Culture

When COVID-19 hit the United States, small towns near ski areas such as Park City, Utah, and Sun Valley, Idaho, experienced some of the highest per capita cases; people from around the world had brought the virus along with their skis. As the coronavirus spread, gateway communities--communities near scenic public lands, national parks, and other outdoor recreational amenities--felt acute economic pressure as the virus forced them to shut down tourist activities.

Now, many gateway communities are facing an entirely new problem: a flood of remote workers fleeing big cities to ride out the pandemic, perhaps permanently. Like oil discovery led to western boomtowns, the pandemic has led to the rise of "Zoom Towns"--and with this so-called amenity migration comes a variety of challenges.

"This trend was already happening, but amenity migration into these communities has been expedited and it can have destructive consequences if not planned for and managed. Many of these places are, as some people say, at risk of being loved to death," said Danya Rumore, director of the Environmental Dispute Resolution Program and research assistant professor in the Department of City & Metropolitan Planning at the University of Utah.

Rumore, who is from the gateway community of Sandpoint, Idaho, leads a team of researchers at University of Utah and University of Arizona who study planning and development challenges in western gateway communities. In a new paper in the Journal of the American Planning Association, the team published the results of a 2018 study involving a survey with public officials in more than 1200 western gateway communities and in-depth interviews with officials from 25 communities. In an eerie foreshadowing, a town manager from a developed gateway community said, "We don't have the staff capacity to deal with major crises."

"Our research shows that as small, rural gateway communities grow, they tend to experience a suite of big city problems, like housing affordability and transportation issues," Rumore said. "In 2018 these public officials expressed a sense of already being behind the curve, and in need of additional capacity and resources to plan and adapt to rapid growth."

In an effort to help gateway communities and the regions around them plan for and respond to COVID-19 and planning pressures, Rumore and others have launched the Gateway and Natural Amenity Region (GNAR) Initiative based at Utah State University in the Institute of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism. The GNAR Initiative will begin hosting a webinar series on amenity migration beginning Oct. 15.

Loved to death

As part of the study, officials were asked specific questions about their communities' planning challenges and opportunities. Housing and cost of living were key concerns for many gateway communities; 80% of respondents reported that housing affordability was moderately or extremely problematic for their community. Respondents also cited traffic congestion and other transportation issues as problems. These issues appear to be more strongly associated with population growth than with tourism and will likely get worse as COVID-19 drives rapid migration to these places.

The influx of remote workers could present economic development opportunities for gateway communities, Rumore said, but could also drive up housing prices and cost of living. Half of the survey respondents said that the average wage relative to cost-of-living was moderately or extremely problematic for their community in 2018, prior to this new wave of amenity migration.

"If you've been living there and growing up in this community and you don't have a job that's paying the salary of someone who's in, for example, downtown Seattle, you're going to be excluded from this community and your ability to invest in land and property if you haven't already," said Philip Stoker, assistant professor at the University of Arizona and co-author of the study.

For Zacharia Levine, doctoral student at the U and co-author of the paper, the topic is personal. For 6 years he served as the community and economic community director for Grand County, Utah, which encompasses the gateway city of Moab, the Colorado River, and two national parks--Arches and Canyonlands. Over the last ten years, Moab visitation has grown to more than 3 million people per year. The locals felt it.

"The primary challenges residents reported included downtown congestion, housing affordability and availability, environmental degradation, and a general decline in quality of life. Much of Moab's infrastructure was built when the town became a uranium boomtown; it was never designed to accommodate the world. Just in the last few years, we've had to build new water storage facilities, sewer treatment facilities, roads, and other public infrastructure," said Levine. "Further, our local governments have struggled to increase their human resource capacities to plan for the future, let alone to deal with current issues."

Levine began working with Rumore in hopes of finding guidance to address these immense challenges, but the academic planning literature lacked resources that focused on planning for these unique rural communities. The problem was hardly unique to Moab--some places such as Jackson, Wyoming, and Breckenridge, Colorado, have been experiencing amenity migration and related growth and development pressures for decades. Other gateway communities, such as Torrey, Utah that never thought it would happen to them, are just starting to feel the pressure. Like Rumore, Levine is worried that the flood of remote workers would catch many gateway communities, particularly those that are less developed, off guard.

"Many places have experienced this common trajectory. How does a gateway community navigate tourism, and growth writ-large, more gracefully?" Levine asked. "COVID-19 really blew the lid off that challenge."

The GNAR Initiative

The GNAR Initiative is an affiliation of university faculty, government and state agencies, non-profit organizations and community leaders that supports research, educational efforts, and capacity building to help public lands managers and others. The initiative provides an online toolkit for gateway communities, hosts educational events and community peer-to-peer learning forums, and supports cross-university research initiatives.

As part of its efforts to raise awareness about the likelihood of amenity migration to gateway communities and to share tools and resources, the GNAR Initiative will begin hosting a webinar series on amenity migration beginning Oct. 15.

"The main takeaway from our study and work with gateway communities is that these towns and cities need to plan ahead to manage change and the things that come with it," Rumore said. "The goal of the GNAR Initiative is to help these places thrive and preserve the things that make them so special."

40% of tenant households across Australia indicated that after paying rent there was not enough money left over to buy essentials due to COVID lockdowns

One third of renters surveyed were ignored or unable to negotiate a rent reduction with their landlord

5% of renters were issued with an eviction notice during the pandemic

Around half of survey respondents indicated that their mental health had been negatively affected by COVID-19 lockdowns.

Almost 40% of Australian tenant households can't afford essentials such as bills, clothing, transport and food, after paying rent, because their incomes have reduced significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, new research from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute has found.

The research, 'Renting in the time of COVID-19: understanding the impacts', led by the University of Adelaide surveyed 15,000 public and private renting households across all Australian states and territories during July and August 2020.

The research identified challenges for the rental sector and brings insights into how the rental market is performing, the uptake of existing support measures and the demand for future assistance.

According to the research, as a result of the COVID-19 lockdowns, Australian tenant households earning less than $90,000 per year had higher rates of reduced working hours (up to 26% of households), temporary job loss (up to 16%) or reduction to overall income (up to 11%) when compared to higher income households.

One in six respondents reported that they had accessed government income assistance, such as JobKeeper or JobSeeker, for the first time, with low-to-moderate income households having a higher need for assistance.

Around half of survey respondents indicated that their mental health had been negatively affected by COVID-19 lockdowns and just over 10% reported that this had been significant.

'COVID-19 has been devastating for many Australians but those in the rental sector have been particularly impacted,' says project leader Professor Emma Baker, University of Adelaide Professor of Housing Research.

'The pandemic, and the subsequent economic and social lockdown, has rapidly changed our housing system: the way we use our homes, our ability to afford them, and the role of government safety nets. The pandemic has placed many people in the rental market at risk; they face uncertainty, tenure insecurity, financial hardship and significant mental health effects.'

In examining the stability of tenancies during the pandemic, researchers found that just over 5% of respondents had been issued with an eviction notice during the pandemic. Even though some of those tenants benefitted from state and territory eviction protections, just over half of households issued with eviction notices went on to be evicted.

In addition, 16% of tenant households surveyed had requested a rent alteration (either a deferral or reduction) as a result of COVID-19-related hardship, and of those households, 30% said that the landlord would not negotiate or did not respond to their request.

The report also found there is considerable uncertainty about the need for government income support into the future. When households were asked if they think they will need financial assistance in the coming 12 months, 28% responded that they would, 31% said they did not know and 40% said that they would not.

'Many renters are currently buffered from the full economic effects of the pandemic by their savings, their superannuation and rent deferment, as well as a temporary government supports in the form of eviction moratoriums, JobKeeper and JobSeeker,' says Professor Baker.

'With the on-going health and economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic still evolving, if these savings and superannuation buffers eventually run out, renters will be entirely dependent on packages of government support. In the absence of an effective and accessible vaccine, it is likely that the situation for renters captured in this mid-2020 snapshot will be different--and almost certainly worse--by mid-2021.'

There is an old saying, "If rubber is the material that opened the way to the ground, aluminum is the one that opened the way to the sky." New materials were always discovered at each turning point that changed human history. Materials used in memory devices are also drastically evolving with the emergence of new materials such as doped silicon materials, resistance changing materials, and materials that spontaneously magnetize and polarize. How are these new materials made? A research team from POSTECH has revealed the mechanism behind making materials used in new memory devices by using artificial intelligence.

The research team led by Professor Si-Young Choi of Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the team led by Professor Daesu Lee of the Department of Physics at POSTECH have together succeeded in synthesizing a novel substance that produces electricity by causing polarization (a phenomenon in which the position of negative and positive charges is separated from the negative and positive charges within the crystal) at room temperature and confirmed its variation in the crystal structure by applying deep neural network analysis. This paper was published in the recent issue of Nature Communications.

The atomic structures of perovskite oxides are often distorted and their properties are determined by the oxygen octahedral rotation (OOR) accordingly. In fact, there are only a few stable OOR patterns present at equilibrium and this inevitably limits the properties and functions of perovskite oxides.

The joint research team focused on a perovskite oxide called CaTiO3 which remains nonpolar (or paraelectric) even at the absolute temperature of 0K. Based on the ab-initio calculations, however, the team found that a unique OOR pattern that does not naturally exist would be able to facilitate the ferroelectricity, a powerful polarization at room temperature.

In this light, the research team succeeded in synthesizing a novel material (heteroepitaxial CaTiO3) that possesses the ferroelectricity by applying interface engineering that controls the atomic structures at the interface and accordingly its physical property.

In addition, deep neural network analysis was applied to examine the fine OOR and the variation of a few decades of picometer in the atomic structures, and various atomic structures were simulated and data were utilized for AI analysis to identify artificially controlled OOR patterns.

"We have confirmed that we can create new physical phenomena that do not naturally occur by obtaining the unique OOR pattern through controlling the variation in its atomic structure," remarked Professor Daesu Lee. "It is especially significant to see that the results of the convergent research of physics and new materials engineering enable calculations for material design, synthesis of novel materials, and analysis to understand new phenomena."

Professor Si-Young Choi explained, "By applying the deep machine learning to materials research, we have successfully identified atomic-scale variations on tens of picometers that are difficult to identify with the human eye." He added, "It could be an advanced approach for materials analysis that can help to understand the mechanism for creating new materials with unique physical phenomena."

Plastic gathered from remote corners of the South Pacific Ocean, including nesting areas of New Zealand albatrosses, has confirmed the global threat of plastic pollution to seabirds.

Published on 12 October in the journal Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems, the study looks for patterns in the plastics seabirds from around the South Pacific ingest.

It uses data gathered by Canterbury Museum Senior Curator Natural History Dr Paul Scofield and Wellington ornithologist Christopher Robertson in the late 1990s and 2000s.

"Plastic pollution is a major threat to seabird species, not just here in New Zealand but around the world," says Dr Scofield. "Knowing more about how seabirds interact with plastic might help us solve this problem in the future. At the moment, it's only getting worse."

Christopher Robertson, co-author of the study says, "One of the interesting takeaways from this study is that it shows you just how far plastic can travel in the ocean. Some of the areas where we collected the plastic are very remote. To me, that shows that this is a global issue; it's not something a single country can solve on its own."

"The samples provided by our colleagues from New Zealand allowed us to assess the patterns of seabird-plastic interactions on a larger scale, across the entire South Pacific Ocean," says the study's lead author, Valeria Hidalgo-Ruz from the Chilean Millenium Nucleus Centre of Ecology and Sustainable Management of Oceanic Islands.

"The results confirm that even seabirds in one of the most remote areas of the world, the Rapa Nui (Easter Island) ecoregion, are strongly affected by this global problem, highlighting the need for urgent solutions."

In the late 1990s and 2000s, fieldworkers gathered thousands of pieces of plastic from albatross nesting sites on the Chatham Islands, Campbell Island and Taiaroa Head in Otago. The birds swallowed most of the plastic while foraging at sea and then regurgitated it at the nesting sites as they tried to feed their chicks.

Between 2003 and 2004, the team also examined plastic from the stomachs of Sooty Shearwaters killed by fishing operations around the Chatham Rise and the southeast coast of the South Island.

The study compared these plastics with similar samples from other locations around the Pacific including coastal Chile and Rapa Nui. The researchers examined the types of plastic found along with their shape, colour and density.

Albatrosses are more likely to eat brightly-coloured plastic, in particular red, green and blue. The birds probably mistake these objects for prey. The study suggests the brightly-coloured fishing gear of commercial fishing operations around the Chatham Islands and in Chile could be the source of some of the plastic found at those nesting sites.

Plastics found in the stomachs of diving seabirds like the Sooty Shearwater were dominated by hard, white/grey and round plastic items. The researchers believe most of these objects are ingested accidentally when the birds eat fish or other prey that have consumed plastic.

The ingestion of marine plastics is a major issue for seabird conservation and will affect most seabird species by 2050, according to estimates.

The number of trees inhabiting the Western Sahara, the Sahel and the Sudanian zone has exceeded the expectations of scientists, with more than 1.8 billion having been located thanks to an international collaboration including researchers from the CNRS*. High-resolution remote sensing made it possible to gather a multitude of satellite images of these areas, which were then analysed by applying an artificial intelligence pattern recognition method. According to the study, which focused on trees with a crown size greater than 3m², isolated trees cover an area of 1.3 million km², about 2.5 times the surface area of France. Scientists also noted that crown size and tree density depends closely on the climatic regime and land use. These trees make a major contribution to local resources, biodiversity and carbon storage, as well as playing a crucial role in dry tropical ecosystems and agrosystems. This work, published on 14th October in Nature, highlights the possibility of creating an inventory of all the non-forest trees on the planet, in order to assess their contribution to environmental issues.

Favourable climatic conditions influenced the sequence of settlement movements of Homo sapiens in the Levant on their way from Africa to Europe. In a first step, modern humans settled along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Only then did they spread out into the Sinai desert and the eastern Jordanian Rift Valley. This is the result of archaeological research conducted by Collaborative Research Centre 'Our Way to Europe' (CRC 806) at the universities of Cologne, Bonn, and Aachen. The article 'Al-Ansab and the Dead Sea: mid-MIS 3 Archaeology and Environment of the Early Ahmarian Population of the Levantine Corridor' was published in PLOS ONE.

For more than ten years, the team has been analysing sediments, pollen, and archaeological artefacts around the site of Al-Ansab 1 near the ancient ruin-city of Petra (Jordan). The goal was to gain an understanding of the environmental conditions that prevailed at the time of human expansion. 'Human presence consolidated in the region under favourable climate conditions', said Professor Dr Jürgen Richter, lead author of the study.

The success story of anatomically modern humans outside of Africa began about 100,000 years ago with well-known sites such as Qafzeh and Skhul in Israel. However, these early records only reveal a brief, temporary expansion of the territory into the Levant. Permanent settlement of the region only dates back to about 43,000 years ago, scientists believe. During the epoch of the so-called 'Early Ahmarian', modern humans gradually had been spreading throughout the Levant - a first step on their way to Asia and Europe.

Favourable climatic conditions were preconditions for permanent human settlement. On a large scale, this is illustrated by the presence of the so-called Lake Lisan. This freshwater lake was located where the Dead Sea is today. However, it was of a much larger extent and carried greater water volume. Most of the water evaporated only with the end of the last ice age, leaving behind the hypersaline Dead Sea known today.

Even on a small scale, the scientists were able to recognise the favourable environmental conditions: geo-archaeological teams from the University of Cologne and RWTH Aachen University examined the site of Al-Ansab 1. Whereas today, the Wadi Sabra, in which the site is located, is strongly shaped by seasonal flash floods, geomorphological and archaeological investigations showed that at the time of settlement, the conditions were less erosive and continuously wet, permitting the presence of humans.

'This enabled the spread of humans from the coastal Mediterranean area to the formerly drier regions of the Negev desert and the eastern slopes of the Jordan Rift Valley. They hunted gazelles in the open landscape - a prey we found in many sites in the region from this period', says Richter. 'Humans did not come by steady expansion out of Africa through the Levant and further to Europe and Asia. Rather, they first settled in a coastal strip along the Mediterranean Sea.'

The region around the site of Al-Ansab 1 therefore was a stepping stone on Homo sapiens' way - a journey that did not take a straight path to the European continent, but was guided by complex interactions between humans and their environment.

Researchers from the University of Seville, in collaboration with colleagues from the Universities of Murcia and Marburg (Germany) have identified a new protein that makes it possible to repair DNA. The protein in question, called cryptochrome, has evolved to acquire this and other functions within the cell.

Ultraviolet radiation can damage the DNA, leading to mutations that disrupt cell function and can allow cancer cells to grow out of control. Our cells have DNA repair systems to defend themselves against this sort of damage. One of these systems is based on a protein, photolysis, which uses blue light to repair DNA damage before it leads to mutations.

Over the course of evolution, the genes for photolysis duplicated and became specialised, creating new proteins, cryptochromes, which have honed their ability to perceive blue light and now perform other functions in cells. For example, cryptochromes use blue light as a signal to regulate plant growth and the rhythm that controls daily activity (the circadian rhythm) in fungi and animals.

The authors of this study discovered that in the fungus Mucor circinelloides, a human pathogen, cryptochromes are the protein responsible for DNA repair after exposure to ultraviolet radiation, a function that should be performed by photolysis. They also suggest that cryptochromes in this fungus acquired their ability to repair DNA during evolution from an ancestral cryptochrome that was not able to repair DNA. This discovery illustrates how proteins change as their functions evolve.

The results have been published in an article in the prestigious journal Current Biology.

While most people dying from COVID-19 are elderly, up to 5 to 10 percent of younger adults and children can also be seriously infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Researcher from all over the world have tried to determine why some people become very ill and others are barely affected with COVID-19.

Researchers from the University of Bergen and their French colleagues are getting closer to an answer.

"We found that persons with serious COVID-19 disease have antibodies that are blocking so-called interferons, which are an important part of the body´s defence mechanism," says Professor Eystein Husebye at the Department of Clinical Science, University of Bergen (UiB).

Enable possible treatment

Husebye was involved in this study because he has had long experience with patients suffering from the immune disease APS1. APS1 is a serious, but rare, immune disease. Patients with APS1 have a high concentration of antibodies against interferones.

If these patients then become infected with COVID-19, their bodies will work against their own immune systems. In addition, this response has also been seen in patients with milder immune diseases.

"It is relatively easy to see if young people with COVID-19 have these antibodies in their blood. If so, it might be possible to supply them with extra interferons as treatment," Husebye says.

May explain gender differences

The UiB-discoveries support other mysterious findings relating to COVID-19.

"Deaths and severe COVID-19 are more frequent among men than women. Our study has shown that men have more of these antibodies," Husebye says.

Even if it is easy to use blood tests to discover antibodies against interferons, Husebye does not recommend massive screening in healthy people. Most people with APS1 are diagnosed in their childhood, and most people with immune failure have been diagnosed already.

"Immune failure is just a piece in the puzzle when it comes to understand why young people may die of COVID-19. Old people generally die of more complex causes," says Eystein Husebye.

Tsukuba, Japan - End-of-life discussions, considered an essential part of high-quality end-of-life care for patients with life-threatening illnesses, make it easier to provide treatment and care that satisfy the patient's wishes. They also contribute to reducing depression and complicated grief among bereaved family members. In countries with increasing numbers of older people, such as Japan, there's a strong need to find how to have these discussions and how to make them effective.

A new study centered at Japan's University of Tsukuba found an important connection between the experience of caring for a loved one and the likelihood of having end-of-life discussions. Also, while experiencing someone's death may seem like another factor that would encourage these discussions, the study did not find such a connection. The findings were published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management.

"Compared with in Western nations, research has found people in Japan are less likely to engage in end-of-life discussions," study co-author Professor Takehiro Sugiyama says. "We wanted to find what factors relate to having these discussions, and what sort of people do and don't have them."

The research divided respondents into two groups based on their experience having end-of-life discussions: those who had engaged in such discussions and those who had not. The main predictors were the experiences of the death of and care for a loved one.

This appears to be the first study to clarify the association between the experience of caring for a loved one and the history of having engaged in one's own end-of-life discussions. The team used a nationwide survey to gather data on nearly 1,000 men and women, young and old. Then they further looked at where these experiences took place, along with possibly related factors, such as people's age, sex, and family makeup.

They found a clear connection between the experience of caring for a loved one and end-of-life discussions, irrespective of the caregiver's age. However, they found that experiencing a loved one's death was not associated with these discussions. They also found that men, both those under 65 and those aged 65 and older, were less likely to have such discussions.

The findings additionally revealed potential factors associated with being less likely to have end-of-life discussions: younger age and not having a family doctor. This means health-care providers may need to highlight the need for further education to promote the importance of end-of-life discussions, especially for younger people and for men.

"Caregiving involves factors such as managing a loved one's medication, supporting them, and advocating for them," first author Kyoko Hanari says. "These factors may motivate people to initiate end-of-life discussions. That and our other findings are a useful base to build on, seeing the beneficial impacts of these discussions."

Especially in aging societies, end-of-life discussions are increasingly needed. Researchers now need to dig deeper into the relation with caregiving and other factors, find how to motivate such discussions, and examine what they should include.

(Vienna, 14 October 2020) Numerous scientific studies indicate that inflammatory processes play a key role in the development of psychiatric disorders. One of the areas of particular interest is the interleukin 6/STAT3 signal transduction pathway, which is associated with depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. In a study published in leading journal Molecular Psychiatry, MedUni Vienna researchers led by Daniela Pollak from the Division of Neurophysiology and Neuropharmacology showed that STAT3 plays an important role in the serotonergic system as a molecular mediator for controlling emotional reactivity, thereby establishing a mechanistic link between the immune system, serotonergic transmission and affective disorders such as depression.

The STAT3 signal transduction pathway is activated in response to a series of immunogenic and non-immunogenic stimuli, i.e. those that can and those that cannot trigger an immune response. "It was found that STAT3 is involved in nervous system functions that are important for controlling behaviour in physiological and pathological situations. In an earlier study, we had managed to show that STAT3 also regulates the expression of the serotonin transporter gene (Note: SERT)," explains Pollak.

Changes in serotonergic transmission, that is to say the transmission of information from one neuron to another using serotonin as a messenger substance, correlate closely with pathological changes in depression or other affective disorders. However, the interaction between the STAT3 signal transduction pathway and the neuronal information flow in the brain and its importance in regulating emotional behaviour has not yet been explored.

STAT3 deficiency reduces emotional reactivity

The published work therefore specifically investigated the significance of the STAT3
signal transduction pathway in the serotonergic system of the midbrain - an emotional regulation centre - by targeted inhibition of STAT3 in a mouse model. Says Pollak: "Where STAT3 was selectively absent from the serotonergic system of the midbrain, the mice displayed reduced, negative emotional reactivity in their behaviour and a diminished response to the effects of amphetamine in the brain. These effects could be detected in mice with reduced STAT3 expression both in a genetic and in a viral model, so that it was possible to rule out developmental changes and to show that an acute manipulation of STAT3 in the adult organism impacts on emotional behaviour."

In animals lacking in STAT3, there was also found to be a change in the neuronal activity of serotonergic cells of the midbrain. Changes in molecular networks that are significant in neuropsychiatric illnesses were also found on the level of gene expression. "The results of our study indicate that STAT3 plays an important role as a molecular mediator in the serotonergic system for controlling emotional reactivity, thereby establishing a mechanistic link between the immune system, serotonergic transmission and affective disorders."

Service: Molecular Psychiatry

"STAT3 in the raphe nuclei gates behavioural reactivity and regulates gene networks associated with neuropsychiatric disorders". Sonali N. Reisinger, Spyridon Sideromenos, Orsolya Horvath, Sophia Derdak, Ana Cicvaric, Francisco Monje, Martin Bilban, Martin Häring, and Micaela Glat and Daniela D. Pollak.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-020-00904-2.

Fanconi anaemia (FA) is a genetic disease affecting small children characterized by bone-marrow failure, developmental abnormalities and predisposition to multiple forms of cancer. The molecular mechanisms behind FA are inherited mutations in genes encoding for DNA repair proteins, leading to irreversible bone marrow failure. The exact mechanisms how these genetic mutations lead to the exhaustion of stem cells from the bone marrow has been unknown.

Now, the researchers have identified a cause for this failure. The findings were published in the distinguished Cell Stem Cell journal.

"The results open new paths for developing novel therapies for the disease, for which the only curative treatment currently available is stem cell transplantation. Understanding the mechanism of bone marrow failure better can help to plan stem cell transplantations and to develop new therapies for milder forms of Fanconi anaemia," says Anniina Färkkilä, docent and clinical researcher at the University of Helsinki.

Expression of the MYC gene resulted in permanent bone marrow failure

In the study, researchers at the University of Helsinki analysed the gene expression of individual cells, and found, to their surprise, overexpression of the MYC gene in the bone marrow stem cells of patients with Fanconi anaemia. MYC is one of the best-known genes regulating the formation of malignant tumours.

Functional experiments demonstrated that MYC overexpression resulted in the division of stem cells and their detachment from the bone marrow.

"The overexpression of the MYC gene was caused by inflammation mediators, and it led to an abnormal presence of stem cells in the circulation of patients suffering from Fanconi anaemia. In mouse experiments, a MYC inhibitor reduced stem cell detachment, but at the same time it also reduced cell proliferation," Färkkilä notes.

This suggested that MYC, upregulated in the stem cells due to the inflammatory stress signals, was required for the survival of the stem cells, but as a side effect led to the detachment from the bone marrow niche, and the development of bone marrow failure in FA patients.

Identifying the mechanism associated with bone marrow failure helps to develop biomarkers also for premalignant states in patients with Fanconi anaemia.

"The DNA repair genes defective in FA often result in the development of a number of cancers, which also makes the findings potentially significant in relation to other cancer types, such as ovarian cancer," Färkkilä says.

A new study from the University of Eastern Finland shows that a bettor likely stays away from betting for a 27% longer time after a losing day than after a day on which they won or broke even. The study looked at how losing or winning on the previous betting day predicts how long it takes from a bettor to return to the next session of online horse race betting. The study also found that high wins or losses on the previous betting day do not predict the timing of the next betting session.

"A typical online horse race bettor seems to modify their betting behaviour according to how successful their previous betting day was. Earlier studies have found that bettors tend to reduce their stakes after a losing day. We were now able to show that a typical bettor also stays away from betting for a longer time after losing," Early Stage Researcher Tuomo Kainulainen from the University of Eastern Finland says.

Published in Journal of Gambling Studies, the study used individual-level gambling account data. The researchers analysed the betting behaviour of more than 9,000 individuals in Finland who placed bets on the Finnish horse race betting operator Fintoto's online betting platform in August 2012.

No differences in the betting behaviour of women and men after a losing day

A typical online horse race bettor in Finland is a 51-year-old male who lives in an urban area and places a bet approximately every four days. The average betting volume per day was 43 euros (roughly 50 US dollars) and the average net loss per day was 12 euros (roughly 14 US dollars).

The study also examined whether different groups of bettors identified in the data had a different reaction to a losing day. The researchers analysed the association of individual characteristics, such as age and gender, with the next betting session after a losing day. They found that after a losing day, inexperienced bettors are likely to stay away from betting for a longer time than experienced ones.

"Despite women engaging in online horse race betting less frequently than men, we find no difference in how these two groups modify their behaviour after a losing day," Kainulainen points out.

The researchers found some differences in how different groups of bettors reacted to a losing day, but these differences were very small. The study suggests that all bettors, regardless of their individual characteristics, are likely to stay away from betting for longer after a losing day.

Scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have modelled the cradle-to-grave environmental impact of using different types of shopping bags and report that in cities like Singapore, single-use plastic bags (made from high-density polyethylene plastic) have a lower environmental footprint than single-use paper and multi-use cotton bags.

Reusable plastic bags made from polypropylene non-woven plastic were the most eco-friendly option, followed by single-use plastic bags.

The model revealed that cotton and kraft paper bags have relatively bigger environmental footprints due to their greater contribution to global warming and eco-toxicity potential in their production.

However, the NTU team stressed that their model applied specifically to Singapore and might be applicable in cities such as Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Dubai. Reusable and single-use plastic bags would be a comparatively better environmental option only in these cities, due to the model's focus on densely populated metropolitan areas that have waste management structures with similar end-of-life incineration facilities.

The findings were published in the scientific Journal of Cleaner Production in August 2020.

Assistant Professor Grzegorz Lisak, Director of Residues & Resource Reclamation Centre at the Nanyang Environment and Water Institute (NEWRI), who led the research, said: "Our main message is that re-usable plastic bags are the best option, provided that they are re-used many times - over 50 times to be precise. However, one surprising conclusion is that, in our model, in a single-use case, plastic bags, if treated properly afterwards, are less environmentally detrimental than the other types of bags in this study."

"It is essential to evaluate the implications case by case for dealing with plastic waste. In a well-structured closed metropolitan waste management system with incineration treatment, using plastic bags may be the best option that is currently available, provided that there is no significant leakage of waste into the environment."

To reach their conclusions, the team carried out a life cycle analysis of five types of bags to evaluate the environmental impacts associated with their production, distribution, transportation, waste collection, treatment, and end-of-life disposal.

The research team found that the global warming potential of a single-use kraft paper bag was the highest, over 80 times that of reusable plastic bags. Single-use plastic and reusable cotton bags (reused 50 times) were calculated to have over ten times the global warming potential of reusable plastic bags (reused 50 times).

To offset the emission equivalent to equal that of the creation of one single-use plastic bag, a reusable plastic bag would need to be reused four times.

The team also observed that the relative negative environmental impacts of cotton and kraft paper bags in the model are due to their production processes that consume immense amounts of water and natural resources. Hence, improving the production methods, optimizing resource usage, and following sustainable practices could in future favour the usage of bags made from cotton and paper.

Relevance to cities and their waste reduction goals

In the case of Singapore, the team recommends the usage of reusable plastic bags to the greatest extent possible to reduce consumption of single-use plastic bags. Reprocessing single-use plastic bags would be a good policy goal to cut down on their environmental impact.

Asst Prof Lisak said that based on 2018 statistics in Singapore, reducing the single-use plastic grocery bag consumption by half could prevent over 10 million kg-CO2 equivalent emissions in a year.

Moving forward, the team will be embarking on further studies connected to plastic waste management, waste plastic upgrading and the development of new products

Artificial intelligence has arrived in our everyday lives--from search engines to self-driving cars. This has to do with the enormous computing power that has become available in recent years. But new results from AI research now show that simpler, smaller neural networks can be used to solve certain tasks even better, more efficiently, and more reliably than ever before.

An international research team from TU Wien (Vienna), IST Austria and MIT (USA) has developed a new artificial intelligence system based on the brains of tiny animals, such as threadworms. This novel AI-system can control a vehicle with just a few artificial neurons. The team says that the system has decisive advantages over previous deep learning models: It copes much better with noisy input, and, because of its simplicity, its mode of operation can be explained in detail. It does not have to be regarded as a complex "black box", but it can be understood by humans. This new deep learning model has now been published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

Learning from nature

Similar to living brains, artificial neural networks consist of many individual cells. When a cell is active, it sends a signal to other cells. All signals received by the next cell are combined to decide whether this cell will become active as well. The way in which one cell influences the activity of the next determines the behavior of the system--these parameters are adjusted in an automatic learning process until the neural network can solve a specific task.

"For years, we have been investigating what we can learn from nature to improve deep learning," says Prof. Radu Grosu, head of the research group "Cyber-Physical Systems" at TU Wien. "The nematode C. elegans, for example, lives its life with an amazingly small number of neurons, and still shows interesting behavioral patterns. This is due to the efficient and harmonious way the nematode's nervous system processes information."

"Nature shows us that there is still lots of room for improvement," says Prof. Daniela Rus, director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). "Therefore, our goal was to massively reduce complexity and enhance interpretability of neural network models."

"Inspired by nature, we developed new mathematical models of neurons and synapses," says Prof. Thomas Henzinger, president of IST Austria.

"The processing of the signals within the individual cells follows different mathematical principles than previous deep learning models," says Dr. Ramin Hasani, postdoctoral associate at the Institute of Computer Engineering, TU Wien and MIT CSAIL. "Also, our networks are highly sparse--this means that not every cell is connected to every other cell. This also makes the network simpler."

Autonomous Lane Keeping

To test the new ideas, the team chose a particularly important test task: self-driving cars staying in their lane. The neural network receives camera images of the road as input and is to decide automatically whether to steer to the right or left.

"Today, deep learning models with many millions of parameters are often used for learning complex tasks such as autonomous driving," says Mathias Lechner, TU Wien alumnus and PhD student at IST Austria. "However, our new approach enables us to reduce the size of the networks by two orders of magnitude. Our systems only use 75,000 trainable parameters."

Alexander Amini, PhD student at MIT CSAIL explains that the new system consists of two parts: The camera input is first processed by a so-called convolutional neural network, which only perceives the visual data to extract structural features from incoming pixels. This network decides which parts of the camera image are interesting and important, and then passes signals to the crucial part of the network - a "control system" that then steers the vehicle.

Both subsystems are stacked together and are trained simultaneously. Many hours of traffic videos of human driving in the greater Boston area were collected, and are fed into the network, together with information on how to steer the car in any given situation--until the system has learned to automatically connect images with the appropriate steering direction and can independently handle new situations.

The control part of the system (called neural circuit policy, or NCP), which translates the data from the perception module into a steering command, only consists of 19 neurons. Mathias Lechner explains that NCPs are up to 3 orders of magnitude smaller than what would have been possible with previous state-of-the-art models.

Causality and Interpretability

The new deep learning model was tested on a real autonomous vehicle. "Our model allows us to investigate what the network focuses its attention on while driving. Our networks focus on very specific parts of the camera picture: The curbside and the horizon. This behavior is highly desirable, and it is unique among artificial intelligence systems," says Ramin Hasani. "Moreover, we saw that the role of every single cell at any driving decision can be identified. We can understand the function of individual cells and their behavior. Achieving this degree of interpretability is impossible for larger deep learning models."

Robustness

"To test how robust NCPs are compared to previous deep learning models, we perturbed the input images and evaluated how well the agents can deal with the noise," says Mathias Lechner. "While this became an insurmountable problem for other deep neural networks, our NCPs demonstrated strong resistance to input artifacts. This attribute is a direct consequence of the novel neural model and the architecture."

"Interpretability and robustness are the two major advantages of our new model," says Ramin Hasani. "But there is more: Using our new methods, we can also reduce training time and the possibility to implement AI in relatively simple systems. Our NCPs enable imitation learning in a wide range of possible applications, from automated work in warehouses to robot locomotion. The new findings open up important new perspectives for the AI community: The principles of computation in biological nervous systems can become a great resource for creating high-performance interpretable AI--as an alternative to the black-box machine learning systems we have used so far."

Around 15% of Parkinson's disease cases are related to a known genetic background, out of which mutations in the Parkin and PINK1 genes are among the most frequent ones. Thus, revealing cellular mechanisms which are altered by these mutations is crucial for the development of new therapeutic approaches. In this study, the researchers analysed the blood serum of 245 participants from two independent cohorts and showed that patients carrying mutations in the Parkin or PINK1 genes have an increased level of circulating mitochondrial DNA and interleukin 6 (IL6).

These results indicate that deficiency in Parkin or PINK1 proteins - caused by a mutation on the corresponding gene - leads to impaired mitophagy. This dysfunction at the mitochondria level causes the release of mitochondrial DNA, thereby triggering inflammation and the elevation of interleukin 6 levels in the blood. When reaching the brain, IL6 is then thought to play a role in neurodegeneration. "Our study suggests that treatment with anti-inflammatory drugs holds the potential to alleviate the course of Parkinson's disease - at least for patients with mutations in the Parkin or PINK1 gene," explains Prof. Anne Grünewald, head of the Molecular and Functional Neurobiology group at the LCSB and one of the two senior authors of the study.

By studying the difference between patients carrying the Parkin or PINK1 mutation either on one (heterozygous) or both chromosomes, the researchers also showed that monitoring the level of systemic inflammation in the blood might be used as a biomarker for these genetic forms of Parkinson's disease. Whereas patients with mutations in both chromosomes showed elevated levels of interleukin 6 compared to heterozygous patients, the latter still displayed a significant increase compared to healthy controls. "This tells us that heterozygous mutations also constitute a strong risk factor for the onset of Parkinson's disease," explains Prof. Grünewald. "Even before the disease has broken out in these heterozygous carriers, we might be able to detect it at an early stage by monitoring IL6 in the serum." Similarly, the study showed that the level of circulating mitochondrial DNA could serve as a marker of the progression of the disease for heterozygous Parkin/PINK1 mutation carriers.

Prof. Grünewald concludes: "Our findings have a high value for potential clinical applications, be it biomarkers in the patient's serum that detect the state of the disease or new therapeutic approaches targeting the innate immune response in Parkin/PINK1-associated Parkinson's disease."