Culture

The social and economic impacts of COVID-19 have battered small- and medium-sized enterprises, putting millions of jobs in the U.S. at risk. And a year rife with natural disasters has not done many struggling businesses any favors.

To learn about the strategies and experiences of businesses managing this double threat, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), surveyed small- and medium-sized enterprises across the country. In a new report of survey results, nearly a quarter of businesses felt natural disaster preparations helped them address COVID-19. They tended to find preparations of broad applicability during natural disasters, such as telework readiness, more useful than hazard-specific measures. The survey also identified areas of hardship for businesses, including uncertainty and a lack of guidance and resources.

"The survey results can help by drawing attention to how small- and medium-sized businesses are thriving or suffering and showing where natural disaster planning and preparation helped," said Ariela Zycherman, NOAA social scientist and co-author of the report. "The results will also help us identify places where there are needs and opportunities to build social and economic resilience to multiple types of disasters."

The NIST and NOAA researchers conducted the survey from July 8 to Aug. 8, reaching businesses with fewer than 10 to more than 100 employees from a wide array of industries, including construction, manufacturing and retail. With help from other entities, such as the Minority Business Development Agency and the Small Business Administration, the authors promoted the survey via email, newsletter and social media, obtaining more than 1,300 responses.

In the survey, the team asked businesses about challenges presented by COVID-19 and measures taken to manage them. The researchers also inquired about experiences with sudden, high-impact disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes and wildfires, as well as longer-lasting, slower-onset events, including droughts and winter storms.

Twenty-nine percent of respondents said they had experienced natural disasters since March 13, when the federal government declared the pandemic a national emergency. The researchers expect this figure would be much higher had the survey been distributed later, however, as events such as the wildfires along the West Coast surged after the survey closed.

Some 24% of survey respondents said experience preparing for natural disasters in the past helped them during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the survey's open-ended responses, the researchers were able to glean insights into which types of preparation businesses found most beneficial.

Practices with broad applicability shone through over those specific to one kind of disaster. Two notable examples from the responses were having rainy-day funds for when income streams dry up and the ability to operate a business remotely, said Jennifer Helgeson, a NIST research economist and lead author of the report.

One respondent wrote, "We have dealt with many weather emergencies in the past as well [as] a bad flu pandemic, all of which prepared us for something like COVID-19, especially as it relates to teleworking. Our employees have been used to teleworking during emergencies."

Many businesses have not made a smooth transition, however. Smaller operations that rely on in-person customers, such as in the service industry, face a particularly grave threat in COVID-19, which has eaten away at customer bases for lengths of time these businesses were not prepared for.

The outlook for many of the surveyed businesses is currently worrisome, as 72% are concerned about heading into another distressing scenario on top of the pandemic. Almost a third of these businesses are wary of natural disasters specifically. A strong sense of uncertainty also looms over numerous businesses -- a sense that may be compounded by a lack of resources, a situation reported by 37% of respondents.

The researchers found that businesses are commonly struggling to obtain guidance on prioritizing their actions amid the strains of the pandemic, personal protective equipment, and training on how to receive support from financial institutions and lending personnel.

A large portion of businesses anticipate that they are in for the long haul before returning to pre-COVID operating capacity. While 39% said they believe recovery will take less than 18 months, 23% estimate the process will go on for longer. And nearly a fifth of respondents indicated full recovery as an unlikely outcome, no matter the time frame, with many indicating they are now considering early retirement.

The researchers plan to complement the data from this initial report by distributing another survey in the winter to both previously contacted and new businesses. With a second wave, the team plans to collect information about how businesses operating in a pandemic respond to events expected in the near future, including winter storms and the flu season, Helgeson said. Further study might also identify where and how businesses are currently receiving aid.

"I do think there will be more of a focus on understanding if there are certain attributes of the business, whether it be employee size or ownership demographics, that can correlate loosely with the kinds of support they've received or the places they're asking for support," Helgeson said. "Is it more about friends and family or is it more about small-business loans? And how might this change if they experience a natural disaster during the pandemic?"

For agencies and institutions committed to supporting small- and medium-sized enterprises for resilience planning and adaptation, the data from this and any subsequent reports could enhance strategies to reach vulnerable populations and deliver some certainty during a deeply uncertain time.

More than a third of people (34%) in Turkey and one sixth of people (17%) in the UK are 'hesitant' about a COVID-19 vaccine, according to a study by UCL and Dokuz Eylul University in Turkey.

The research, published in the journal Psychological Medicine, asked over 5,000 participants in Turkey and the UK about their willingness to vaccinate for a potential COVID-19 vaccine and beliefs on the origin of the novel coronavirus. The findings show concerning levels of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.

Lead author, Dr Gul Deniz Salali, an evolutionary anthropologist at UCL, said: "From an evolutionary point of view, natural selection should favour a bias towards making the least costly decision when there is uncertainty. This is why when people face a choice between taking a specific action or doing nothing, they sometimes prefer to do nothing. This cognitive bias, called the omission bias, may kick in when people make vaccination decisions."

The researchers examined the factors that are associated with acceptance of a COVID-19 vaccine. One of the key factors that explained the probability of vaccine acceptance was a person's belief on the origin of the novel coronavirus.

Odds of vaccine acceptance were 26% higher in Turkey and 63% higher in the UK if a person believed in the natural origin, compared to those who were not sure about the virus origin. In Turkey, participants who believed in the artificial origin of the virus (i.e. SARS-Cov-2 was human-made) were 54% more likely to be vaccine-hesitant.

The research is led by Dr Salali and conducted in collaboration with a social psychology doctoral researcher, Mete Sefa Uysal at Dokuz Eylul University in Turkey.

The study reported several other behavioural and demographic factors that influenced vaccination and origin beliefs. Participants who had higher levels of pandemic related anxieties, such as being more worried about catching or passing on the virus, were more likely to accept COVID-19 vaccination. Compared to women, men in Turkey were more likely to accept a COVID-19 vaccine and believe in the natural origin of the virus.

Dr Salali said "From an evolutionary perspective, emotions can be seen as detectors helping us to avoid death or promote reproduction, especially under uncertainty. The positive correlation between COVID-19 related anxiety and vaccine acceptance can be rooted in the adaptive function of anxiety in decreasing mortality risk."

"Because women are more likely to take healthcare decisions for their children, they may also be more likely to seek out information about vaccines and be exposed to online anti-vaccination content. Moreover, women score higher on disgust sensitivity which is associated with vaccine hesitancy."

Much research effort is focused on developing an effective vaccine for combatting COVID-19. Vaccine development itself, however, will not be enough given that a sufficient amount of people will need to be vaccinated for widespread immunity. The study findings point at a concerning level of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, especially in Turkey, and suggest that wider communication of the scientific consensus on the origin of the novel coronavirus with the public may help future campaigns targeting COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.

A new study, led by the doctors who regularly treat gunshot victims, examined the way the media covers shootings and found that news reports place a disproportionate emphasis on fatal and multiple shootings, while also focusing on uncommon victims, such as women. The researchers fear that the gap between what is covered - and what goes uncovered - in the news could be painting an unrealistic picture of gun violence, which might affect the way the public perceives it. The study was published today in the journal Preventive Medicine.

"As a trauma surgeon, and someone who feels very connected to my patients, I take notice of gun violence coverage in the news--most often the lack thereof. I am particularly saddened when I find there was no media reporting on the shootings that have caused injury and death to my patients, which is most often the case," said the study's lead author, Elinore Kaufman, MD, an assistant professor of Surgery in Traumatology in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "While I was not surprised to see data on under-reporting in the media, I was startled to see how much it varied related to victim characteristics."

Kaufman and her fellow researchers drew on police reports and information kept by the Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit research group, to monitor media reporting during 2017 inthree different cities: Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Rochester, NY. Of the 1,801 victims of intentional shootings (outside of self-inflicted shootings), the researchers saw that almost exactly half, 900, were covered in the news.

Of these victims, roughly 83 percent were Black, but just 49 percent of them made the news. Moreover, if the victim was a man, he was about 40 percent less likely to be covered on the news than a woman.

Disparities in news coverage continued when the deadliness of the shootings was examined. Although 16 percent of the victims from the analyzed shootings died, these fatal shootings accounted for 83 percent of the cases covered by the news.

"A vast majority of the victims of gun violence survive, but I don't think the public knows much about people whose lives have been disrupted in so many ways by their injuries, and who need all our support to recover," Kaufman said. "I like to think that more public awareness of the impact of gun violence on survivors would lead to broader support for the services and programs that they need."

Statistics have shown that one in four Americans perceive mass shootings to be the greatest gun violence threat facing their communities, but the study showed that shootings with multiple victims occurred just 22 percent of the time. However, mass shootings were almost six times as likely to make the news.

"This skews our focus toward things like active shooter drills in schools, and away from the kind of community investment that we need to prevent the forms of gun violence that are so much more common," Kaufman said.

There were some differences on the city level data that the study uncovered. Philadelphia had the most shooting victims in 2017 with 1,216 (compared to 407 in Cincinnati and 178 in Rochester), but those victims were also covered the least: only 46 percent of the time (compared to 55 percent in Cincinnati and 65 percent in Rochester).

"I think the news media in any given market has limited space for reporting on violence, and so in areas where violence is common, there's going to be a lot of underreporting. The opposite could be true as well: In areas with little violence, the reporting may be disproportionate," she explained.

While the study focused on the numbers and percentages associated with media reporting on gun violence, Kaufman and her fellow researchers believe that it is just the beginning of the story. Public perception and support are key to making public health policy changes, and media reporting clearly has an influence on them. As such, changing the content of the reports appears key.

That might especially be important as newsrooms are hit by budget cuts and downsizing. With a smaller pool of reporters to cover incidents, shifting the focus of coverage to more truly represent the realities of gun violence could solve issues the study found.

"We understand that reporting community gun violence is an interminable obligation, especially for contracting newsrooms," said senior author Jim McMillan, the director of the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting, a project of the Initiative for Better Gun Violence Reporting. "But instead of trying to double down on incident coverage, we recommend that journalists collaborate with other stakeholders to advance best reporting practices such as focusing on evidence-based solutions to the crisis."

So while every instance may not make the news due to the realities of modern newsrooms, such shifts in focus could go a long way toward solving perception issues.

"Many of these reports that we counted were one- or two-liners that tell very little about the humans whose lives are impacted by these shootings," Kaufman said. "We hope to soon study how widely reporters are able to engage more deeply and substantively with the subject, and perhaps even measure the impact of different kinds of stories on readers and watchers of the news."

Abu Dhabi, UAE - October 17, 2020: Large swaths of single-celled eukaryotes, non-bacterial single-cell organisms like microalgae, fungi or mold, can control microbiomes (a collection of tiny microbes, mostly bacteria) by secreting unusual small molecules around their cells, maintaining host survival and ecological success, according to a new study by NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Assistant Professor of Biology Shady Amin.

Research in the past decade has shown that most eukaryotes need microbiomes to survive. While we understand how large eukaryotes, like humans, corals and plants, control their microbiomes, scientists do not know how single-celled eukaryotes, like microalgae, do so.

In humans, microbiomes can influence digestion, physical features, weight, susceptibility to disease, and even mental health. In corals, microbiomes sustain corals and enable them to withstand environmental change. In trees, microbiomes provide essential nutrients that enable forests and agricultural crops to grow. In microalgae, these microbiomes provide vitamins and other nutrients that keep microalgae alive.

In the paper, Diatom Modulation of Select Bacteria Through Use of Two Unique Secondary Metabolites, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), researchers from NYUAD and other institutions, found that single-celled eukaryotes can control the behavior and growth of microbiomes by promoting beneficial microbes while preventing bad (parasitic) microbes from coming close, enabling scientists to understand how organisms like microalgae control bacteria around them.

The findings will enable scientists to predict how climate change will impact fisheries and atmospheric gas composition because single-celled eukaryotes in the oceans are responsible for a significant fraction of oxygen production on Earth and support the marine food web, including the fish and corals. The findings will also help expand scientists' understanding of evolution since single-celled eukaryotes constitute a significant fraction of life on earth.

"The discovery that a cryptic chemical language enables some single-celled eukaryotes to manipulate bacterial behavior is significant since most eukaryotes on Earth are single-celled and many are essential for our survival, " said Amin.

The Polish-Israeli team from the Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw and the Weizmann Institute of Science has made another significant achievement in fluorescent microscopy. In the pages of the Optica journal the team presented a new method of microscopy which, in theory, has no resolution limit. In practice, the team managed to demonstrate a fourfold improvement over the diffraction limit.

The continued development of biological sciences and medicine requires the ability to examine smaller and smaller objects. Scientists need to see into the structure of, and the mutual relationships between, for example, proteins in cells. At the same time, the samples being observed should not differ from the structures naturally occurring in biological organisms, which rules out the use of aggressive procedures and reagents. Although it revolutionised the natural sciences, the classical optical microscope is clearly insufficient today. Due to the wavelike nature of light, an optical microscope does not allow imaging structures smaller than about 250 nanometres. As a result, objects closer to each other than half the wavelength of light (which is about 250 nm for green light) cannot be discerned. This phenomenon, known as the diffraction limit, one of the main obstacles in observing the tiniest biological structures, scientists have long attempted to overcome. Electron microscopes provide orders of magnitude better resolution but only allow the examination of inanimate objects, which must be placed in a vacuum and bombarded by an electron beam. For this reason, electron microscopy cannot be used for studying living organisms and the natural processes occurring in them. This is where fluorescence microscopy steps in, hence the rapid development of super-resolution fluorescence microscopy as a field of physical sciences and the two Nobel Prizes already awarded for related research - in 2008 and 2014.

Nowadays several techniques of fluorescence microscopy are available, and some of them have become widespread in biological imaging. Some methods, such as PALM, STORM or STED microscopy, are characterised by an ultra-high resolution and allow discerning objects located just a dozen or so nanometres from each other. However, these techniques require long exposure times and a complex procedure of biological specimen preparation. Other techniques, such as SIM or ISM microscopy, are easy to use, but offer a very limited resolution improvement, allowing to identify structures only half the size of the diffraction limit.

Aleksandra Sroda, Adrian Makowski and Dr. Radek Lapkiewicz from the Quantum Optics Lab at the Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw, in cooperation with Dr. Ron Tenne, Uri Rossman, Gur Lubin and Prof. Dan Oron from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, have introduced a new technique of super-resolution microscopy, called Super-resolution optical fluctuation image scanning microscopy (SOFISM). In SOFISM, the naturally occurring fluctuations in emission intensity of fluorescent markers are used to further enhance the spatial resolution of an image scanning microscope (ISM). ISM, an emerging super-resolution method, has already been implemented in commercial products and proven valuable for the bio-imaging community. Largely, since it achieves a modest improvement in lateral resolution (x2), with very few changes to the optical setup and without the common handicap of long exposure times. Thus, it enables a natural extension of the capabilities of a standard confocal microscope. ISM uses a confocal microscope in which a single detector is replaced with a detector array. In SOFISM correlations of intensities detected by multiple detectors are computed. In principle, the measurement of the n-th order correlation can lead to a factor of 2n resolution improvement with respect to the diffraction limit. In practice, the resolution achievable for higher-order correlations is limited by the signal-to-noise ratio of the measurements.

"SOFISM is a compromise between ease of use and resolution. We believe that our method will fill the niche between the complex, difficult-to-use techniques providing very high resolution and the easy-to-use lower-resolution methods. SOFISM does not have a theoretical resolution limit, and in our article, we demonstrate results which are four times better than the diffraction limit. We also show that the SOFISM method has a high potential in the imaging of three-dimensional biological structures," said Dr. Radek Lapkiewicz.

Crucially, SOFISM is, in its technical aspects, highly accessible, as it only requires introducing a small modification to the widely-used confocal microscope - replacing its photomultiplier tube with a SPAD array detector. In addition, it is necessary to slightly increase the measurement time and change the data processing procedure. "Until recently, SPAD array detectors were expensive and their specifications were not sufficient for correlation-based microscopy. This situation has recently changed. The new SPAD detectors introduced last year removed both the technological and price-related barriers. This makes us think that fluorescence microscopy techniques such as SOFISM might, in a few years' time, become widely used in the field of microscopic examination," stressed Dr. Lapkiewicz.

Twenty years after the release of the human genome, the genetic "blueprint" of human life, an international research team, including the University of British Columbia's Chris Overall, has now mapped the first draft sequence of the human proteome.

Their work was published Oct. 16 in Nature Communications and announced today by the Human Proteome Organization (HUPO). Overall is the only Canadian scientist involved in the Nature Communications paper.

"Today marks a significant milestone in our overall understanding of human life," says Overall, a professor in the faculty of dentistry and a member of the Centre for Blood Research at UBC. "Whereas the human genome provides a complete 'blueprint' of human genes, the human proteome identifies the individual building blocks of life encoded by this blueprint: proteins. "Proteins interact to shape everything from life-threatening diseases to cellular structure in our bodies."

With 90 per cent of the proteins in the human body now mapped, Overall says scientists have a deeper understanding of how individual proteins interact to influence human health, providing insights into disease prevention and individualized medicine.

Their work may have implications for scientists studying potential treatments for COVID-19.

"In COVID-19, for instance, there are two proteomes involved, that of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and that of the infected cells, both of which likely interact with, modify, and change the function of the other," says Overall. "Understanding this relationship can shed light on why some cells and individuals are more resilient to COVID-19 and others more vulnerable, providing essential functional information about the human body that genomics alone cannot answer."

As many human diseases result from changes in the composition or functions of proteins, mapping the proteome strengthens the foundation for disease diagnosis, prediction of outcomes, treatment, and precision medicine.

"Humans share 99.9 per cent of their DNA between individuals, yet deficiencies in the proteome 'parts' stemming from inherited genetic mutations can lead to genetic diseases, or defective or inadequate immune and cellular responses to environmental, nutritional and infection stressors," says Overall. "Knowing which proteins are key to protection from disease, and the deficiencies in expression or activity that are hallmarks of disease, can inform individualized medicine and the development of new therapies."

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields lack diversity. It is an issue that a group of University of Minnesota-led biology education researchers is aiming to address through a targeted effort to bring diverse perspectives to the foreground.

Their report published in CBE--Life Sciences Education lays out gaps in the biology education field and proposes leveraging an existing research coordination network called Equity and Diversity in Undergraduate STEM (EDU-STEM) to tackle them.

The vast majority of biology education research is completed at leading public research universities, known as R1 institutions, where the student populations tend to be majority middle- and upper-class white students. Research conducted in these settings informs teaching strategies and content that is leveraged in classrooms with more diverse demographics, including tribal universities and colleges, community colleges, minority-serving institutions, and historically Black colleges and universities. These institutions serve a much larger portion of historically underrepresented groups than R1 institutions.

"As it stands now, biology education research does not capture student experiences across diverse institutions," said Seth Thompson, the director of outreach in the College of Biological Sciences (CBS) and a lead author on the report.

EDU-STEM consists of education researchers from across STEM disciplines who focus on addressing gaps in introductory courses. The network first launched in 2017 and is co-led by CBS Associate Professor Sehoya Cotner and Cissy Ballen, a former postdoc in the Cotner Lab and now a faculty member at Auburn University. Although the network currently consists of biology educational researchers, the group hopes to expand and include education researchers in other STEM disciplines.

EDU-STEM is seeking additional collaborators to join the network. Instructors from tribal universities and colleges, community colleges, minority-serving institutions, and historically Black colleges and universities are encouraged to join.

"Student experiences are very different across institutions and thus the effect of educational interventions can be wildly different," said Thompson. "The majority of recommendations highlight student experiences from predominantly white R1 institutions. This collaborative network seeks to change that."

A specific region of messenger RNAs, the 3' untranslated region (3'UTR), plays an important role for cells to function properly. During embryonic development, 3'UTRs in hundreds of RNAs lengthen exclusively in neurons, which is crucial for the cells of the brain to function properly. The lab of Valérie Hilgers at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg was now able to show that in Drosophila, an elegant and robust mechanism secures this process of 3'UTR extension. In their newest study they describe for the first time a hierarchical mechanism of take-over of function starting from the protein ELAV as a Master Regulator of neuronal transcript signatures, with a second-in-command protein FNE that is only activated if the Master is absent.

Neurons, also known as nerve cells, send and receive signals in our brain. They are particularly complex and unique in many aspects: Neurons do not divide or regenerate like many other cell types, and they can be excitatory, inhibitory or modulatory in their effect and motor, sensory or secretory in their function.

RNA molecules play an important role in making sure that neurons function properly. Nearly every known neurological or neurodegenerative disease in humans is associated with the malfunction of RNA regulation. During gene expression, messenger RNA molecules (mRNAs) are transcribed from the DNA and are later translated into a protein. But RNA is not simply the intermediate between DNA and protein.
RNA has important regulatory roles

Several regions of the mRNA molecule are not translated into a protein, for example the 3' untranslated region (3'UTR) that immediately follows the protein-coding region of the mRNA after the stop codon. Interestingly, the 3'UTR has a lot of regulatory roles on its own. For example, it can determine when and where a gene is active, dictates where in the cell a protein finds its place, and plays a particular role in synapse formation and maintenance of memory.

A unique RNA mechanism, which was discovered only a decade ago, distinguishes the nerve cells from all other cells: the addition of a long stretch of non-coding sequence to many mRNAs. This phenomenon, termed "3'UTR extension", is of crucial importance for neurons to maintain their unique identity, and to function properly.

The lab of Valérie Hilgers at the MPI of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg focuses on this distinctive RNA processing mechanism. In previous work from the lab, it was found that in Drosophila, the protein ELAV is important for promoting 3'UTR extension in neurons. In this study, the team set out to learn more about ELAV.

ELAV as Master regulator of neuron biology

It turned out that ELAV is a so-called "Master regulator". In Biology, Master regulators are proteins that are deemed responsible for the control of a whole regulatory program of the cell. Thus, they are in charge of important, transformative events, on their own. Without them, the transformative event cannot take place. Relying on one single effector for such important tasks puts the cell at risk; this is why usually, several proteins share the work in biological systems.

But the scientists found an unusual system of robustness that ensures the formation and maintenance of neuronal transcript signatures in Drosophila. "Under normal conditions, ELAV acts as a Master regulator and single-handedly mediates 3'UTR extension. Interestingly, it also represses the expression of the exon of another gene of the same family called FNE. But if we put the system under stress by mutating ELAV, we could show that a new, activated form of FNE is expressed, which translocates into the nucleus to perform the function of ELAV in its absence," says Judit Carrasco, first author of the study.
EXAR mechanism manages succession

The team termed this hitherto unknown mechanism EXAR (EXon-Activated Rescue). "Considering the importance of "3'UTR extension" for the proper functioning of neurons, it makes sense to use such a robust mechanism, where succession is clearly defined", says Valérie Hilgers, who is also member of CIBSS - Centre for Integrative Biological Signalling Studies, Cluster of Excellence at the University of Freiburg.

This new insight into ELAV and the EXAR mechanism is a promising avenue for future research. ELAV is one of the best-conserved proteins in animals; it is found in every nerve cell of every animal. In humans, for instance, ELAV proteins are involved in numerous neurological diseases. The concrete mechanisms of how ELAV influences the health of neurons are not quite clear yet. The Hilgers lab in Freiburg wants to understand how ELAV proteins act on RNA to keep a neuron healthy.

The sign of a healthy personal relationship is one that is equally mutual - where you get out just as much as you put in. Nature has its own version of a healthy relationship. Known as mutualisms, they are interactions between species that are mutually beneficial for each species. One example is the interaction between plants and pollinators, where your apple trees are pollinated and the honeybee gets nectar as a food reward. But what makes these mutualisms persist in nature? If rewards like nectar are offered freely, does this make mutualisms more susceptible to other organisms that take those rewards without providing a service in return?

A team of researchers from the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University, including co-principal investigators Kari Segraves, professor of biology, and David Althoff, associate professor of biology, along with postdoctoral researcher Mayra Vidal, former research assistant professor David Rivers, and Sheng Wang '20 Ph.D., recently researched that question and the results have been published in this month's edition of the prestigious journal Science.

They investigated the abilities of simple versus diverse communities of mutualists, comparing how each deal with cheaters. Cheaters are species that steal the benefits of the mutualism without providing anything in return. An example of one of nature's cheaters are nectar robbers. Nectar-robbing bees chew through the side of flowers to feed on nectar without coming into contact with the flower parts that would result in pollination.

The research team wanted to test if having multiple mutualists with similar roles allows the community as a whole to persist when cheaters take away the mutualists' resources. The idea was to examine whether having more species involved in a mutualism, such as many pollinator species interacting with many different plant species, made the mutualism less susceptible to the negative effects of cheaters. They also wanted to analyze whether increasing the number of mutualist species allowed all the mutualists to persist or if competition would whittle down the number of mutualists species over time. In essence, the team wanted to understand the forces governing large networks of mutualists that occur in nature.

A&S researchers tested their ideas by producing mutualisms in the lab using yeast strains that function as mutualistic species. These strains were genetically engineered to trade essential food resources. Each strain produced a food resource to exchange with a mutualist partner. They engineered four species of each type of mutualist as well as two cheater strains that were unable to make food resources.

The researchers assembled communities of yeast that differed both in the number of species and the presence of cheaters. They found that communities with higher numbers of mutualist species were better able to withstand the negative effects of cheaters because there were multiple species of mutualists performing the same task. If one species was lost from the community due to competing with a cheater, there were other species around to perform the task, showing that the presence of more species in a community can lessen the negative effects of cheaters.

"It's similar to thinking about a plant that has many pollinator species," says Segraves. "If one pollinator species is lost, there are other pollinator species around to pollinate. If a plant only has one species of pollinator that goes extinct, the mutualism breaks down and might cause extinction of the plant."

Their results highlight the importance of having multiple mutualist species that provide similar resources or services, essentially creating a backup in case one species goes extinct. Segraves compares this phenomenon to the relationship between retailers and consumers. Communities typically have multiple banks, grocery stores, restaurants and hospitals to ensure that there are always goods and services available should something happen to one company or facility, or, as with COVID today, grocery stores now have multiple suppliers to fend off shortages.

Segraves says future research will explore the possibility of a mutualist species becoming a cheater. The group is testing if mutualists that perform the same function might set up an environment that allows one of those mutualist species to become a cheater since there are other mutualists around that can fill that role. They predict that the mutualist species that is experiencing the most competition from the other mutualists will be the species that switches to cheating. They also hope to determine how the mutualists and cheaters evolved over time to provide a deeper understanding of the actual changes that led to differing outcomes in the communities.

INFORMS Journal Marketing Science New Study Key Takeaways:

"Word-of-mouth" is not always a substitute for advertising.

When consumers learn about products from other consumers, businesses should increase advertising spending to prove their product is high-quality.

When all consumers share their experiences, a high-quality business may be better served by reducing its advertising spending.

As more negative experiences are shared, it can be optimal for a high-quality business to spend more on advertising.

CATONSVILLE, MD, October 19, 2020 - Most people have seen or heard from a friend, neighbor or family member about a product or service they've used and how their experience was. It's called observational learning or word-of-mouth. These communications don't provide an unbiased assessment of true quality. Given this, businesses are faced with the difficult decision of determining when and how to spend their ad dollars. New research in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science finds when consumers learn about products/services from other consumers, a business may actually want to spend more money to credibly signal its quality.

The study, "When Consumers Learn, Money Burns: Signaling Quality Via Advertising with Observational Learning and Word of Mouth," details that word of mouth and advertising are not the same. Word of mouth is believed to be "free" advertising; but this may not always be the case. In fact, the opposite may be true when the role of advertising is to credibly signal product quality to consumers.

Word-of-mouth interactions may involve underreporting (not everyone shares experiences), positive reporting (when positive experiences are communicated more widely than negative ones) or negative reporting (when negative experiences are communicated more widely than positive ones).

"While both word of mouth and advertising can provide information regarding quality to consumers, one would suspect a high-quality business should have to spend less on advertising as it would benefit from word of mouth," said Yogesh Joshi, a professor at the University of Maryland. "However, this research shows that word of mouth, rather than softening the need for spending on advertising, may require a high-quality business to allocate more resources to these quality signaling efforts."

Joshi and his co-author Andres Musalem of the University of Chile and Instituto Sistemas Complejos de Ingeniería (ISCI) say the benefits for a low-quality business force a high-quality one to spend more on advertising, to prove their worth and that their quality is better than the low-quality business that's getting traction from word of mouth.

"When all consumers share their experiences, a high-quality business may be better served by reducing its investment in advertising, and in certain cases by a lot," said Joshi. "Further, as more negative experiences are shared, it can be optimal for a high-quality business to spend more on advertising because as the sharing of negative experiences increases, some late consumers who would have otherwise been exposed to no experiences are now exposed to complaints."

When quality differences across types are not too strong, and consumers share more complaints, the researchers say a high-quality business may need to allocate more resources to its quality-signaling advertising efforts.

Just like humans, microbes have equipped themselves with tools to recognize and defend themselves against viral invaders. In a continual evolutionary battle between virus and host, CRISPR-Cas act as a major driving force of strain diversity in host-virus systems.

A new study led by Professor of Life Sciences Shai Pilosof (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel), Professor of Microbiology Rachel Whitaker (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Professor of Ecology and Evolution Mercedes Pascual (University of Chicago) highlights the role of diversified immunity in mediating host-pathogen interactions and its eco-evolutionary dynamics. The study also included Professor of Bioengineering and Bliss Faculty Scholar Sergei Maslov (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Sergio A. Alcal´a-Corona (University of Chicago), and PhD graduate students Ted Kim and Tong Wang (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign).

Their findings were reported in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

"The motivation for this study was to figure out how the structure of immunity in microbial populations impacts the dynamics of virus-host interactions," said Whitaker.

Now famous for its application in genetic engineering (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2020), the CRISPR-Cas system originated as an adaptive immune system for microbes. In this system, "protospacers" -- segments of DNA from the infecting virus -- are incorporated into the microbial host genome, termed "spacers." The host molecular machinery uses these spacers to recognize, target and destroy viruses, analogous to the human adaptive immune system.

Researchers used computational models to explore the influence of microbial immune diversity on population dynamics of host-virus interactions. Their simulations revealed two alternating major regimes: the virus diversification regime (VDR) where viruses proliferate and diversify, and the host-controlled regime (HCR) where hosts constrain virus diversification, leading to their extinction.

As the viruses diversified in VDR regimes, so too did the hosts. The viruses that were able to escape host control harbored mutations in their protospacers, thereby leading to higher encounter rates with hosts. From these increased encounters, hosts were able to acquire new spacers, increasing CRISPR diversity. In turn, the immunity network exhibited weighted-nestedness, which enabled host control.

"Weighted-nestedness means that some microbial strains have redundant immunity to many viruses while others have limited immunity to a few," said Whitaker. "It is this structure that leads to the dynamics of host stability punctuated by viral epidemics."

To test the weighted-nestedness immunity structure predicted by their theory, researchers compared the data to empirical datasets from natural systems. Their findings revealed the presence of virus control via distributed and redundant immunity in these static empirical datasets.

"We next want to test this model in dynamic natural systems," said Whitaker. "We are focused on collecting high-resolution temporal data on hot springs and wastewater treatment because they are relatively simple with few viruses and microbial species."

By understanding the dynamics of host-virus populations in natural systems, researchers can better control microbes in industrial settings.

"Some industrial applications like wastewater treatment, yogurt, and solvent production depend on stable microbial populations," said Whitaker. "Often, these applications fail because of viral epidemics that kill these microbes. We believe that understanding CRISPRs diversity and structure can support the design of stable microbial populations that are immune to virus infection."

LIVERMORE, Calif. -- The development of a new method to make non-volatile computer memory may have unlocked a problem that has been holding back machine learning and has the potential to revolutionize technologies like voice recognition, image processing and autonomous driving.

A team from Sandia National Laboratories, working with collaborators from the University of Michigan, published a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Advanced Materials that details a new method that will imbue computer chips that power machine-learning applications with more processing power by using a common material found in house paint in an analog memory device that enables highly energy-efficient machine inference operations.

"Titanium oxide is one of the most commonly made materials. Every paint you buy has titanium oxide in it. It's cheap and nontoxic," explains Sandia materials scientist Alec Talin. "It's an oxide, there's already oxygen there. But if you take a few out, you create what are called oxygen vacancies. It turns out that when you create oxygen vacancies, you make this material electrically conductive."

Those oxygen vacancies can now store electrical data, giving almost any device more computing power. Talin and his team create the oxygen vacancies by heating a computer chip with a titanium oxide coating above 302 degrees Fahrenheit (150 degree Celsius), separate some of the oxygen molecules from the material using electrochemistry and create vacancies.

"When it cools off, it stores any information you program it with," Talin said.

Energy efficiency a boost to machine learning

Right now, computers generally work by storing data in one place and processing that data in another place. That means computers have to constantly transfer data from one place to the next, wasting energy and computing power.

The paper's lead author, Yiyang Li, is a former Truman Fellow at Sandia and now an assistant professor of materials science at the University of Michigan. He explained how their process has the potential to completely change how computers work.

"What we've done is make the processing and the storage at the same place," Li said. "What's new is that we've been able to do it in a predictable and repeatable manner."

Both he and Talin see the use of oxygen vacancies as a way to help machine learning overcome a big obstacle holding it back right now -- power consumption.

"If we are trying to do machine learning, that takes a lot of energy because you are moving it back and forth and one of the barriers to realizing machine learning is power consumption," Li said. "If you have autonomous vehicles, making decisions about driving consumes a large amount of energy to process all the inputs. If we can create an alternative material for computer chips, they will be able to process information more efficiently, saving energy and processing a lot more data."

Research has everyday impact

Talin sees the potential in the performance of everyday devices.

"Think about your cell phone," he said. "If you want to give it a voice command, you need to be connected to a network that transfers the command to a central hub of computers that listen to your voice and then send a signal back telling your phone what to do. Through this process, voice recognition and other functions happen right in your phone."

Talin said the team is working on refining several processes and testing the method on a larger scale. The project is funded through Sandia's Laboratory Directed Research and Development program.

For recreational fishing enthusiasts, the thrill of snagging their next catch comes with discovering what's hooked on the end of the line. In many freshwater streams and rivers -- across the central and eastern parts of the U.S. -- anglers are often catching a popular freshwater game fish: the smallmouth bass. Now, scientists have discovered a new level of biodiversity within that species.

Previously, scientists identified two subspecies of smallmouth bass: the widespread Northern smallmouth bass and a much smaller subgroup called the Neosho smallmouth bass. The Neosho are native to an ecologically isolated region of the lower Midwest known as the Central Interior Highlands, which weave through southwestern Missouri, northern Arkansas and northeastern Oklahoma.

To help the conservation departments manage the present diversity of this smaller subspecies of smallmouth bass, two University of Missouri researchers -- Joe Gunn and Lori Eggert -- worked with the Missouri Department of Conservation, Oklahoma State University's Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management and the Oklahoma Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit of the U.S. Geological Survey at Oklahoma State University to collect over 800 fin samples from smallmouth bass at 43 different sites in the Central Interior Highlands. The MU researchers helped analyze the samples for genetic diversity.

"Management is necessary because this is a gamefish," said Eggert, a conservation biologist and professor emeritus in the Division of Biological Sciences in MU's College of Arts and Science. "Human actions have already strongly affected the species and will continue to do so. This management generally takes the form of 'stocking' to enhance opportunities for recreational anglers. If the source and subspecies of fish used in stocking particular streams is not considered, stocking events could lead to 'genetic swamping' of the local fish. In some cases, this could lead to one subspecies dominating the other in streams outside its native range. Letting 'nature take its course' is not an option."

For years, Eggert has studied the ecology and evolution of animal populations, including most notably African forest elephants. She originally wanted to become a veterinarian, but her passion for conservation biology developed while in college and grew as she served as an intern in the genetics program at the Zoological Society of San Diego. There, she was able to learn about conservation efforts on behalf of species such as the Przewalski's horse of Mongolia and the giant panda in China.

Eggert knows a proper understanding of the genetic diversity of animal populations is important when managing these populations.

"With the Neosho being a native fish to the Central Interior Highlands, this study highlights the importance of thinking about management actions when moving fish between streams," Eggert said. "In the past, it's just been 'a fish is a fish,' and hatcheries were providing fish without anyone first considering where these fish are originally coming from. It's not just 'a fish is a fish.' A fish being added to a Neosho stream should really come from a Neosho stream. We also need to look at which Neosho stream is involved, because each may be home to a genetically different population, and we don't quite know yet how important the mixing of these different genetic populations is to their overall health within an ecosystem."

Gunn, a graduate student in MU's College of Arts and Science, is currently working toward a doctorate in the Division of Biological Sciences, with an emphasis in conservation biology. Since he was little, he's always loved nature, and enjoys thinking about complex concepts in ecology and evolution. He wants to use his knowledge and understanding of animal species to make a positive impact on the management and preservation of threatened species and their environments.

Gunn said this study shows there is considerable diversity within the smallmouth bass family.

"Our methods have been used before to identify previously unknown lineages of animal populations," Gunn said. "This can be applied to species within any group, whether it's mammals, fish, reptiles or birds. There are also very interesting dynamics between different groups, and these same methods can also be used to identify genetic structures and morphological differentiation within a specific species. Here, we've found considerable diversity between the two known subspecies of smallmouth bass, the Neosho and the Northern smallmouth bass, the latter of which can be found in a larger area of the U.S."

Nearly every organism hosts a collection of symbiotic microbes--a microbiome. It is now recognized that microbiomes are major drivers of health in all animals, including humans, and that these symbiotic systems often exhibit strong daily rhythms.

New research led by University of Hawai'i at Manoa scientists revealed that, in the mutually beneficial relationship between with the Hawaiian bobtail squid, Euprymna scolopes, and the luminescent bacterium, Vibrio fischeri, an immune protein called "macrophage migration inhibitory factor" or "MIF," is the maestro of daily rhythms. This finding, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could provide important clues on factors affecting human microbiome rhythms, as the MIF protein is also found in abundance in mammalian symbiotic tissues.

To survive, the nocturnal Hawaiian bobtail squid depends on V. fischeri, which gives it the ability to mimic moonlight on the surface of the ocean and deceive monk seals and other predators, as it forages for food. The symbiotic bacteria also require nutrition, especially at night when they are more numerous and their light is required for the squid's camouflage.

The research team, led by Eric Koch, who was a graduate researcher at the Pacific Biosciences Research Center (PBRC) in the UH Manoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at the time of the study, determined the squid regulates production of MIF as a way to control the movement of specialized immune cells, called hemocytes, which provide chitin for bacteria to feed on.

At night, when the team found MIF was low in the squid's light organ, hemocytes were allowed into the regions where the bacteria reside and chitin was delivered. During the day, MIF was very high, which inhibits the hemocytes from coming into the symbiotic tissues and dumping their chitin at the wrong time.

This cycling of nutrients has cascading effects on all of the other rhythms associated with the symbiotic system--perhaps affecting overall health, development or reproduction.

For nearly three decades, professors Margaret McFall-Ngai and Edward Ruby at PBRC have used the squid-bacterial symbiosis system to characterize animal microbiomes.

"We had recognized daily rhythms in the squid-vibrio symbiosis since 1996, but how the rhythm is controlled was not known," said McFall-Ngai. "This study brought the whole thing into sharp focus, allowing us to understand how the rhythm works and how it matures in the animal."

Such discoveries can pave the way for understanding how microbiomes function--what they do and how they do it--in other organisms and environments.

"A recent study of the mammalian, and human, gut microbiome has shown that MIF is present at high levels and controls the interactions of the microbes with the host cell," said McFall-Ngai. "As has happened with other phenomena, such a developmental inducers, the simplicity of the squid-vibrio system has provided a window into the mechanisms of symbiosis. Because these mechanisms appear to be highly conserved among all animals, including humans, understanding how they function promises to give us the tools to foster healthy people and resilient ecosystems."

More research is needed before a less invasive form of ventilation is used near the end of life for patients who have cancer and dementia, recommends the authors of a scientific paper published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

While analyzing data from nearly 2.5 million Medicare-funded hospitalizations within the last 30 days of a patient's life, the researchers found overall use of non-invasive ventilation increased substantially. That increase was nearly nine-fold, going from 0.8% of patients in 2000 to 7.1% of patients 2017. This change came without much data measuring the therapy's effectiveness for certain patient groups such as those with cancer and dementia, the authors noted.

Non-invasive ventilation delivers air through a face mask to help hospitalized patients breathe, similar to how breathing machines help people with sleep apnea at night. It also avoids some of the drawbacks of mechanical ventilation, such as needing to sedate a patient and insert a tube into the windpipe, both of which increase various health risks and make patient communication difficult.

Studies have shown non-invasive ventilation can help hospitalized patients with congestive heart failure and chronic lung disease. However, there is very little data supporting non-invasive ventilation use for hospitalized patients who are near the end of life and have breathing problems from other diseases such as cancer and dementia. Some small studies suggest this therapy also may provide cancer patients with more quality time with their loved ones toward the end of life.

"But just because non-invasive ventilation can work well for some patients, that doesn't automatically mean it will work well for others," said Donald Sullivan, M.D., M.A., M.C.R., the paper's lead author.
"More hospitalized patients are using non-invasive ventilation toward the end of their lives, even though there isn't a lot of evidence that clearly lays out the therapy's pros and cons.

"To help our patients and their families make informed decisions, we need to know more about when non-invasive ventilation may be helpful, and when it might be harmful," added Sullivan, who is also an associate professor of medicine (pulmonary and critical care medicine) in the OHSU School of Medicine.

Wearing a mask can make patients with altered cognition anxious and distressed. People dying of dementia may need to be sedated to receive this therapy. Ultimately, this therapy could prolong suffering for patients near the end of life, Sullivan said.

Sullivan and his co-authors recommend pursuing randomized clinical trials to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of non-invasive ventilation in different patient groups.