Culture

NOAA/NASA's Suomi NPP satellite captured these series of images (made into an animated GIF) showing the winds changing direction on Sep. 06, 2020 when choking clouds of brown smoke began to billow and cascade into the Pacific Ocean. (Dates displayed in lower left hand corner.) By Sep. 10, the smoke cloud had traveled over 1,300 miles. The square miles of smoke in the image below totals 963,269. That estimate has been computed using the measurement tool within the NASA Worldview application.

A stunning 3.1 million acres have burned this year in California alone (per CAL fire), which is up from a total of 2.5 million acres as of Wednesday, Sep. 09, 2020. In addition, 805,314 acres have been lost in Oregon (State of Oregon Fires and Hotspots Dashboard, as of 9:30am EDT Sep. 11) and 500,000 acres (Northwest Interagency Coordination Center) in Washington state. Winds blowing through the west have been stoking fires and helping spread them quickly as evidenced in the growth of over a half million acres in less than two days. There have been 12 wildfire-related fatalities this year. Records have been shattered during this fire season and experts continue to blame drought, excessive heat and strong winds for this tragedy. Because the climate continues to change, scientists also believe that these types of fire events will not only continue but will worsen. Predictive meterologist for the National Interagency Fire Center, Nick Nausler, tweeted: "Multiple fires made 20-plus mile runs in 24 hours over the last few days in California, Oregon and Washington. Such distances traveled so quickly may not be all that rare in grassland fires. However, most of these fires are making massive runs in timber and burning tens of thousands of acres and in some cases 100,000-plus acres in one day. The sheer amount of fire on the landscape is surreal."

NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Worldview application provides the capability to interactively browse over 700 global, full-resolution satellite imagery layers and then download the underlying data. Many of the available imagery layers are updated within three hours of observation, essentially showing the entire Earth as it looks "right now." Actively burning fires, detected by thermal bands, are shown as red points. Image Courtesy: NASA Worldview, Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS). Caption: Lynn Jenner

An antibody test for the virus that causes COVID-19, developed by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin in collaboration with Houston Methodist and other institutions, is more accurate and can handle a much larger number of donor samples at lower overall cost than standard antibody tests currently in use. In the near term, the test can be used to accurately identify the best donors for convalescent plasma therapy and measure how well candidate vaccines and other therapies elicit an immune response.

Additional uses coming later that are likely to have the biggest societal impact, the researchers say, are to assess relative immunity in those previously infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and identify asymptomatic individuals with high levels of neutralizing antibodies against the virus.

The UT Austin research team, led by Jason Lavinder, a research associate in the Cockrell School of Engineering, and Greg Ippolito, assistant professor in the College of Natural Sciences and Dell Medical School, developed the new antibody test for SARS-CoV-2 and provided the viral antigens for this study via their UT Austin colleague and collaborator, associate professor Jason McLellan. Other UT Austin team members are Dalton Towers and Jimmy Gollihar. The work was published this week in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.

"This is potentially game-changing when it comes to serological testing for COVID-19 immunity," Lavinder said. "We can now use highly scalable, automated testing to examine antibody-based immunity to COVID-19 for hundreds of donors in a single run. With increased levels of automation, limited capacity for serological testing can be rapidly addressed using this approach."

The gold standard of COVID-19 antibody testing measures the amount of virus neutralizing (VN) antibodies circulating in the blood, because this closely correlates with immunity. However, this kind of antibody testing is not widely available because it's technically complex; requires days to set up, run and interpret; and needs to be performed in a biosafety level 3 laboratory.

The research team, therefore, looked to another type of test, called ELISA assays, that can be implemented and performed with relative ease in a high-throughput fashion and are widely available and extensively used in clinical labs across the world. The ELISA tests, or enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays, look at whether antibodies against specific SARS-CoV-2 proteins are present and produce a quantitative measure of those antibodies.

The goal of the study was to test the hypothesis that levels of antibodies that target two regions of the virus's spike protein--spike ectodomain (ECD) and receptor binding domain (RBD)--are correlated with virus neutralizing antibody levels, making these more accessible, easier-to-perform ELISA tests a surrogate marker to identify plasma donors with antibody levels above the recommended U.S. Food and Drug Administration threshold for convalescent plasma donation.

In collaboration with UT Austin, Penn State University and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, study authors James M. Musser, M.D., Ph.D., and Eric Salazar, M.D., Ph.D., physician scientists at Houston Methodist, used the new test to evaluate 2,814 blood samples used in an ongoing study of convalescent plasma therapy. Houston Methodist became the first academic medical center in the nation to transfuse plasma from recovered individuals into COVID-19 patients.

The researchers found that the ELISA tests had an 80% probability or greater of comparable antibody level to VN levels at or above the FDA-recommended levels for COVID-19 convalescent plasma. These results affirm that all three types of tests could potentially serve as a quantitative target for therapeutic and prophylactic treatments.

Ultimately, the study successfully concluded that anti-RBD or anti-ECD antibody levels can serve as a surrogate for VN levels to identify suitable plasma donors and that these alternate ELISA tests may provide critical information about COVID-19 immunity.

"This research required a perfect storm at the university, which included the extraordinary combination of a world-famous coronavirus structural biology lab, a nimble and passionate visiting army scientist, and the highest echelons of the university's administration who were committed to bringing our extensive research programs to bear on the COVID-19 crisis," Ippolito said.

AUSTIN, Texas — After months of social distancing mandates, people are leaning heavily on technology for a sense of social connection. But new research from The University of Texas at Austin suggests people too often opt to send email or text messages when a phone call is more likely to produce the feelings of connectedness they crave.

In the study, people chose to type because they believed a phone call would be more awkward — but they were wrong, said Amit Kumar, a McCombs School of Business assistant professor of marketing, co-author with Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago.

“People feel significantly more connected through voice-based media, but they have these fears about awkwardness that are pushing them towards text-based media,” Kumar said.

The research is online in advance in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

In one experiment, researchers asked 200 people to make predictions about what it would be like to reconnect with an old friend either via email or phone, and then they randomly assigned them to actually do it. Even though participants intuited that a phone call would make them feel more connected, they still said they would prefer to email because they expected calling would be too awkward.

But the phone call went much better than an email, researchers found.

“When it came to actual experience, people reported they did form a significantly stronger bond with their old friend on the phone versus email, and they did not feel more awkward,” Kumar said.

In another experiment, researchers randomly assigned strangers to connect either by texting during a live chat, talking over video chat, or talking using only audio. Participants had to ask and answer a series of personal questions such as, “Is there something you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?” or “Can you describe a time you cried in front of another person?”

Participants didn’t expect that the media through which they communicated would matter, and in this case they also predicted that they would feel just as connected to the stranger via text as by phone.

But the researchers found when they really interacted, people felt significantly more connected when they communicated by talking than by typing. And, again, they found it wasn’t more awkward to hear each other’s voices.

In fact, the voice itself — even without visual cues — seemed to be integral to bonding, the researchers found.

Confronting another myth about voice-based media, researchers timed participants reconnecting with their old friend. They found the call took about the same amount of time as reading and responding to email.

The researchers said the results both reveal and challenge people’s assumptions about communication media at a time when managing relationships via technology is especially important, Kumar said. “We’re being asked to maintain physical distance, but we still need these social ties for our well-being — even for our health.”

For more information about this research, read the McCombs Big Ideas feature story or watch the video interview.

Journal

Journal of Experimental Psychology

A new study out this week during the Global Week for Action on non-communicable diseases (NCDs) highlights that global public health regulation intended to tackle unhealthy diets, a key risk factor for NCDs, is being consistently opposed by the food and drinks lobby.

NCDs, such as heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, account for over 70% for global death and disability but failure to implement co-ordinated and targeted action has led to a growing problem – evidenced through the current obesity crisis facing much of the world.

The new research, from health policy analysts at Bath in collaboration with researchers from the universities of Edinburgh and São Paulo, and the World Public Health Nutrition Association, examined all food industry responses to consultations held by the World Health Organization (WHO) on NCD policy and governance between September 2015 and September 2018.

By evaluating responses across five separate consultations run by the WHO throughout this period, the work shows that, despite a rhetoric of support for public health, food industry groups consistently oppose effective regulations such as taxes and marketing restrictions, and advocate for weaker voluntary and partnership approaches instead.

Lobby groups also challenged established public health evidence about tackling NCDs. For example, the International Council of Beverages Associations which represents the soft drinks industry questioned the well-established link between sugar-sweetened beverages and obesity suggesting:

‘The overall weight of the scientific evidence on sugar and/or sugar-sweetened beverages show that they do not have a unique effect on body weight beyond their contribution to total calorie intake.’

In addition, the lobby group inaccurately argued that the world’s leading public health agency was not in a position to advise on health taxes:

‘Offering such policy advice in a field – economics and fiscal policy – far from WHO’s expertise is not in our opinion a prudent course of action.’

In fact, argue the researchers, the WHO includes among its staff many economists and the World Bank also promotes the use of health taxes.

The researchers suggest that the arguments used are similar to those deployed by the tobacco industry when the WHO started to take stronger action to regulate cigarettes in the early 2000s. These included claiming that regulation would not work or was not needed, and questioning the science and evidence underlying policies such as sugar-sweetened beverage taxation.

Recognising that good health is essential to development, the UN's landmark Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include a target to promote health and reduce premature mortality from NCDs by one third by 2030 (SDG 3). The COVID-19 pandemic, which affects people living with NCDs more severely, has shown how important this is.

Yet, the researchers highlight a possible tension between this goal, to improve health, and another, SDG 17, which promotes public-private partnerships. They document how food industry groups use the latter to promote industry involvement in policymaking, which for many is seen to be undermining attempts to improve health. A number of groups used SDG 17 to oppose a tool developed by the WHO to help member states protect nutrition programmes against conflicts of interest, arguing that such limitations on engagement with the food industry would not be coherent with the partnership aim promoted by the goal.

Lead author, Kathrin Lauber from the Tobacco Control Research Group at the University of Bath explains: “What happens at the WHO, and what doesn’t happen, is important to all of us. The agency’s guidelines can provide countries with a mandate to introduce crucial public health protections, which is why we see food and drink lobby groups pushing to keep the policy recommendations weak. Moreover, positioning collaboration with the commercial sector as a default risks impeding not only the work of the WHO as the UN’s key health agency, but also that of countries across the world working to reduce the burden of NCDs.”

Lucy Westerman, Policy and Campaigns Manager, NCD Alliance said: “As one of the many civil society advocates who engaged tirelessly in these same nutrition and noncommunicable disease (NCD) related WHO consultations and processes between 2015-2018, and who witnessed engagement of industry in some of these processes and related negotiations and outcomes, this analysis is extremely welcome and enlightening. The researchers' analysis illuminates but one of many ways in which such unhealthy commodity industries seek to dilute global health policy undermining efforts to ensure all people have access to healthy, nutritious diets. If we are to realise nutrition, NCD and Sustainable Development Goal targets and health for all, these industries cannot be allowed to dilute public health policy.”

This study was funded by the Roger and Sue Whorrod PhD Studentship. Professor Anna Gilmore and Kathrin Lauber are members of SPECTRUM, a UK Prevention Research Partnership (UKPRP) Consortium.

'Non-communicable disease governance in the era of the sustainable development goals: a qualitative analysis of food industry framing in WHO consultations' is published in the journal Globalization and Health https://globalizationandhealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12992-020-00611-1.

Journal

Globalization and Health

DOI

10.1186/s12992-020-00611-1

New Haven, Conn. -- The universe's funhouse mirrors are revealing a difference between how dark matter behaves in theory and how it appears to act in reality.

Dark matter is the invisible glue that keeps stars bound together inside a galaxy. It makes up most of a galaxy's mass and creates an invisible scaffold that tethers galaxies to form clusters.

Dark matter does not emit, absorb, or reflect light. It does not interact with any known particles. Its presence is known only through its gravitational pull on visible matter in space.

Although dark matter is lightly smeared throughout the universe, it is heaped in regions of space called galaxy clusters. Each of these massive clusters, held together by gravity, is made up of about 1,000 individual galaxies -- each of which carries its own dollop of dark matter.

In a new study in the journal Science, Yale astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan and a team of international researchers analyzed Hubble Space Telescope images from several massive galaxy clusters and found that the smaller dollops of dark matter associated with cluster galaxies were significantly more concentrated than predicted by theorists.

The finding implies there may be a missing ingredient in scientists' understanding of dark matter.

"There's a feature of the real universe that we are simply not capturing in our current theoretical models," said Natarajan, a senior author of the study and a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale. "This could signal a gap in our current understanding of the nature of dark matter and its properties, as this exquisite data has permitted us to probe the detailed distribution of dark matter on the smallest scales."

Astronomers are able to "map" the distribution of dark matter within galaxy clusters via the bending of light the galaxies produce -- a concept called gravitational lensing. Like a funhouse mirror, gravitational lensing distorts the shapes of background galaxies that appear in telescope images of cluster galaxies. The higher the concentration of dark matter in a cluster, the more dramatic the observed lensing effects.

The researchers used images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, coupled with spectroscopy from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, to produce high-fidelity dark-matter maps.

A 3D view of the data showed the presence of dark matter hills,
mounds, and valleys. From this perspective the mapped dark matter looks like a mountain range, with peaked regions. The peaks are the dollops of dark matter associated with individual cluster galaxies.

The especially high quality of the study's data allowed the researchers to test whether these dark matter landscapes matched theory-based computer simulations of galaxy clusters with similar masses, located at roughly the same distances.

What they discovered was that the simulations did not show any of the same level of dark-matter concentration on the smallest scales -- the scales associated with individual cluster galaxies.

"To me personally, detecting a gnawing gap -- a factor of 10 discrepancy in this case -- between an observation and theoretical prediction is very exciting," Natarajan said. "A key goal of my research has been testing theoretical models with the improving quality of data to find these gaps. It's these kinds of gaps and anomalies that have often revealed that either we were missing something in the current theory, or it points the way to a
brand-new model, which will have more explanatory power."

Natarajan has spent more than a decade confronting theoretical models of dark matter with data from gravitational lensing. "The quality of data and the sophistication of models have only now converged to permit stress testing of the cold dark matter paradigm, and it has revealed a crack," she said.

Males and females share the vast majority of their genomes. Only a sprinkling of genes, located on the so-called X and Y sex chromosomes, differ between the sexes. Nevertheless, the activities of our genes--their expression in cells and tissues--generate profound distinctions between males and females.

Not only do the sexes differ in outward appearance, their differentially expressed genes strongly affect the risk, incidence, prevalence, severity and age-of-onset of many diseases, including cancer, autoimmune disorders, cardiovascular disease and neurological afflictions.

Researchers have observed sex-associated differences in gene expression across a range of tissues including liver, heart, and brain. Nevertheless, such tissue-specific sex differences remain poorly understood. Most traits that display variance between males and females appear to result from differences in the expression of autosomal genes common to both sexes, rather than through expression of sex chromosome genes or sex hormones.

A better understanding of these sex-associated disparities in the behavior of our genes could lead to improved diagnoses and treatments for a range of human illnesses.

In a new paper in the PERSPECTIVES section of the journal Science, Melissa Wilson reviews current research into patterns of sex differences in gene expression across the genome, and highlights sampling biases in the human populations included in such studies.

"One of the most striking things about this comprehensive study of sex differences," Wilson said, "is that while aggregate differences span the genome and contribute to biases in human health, each individual gene varies tremendously between people."

Wilson is a researcher in the Biodesign Center for Mechanisms in Evolution, the Center for Evolution and Medicine, and ASU's School of Life Sciences.

A decade ago, an ambitious undertaking, known as the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) consortium began to investigate the effects DNA variation on gene expression across the range of human tissues. Recent findings, appearing in the Science issue under review, indicate that sex-linked disparities in gene expression are far more pervasive than once assumed, with more than a third of all genes displaying sex-biased expression in at least one tissue. (The new research highlighted in Wilson's PERSPECTIVES piece describes gene regulatory differences between the sexes in every tissue under study.)

Sex-linked differences in gene expression are shared across mammals, though their relative roles in disease susceptibility remain speculative. Natural selection likely guided the development of many of these attributes. For example, the rise of placental mammals some 90 million years ago may have led to differences in immune function between males and females.

Such sex-based distinctions arising in the distant past have left their imprint on current mammals, including humans, expressed in higher rates of autoimmune disorders in females and increased cancer rates in males.

Despite their critical importance for understanding disease prevalence and severity, sex differences in gene expression have only recently received serious attention in the research community. Wilson and others suggest that much historical genetic research, using primarily white male subjects in mid-life, have yielded an incomplete picture.

Such studies often fail to account for sex differences in the design and analysis of experiments, rendering a distorted view of sex-based disease variance, often leading to one-size-fits-all approaches to diagnosis and treatment. The authors therefore advise researchers to be more careful about generalizations based on existing databases of genetic information, including GTEx.

A more holistic approach is emerging, as researchers investigate the full panoply of effects related to male and female gene expression across a broader range of human variation.

According to the Global Hygiene Council's (GHC) public health experts, following a risk-based approach to home hygiene is essential to help curb the growing threat of antibiotic resistance.

It is estimated that rates of resistance to commonly-used antibiotics could exceed 40-60% in some countries by 2030. With AMR set to claim the lives of 10 million by 2050 if no action is taken, the GHC's experts are calling for a review of hygiene practices in homes and everyday life to ensure that they are effective and appropriate to the urgent public health issues we currently face, such as AMR and COVID-19.

In a new Position Paper developed by the GHC and published in the latest edition of the American Journal of Infection Control, the experts set out the evidence showing that better hygiene in our homes and everyday lives plays an essential part in tackling antibiotic resistance. Good hygiene contributes to the fight against AMR in two ways, by preventing infection, thereby reducing the need for antibiotic prescribing and preventing person to person spread of infections which are antibiotic resistant.

The paper reviews evidence that to minimize the spread of infections in home and community settings, a more focused approach to hygiene based on risk assessment is needed. For example, removing infection-spreading germs from high-risk surfaces and hands at critical times, such as when preparing food and using the toilet, has been proven to minimise the spread of infections from person to person. One intervention study demonstrates that improved hand hygiene amongst a group of children in a day centre can reduce the need for antibiotic use for common respiratory infections by 30%.

As Professor Sally Bloomfield, public health expert and contributor to the paper, explains; "Instead of deep-cleaning our homes, we urge everyone to maintain this evidence-based Targeted Hygiene approach in our homes and everyday lives, focusing on the times and places harmful microbes are most likely to spread, to not only help contain the spread of coronavirus now but ongoing to help tackle AMR."

To coincide with the publication of the Paper, the GHC has launched a Manifesto calling upon national and international policy makers, health agencies and healthcare professionals to further recognise the importance of hygiene in the home and everyday life settings and acknowledge the following:

1/ National AMR committees, responsible for implementing national AMR plans, should recognise that improved hand and surface hygiene in the home and community are key to minimise the spread of infections and as a consequence the consumption of antibiotics, which will then help in the fight against AMR. To achieve this, recommendations for improved hygiene in the wider community should be included in global AMR action plans by 2022 and in all national plans by 2025.

2/ IPC advice, guidance and education for HCPs on hand and surface hygiene and its relation to AMR should not be limited to healthcare settings, but also include recommendations to influence the wider community with immediate effect.

3/ Relevant medical associations should ensure messaging around home and community hygiene is cascaded to members through amending on-going and existing AMR training and education.

With evidence to show that home and community hygiene urgently needs to be taken more seriously, it is time for the global community to collaborate and recognise that reducing the need for antibiotic prescribing and the circulation of AMR strains in healthcare settings cannot be achieved without also reducing the circulation of infections and AMR strains in the community.

A new comprehensive analysis on the effect of Mozart's music on epilepsy has confirmed that listening to his piano music can reduce the frequency of epilepsy attacks. The results of this comprehensive meta-analysis (a study of studies), which may overturn current scepticism about the effect, are presented at the ECNP congress after recent publication in a peer-reviewed journal*.

The idea that listening to Mozart may have beneficial effects on mental health arose from early findings in the 1990s. There have been several studies since, but many involved small numbers of people, or have been of variable quality, leading to mixed evidence overall. This has meant that the "Mozart Effect" has been treated with some scepticism by many clinicians. Now two Italian Researchers, Dr Gianluca Sesso and Dr Federico Sicca from the University of Pisa have conducted a systematic review of works related to the effect of Mozart's music on epilepsy.

Working according to accepted standard methods for analysing clinical treatment, they looked at 147 published research articles, which they then evaluated according to such things are relevance and quality of the research. This allowed them to select 12 pieces of research which they gathered into 9 separate groups, representing the best available science on the effect of Mozart's music on epilepsy.

They found that listening to Mozart, especially on a daily basis, led to a significant reduction in epileptic seizures, and also to a reduced frequency of abnormal brain activities in epileptic patients (called interictal epileptiform discharges, which are commonly seen in epileptic patients). These effects occurred after a single listening session and were maintained after a prolonged period of treatment.

Gianluca Sesso said "This isn't the first such review of the effect of Mozart's music on epilepsy, but there has been a flow of new research in the last few years, so it was time to stand back and look at the overall picture. The design of the studies varies, for example some people look at a single listening session, others at daily listening sessions, so it's not easy to form a conclusion.

Epilepsy is surprisingly common, affecting just under 1 person in a hundred worldwide. This means that it has significant social and personal costs. Mostly it's treated by drugs, but these drugs don't work in around 30% of patients, so we need to be open to other therapies: the important thing is that these therapies can be tested and shown to work, and this is what we have shown here".

The meta-analysis indicates that a period of listening to Mozart can give an average reduction in epileptic seizures ranging from between 31% to 66%, but this varies from person to person and according to the music stimulus used. The original studies on the Mozart Effect used the sonata for 2 pianos, K448, and this has remained the music most used in studies. The K545 piano sonata has also been shown to have an effect.

Dr Sesso said "All cultures have music, so it obviously fulfils some psychological need. The mechanisms of the Mozart Effect are poorly understood. Obviously other music may have similar effects, but it may be that Mozart's sonatas have distinctive rhythmic structures which are particularly suited to working on epilepsy. This may involve several brain systems, but this would need to be proven.

This is a review of research, and not original research. One thing it shows is that we need more consistent studies into the effect of music on the mind"

Commenting, Dr Vesta Steibliene, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, and member of the ECNP Abstract and Poster Committee said:

"There is growing interest in non-invasive brain stimulation techniques in the treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders. This review revealed that Mozart music could be an effective non-invasive method of neurostimulation, reducing the frequency of epileptic seizures, even in hard to treat patients. However, in order to use this method in clinical settings, the exact mechanism of the Mozart music effect on the brain regions should be better understood".

Dr Steibliene was not involved in this work, this is an independent comment.

For the first time doctors have shown that measuring changes in 24-hour heart rate can reliably indicate whether or not someone is depressed. In practical terms, this may give clinicians an objective "early warning" of potential depression, as well as a rapid indication whether or not treatment is working, so opening the way to more rapid and responsive treatment. Presenting results of this pilot study at the ECNP virtual congress, lead researcher, Dr Carmen Schiweck (Goethe University, Frankfurt) said "Put simply, our pilot study suggests that by just measuring your heart rate for 24 hours, we can tell with 90% accuracy if a person is currently depressed or not".

Scientists have known that heart rate is linked to depression, but until now they have been unable to understand exactly how one is related to the other. In part this is because while heart rates can fluctuate quickly, depression both arrives and leaves over a longer period, with most treatments taking months to take effect. This makes it difficult to see whether or not changes in one's depressive state might be related to heart rate.

"Two innovative elements in this study were the continuous registration of heart rate for several days and nights, and the use of the new antidepressant ketamine, which can lift depression more or less instantly. This allowed us to see that average resting heart rate may change quite suddenly to reflect the change in mood", said Carmen Schiweck.

Ketamine has a history as both an anaesthetic and a party drug (a drug of abuse). However in December last year it was licenced to treat major depression in Europe, after having been introduced in the USA a few months earlier. Traditional antidepressants can take weeks to show an effect, in contrast ketamine is rapid acting, with results often being seen in minutes.

As Carmen Schiweck said "We knew that something was going on to link heart rate to psychiatric disorders, but we didn't know what it was, and whether it would have any clinical relevance. In the past researchers had shown that depressed patients had consistently higher heart rates and lower heart rate variability, but because of the time it takes to treat depression it had been difficult to follow up and relate any improvement to heart rate. But when we realized that ketamine leads to a rapid improvement in mood, we knew that we might be able to use it to understand the link between depression and heart rate".

Dr Schiweck performed this work in the Mind Body Research group at KU Leuven, Belgium, with Dr Stephan Claes as the principal investigator. The team worked with a small sample of 16 patients with Major Depressive Disorder, none of who had responded to normal treatment, and 16 healthy controls. They measured their heartrates for 4 days and 3 nights, and then the volunteers with depression were given either ketamine treatment or a placebo.

"We found that those with depression had both a higher baseline heart rate, and a lower heart rate variation, as we expected. On average we saw that depressed patients had a heart rate which was roughly 10 to 15 beats per minutes higher than in controls. After treatment, we again measured the heart rates and found that both the rate and the heartrate fluctuation of the previously depressed patients had changed to be closer to those found in the controls".

The most striking finding was that the scientists were able to use 24-hour heart rate as a "biomarker" for depression. Heart rates were measured using a wearable mini-ECG. The data was fed to an Artificial Intelligence programme, which was able to classify nearly all controls and patients correctly as being depressed or healthy.

"Normally heart rates are higher during the day and lower during the night. Interestingly, it seems that the drop in heart rate during the night is impaired in depression. This seems to be a way of identifying patients who are at risk to develop depression or to relapse." said Carmen Schiweck.

The team also found that patients with a higher resting heart rate responded better to the treatment with Ketamine, which may help identify which patients are likely to respond to which treatment.

Carmen Schiweck said "We need to remember that this is a small proof-of-concept study: 6 of our of our 16 initial patients responded to treatment with at least a 30% reduction on the Hamilton Rating scale for depression, so we need to repeat the work with a larger, anti-depressant free sample. Our next step is to follow up depressed patients and patients who are in remission, to confirm that the changes we see can be used as an early warning system".

Commenting, Professor Brenda Penninx of the Department of Psychiatry at Amsterdam University Medical Centre, said:

"This is an innovative proof-of-concept study. My own group had previously studied short-term heart rate variability in over a thousand depressed patients and controls, and we did not detect a consistent differentiation, and found antidepressants to have more impact than depression status itself. However, this study monitored heart rate variability in the ambulatory setting for several days and nights, which gives unique night and day information on the autonomic nervous system. It needs to be examined whether these interesting findings hold in larger, more diverse treatment settings".

Professor Penninx was not involved in this work, this is an independent comment.

Recent protests across the United States and the world have put a magnifying glass on issues of diversity and equity. A new study explores the ways in which these issues go all the way to the top of the corporate ladder.

In "At the Table but Can't Break Through the Glass Ceiling," led by the University of Delaware's Laura Field, found that even when corporate boards include directors who are women and/or racial minorities, these diverse directors are significantly less likely to serve in positions of leadership. This is despite diverse directors being more likely to possess stronger qualifications.

"While specialized skills such as prior leadership or finance experience increase the likelihood of appointment, that likelihood is reduced for diverse directors," wrote Field, who is Donald J. Puglisi Professor of Finance at UD's Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, and her coauthors, the University of South Carolina's Matthew E. Souther and the University of Missouri at Columbia's Adam S. Yore.

In a question-and-answer interview, Field provided more information on these results. She also discusses why this inequity could be occurring and how it could be solved.

Can you talk more about the data that your team found?

Prior research has shown that women and minorities are underrepresented in corporate boards, and we've seen increasing calls from institutional investors and regulators for firms to diversify their boards. U.S. firms seem to be responding to these calls for greater board diversity: The percentage of female and minority directors has increased substantially over the past 20 years. In our paper, we examined the extent to which female and minority (diverse) directors served in board leadership roles, as chairman of the board, lead director or as chairman of one of the four major committees (audit, compensation, governance and nominating).

We studied a large sample of directors on U.S. corporate boards over the period from 2006 to 2017. Our sample was extensive, including 126,044 director-firm-year observations, which represented 19,686 individual directors serving at 2,254 unique firms. We found that diverse directors were highly qualified; they had a greater number of professional credentials, they had more extensive outside board and other firm committee experience and they came from larger director networks than their white male counterparts. Nonetheless, we found that women and minority directors were significantly less likely to be appointed to board leadership roles. In each year of our sample period, female and minority directors were less likely to serve in leadership roles, while white males were more likely to serve as board leaders.

When we looked at how specific experience increases the likelihood of appointment to a leadership role, we found that diverse directors were at a disadvantage. For example, while a white male director with prior chairman/lead director experience was 10.5% more likely to be appointed as chairman/lead director, a diverse director with the same experience was only 6.1% more likely to be chosen. Regardless of the experience measure we considered, diverse directors were less likely to serve in leadership roles than their white male counterparts.

Why might this be happening?

There are several possible explanations for why diverse directors are less likely to serve in board leadership roles. As previously discussed, qualifications or experience do not explain the results: Diverse directors are generally as qualified as non-diverse directors. There are several other possible explanations for why diverse directors may not serve in board leadership roles in the same proportion as white males:

Given the recent focus on board diversity, diverse directors may choose to serve on more boards rather than commit substantial resources to serving in leadership positions on fewer boards.

Diverse directors may not choose to serve in board leadership positions because they are risk-averse or because they live farther from the firm.

Diverse directors may not be effective in board leadership roles.

We thoroughly examined each possible explanation and found no evidence to support any of them. In terms of the effectiveness of diverse directors, we found that the quality of financial reporting was higher with a diverse chair on the audit committee, the sensitivity of CEO turnover to performance was similar for boards with or without a diverse non-executive chairman or lead director, and abnormal CEO pay was similar for boards with or without a diverse chair on the compensation committee. We also examined shareholder voting, and we found that diverse directors receive significantly higher shareholder voting support than do their non-diverse counterparts, suggesting that shareholders view them as effective.

In sum, our evidence points to the conclusions that diverse directors possess at least the same professional skills as their peers and, when serving in leadership roles, diverse directors perform their board duties at least as well as their non-diverse counterparts. Moreover, we found no evidence to suggest that diverse directors avoid serving in board leadership roles. Thus, we posit that biases may at least partially explain the leadership gap we observed for diverse directors.

Does your research team have any suggestions on how to remedy this problem?

To identify possible intermediations to mitigate the diversity leadership gap, we considered three interventions suggested by prior literature to enhance board diversity:

Increasing the proportion of diverse directors on the board

Adopting a diversity policy in director nominations explicitly considering gender and race

Including a diverse director on the nominating committee

We found that firms adopting a diversity policy indicating that they consider race and gender in their board nomination policy were more likely to have diverse directors serving in board leadership roles, as were firms with a diverse director on the nominating committee.

However, our results suggest that merely increasing diverse representation on the board will not mitigate the leadership gap. Thus, our research suggests that if firms wish to mitigate the diversity leadership gap, they should make conscious efforts to do so, by publicly acknowledging their commitment to diversity and by including diverse directors on the board's nominating committee.

Why is this research unique and significant?

Our paper raises important questions about board inequity and lends justification to several recent public concerns on the issue. While most concerns raised by advocates have focused primarily on board composition, we point to evidence of inequity even after these directors have been elected to the board.

September 11, 2020

PHILADELPHIA -- Penn Medicine researchers have found that middle-aged individuals -- those born in the late 1960s and the 1970s -- may be in a perpetual state of H3N2 influenza virus susceptibility because their antibodies bind to H3N2 viruses but fail to prevent infections, according to a new study led by Scott Hensley, PhD, an associate professor of Microbiology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The paper was published today in Nature Communications.

"We found that different aged individuals have different H3N2 flu virus antibody specificities," Hensley said. "Our studies show that early childhood infections can leave lifelong immunological imprints that affect how individuals respond to antigenically distinct viral strains later in life."

Most humans are infected with influenza viruses by three to four years of age, and these initial childhood infections can elicit strong, long lasting memory immune responses. H3N2 influenza viruses began circulating in humans in 1968 and have evolved substantially over the past 51 years. Therefore, an individual's birth year largely predicts which specific type of H3N2 virus they first encountered in childhood.

Researchers completed a serological survey -- a blood test that measures antibody levels -- using serum samples collected in the summer months prior to the 2017-2018 season from 140 children (ages one to 17) and 212 adults (ages 18 to 90). They first measured the differences in antibody reactivity to various strains of H3N2, and then measured for neutralizing and non-neutralizing antibodies. Neutralizing antibodies can prevent viral infections, whereas non-neutralizing antibodies can only help after an infection takes place. Samples from children aged three to ten years old had the highest levels of neutralizing antibodies against contemporary H3N2 viruses, while most middle-aged samples had antibodies that could bind to these viruses but these antibodies could not prevent viral infections.

Hensley said his team's findings are consistent with a concept known as "original antigenic sin" (OAS), originally proposed by Tom Francis, Jr. in 1960. "Most individuals born in the late 1960s and 1970s were immunologically imprinted with H3N2 viruses that are very different compared to contemporary H3N2 viruses. Upon infection with recent H3N2 viruses, these individuals tend to produce antibodies against regions that are conserved with older H3N2 strains and these types of antibodies typically do not prevent viral infections."

According to the research team, it is possible that the presence of high levels of non-neutralizing antibodies in middle-aged adults has contributed to the continued persistence of H3N2 viruses in the human population. Their findings might also relate to the unusual age distribution of H3N2 infections during the 2017-2018 season, in which H3N2 activity in middle-aged and older adults peaked earlier compared to children and young adults.

The researchers say that it will be important to continually complete large serological surveys in different aged individuals, including donors from populations with different vaccination rates. A better understanding of immunity within the population and within individuals will likely lead to improved models that are better able to predict the evolutionary trajectories of different influenza virus strains.

"Large serological studies can shed light on why the effectiveness of flu vaccines varies in individuals with different immune histories, while also identifying barriers that need to be overcome in order to design better vaccines that are able to elicit protective responses in all age groups," said Sigrid Gouma, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher of Microbiology and first author on the paper.

As missions like NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, TESS and Kepler continue to provide insights into the properties of exoplanets (planets around other stars), scientists are increasingly able to piece together what these planets look like, what they are made of, and if they could be habitable or even inhabited.

In a new study published recently in The Planetary Science Journal, a team of researchers from Arizona State University (ASU) and the University of Chicago have determined that some carbon-rich exoplanets, given the right circumstances, could be made of diamonds and silica.

"These exoplanets are unlike anything in our solar system," says lead author Harrison Allen-Sutter of ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration.

Diamond exoplanet formation

When stars and planets are formed, they do so from the same cloud of gas, so their bulk compositions are similar. A star with a lower carbon to oxygen ratio will have planets like Earth, comprised of silicates and oxides with a very small diamond content (Earth's diamond content is about 0.001%).

But exoplanets around stars with a higher carbon to oxygen ratio than our sun are more likely to be carbon-rich. Allen-Sutter and co-authors Emily Garhart, Kurt Leinenweber and Dan Shim of ASU, with Vitali Prakapenka and Eran Greenberg of the University of Chicago, hypothesized that these carbon-rich exoplanets could convert to diamond and silicate, if water (which is abundant in the universe) were present, creating a diamond-rich composition.

Diamond-anvils and X-rays

To test this hypothesis, the research team needed to mimic the interior of carbide exoplanets using high heat and high pressure. To do so, they used high pressure diamond-anvil cells at co-author Shim's Lab for Earth and Planetary Materials.

First, they immersed silicon carbide in water and compressed the sample between diamonds to a very high pressure. Then, to monitor the reaction between silicon carbide and water, they conducted laser heating at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, taking X-ray measurements while the laser heated the sample at high pressures.

As they predicted, with high heat and pressure, the silicon carbide reacted with water and turned into diamonds and silica.

Habitability and inhabitability

So far, we have not found life on other planets, but the search continues. Planetary scientists and astrobiologists are using sophisticated instruments in space and on Earth to find planets with the right properties and the right location around their stars where life could exist.

For carbon-rich planets that are the focus of this study, however, they likely do not have the properties needed for life.

While Earth is geologically active (an indicator habitability), the results of this study show that carbon-rich planets are too hard to be geologically active and this lack of geologic activity may make atmospheric composition uninhabitable. Atmospheres are critical for life as it provides us with air to breathe, protection from the harsh environment of space, and even pressure to allow for liquid water.

"Regardless of habitability, this is one additional step in helping us understand and characterize our ever- increasing and improving observations of exoplanets," says Allen-Sutter. "The more we learn, the better we'll be able to interpret new data from upcoming future missions like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to understand the worlds beyond on our own solar system."

INDIANAPOLIS--Researchers at Indiana University School of Medicine are learning more about how a person's genes play a role in the possibility they'll suffer from alcoholic cirrhosis with the discovery of a gene that could make the disease less likely.

Alcoholic cirrhosis can happen after years of drinking too much alcohol. According to the researchers, discovering more about this illness couldn't come at a more important time.

"Based on U.S. data, alcohol-associated liver disease is on the rise in terms of the prevalence and incidents and it is happening more often in younger patients," said Suthat Liangpunsakul, MD, professor of medicine, dean's scholar in medical research for the Department of Medicine Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, and one of the principal investigators of the study. "There's a real public health problem involving the consumption of alcohol and people starting to drink at a younger age."

The team describes their findings in a new paper published in Hepatology. The GenomALC Consortium was funded by the National Institutes on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institute of Health (NIH). This genome-wide association study began several years ago and is one of the largest studies related to alcoholic cirrhosis ever performed. DNA samples were taken from over 1,700 patients from sites in the United States, several countries in Europe and Australia and sent to IU School of Medicine where the team performed the DNA isolation for genome analysis. The patients were divided into two groups--one made up of heavy drinkers that never had a history of alcohol-induced liver injury or liver disease and a second group of heavy drinkers who did have alcoholic cirrhosis.

"Our key finding is a gene called Fas Associated Factor Family Member 2, or FAF2," said Tae-Hwi Schwantes-An, PhD, assistant research professor of medical and molecular genetics and the lead author of the study. "There's this convergence of findings now that are pointing to the genes involved in lipid droplet organization pathway, and that seems to be one of the biological reasonings of why certain people get liver disease and why certain people do not."

The researchers are anticipating to study this gene more closely and looking at its relationship to other, previously-discovered genes that can make a person more likely to develop alcoholic cirrhosis.

"We know for a fact those genes are linked together in a biological process, so the logical next step is to study how the changes in these genes alter the function of that process, whether it's less efficient in one group of people, or maybe it's inhibited in some way," Schwantes-An said. "We don't know exactly what the biological underpinning of that is, but now we have a pretty well-defined target where we can look at these variants and see how they relate to alcoholic cirrhosis."

As their research continues, the team hopes to eventually find a way to identify this genetic factor in patients with the goal of helping them prevent alcoholic cirrhosis in the future or developing targeted therapies that can help individuals in a more personalized way.

Molecules belonging to an almost unknown bioluminescent system found in larvae of the fungus gnat Orfelia fultoni (subfamily Keroplatinae) have been isolated for the first time by researchers at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. The small fly is one of the few terrestrial organisms that produce blue light. It inhabits riverbanks in the Appalachian Mountains in the eastern United States. A key part of its bioluminescent system is a molecule also present in two recently discovered Brazilian flies.

The study, supported by Paulo Research Foundation - FAPESP, is published in Scientific Reports. Five authors are affiliated with UFSCar and two with universities in the United States.

The bioluminescent systems of glow-worms, fireflies and other insects are normally made up of luciferin (a low molecular weight molecule) and luciferase, an enzyme that catalyzes the oxidation of luciferin by oxygen, producing light. While some bioluminescent systems are well known and even used in biotechnological applications, others are poorly understood, including blue light-emitting systems, such as that of O. fultoni.

"In the published paper, we describe the properties of the insect's luciferase and luciferin and their anatomical location in its larvae. We also specify several possible proteins that are possible candidates for the luciferase. We don't yet know what type of protein it is, but it's likely to be a hexamerin. In insects, hexamerins are storage proteins that provide amino acids, besides having other functions, such as binding low molecular weight compounds, like luciferin," said Vadim Viviani, a professor in UFSCar's Sustainability Science and Technology Center (CCTS) in Sorocaba, São Paulo, and principal investigator for the study.

The study was part of the FAPESP-funded project "Arthropod bioluminescence". The partnership with United States-based researchers dates from a previous project, supported by FAPESP and the United States National Science Foundation (NSF), in partnership with Vanderbilt University (VU), located in Nashville, Tennessee.

In addition to luciferin and luciferase, researchers began characterizing a complex found in insects of the family Keroplatidae, which, in addition to O. fultoni, also includes a Brazilian species in the genus Neoditomyia that produces only luciferin and hence does not emit light.

Because they do not use it to emit light, the luciferin in O. fultoni and the Brazilian Neoditomyia has been named keroplatin. In larvae of this subfamily, keroplatin is associated with "black bodies" - large cells containing dark granules, proteins and probably mitochondria (energy-producing organelles). Researchers are still investigating the biological significance of this association between keroplatin and mitochondria.

"It's a mystery," Viviani said. "This luciferin may play a role in the mitochondrial energy metabolism. At night, probably in the presence of a natural chemical reducer, the luciferin is released by these black bodies and reacts with the surrounding luciferase to produce blue light. These are possibilities we plan to study."

Brazilian cousins

An important factor in the elucidation of the United States insect's bioluminescent system was the discovery of a larva that lives in Intervales State Park in São Paulo in 2018. It does not emit light but produces luciferin, similar to O. fultoni (read more at: agencia.fapesp.br/29066).

In their latest study, the group injected purified luciferase from the United States species into larvae of the Brazilian species, which then produced blue light. The nonluminescent Brazilian species is more abundant in nature than the United States species, so a larger amount of the material could be obtained for study purposes, especially to characterize the luciferin (keroplatin) present in both species.

In 2019, the group discovered and described Neoceroplatus betaryensis, a new species of fungus gnat, in collaboration with Cassius Stevani, a professor at the University of São Paulo's Institute of Chemistry (IQ-USP). It was the first blue light-emitting insect found in South America and was detected in a privately held forest reserve near the Upper Ribeira State Tourist Park (PETAR) in the southern portion of the state of São Paulo. A close relative of O. fultoni, N. betaryensis inhabits fallen tree trunks in humid places (read more at: agencia.fapesp.br/31797).

"We show that the bioluminescent system of this Brazilian species is identical to that of O. fultoni. However, the insect is very rare, and so it's hard to obtain sufficient material for research purposes," Viviani said.

The researchers are now cloning the insect's luciferase and characterizing it in molecular terms. They are also analyzing the chemical structure of its luciferin and the morphology of its lanterns.

"Once all this has been determined, we'll be able to synthesize the luciferin and luciferase in the lab and use these systems in a range of biotech applications, such as studying cells. This will help us understand more about human diseases, among other things," Viviani said.

Below please find a summary and link(s) of new coronavirus-related content published today in Annals of Internal Medicine. The summary below is not intended to substitute for the full article as a source of information. A collection of coronavirus-related content is free to the public at http://go.annals.org/coronavirus.

Counts based on death certificates underestimate COVID-19 mortality rates
Researchers suggest ways to address challenges associated with measuring direct and indirect deaths attributable to COVID-19 pandemic

Estimating deaths from COVID-19 based on death certificate data significantly underestimates the true mortality rate of the pandemic. Authors from Stanford University School of Medicine, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and Harvard Medical School describe how methods used to assess death tolls from disasters and other pandemics can be used to provide a more accurate picture of COVID-19 death rates now and moving forward. This means measuring direct, indirect, and excess deaths from COVID-19. Their proposed solution is published in Annals of Internal Medicine. Read the full text: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-3100.

Overcoming challenges when calculating direct deaths will require a consensus among health care institutions, medical examiners, and public health agencies. The authors endorse counting all deaths from pneumonia, influenza-like illness, and COVID-19 and subtracting the expected seasonal number of cases of pneumonia and influenza computed from trends in the previous 5 years, as currently done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). To calculate indirect deaths, the researchers recommend employing the CDC's "but for" principle, which is used when ascertaining disaster-related deaths: "But for the [pandemic], would the person have died when he/she did?" Expected recommendations from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, could help with this. And to calculate excess deaths, publicly available, well-curated historical data, with published application programming interfaces is needed. According to the authors addressing these issues is critical to our understanding of the pandemic and its effect on human life.

The author of an accompanying editorial from Merck & Co. agrees that reliable and timely information about both direct and indirect mortality attributable to the COVID-19 pandemic is essential. The most accurate data to assess mortality in the United States from any cause are derived from the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). Seeing as these data are crucial to informing health and emergency preparedness systems in the United States, they are worth greater investment.