consuming them it means that they are foraging differently than we understood before."

Going forward, this novel combination of dietary DNA analysis with behavioral experiments may be used by other ecologists interested in the foraging behaviors of a wide range of animal species.

"It's really exciting to see the doors that open when animal behavior is combined with metabarcoding," said STRI staff scientist Rachel Page. "Even though we have studied Trachops intensely for decades, we actually know very little about its behavior in the wild. It was completely surprising to see prey items show up in the diet that we never anticipated, such as frog species whose mating calls seemed to lack acoustic parameters helpful for localization and, more surprising, prey that it seems the bats must have detected by echolocation alone, like hummingbirds. This work makes us rethink the sensory mechanisms underlying this bat's foraging behavior, and it opens all kinds of new doors for future questions."

Older adults have suffered disproportionately from the COVID-19 pandemic, with increased risk of severe illness and death reported across the globe. A new report argues that one policy change made during the pandemic should remain in place after the novel coronavirus virus fades away: better access to home health services through Medicare.

In a new set of recommendations published by the Commonwealth Fund, researchers at Oregon Health & Science University and Duke University argue for regulatory changes to expand the Medicare home health benefit.

"Changes to the benefit could allow more Medicare beneficiaries to receive services in their own homes, rather than institutional settings, so they may reduce their exposure to COVID-19," they write.

The pandemic affords a unique opportunity to consider long-term improvements in health care for seniors, said Walt Dawson, D.Phil., an assistant professor of neurology in the OHSU School of Medicine, who co-authored the report with Courtney Harold Van Houtven, Ph.D., a professor of population health science in the Duke University School of Medicine.

"This is a real opportunity for change in our health care system," Dawson said. "It's an opportunity to rethink and readdress how we provide health care and how we pay for health care services, in particular for older adults."

"Bolstering the Medicare home health benefit could enable older adults to more easily receive care in the setting that most of them prefer - their homes," Van Houtven said. "Innovations could help the older adult with care needs and family caregivers who support them."

The temporary pandemic-era rules are a major benefit to seniors for whom traveling can be an ordeal, including the McCrary family in John Day, Oregon.

Margy McCrary said she and her husband, Eddie, a retired machinist living with a form of aphasia, recently completed an annual neurology checkup with an OHSU clinician by way of an hour-long video exam from the comfort of their own home, saving a five-hour trip into Portland.

"It was a Godsend," she said. "It's more comfortable for him, he's more at ease, the stress level's down. This is just such a relief. If anything good comes out of this COVID thing, doing these video appointments has been perfect."

New Medicare rules approved under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES, Act in March for the first time enabled nurse practitioners, clinical nurse specialists and physician assistants to certify a Medicare beneficiary's eligibility for home health services. Until then, only a physician could certify a patient's need for home health care. In addition, the act provided sweeping expanded access to telehealth services, albeit not for home health visits.

"Strengthening telehealth access could enable critical monitoring of patient status at a time when beneficiaries are not eager to have providers visit their homes," the authors write.

The new Medicare rules are a welcome relief for many patients in the same position as the McCrarys, said Allison Lindauer, Ph.D., N.P., assistant professor of neurology in the OHSU School of Medicine.

As a nurse practitioner, she now can certify home health for patients who need it.

"Advanced practice providers have been very limited in their ability to order home care services," Lindauer said. "I really believe in the value of home-based care and rehabilitation and am relieved I can now order this for my patients."

The report lays out three major policy recommendations:

Expand opportunities to provide care at home: The report suggests better integrating home health, health care and social care; expanding coverage of telehealth home health visits after discharge from skilled nursing facilities; and paying family caregivers to support COVID-19 patients' recovery at home.

Bolster the home health workforce: This would make permanent the scope of practice for nurse practitioners, physician assistants and clinical nurse specialties now allowed under the CARES Act. The report also recommends increasing wage and benefits for home health aides, who currently earn less than $12 an hour on average nationwide.

Enhance quality and oversight: The report recommends expanding regulatory oversight of home health agencies.

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 7 A.M. ET, THURSDAY, OCT. 22, 2020

PITTSBURGH, Oct. 22, 2020 - A metabolite produced following consumption of dietary soy may decrease a key risk factor for dementia--with the help of the right bacteria, according to a new discovery led by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.

Their study, published today in the journal Alzheimer's & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions, reports that elderly Japanese men and women who produce equol--a metabolite of dietary soy created by certain types of gut bacteria--display lower levels of white matter lesions within the brain.

"White matter lesions are significant risk factors for cognitive decline, dementia and all-cause mortality," said lead author Akira Sekikawa, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of epidemiology at Pitt Public Health. "We found 50% more white matter lesions in people who cannot produce equol compared to people who can produce it, which is a surprisingly huge effect."

To obtain this result, Sekikawa's research team measured equol levels within the blood of 91 elderly Japanese participants with normal cognition. Participants were sorted by their equol production status, and then six to nine years later underwent brain imaging to detect levels of white matter lesions and deposits of amyloid-beta, which is the suspected molecular cause of Alzheimer's disease.

The researchers found that while equol production did not appear to impact levels of amyloid-beta deposited within the brain, it was associated with reduced white matter lesion volumes. Sekikawa's team also discovered that high levels of isoflavones--soy nutrients that are metabolized into equol--had no effect on levels of white matter lesions or amyloid-beta when equol wasn't produced.

According to Sekikawa, the ability to produce equol from soy isoflavones may be the key to unlocking protective health benefits from a soy-rich diet, and his team has previously shown that equol production is associated with a lower risk of heart disease. As heart disease is strongly associated with cognitive decline and dementia, equol production could help protect the aging brain as well as the heart.

Epidemiological studies in Japan, where soy is regularly consumed, have shown that dietary intake of soy isoflavones has been linked to a lower risk for heart disease and dementia. However, most clinical trials in America have failed to show this.

Sekikawa believes that this discrepancy may be due to the microbiome--40-70% of Japanese harbor gut bacteria that can convert dietary isoflavones into equol compared to only 20-30% of Americans.

Sekikawa said that equol supplements could one day be combined with existing diet-based prevention strategies that appear to lower the risk of dementia, particularly the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) and Mediterranean diets.

Though Sekikawa hopes to evaluate the neuroprotective effects of equol supplements in a future randomized clinical trial, in the meantime, he urges caution to anyone who might be tempted to purchase equol supplements to stave off dementia.

"This type of study always catches people's attention, but we cannot prove that equol protects against dementia until we get a randomized clinical trial with sufficient evidence," he said.