Culture

Tokyo, September 21, 2020- The ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has substantially affected patients with dementia and their caregivers. Owing to the restrictive measures taken worldwide to block the spread of COVID-19 outbreaks (including the declaration of a state of emergency in Japan), patients with dementia and their caregivers have not been able to receive the usual support and care. Therefore, this is expected to lead to adverse effects on the patients and their caregivers, and many investigators have warned about the risks (1-3). In fact, many scheduled appointments for routine outpatients' examinations and care services have been canceled and postponed owing to the COVID-19 outbreak. When dementia outpatients came to our clinic for their postponed outpatient appointments after the state of emergency declaration was lifted, we found that some patients were afraid of COVID-19 infection whereas some were not. We noticed that patients with severe dementia tended to be less susceptible to COVID-19 than patients with mild dementia in the daily clinical setting. Based on the hypothesis that patients with severe dementia tend to be unaware of the COVID-19 outbreak and hence may be less depressed, we compared the rate of recognition of the COVID-19 outbreak and resultant depressive tendencies between patients with mild dementia and those with severe dementia.

In this study, patients with Alzheimer disease (AD) (4) are included in this study because the depressive tendency depends on the cause of dementia. A total of 126 consecutive outpatients with AD from the Memory Disorder Clinic at the Department of Geriatric Medicine, Tokyo Medical University, were enrolled in this study from May 25, on the day when the declaration of emergency was lifted, to June 30, 2020. In addition to the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) (5) and Geriatric Depression Scale - Short Version (GDS-S) (6) performed as routine psychological tests, the participants were asked the following 2 questions: "Do you know COVID-19?" and "Why are you wearing a face mask?". The patients were divided into the mild AD group (MMSE score ? 21, n = 51) and the moderate to severe AD group (MMSE score

An international research team has developed "electronic skin" sensors capable of mimicking the dynamic process of human motion. This work could help severely injured people, such as soldiers, regain the ability to control their movements, as well as contribute to the development of smart robotics, according to Huanyu "Larry" Cheng, Dorothy Quiggle Early Career Professor in the Penn State Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics.

Cheng and collaborating researchers based in China published their work in a recent issue of Nano Energy.

"The skin of the human hand is amazing -- that's what we tried to imitate," Cheng said. "How do we capture texture and force? What about the years of evolution that produced the impressive sensitivity of the fingertip? We're attempting to reproduce this biological and dynamic process to enable objects to behave similarly to the human hand."

The dual-mode sensor measures both the magnitude and load of movement, such as the effort of swinging a tennis racquet, as well as rate, duration and direction. The trick was to decouple this measurement and understand how the separate parameters influence each other.

For example, bouncing a tennis ball gently on a racquet requires different input than serving a ball to an opponent. Those same variables come into play when a person with a prosthetic arm needs to differentiate between handling an egg or carrying a watermelon.

"We can apply these sensors to help people capture the magnitude for pressing, bending and more," Cheng said. "We can also use these sensors on soft robotics to manipulate delicate objects, like catching a fish, or even in a disaster when they may need to crawl into irregular spaces and move debris."

The data is informed by synergy created between the piezoelectric and piezoresistive signals, according to Cheng. Piezoelectric signals measure outside force -- such as pressure -- to create electrical charge, while piezoresistive signals mitigate the current.?The dual mode sensors are sandwiched together, with two internal layers of pyramid-shaped microstructures facing one another. The microstructures measure magnitude and duration measurements from the piezoresistive layer and the dynamic loading rate and direction from the piezoelectric layer. This synergistic effect allows for a high sensitivity over a broad pressure and frequency range, meaning that researchers can precisely measure the force and flexibility needed to imitate specific movements.

"We combined the best of the best models and sensors to create something new," Cheng said.

PHILADELPHIA -- New research has uncovered the previously unknown presence of CD19 -- a B cell molecule targeted by chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell immunotherapy to treat leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma -- in brain cells that protect the blood brain barrier (BBB).

This discovery may potentially be the cause for neurotoxicity in patients undergoing CD19 directed CAR T cell immunotherapy, according to the research team led by Avery Posey, PhD, an assistant professor of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and Research Health Science Specialist at the Corporal Michael J. Crescenz VA Medical Center in Philadelphia, PA.

"Our work has revealed that there is CD19 expression in a subset of cells that are, one, not B cells, and two, potentially related to the neurotoxicity we observe in patients treated with CAR T cell therapy targeting CD19," Posey said. "The next question is, can we identify a better target for eliminating B cell related malignancies other than CD19, or can we engineer around this brain cell expression of CD19 and build a CAR T cell that makes decisions based on the type of cell it encounters--for instance, CAR T cells that kill the B cells they encounter, but spare the CD19 positive brain cells?"

As so often happens in scientific endeavors, the path to this discovery was made somewhat by chance. Kevin Parker, a PhD student at Stanford and co-author on the paper, was at home analyzing previously published single cell sequencing data sets in his spare time. He found CD19 expression in a data set of fetal brain samples that looked odd, because the accepted wisdom was that CD19 only existed in B cells. So his lab reached out to the pioneers of CAR T cell immunotherapy, Penn Medicine.

"I suggested we test this as a preclinical model. When we treated the mouse model with CAR T cells targeting the mouse version of CD19, we found what looks like the start of neurotoxicities," Posey said.

The team observed an increase in BBB permeability when mouse CD19 was targeted by CAR T cells, even in mice that lack B cells, but not when human CD19 was targeted as a control treatment (mice do not express human CD19).

"Even more interesting, this BBB permeability was more severe when the CAR T cells were fueled by a costimulatory protein called CD28 than when the CAR T cells used 4-1BB," Posey said "This difference in the severity of BBB permeability correlates with what we know about the clinical observations of CAR T cell-related neurotoxicities -- the frequency of patients experiencing high-grade neurotoxicity is lower for those that received the 4-1BB-based CAR T cells."

His team sought to investigate the higher incidence of neurotoxicity in CD19-directed immunotherapies, compared to treatments targeting other B cell proteins, such as CD20. Notably, CD19 CAR T cells are sensitive to even low levels of CD19 antigen density, emphasizing the importance of identifying any potential reservoir of CD19 other than B cells.

The researchers' discovery of CD19 molecules in the brain provides evidence that this increase in neurotoxicity is due to CD19-directed CAR T cell immunotherapies. Posey said, though, that generally this neurotoxicity is temporary and patients recover.

This research also highlights the potential utility of developing a comprehensive human single-cell atlas for clinical medicine. Sequencing is an unbiased, genome-wide measurement of gene expression that can capture even rare populations of cells. These rare cell types might otherwise be missed in measurements of bulk tissue due to their low frequency, but as this study demonstrates could be critically important in understanding the clinical effects of targeted therapy. While current CAR T cells recognize only a single antigen, future generations of CAR T cells may be able to discriminate between unique combinations of target antigens to improve their cell-type specificity. The researchers envision that a comprehensive database of gene expression across all human cell types will enable the precise identification of cell type-specific target antigens which can be used to design safe and effective cellular immunotherapies.

"That's what we think one of the biggest take-home messages is," Posey said. "The incredible usefulness of single cell atlas or single cell sequencing technology to determine whether a potential immunotherapy or drug target is going to be present somewhere in the body that we would not normally expect it based on conventional thought and whether this expression may lead to toxicity."

CD19 is thought to be a lineage-restricted molecule -- behaving in a functionally and structurally limited way. But this study shows that some small percentage of brain cells also express CD19.

"We would not have identified that through bulk sequencing, where we're looking at a population of cells versus a single cell type," Posey said. "It's only through single cell sequencing that we're able to identify that there's this very small percentage of cells in the brain that also contain this molecule, contrary to popular thought."

On 8 May 2020, the Institute of Agrifood Research and Technology (IRTA) reported the case of the first cat infected with SARS-CoV-2 in Spain. It was a 4-year-old cat called Negrito, who lived with a family affected by COVID-19, with one case of death. Coinciding with these facts, the animal presented severe respiratory difficulties and was taken to a veterinary hospital in Badalona (Barcelona), where it was diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Due to a terminal condition the hospital decided to do a humanitarian euthanasia. The necropsy, performed at the High Biosafety Level Laboratories of the Animal Health Research Center (CReSA) at IRTA, confirmed that Negrito suffered from feline hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and had no other lesions or symptoms compatible with a coronavirus infection. The RT-PCR test confirmed that the animal had become infected with SARS-CoV-2, but with a very low and residual viral load.

To date there have been few cases of feline SARS-CoV-2 infection worldwide, which is why researchers have deepened the case study and published it recently in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). They performed serological tests on the cat Negrito and another cat that also lived in the same home, Whisky, which did not show any signs of disease. The tests, carried out by the AIDS Research Institute (IrsiCaixa), show that the two cats had developed antibodies against SARS-CoV-2. "In both cases we have detected neutralizing antibodies, in other words, they have the ability to bind to the virus and block it," explains Julià Blanco, IGTP researcher at IrsiCaixa. He goes on to say "this is important because it shows us that the immune system of cats can deal with SARS-CoV-2 and, in these specific cases, protect them from developing symptoms".

Experimental studies currently being conducted show that cats, in addition to becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2, can transmit it to other nearby cats, but without any clinical signs. However, the first suspicions of researchers were that both Negrito and Whisky had been infected by their owners because they had not had contact with other cats. To check this, the team analyzed the genetic sequence of the virus that Negrito had and found that "it has a 99.9% similarity to the virus of the owner who died, this suggests that the cat became directly infected from family members", explains Marc Noguera-Julián, researcher at IrsiCaixa.

Given the number of people infected worldwide and the few reported cases of animals, experts continue to note that "pets play a negligible role in the epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 and, in particular, cats become very residually infected and there is no evidence of transmission of the virus to humans. This is a case of reverse zoonosis, in which cats are the side victims without the virus causing them health problems", states Júlia Vergara-Alert, researcher at IRTA-CReSA. So far, there has only been one reported episode in the Netherlands in which a farmer became infected through minks, which would be the first known potential case of COVID-19 zoonosis.

IRTA and the Council of Veterinary Associations of Catalonia, with the collaboration of the Veterinary Clinical Hospital of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona are studying whether pets can become infected with SARS-CoV-2

Following the Negrito case, in May the IRTA-CReSA coronavirus research team, in coordination with the Council of Colleges of Veterinarians of Catalonia and the Veterinary Clinical Hospital of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, started a study to assess how often cats, dogs and ferrets have become infected with SARS-CoV-2 from people in a family setting. The study is being carried out with the voluntary participation of veterinary clinics and hospitals in Catalonia and consists of taking samples of oropharyngeal and rectal swabs, as well as animal serum.

"We want to check if the case of Negrito and Whisky has been punctual or is repeated in more cases; in this way we will have more scientific information on how the most common pets can become infected with SARS-CoV-2 and to what degree", explains Joaquim Segalés, IRTA-CReSA researcher and professor at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). The professor also remarks that "so far, it is known that around the world there have been some cases of cats and dogs that have become infected through their owners, but these animals have not suffered a serious illness and there is no evidence that they have transmitted the virus to their owners".

Monday, September 21, 2020, CLEVELAND: A new Cleveland Clinic study has found that receiving the influenza vaccine does not increase a person's risk for contracting COVID-19 or worsen associated morbidity or mortality. Published in the Journal of Clinical and Translational Science, the study shows the flu vaccine is the single most important intervention to help stay healthy this fall and winter.

Seasonal flu activity is unpredictable, and otherwise healthy people are hospitalized due to serious respiratory infection each year. This year, it's even more important to receive the flu vaccination to help prevent a twindemic of flu and COVID-19.

In this new study, a team of researchers led by Joe Zein, M.D. - a pulmonologist at Cleveland Clinic - analyzed more than 13,000 patients tested for COVID-19 at Cleveland Clinic between early March and mid-April of this year.

Comparing those who had received unadjuvanted influenza vaccines in the fall or winter of 2019 (4,138 patients) against those who did not received the vaccine (9,082 patients) revealed that influenza vaccination was not associated with increased COVID-19 incidence or disease severity, including risk for hospitalization, admission to the intensive care unit or mortality.

"Our findings suggest that we should proceed as usual with our vaccination strategy for global influenza this flu season," said Dr. Zein. "Getting the annual flu vaccine remains the best safeguard against the influenza virus--both for yourself and the people around you."

Since much is still unknown about the possible outcomes of concurrent SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) and influenza infection--including disease pathology and burden to the healthcare system--researchers and clinicians believe that the population's adherence to widespread and early flu vaccination while researchers continue to collect data will help to mitigate the risk of simultaneous viral infections and epidemics/pandemics.

"We have already seen the stress that COVID-19 can put on our hospitals and resources," said Dr. Zein. "While we're not yet sure how flu season will affect COVID-19 susceptibility and infections, we strongly advise people to get their influenza vaccines, both for their individual health and the collective health of our care systems."

This study is the latest to utilize data from patients enrolled in Cleveland Clinic's COVID-19 Registry, which includes all individuals tested at Cleveland Clinic for the disease, not just those that test positive. Cleveland Clinic was one of the first organizations to develop a data registry and biobank for the emergent disease. Data from the registry has already been used in several landmark COVID-19 studies, including those that have led to the development of models that can predict a patient's likelihood of testing positive for COVID-19 and being hospitalized due to the disease.

By studying 488 public airports in the United States, University of Colorado Denver School of Public Affairs researcher Serena Kim, PhD, found that 20% of them have adopted solar photovoltaic (PV), commonly known as solar panels, over the last decade. Solar photovoltaic (PV) is the conversion of light into electricity using semiconducting materials that exhibit the photovoltaic effect. 

While studying institutional arrangements as a factor that contributes to airport solar PV deployment, Kim found that airports operated by general-purpose governments (cities, states, or counties) have deployed solar panels more than special-purpose governments (port or airport authorities) as of 2020. Kim discovered that airports involved in professional organizations are more likely to deploy solar panels, but this relationship is contingent on airport governance. Airport solar deployment increases by airports’ professional organization membership, but with a higher rate for special-purpose airports than general-purpose airports. 

According to Kim, airports provide an ideal venue for studying how institutional arrangements shape renewable energy deployment due to the notable differences between the general-purpose and special-purpose airports. The biggest difference between these two types of airports is how each selects its board members. More than 80% of general-purpose board members are elected, while only 7% of special-purpose airport board members are elected. 

“Airport board members, directors, and managers’ leadership, and their interactions with other airport professionals can promote renewable energy transitions at airports,” said Kim. 

Colorado Connection  

One of the airports studied was Denver International Airport (DIA, as state residents know it, although the official abbreviation is DEN). Since 2008, DIA has become one of the largest solar projects in the U.S., installing 42,614 solar panels on a total of 56 acres.   

According to airport officials interviewed for the study, DIA has been successful in rolling out solar energy because of support from the city government, airport leadership, and its electricity provider, Xcel Energy. Being at the forefront of on-site solar energy at airports, DIA has built an economically and environmentally sustainable energy management system. While reducing the airport’s carbon footprint by operating 10 megawatts (MW) solar facilities, DIA pays less than the average electricity cost for the energy generated from the solar arrays built after 2012. Excess electricity is sold back to the utility under the Xcel Solar Rewards program. All contracts go through the city council approval process, and the aviation department works closely with the city government’s sustainability department.  

“DIA’s solar energy project is an example of successful collaborative partnerships,” said Kim. “All solar arrays at DIA are developed by public-private partnerships. Private solar companies own and operate the solar systems, and DIA executes power purchase agreements with the private solar companies. Xcel Energy plays a key role in the partnership as they offer rebates to offset the construction costs, purchase excess energy, and retain renewable energy certificates.” 

Other airports involved in this study include Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, Tallahassee International Airport, and Orlando International Airport.  

Next Steps for Policymakers

According to Kim’s research findings, on-site solar deployment potentials are shaped by utilities’ engagement and interest in renewable energy development. Airport solar energy is more likely to appear in the service area of investor-owned utilities, which have greater resources and expertise to invest in renewable energy.  

“Accessing clean, reliable, and affordable energy is integral to resilient, sustainable, and equitable futures,” said Kim. “Policymakers who wish to facilitate on-site solar use should consider strategies for addressing resource and information gaps across investor-owned utilities, municipal utilities, and rural electric cooperatives.” 

Journal

Energy Policy

DOI

10.1016/j.enpol.2020.111536

In a paper published today in Nature Astronomy, researchers report the first ever clear images of nanojets -- bright thin lights that travel perpendicular to the magnetic structures in the solar atmosphere, called the corona -- in a process that reveals the existence of one of the potential coronal heating candidates: nanoflares.

In pursuit of understanding why the Sun's atmosphere is so much hotter than the surface, and to help differentiate between a host of theories about what causes this heating, researchers turn to NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) mission. IRIS was finely tuned with a high-resolution imager to zoom in on specific hard-to-see events on the Sun.

Nanoflares are small explosions on the Sun - but they are difficult to spot. They are very fast and tiny, meaning they are hard to pick out against the bright surface of the Sun. On April 3, 2014, during what's known as a coronal rain event when streams of cooled plasma fall from the corona to the Sun's surface looking almost like an enormous waterfall, researchers noticed bright jets appearing near the end of the event. These telltale flashes are nanojets -- heated plasma traveling so fast that they appear on images as bright thin lines seen within the magnetic loops on the Sun. Nanojets are considered a "smoking gun," key evidence of the presence of nanoflares. Each nanojet is believed to be initiated by a process known as magnetic reconnection where twisted magnetic fields explosively realign. One reconnection can set off another reconnection, creating an avalanche of nanojets in the corona of the Sun, a process that could create the energy that is heating the corona. In the visualization above, the Solar Dynamic Observatory gives us a full view of the Sun before zooming into IRIS's up close view of the nanojets, which briefly light up in the magnetic loops.

IRIS gathers its high resolution images by focusing in on a small portion of the Sun at a time. So observing specific events is a combination of educated guesswork and looking at the right place at the right time. Once the nanojets were identified against the backdrop of the coronal rain, researchers coordinated with NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and the Hinode observatory, a partnership among the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, ESA (European Space Agency), and NASA to get a complete view of the Sun, and confirm whether they were detecting nanojets, and assess their effects on the corona.

The researchers combined the many observations with advanced simulations to recreate the events they saw on the Sun. The models showed that the nanojets were a telltale signature of magnetic reconnection and nanoflares, contributing to coronal heating in the simulations. More studies will need to be done to establish the frequency of nanojets and nanoflares all over the Sun, and how much energy they contribute to heating the solar corona. Going forward, missions like Solar Orbiter and Parker Solar Probe can give more detail into the processes that heat the solar corona.

At the beginning of the month, 60 percent still restricted themselves in this regard. At the same time, the proportion of people concerned about the impact of the virus on their social relationships fell to 15 percent. "It becomes clear that for many people life is returning more strongly back to the usual pattern of everyday life", says Professor Dr. Dr. Andreas Hensel, president of the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment.

https://www.bfr.bund.de/cm/349/200915-bfr-corona-monitor-en.pdf

Nevertheless, the majority of people still consider an infection through proximity to other people to be probable. However, a clear difference can be observed between the age groups: While 78 percent of people under the age of 40 consider an infection via this pathway to be probable, this proportion is only 41 percent among those aged 60 and over. One reason for this may be that elderly people often have fewer social contacts and thus encounter considerably fewer people in their everyday lives than younger people.

In contrast, most of the legal regulations on dealing with other people in public still find broad approval, regardless of age. Both the mandatory use of masks and the mandatory distance are considered appropriate by around 90 percent of the respondents - and a similar number of people state that they implement these measures in their everyday lives.

The BfR continually adapts its FAQs on the topic of coronavirus to the current state of science:

https://www.bfr.bund.de/en/can_the_new_type_of_coronavirus_be_transmitted_via_food_and_objects_-244090.html

IIASA researchers have developed a novel measurement framework to track energy poverty that better aligns with the services people lack rather than capturing the mere absence of physical connections to a source of electricity. This alternative framework can aid better tracking of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 by virtue of its simplicity and sensitivity to the diversity in service conditions among the poor.

Despite significant efforts and progress made across the developing world to provide households with electricity, close to 800 million people, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, still have no access to electricity services. According to a new study published in the journal Progress in Energy, accurately measuring energy poverty requires distinguishing poor electricity supply conditions from service deprivations within the home. For instance, availability of power is a condition related to electricity supply, whereas whether a person enjoys a comfortable temperature level in their home depends on their ability to afford cooling equipment and its running costs. Tracking energy poverty in this way can help direct policy efforts towards energy suppliers and households, and thereby accelerate efforts to achieve the targets of SDG7: Ensuring universal access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all.

Currently, two indicators are recommended to track Target 7.1 - Indicator 7.1.1: Proportion of population with access to electricity, and Indicator 7.1.2: Proportion of population with primary reliance on clean fuels and technology. These binary indicators, while easy to communicate and quantify, mask several service shortcomings among those that have connections to electricity, which underestimates the challenge of eradicating energy poverty.

"Our main objective in this research was to try to design a better but simple framework for measuring energy poverty, and apply this to actual data from Ethiopia, India, and Rwanda to test how well it captures energy poverty in comparison to other multidimensional frameworks, such as the World Bank's Multi-Tier Framework (MTF)," explains Shonali Pachauri, acting director of the IIASA Transitions to New Technologies Program and a senior researcher in the Energy Program.

According to the authors, the World Bank MTF - while being a significant improvement over binary indicators - is overly complicated, and conflates electricity supply characteristics with household service conditions. The alternative framework the authors propose prunes the dimensions of energy poverty measures to those specified in the SDG 7 target and defines thresholds to mark fewer tiers. It also distinguishes electricity supply indicators from those that relate to household poverty. For instance, the authors propose to use appliance ownership as an indicator of households' access to energy services rather than electricity consumption, which could be misleading if caused by poor energy efficiency. The affordability indicator is also expanded to include appliance purchase costs in addition to the recurrent electricity costs. When applied to real data, the new framework suggests that affordability is even more of a constraint to gaining access to modern electric services for households in Ethiopia, India, and Rwanda.

"Making the normative foundations of measurement frameworks more explicit make it easier to communicate what they capture. Such frameworks also need to strike a balance between accuracy of measurement with simplification and conceptual clarity for application on a global scale. Further refinements of the alternative framework we propose, through applications to other nations, can help improve how we identify the most vulnerable and design and target policies to improve energy access for all," concludes Narasimha Rao a senior researcher in the IIASA Energy Program and a faculty member at the Yale School of the Environment.

The traditional rice-based diet of some east-Asian population has brought to a number of genomic adaptations that may contribute to mitigating the spread of diabetes and obesity. An international study led by the University of Bologna and published in the journal Evolutionary Applications has recently suggested this interesting hypothesis. Researchers analysed and compared the genomes of more than 2,000 subjects from 124 south-east-Asian populations.

"We suggest that it may be possible that some east-Asian populations, whose ancestors started eating rice on a daily basis at least 10,000 years ago, have evolved genomic adaptations that mitigate the harmful effects of high-glycaemic diets on metabolism", confirms Marco Sazzini, study coordinator and professor at the Department of Biology, Geology and Environmental Sciences of the University of Bologna. "Furthermore, these adaptations plausibly continue to play a pivotal role in protecting them from the negative effects that derive from major dietary alterations brought about by the globalisation and westernization of their lifestyles. These alterations dramatically increased their consumption of food rich in processed sugar and with a high glycaemic index".

RICE AND GLYCAEMIC INDEX

Among the so-called domesticated cereals, rice presents a high glycaemic index and is rich in carbohydrates. This means that once ingested and digested, it causes sugar in the blood to increase. If eaten regularly and in large quantities, rice may represent a potential risk factor for developing insulin resistance and related metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes.

However, if we compare east-Asian people having used rice as a staple food for over 10,000 years with those in the Indian sub-continent, we soon find out that the latter show higher rates of diabetes and obesity than east-Asians. Why are these two groups different?

A 10,000-YEAR-OLD DIET

Archaeology may provide a hint to answering that question. Archaeobotanical findings in some eastern regions of Asia show that wild rice had been part of the inhabitants' diets in the past starting 12,000 years ago. After rice domestication and the introduction of rice farming techniques, between 7,000 and 6,000 years ago, rice spread rapidly across Korea and Japan. In northern regions of the Indian sub-continent, an independent domestication process had started 4,000 years ago and brought to the selection of rice varieties presenting a lower glycaemic index if compared to east-Asian rice.

"Different rice varieties and a head start of millennia may have put populations in China, Korea, and Japan under a more pressing metabolic stress than that experienced by south Asian populations", explains Arianna Landini, first author of this study and a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. "This might have allowed them to evolve genomic adaptations that mitigate the risk of becoming ill with metabolic diseases linked with a high-sugar diet".

RICE AND GENOMIC ADAPTATIONS

To test such a hypothesis, researchers analysed the genome of more than 2,000 subjects from 124 east-Asian and south-Asian populations. Then, they compared the adaptive evolution observed in Chinese Han and Tujia ethnic groups, as well as in people of Korean and Japanese ancestry (with a long-standing tradition of rice-based diets) with that of people from regions of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Vietnam, and south-east Asia. Southeast Asian subjects were used as control groups because their adoption of cereal-based diets occurred many thousand years later.

"The genomic adaptations observed in control groups differ greatly from those of east Asian populations and are not related to metabolic stress due to a specific diet", says Claudia Ojeda-Granados, one of the authors and a research fellow at the University of Bologna. "Chinese Han and Tujia ethnic groups, as well as people of Korean and Japanese ancestry show instead similar metabolic genomic adaptations".

Some of the genetic modifications the researchers identified are associated with a lower BMI and a weaker risk of cardiovascular diseases thanks to a reduced conversion of carbohydrates into cholesterol and fatty acids. Some other adaptations favour a reduced insulin resistance as they negatively modulate the glucogenesis in the liver. Finally, some others stimulate the production of retinoic acid, which is a metabolite of vitamin A. Deficiency in this nutritional organic compound often causes health-issues in people eating a rice-based diet.

"Our results demonstrate once again how studying evolutionary history may successfully inform biomedical research, eventually leading to the identification of the mechanisms underlying the different susceptibility of human populations to different diseases", concludes Sazzini.

When veterinarian Cynthia Otto was in Manhattan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks helping support the search and rescue dogs, she heard rumors about the possible impact on the dogs' long-term health.

"I was at Ground Zero and I would hear people make comments like, 'Did you hear that half of the dogs that responded to the bombing in Oklahoma City died of X, Y, or Z?' Or they'd say dogs responding to 9/11 had died," she recalls. "It was really disconcerting."

It also underscored to her the importance of collecting rigorous data on the health of dogs deployed to disaster sites. An initiative that launched in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks did just that, and this week, 19 years later, Otto and colleagues' findings offer reassurance. Dogs that participated in search-and-rescue efforts following 9/11 lived a similar length of time, on average, compared to a control group of search-and-rescue dogs and outlived their breed-average life spans. There was also no discernable difference in the dogs' cause of death.

"Honestly this was not what we expected; it's surprising and wonderful," says Otto, director of the School of Veterinary Medicine's Working Dog Center, who shared the findings in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association.

While postmortem results showed that dogs that deployed after the 9/11 attacks had more particulate material in their lungs upon their death, it seems this exposure didn't cause serious problems for the animals in life. The most common cause of death were age-related conditions, such as arthritis and cancer, similar to the control group.

During and in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 response, Otto and colleagues reached out to handlers to recruit search-and-rescue dogs into a longitudinal study that would track their health, longevity, and cause of death. They recruited 95 dogs that had worked at the World Trade Center, Fresh Kills Landfill, or Pentagon disaster sites. As a control group, they also included in the study 55 search-and-rescue dogs that had not deployed to 9/11.

As part of being involved, the dogs received annual medical examinations, including chest X-rays and bloodwork. When the dogs died, the researchers paid for the handlers to have veterinarians collect samples of various organ tissues and send them for analysis at Michigan State University. Forty-four of the 9/11 dogs and 19 of the control group dogs underwent postmortems. For most of the other dogs in the study, the research team obtained information on cause of death from medical records or the handlers themselves.

While the team had expected to see respiratory problems in the exposed dogs--conditions that have been reported by human first responders to 9/11--they did not.

"We anticipated that the dogs would be the canary in the coal mine for the human first responders since dogs age faster than humans and didn't have any of the protective equipment during the response," Otto says. "But we didn't see a lot that was concerning."

In fact, the median age at death for 9/11 dogs was about the same as the control group: 12.8 compared to 12.7 years. The most common cause of death for the dogs that deployed was degenerative causes--typically euthanasia due to severe arthritis--followed closely by cancer, though the risk of cancer was about the same as in control group dogs.

Otto and her colleagues have ideas for why the foreign particulate matter found in some of the dog's lungs did not translate to ill health, though they emphasize that they're speculations, not yet based in data.

"For the pulmonary effects, it's somewhat easier to explain because dogs have a really good filtering system," Otto says. "Their lungs are different--they don't get asthma, for example--so it seems like there is something about their lungs that's more tolerant than in humans."

She notes that working dogs tend to be extremely physically fit compared to pet dogs, perhaps counteracting any ill effects of the deployment conditions on health. But working dog handlers and trainers can always do more to focus on fitness and conditioning, especially because doing so could slow the progression of arthritis, a disease which played a role in the death of many dogs in the study.

"We know when people stop moving, they gain weight and that puts them at a higher risk of arthritis, and arthritis makes it painful to move, so it's a vicious cycle," she says. "The same can be true of dogs."

The mind-body connection may also help explain the difference between humans and dogs and the longevity of the working dogs, Otto says, as dogs don't necessary worry and experience the same type of stress in the wake of a disaster.

"These dogs have an incredible relationship with their partners," Otto says. "They have a purpose and a job and the mental stimulation of training. My guess is that makes a difference, too."

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - A new paper suggests three solutions to addressing the backlog of non-urgent surgeries delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"As a surgeon, I understand why hospitals needed to delay many elective surgeries to ensure there was enough space and health care workers available to take care of the sickest patients with COVID-19," says Jessica Billig, M.D., a resident physician of plastic surgery at Michigan Medicine and lead author of the paper published in Annals of Surgery. "But we know that continuing to delay these surgeries could result in poor health outcomes for our patients. Which makes us ask, how can we start to work through the backlog of surgeries efficiently and swiftly?"

Billig and her co-author, Erika Sears, M.D., an assistant professor of plastic surgery at Michigan Medicine, provide three strategies to address the need for surgical care:

1. Continue to grow telemedicine. The pair notes that broadly adopting the way telehealth appointments were implemented for postoperative care in the past, and expanding it to some initial surgical consultations, could continue to grow the service and make medical appointments easier on the patient.

2. Expand operating room schedules and ambulatory surgery center capacity. They suggest operating outside of normal working hours, accommodating more outpatient surgical patients at ambulatory surgery center sites and performing minor procedures in the clinic setting to free up operating room space for more complex procedures.

3. Be transparent with patients about surgical billing. Billig and Sears note that many patients are experiencing unemployment and monetary strains due to the pandemic. They encourage surgeons, practices and health care systems to provide patients with access to transparent pricing. Surgeons should also consider location when they are performing a procedure. For example, if it was performed in a clinic, could it result in less out-of-pocket expenses for the patient?

"It should be noted, that if many of these surgeries continue to be put off, many of these health conditions will continue to progress and could cause the patient to become sicker," Billig says. "We hope these strategies offer our colleagues across the country some thoughts to consider so we can accommodate the patients that need our surgical care."

Oak Brook, IL - The October edition of SLAS Discovery features the cover article, "A Critical and Concise Review of Mass Spectrometry Applied to Imaging in Drug Discovery" by Richard J. A. Goodwin Ph.D. (AstraZeneca), Zoltan Takats Ph.D. (Imperial College London), and Josephine Bunch, Ph.D. (National Physical Laboratory).

Mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) has increasingly become a versatile methodology to support pharmaceutical research and development over the past decade. MSI efficiently provides data on drug delivery throughout the human body while simultaneously mapping endogenous metabolites, lipids and proteins on a molecular level, allowing researchers to make both pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic measurements at cellular resolution in tissue. The increasing development costs of new and emerging therapeutic modalities and the associated risks of late-stage program attrition are unique challenges associated with MSI, along with the increasing number of complex and challenging bioanalytical questions within drug discovery. The cover article by Goodwin, Takats and Bunch provides an updated concise review of the use of MSI for drug discovery, while critically considering what is required to immerse MSI into the greater pharmaceutical research and development industry. In addition to the cover article and 10 original research articles, the October issue features a technical brief entitled, "In Silico Selection of Gp120 ssDNA Aptamer to HIV-1."

Articles of Original Research include:

Direct Comparison of Label-Free Biosensor Binding Kinetics Obtained on the Biacore 8K and the Carterra LSA

A High-Throughput Cellular Screening Assay for Small-Molecule Inhibitors and Activators of Cytoplasmic Dynein-1-Based Cargo Transport

Z' Does Not Need to Be > 0.5

Controlling the Reproducibility of AC50 Estimation during Compound Profiling through Bayesian β-Expectation Tolerance Intervals

High-Throughput Fluorescence-Based Activity Assay for Arginase-1

Identification of Novel Carbonic Anhydrase IX Inhibitors Using High-Throughput Screening of Pooled Compound Libraries by DNA-Linked Inhibitor Antibody Assay (DIANA)

A Robust and Cost-Effective Luminescent-Based High-Throughput Assay for Fructose-1,6-Bisphosphate Aldolase A

A Pilot Screen of a Novel Peptide Hormone Library Identified Candidate GPR83 Ligands

Development of a High-Throughput Screening Assay to Identify Inhibitors of the Major M17-Leucyl Aminopeptidase from Trypanosoma cruzi Using RapidFire Mass Spectrometry

Two Forms of Tyrosyl-tRNA Synthetase from Pseudomonas aeruginosa: Characterization and Discovery of Inhibitory Compounds

For decades, scientists have urged policymakers to take prompt action to address climate change, but their calls have largely gone unanswered. Now, as wildfires ravage the west and hurricanes batter the Atlantic and Gulf coasts with greater intensity, a new study involving Washington University in St. Louis researchers finds consumers across the United States and in some European countries are ready to start paying for it now.

One reason why governments have been slow to react is because of the cost-participation dilemma. In order to be effective, a climate policy must raise the price of carbon and include most countries in the world, explained Michael Bechtel, associate professor of political science in Arts & Sciences. But that's a challenge because participation is voluntary, and raising energy costs -- no matter how necessary -- is never popular.

As policymakers debate the best way to fund climate action, Bechtel -- along with Kenneth Scheve at Yale University and Elisabeth van Lieshout at Stanford University -- wanted to better understand the public's perspective.

In a study published Sept. 21 in Nature Climate Change, they asked more than 10,000 people in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and France to consider four different methods of funding climate policies:

Should the prices start low and gradually increase over time?

Should prices start high and decrease over time as progress is made?

Should prices start low, increase over time and then come back down?

Or, would consumers prefer a constant-cost plan?

Policymakers and pundits have generally assumed that ramping up climate action and costs over time would be the most attractive approach as it would allow consumers to prepare and adjust their energy usage. Instead, they found the majority in all four countries preferred a simpler, constant-cost plan -- even if average household costs are high.

Policymakers take note: The constant-cost plan also significantly reduced opposition to climate action, as compared with the ramp-up plan.

According to Bechtel, understanding the public's preference for funding climate action is important because these costs would likely be passed on to the consumer.

"Carbon taxes are meant to change energy-intense production as well as consumption patterns, and they would be paid by businesses and consumers," Bechtel said. "An example is a fuel tax that would directly increase the price of gasoline. A second type of a carbon tax is an emissions tax, which would raise the price of industrial activities that emit greenhouse gases. But even with this type of activity, consumers will ultimately incur higher prices because the increased production costs will require raising the price of such emission-intense goods."

Researchers began by introducing the notion of an international agreement, which would entail certain average costs per month and household. Respondents were given the four different options of distributing the costs of implementing the agreement over time and asked to indicate which cost schedule they would select in a referendum given a certain cost level average -- low or high.

Across the four countries, 58% of respondents preferred the constant-cost plan, whereas only 12% preferred an increasing-cost plan.

Those who favored the constant-cost plan stressed the desire to simplify budgeting and plan for the future. It also encouraged people to reduce their energy usage over time. Even when average household costs were substantial -- adding up to 2% of GDP -- most respondents still preferred the certainty of the constant plan.

In comparison, those who preferred the ramp-up approach said this plan allowed people to gradually adjust to rising costs. Respondents also chose this option in the hope that delayed costs would leave less of a consumer impact because of wage increases, inflation, etc.

Essential to tackling climate change

Respondents who preferred higher costs up front emphasized the need to make investments now, which they said were essential to tackling climate change.

"Credible climate policies will have to raise the price of carbon, and the public are concerned about these costs even when they believe the science of climate change and generally want governments to address the issue," the researchers wrote.

"As policymakers seek to design policies that are transparent and meet meaningful emission reduction goals, our research indicates that constant-cost plans promise more support for climate action relative to ramping-up approaches.

"Moreover, due to the delay in large-scale policy responses to climate change, countries will likely have to pursue more progressive and costly climate action to limit the adverse effects of global warming. The drop in support due to higher costs associated with these more ambitious policy efforts may be at least partially mitigated by selecting a set of attractive design features such as the constant distribution of costs."

Progress appears challenging, but it is possible. The 2016 Paris Agreement created a global framework to address climate change with countries committing to work together to limit the global average temperature increase to 2°C or less. But it stopped short of prescribing which policy instruments countries could use to reach the collective goal.

"Countries have agreed that domestic mitigation measures that reduce greenhouse gas emissions are needed," Bechtel said. "This is the goal of carbon pricing: Incentivizing societies to produce less GHG emissions. There are several policy instruments that promise to get us closer to this goal. A carbon tax is one of these instruments, but countries can also use emission trading systems or emission reduction funds, for example. They could also rely on a combination of these policies."

HOUSTON - (Sept. 21, 2020) - A dose of artificial intelligence can speed the development of 3D-printed bioscaffolds that help injuries heal, according to researchers at Rice University.

A team led by computer scientist Lydia Kavraki of Rice's Brown School of Engineering used a machine learning approach to predict the quality of scaffold materials, given the printing parameters. The work also found that controlling print speed is critical in making high-quality implants.

Bioscaffolds developed by co-author and Rice bioengineer Antonios Mikos are bonelike structures that serve as placeholders for injured tissue. They are porous to support the growth of cells and blood vessels that turn into new tissue and ultimately replace the implant.

Mikos has been developing bioscaffolds, largely in concert with the Center for Engineering Complex Tissues, to improve techniques to heal craniofacial and musculoskeletal wounds. That work has progressed to include sophisticated 3D printing that can make a biocompatible implant custom-fit to the site of a wound.

That doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement. With the help of machine learning techniques, designing materials and developing processes to create implants can be faster and eliminate much trial and error.

"We were able to give feedback on which parameters are most likely to affect the quality of printing, so when they continue their experimentation, they can focus on some parameters and ignore the others," said Kavraki, a renowned authority on robotics, artificial intelligence and biomedicine and director of Rice's Ken Kennedy Institute.

The team reported its results in Tissue Engineering Part A.

The study identified print speed as the most important of five metrics the team measured, the others in descending order of importance being material composition, pressure, layering and spacing.

Mikos and his students had already considered bringing machine learning into the mix. The COVID-19 pandemic created a unique opportunity to pursue the project.

"This was a way to make great progress while many students and faculty were unable to get to the lab," Mikos said.

Kavraki said the researchers -- graduate students Anja Conev and Eleni Litsa in her lab and graduate student Marissa Perez and postdoctoral fellow Mani Diba in the Mikos lab, all co-authors of the paper -- took time at the start to establish an approach to a mass of data from a 2016 study on printing scaffolds with biodegradable poly(propylene fumarate), and then to figure out what more was needed to train the computer models.

"The students had to figure out how to talk to each other, and once they did, it was amazing how quickly they progressed," Kavraki said.

From start to finish, the COVID-19 window let them assemble data, develop models and get the results published within seven months, record time for a process that can often take years.

The team explored two modeling approaches. One was a classification method that predicted whether a given set of parameters would produce a "low" or "high" quality scaffold. The other was a regression-based approach that approximated the values of print-quality metrics to come to a result. Kavraki said both relied upon a "classical supervised learning technique" called random forest that builds multiple "decision trees" and "merges" them together to get a more accurate and stable prediction.

Ultimately, the collaboration could lead to better ways to quickly print a customized jawbone, kneecap or bit of cartilage on demand.

"A hugely important aspect is the potential to discover new things," Mikos said. "This line of research gives us not only the ability to optimize a system for which we have a number of variables -- which is very important -- but also the possibility to discover something totally new and unexpected. In my opinion, that's the real beauty of this work.

"It's a great example of convergence," he said. "We have a lot to learn from advances in computer science and artificial intelligence, and this study is a perfect example of how they will help us become more efficient."

"In the long run, labs should be able to understand which of their materials can give them different kinds of printed scaffolds, and in the very long run, even predict results for materials they have not tried," Kavraki said. "We don't have enough data to do that right now, but at some point we think we should be able to generate such models."

Kavraki noted The Welch Institute, recently established at Rice to enhance the university's already stellar reputation for advanced materials science, has great potential to expand such collaborations.

"Artificial intelligence has a role to play in new materials, so what the institute offers should be of interest to people on this campus," she said. "There are so many problems at the intersection of materials science and computing, and the more people we can get to work on them, the better."