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Earlier this year, a study led by researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine provided strong evidence that hundreds of deceased donor kidneys with acute kidney injury (AKI) -- traditionally discarded as unsuitable for transplantation -- could be safely and successfully used. Now, a follow-up investigation by the same team, in collaboration with researchers at 13 other medical institutions in the United States, has shown that two proteins found in deceased donor urine can be measured to define which donor organs -- including those with AKI -- are the best candidates for saving the lives of patients with kidney failure.

The team's findings were reported online July 27, 2020, by the journal Transplantation.

Currently, the national discard or rejection rate for all potential donor kidneys is approximately 18%, but for AKI kidneys, it jumps to 30%. According to statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, nearly 100,000 Americans with kidney failure, also known as end-stage renal disease, are awaiting donor organs. Unfortunately, as reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 9,000 of these patients drop off the waiting list each year, succumbing to death or deteriorating in health so that transplantation is no longer possible.

Making matters worse, says the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, the need for donor kidneys is rising at 8% per year. However, their availability has not grown to match.

To better identify which deceased donor kidneys have a higher probability for successful transplantation and long-term survival as grafted organs, the new study looked to two proteins -- both easily obtained from the urine of donors at the time of organ harvesting -- that the researchers felt could be used as clinical biomarkers.

The two proteins, uromodulin and osteopontin, had been shown in previous studies to play a protective role in kidney health and proper functioning, helping to repair cells damaged by AKI and stimulating immune responses against foreign invaders. Therefore, the research team believed that their presence in deceased donors might indicate which kidneys were most likely to recover from injuries or infections.

"We determined that if the ratio of the amounts of the two proteins, as precisely measured in samples of a deceased donor's urine, was less than or equal to three, then that person's kidneys were the most suitable for transplantation and had a higher chance for staying healthy and functioning longer after the surgery," says Chirag Parikh, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Division of Nephrology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and senior author of the study.

There were 1,298 donors and 2,430 recipients participating in the study. A total of 322 deceased donors (25%) had signs of AKI. The recipients were followed for a median time of four years after surgery to document any graft failures or deaths.

The researchers say that additional studies are needed to validate the use of the uromodulin-to-osteopontin ratio as a clinical tool for timely and accurate evaluation of kidneys for transplantation.

"We estimate that using this strategy, once confirmed as reliable, we can annually reduce the number of kidneys discarded and add a few thousand suitable-for-transplant organs to the pool," Parikh says.

Increasing the donor pool, Parikh adds, would help achieve the goal of the Advancing American Kidney Health initiative, a 2019 presidential directive that aims to double the number of kidneys available for transplant by 2030.

WASHINGTON, August 18, 2020 -- Think you don't need to worry about COVID-19 while using a public restroom? A group of researchers from Yangzhou University in China recently reported that flushing public restroom toilets can release clouds of virus-laden aerosols for you to potentially inhale.

If that's not cringeworthy enough, after running additional computer simulations, they've concluded that flushing urinals does likewise. In Physics of Fluids, from AIP Publishing, the group shares its work simulating and tracking virus-laden particle movements when urinals are flushed.

The researchers' work clearly shows public restrooms can be dangerous places for potentially becoming infected from a virus, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Other work has shown that both feces- and urine-based virus transmission is possible.

"To do this, we used a method of computational fluid dynamics to model the particle movement that occurs with the act of flushing," said Xiangdong Liu. "The specific models are the volume of fluids model and discrete phase model."

Flushing a urinal, much like flushing a toilet, involves an interaction between gas and liquid interfaces. The result of the flushing causes a large spread of aerosol particles to be released from the urinal, which the researchers simulated and tracked.

What the simulations revealed is disturbing. The trajectory of the tiny particles ejected by flushing a urinal "manifests an external spread type, with more than 57% of the particles traveling away from the urinal," said Liu.

But that's not all. When men use urinals within a public restroom, these tiny particles can reach their thigh within 5.5 seconds when compared to the toilet flush, which takes 35 seconds to reach slightly higher. Particles from urinals, however, "show a more violent climbing tendency," Liu said. "The climbing speed is much faster than toilet flushing."

Urinals are used more frequently within densely populated areas, and the researchers point out that particles will travel faster and farther, which poses a serious public health challenge.

This work underscores how important it is to wear a mask within public places but especially restrooms.

"From our work, it can be inferred that urinal flushing indeed promotes the spread of bacteria and viruses," says Liu. "Wearing a mask should be mandatory within public restrooms during the pandemic, and anti-diffusion improvements are urgently needed to prevent the spread of COVID-19."

HOUSTON - (Aug. 18, 2020) - Bioengineers and surgeons from Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) have shown that shielding stem cells with a novel biomaterial improves the cells' ability to heal heart injuries caused by heart attacks.

In a study using rodents, a team led by Rice's Omid Veiseh and Baylor's Ravi Ghanta showed it could make capsules of wound-healing mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) and implant them next to wounded hearts using minimally invasive techniques. Within four weeks, heart healing was 2.5 times greater in animals treated with shielded stem cells than those treated with nonshielded stem cells, the researchers found.

The study is available online in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Biomaterials Science.

Someone has a heart attack every 40 seconds in the United States. In each case, an artery that supplies blood to the heart becomes blocked and heart muscle tissue dies due to lack of blood. Hearts damaged by heart attacks pump less efficiently, and scar tissue from heart attack wounds can further reduce heart function.

"What we're trying to do is produce enough wound-healing chemicals called reparative factors at these sites so that damaged tissue is repaired and restored, as healthy tissue, and dead tissue scars don't form," said Veiseh, an assistant professor of bioengineering and CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research at Rice.

Ghanta, associate professor of surgery at Baylor, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Harris Health's Ben Taub Hospital and co-lead author of the study, said prior studies have shown that MSCs, a type of adult stem cell produced in blood marrow, can promote tissue repair after a heart attack. But in clinical trials of MSCs, "cell viability has been a consistent challenge," Ghanta said.

"Many of the cells die after transplantation," he said. "Initially, researchers had hoped that stem cells would become heart cells, but that has not appeared to be the case. Rather, the cells release healing factors that enable repair and reduce the extent of the injury. By utilizing this shielded therapy approach, we aimed to improve this benefit by keeping them alive longer and in greater numbers."

A few MSC lines have been approved for human use, but Veiseh said transplant rejection has contributed to their lack of viability in trials.

"They're allogenic, meaning that they're not from the same recipient," he said. "The immune system perceives them as foreign. And so very rapidly, the immune system starts chewing at them and clearing them out."

Veiseh has spent years developing encapsulation technologies that are specifically designed not to activate the body's immune system. He co-founded Sigilon Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech company that is developing encapsulated cell therapeutics for chronic diseases. Trials of Sigilon's treatment for hemophilia A are expected to enter the clinic later this year.

"The immune system doesn't recognize our hydrogels as foreign, and doesn't initiate a reaction against the hydrogel," Veiseh said. "So we can load MSCs within these hydrogels, and the MSCs live well in the hydrogels. They also secrete the same reparative factors that they normally do, and because the hydrogels are porous, the wound-healing factors just diffuse out."

In previous studies, Veiseh and colleagues have shown that similar capsules can keep insulin-producing islet cells alive and thriving in rodents for more than six months. In the heart study, study co-lead author Samira Aghlara-Fotovat, a Rice bioengineering graduate student in Veiseh's lab, created 1.5-millimeter capsules that each contained about 30,000 MSCs. Several of the capsules were placed alongside wounded sections of heart muscle in animals that had experienced a heart attack. The study compared rates of heart healing in animals treated with shielded and unshielded stem cells, as well as an untreated control group.

"We can deliver the capsules through a catheter port system, and that's how we imagine they would be administered in a human patient," Veiseh said. "You could insert a catheter to the area outside of the heart and inject through the catheter using minimally invasive, image-guided techniques."

Veiseh said capsules in the study were held in place by the pericardium, a membrane that sheaths the heart. Tests at two weeks showed that MSCs were alive and thriving inside the implanted spheres.

More than 800,000 Americans have hearts attacks each year, and Ghanta is hopeful that encapsulated MSCs can one day be used to treat some of them.

"With further development, this combination of biomaterials and stem cells could be useful in delivering reparative therapy to heart attack patients," he said.

Veiseh said the pathway to regulatory approval could be streamlined as well.

"Clinical grade, allogenic MSCs are commercially available and are actively being used in patients for a range of applications," he said.

Veiseh credited Aghlara-Fotovat with doing much of the work on the project.

"She basically executed the vision," he said. "She developed the hydrogel formulation, the concept of how to package the MSCs within the hydrogel, and she did all the in vitro validation work to show that MSCs remained viable in the capsules."

Aghlara-Fotovat is co-mentored by Ghanta and worked in his lab at Baylor alongside research assistant Aarthi Pugazenthi, including assisting in rodent surgeries and experiments.

"What attracted me to the project was the unmet clinical need in (heart attack) recovery," Aghlara-Fotovat said. "Using hydrogels to deliver therapeutics was an exciting approach that aimed to overcome many challenges in the field of drug delivery. I also saw a clear path to translation into the clinic, which is the ultimate goal of my Ph.D."

"I think one of the things that attracts students to my lab in particular is the opportunity to do translational work," Veiseh said. "We work closely with physicians like Dr. Ghanta to address relevant problems to human health."

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Even for infants just beginning to speak their first words, the way an object is named guides infants' encoding, representation and memory for that object, according to new Northwestern University research.

Encoding objects in memory and recalling them later is fundamental to human cognition and emerges in infancy.

Evidence from a new recognition memory task reveals that as they encode objects, infants are sensitive to a principled link between naming and object representation by 12 months.

During training, all infants viewed four distinct objects from the same object category, each introduced in conjunction with either the same novel noun (Consistent Name condition), a distinct novel noun for each object (Distinct Names condition), or the same sine-wave tone sequence (Consistent Tone condition).

Researchers then tested whether infants remembered which objects they had just seen during training. To do so, infants viewed each training object again, this time presented in silence along with a new object from the same object category. Infants' memory for the individual objects was sensitive to how they had been named. Infants in the Consistent Name condition showed poor recognition memory at test, suggesting that consistently applied names focused them primarily on commonalities among the named objects at the expense of distinctions among them. In contrast, infants in the Distinct Names condition recognized three of the four objects, suggesting that applying distinct names enhanced infants' encoding of the distinctions among the individual objects. Infants in the control Consistent Tone condition recognized only the object they had most recently seen.

"We show that the way an object is named, either as a member of a category, for example, "This is a dog" or as a unique individual, for example, "This is Fido," is instrumental in 12-month-old infants' encoding of and memory for that object," said Alexander S. LaTourrette, co-author of the study. "When the same name is applied consistently to a set of objects, infants encode primarily their commonalties. In contrast, when a unique name is applied to each object, infants encode each object's unique features."

Sandra Waxman, co-author of the study and the Lewis W. Menk professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, said this provides the first demonstration that for infants as young as 12 months of age, whether and how an object is named has rapid and conceptually precise consequences on infants' representation of that object.

"Moreover, the precision of infants' responses reveal that naming objects, even a single naming episode, can have a lasting impact on how infants encode that object, represent it in memory and remember it later," said Waxman, a faculty fellow with the University's Institute for Policy Research.

The researchers said this work sheds new light on the powerful and well-documented advantage of naming on infant object categorization, leaving little doubt that naming a set of distinct individual objects with the same noun invites infants to form an object category.

"Here, we show that hearing the same name for objects invites infants to focus on the commonalities among the objects, but at the expense of remembering the features that are unique to each individual," LaTourrette said.

Waxman said the new evidence opens new avenues for future investigations.

"First, because the current experiment focused exclusively on novel nouns, it remains an open question how familiar nouns, for example, 'Fido' or 'dog,' influence infants' object representations," she said.

"Addressing this question should also shed light on current debates concerning the link between language and cognition in adults. Second, it will be important to specify the effects of naming on infants' object representations throughout the first year of life. We know that naming supports the establishment of object categories consistently throughout the first year, beginning as early as 3 months of age. What remains unknown is whether naming confers its benefits via the same mechanisms throughout this period."

"Naming guides how 12-month-old infants encode and remember objects" published Aug. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Scientists across the globe often use mouse models in the study of human conditions to advance the pursuit of medicines and treatments. Now, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers and their collaborators have created and characterized a new mouse replica of Down syndrome, long considered one of the most challenging disorders to simulate in laboratory animals.

A report of their research appeared June 29, 2020, in the journal eLife Sciences.

The new model may help researchers better understand how people with Down syndrome learn and develop, and eventually, lead to new therapies for potentially deadly complications of the condition, such as heart disease and thyroid problems.

Down syndrome, caused by trisomy 21, occurs when a person is born with an extra partial or entire copy of the 21st chromosome. Typically associated with distinct facial features and developmental delays, people with Down syndrome also experience difficulties with learning and memory, as well as higher rates of thyroid disease, blood and immune disorders and heart disease. Treating these conditions in people with Down syndrome is complicated by their genetics.

"There are more than 500 genes on chromosome 21 that can be overexpressed," says Roger Reeves, Ph.D., professor of physiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "So, in comparison to many other genetic conditions, Down syndrome is vastly more complex."

Further complicating the development of successful treatments is the lack of an accurate animal model to study the biology of Down syndrome and test potential therapies for conditions associated with it.

Reeves and his team endeavored to improve research efforts by creating a more precise replica of the condition in mice. They did this by inserting a human copy of chromosome 21 into mice using the rodent's own cellular structures that organize DNA. This enables the mouse cells to reliably copy and sort the extra human chromosome into new cells as they divide. It also lets the mice pass the additional genetic material on to their offspring.

This means that these mice, named TcMAC21 by the researchers, can be used relatively easily and at low cost in long-term experiments.

The resulting TcMAC21 mice have many characteristics indicative of Down syndrome in humans, including a distinct facial structure, a greater prevalence for congenital heart defects, a smaller-than-usual cerebellum and learning difficulties.

The researchers caution that no single animal model can perfectly replicate a human condition. However, they believe that the TcMAC21 mouse model developed in this study is a good starting point to create new and better strategies for helping people with Down syndrome.

"Our goal is to improve the health of people with Down syndrome to give them the best chance at achieving their full potential," says Reeves.

People who experience threats to their existence -- including economic and political instability -- are more likely to experience miracles, according to a Baylor University study.

While many sociologists have studied the effects of religious experiences, what causes a person to have miraculous experiences has received little attention, said Baylor University sociologist Ed Eschler, Ph.D.

His study -- "In the Valley of the Shadow of Death: Insecurity and Miraculous Experiences" -- is published in the Review of Religious Research.

Eschler investigated the prevalence of miracles in Latin America using data from a 2013 Pew Research Center survey of religious beliefs and experiences. Data were analyzed from 15,400 respondents from 16 countries.

For the study, he defined a miracle as any experience in which a person believes an event or outcome was influenced by supernatural agents.

"It's tempting to think of miracles on a biblical scale: Moses parting the Red Sea and Jesus restoring sight to the blind," Eschler said. "However, unless I've been reading the wrong newspapers, this thinking excludes the lived experiences of most people.

"There's a societal assumption that wealthy and educated people favor scientific, more "rational" explanations for these events," he said. "However, there is rising evidence that it has more to do with the security that being rich and educated brings: people who experience fewer existential threats do not rely on religious explanations of events."

Eschler chose Latin America for his research because "people assume miracles are a rare occurrence in developed nations despite the fact most people have had some sort of supernatural experience.

"Latin America is less developed, so researchers are willing to ask about these 'fringe beliefs' -- although again, these beliefs actually aren't that fringe in the U.S. either."

Eschler's first major finding was that 57% of respondents believed they had experienced a miracle of some kind.

Second, he found that education had no relationship with experiencing miracles.

His third finding was the income does not influence the likelihood of experiencing a miracle, although "absolute poverty" -- not being able to afford food, clothing or medicine -- does.

"Respondents with no formal education were just as likely to experience a miracle as those with a college degree," Eschler said. "The people who live in Latin America are just as intelligent as anywhere else, but there is not the same education infrastructure. In the United States, more than 90% of people have a high school education, compared to around 40% in Latin America. This lets us study if miracles are for the uneducated in a population where the majority has an elementary school education or less."

Additionally, despite an economic downturn at the end of the Cold War, Latin America has made incredible developmental gains in the past 30 years. That allowed him to test whether a country's human and economic development matter more than an individual's education and class.

The findings go against the idea that societies become less religious as science and rationality replace religion, but they support the theory that people become more religious when their existence is threatened and less religious when their life is stable.

Eschler found that most likely to experience a miracle is an older, Black, Pentecostal Protestant woman with strongly held traditional social and religious beliefs who is uncertain about her financial future -- including having difficulty paying for health care, clothing or food. The opposite is true for a young, white/mestizo Catholic with fewer traditional social and religious beliefs and who is financially secure. But every group has members who have experienced miracles.

"The richest and most well educated are still more likely to experience miracles if their life becomes uncertain or is threatened," Eschler said.

Historically, because basically everyone believed in the supernatural, miracles were more common," he said. But as the world has become more secular, "we are aware that it all could just be random chance, even if we believe in the divine."

What has not changed is that attributions to the divine are a way to bring order into a world where people feel they do not have control.

"In my study, I looked at individual economic hardship, but other studies compare countries impacted by warfare or terrorist extremism to those where there has been relative peace," he said. "We may be more likely to turn to doctors or the government instead of magic and miracles, but there are uncertainties in modern life which some still address with the supernatural.

"What strikes me about this project is that it helps me understand some of the craziness going on in our world today, particularly the recent explosion of conspiracy theories. The people pushing these things are likely doing it because it helps them deal with uncertainty. For them, a world controlled by a villainous conspiracy is better than a world controlled by nobody."

NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite passed over the South China Sea and captured a visible image of Tropical Storm Higos. Higos is headed for landfall in southeastern China.

The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard Suomi NPP provided a visible image of Tropical Storm Higos is it moved in a northwesterly direction and toward a landfall in southeastern China. The VIIRS image revealed deep, persistent convection and developing thunderstorms obscuring a low-level circulation center. The VIIRS image also showed there were bands of thunderstorms wrapping around the northern periphery of the system.

At 11 a.m. EDT (1500 UTC), Tropical Storm Higos had maximum sustained winds near 45 knots (52 mph/83 kph). It was located near latitude 21.3 degrees north and longitude 114.3 degrees east, about 82 nautical miles south-southeast of Hong Kong, China.

The Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) expects Higos to continue moving west-northwest until landfall. Warm sea surface temperatures and low wind shear will fuel intensification so it expected to peak at 50 knot (58 mph/93 kph) sustained winds before landfall, south of Hong Kong. JTWC noted, "After landfall, the rugged terrain of mainland China, in addition to increasing vertical wind shear (outside winds that blow at different levels of the atmosphere that can weaken a storm), will cause the system to begin dissipating over land and rapidly erode the system to full dissipation over land by 36 hours.

For more than five decades, NASA has used the vantage point of space to understand and explore our home planet, improve lives and safeguard our future. NASA brings together technology, science, and unique global Earth observations to provide societal benefits and strengthen our nation. Advancing knowledge of our home planet contributes directly to America's leadership in space and scientific exploration.

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Aug. 18, 2020--Combing through historical seismic data, researchers using a machine learning model have unearthed distinct statistical features marking the formative stage of slow-slip ruptures in the earth's crust months before tremor or GPS data detected a slip in the tectonic plates. Given the similarity between slow-slip events and classic earthquakes, these distinct signatures may help geophysicists understand the timing of the devastating faster quakes as well.

"The machine learning model found that, close to the end of the slow slip cycle, a snapshot of the data is imprinted with fundamental information regarding the upcoming failure of the system," said Claudia Hulbert, a computational geophysicist at ENS and the Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author of the study, published today in Nature Communications. "Our results suggest that slow-slip rupture may well be predictable, and because slow slip events have a lot in common with earthquakes, slow-slip events may provide an easier way to study the fundamental physics of earth rupture."

Slow-slip events are earthquakes that gently rattle the ground for days, months, or even years, do not radiate large-amplitude seismic waves, and often go unnoticed by the average person. The classic quakes most people are familiar with rupture the ground in minutes. In a given area they also happen less frequently, making the bigger quakes harder to study with the data-hungry machine learning techniques.

The team looked at continuous seismic waves covering the period 2009 to 2018 from the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, which tracks earth movements in the Cascadia region. In this subduction zone, during a slow slip event, the North American plate lurches southwesterly over the Juan de Fuca plate approximately every 14 months. The data set lent itself well to the supervised-machine learning approach developed in laboratory earthquake experiments by the Los Alamos team collaborators and used for this study.

The team computed a number of statistical features linked to signal energy in low-amplitude signals, frequency bands their previous work identified as the most informative about the behavior of the geologic system. The most important feature for predicting slow slip in the Cascadia data is seismic power, which corresponds to seismic energy, in particular frequency bands associated to slow slip events. According to the paper, slow slip often begins with an exponential acceleration on the fault, a force so small it eludes detection by seismic sensors.

"For most events, we can see the signatures of impending rupture from weeks to months before the rupture," Hulbert said. "They are similar enough from one event cycle to the next so that a model trained on past data can recognize the signatures in data from several years later. But it's still an open question whether this holds over long periods of time."

The research team's hypothesis about the signal indicating the formation of a slow-slip event aligns with other recent work by Los Alamos and others detecting small-amplitude foreshocks in California. That work found that foreshocks can be observed in average two weeks before most earthquakes of magnitude greater than 4.

Hulbert and her collaborators' supervised machine learning algorithms train on the seismic features calculated from the first half of the seismic data and attempts to find the best model that maps these features to the time remaining before the next slow slip event. Then they apply it to the second half of data, which it hasn't seen.

The algorithms are transparent, meaning the team can see which features the machine learning uses to predict when the fault would slip. It also allows the researchers to compare these features with those that were most important in laboratory experiments to estimate failure times. These algorithms can be probed to identify which statistical features of the data are important in the model predictions, and why.

"By identifying the important statistical features, we can compare the findings to those from laboratory experiments, which gives us a window into the underlying physics," Hulbert said. "Given the similarities between the statistical features in the data from Cascadia and from laboratory experiments, there appear to be commonalities across the frictional physics underlying slow slip rupture and nucleation. The same causes may scale from the small laboratory system to the vast scale of the Cascadia subduction zone."

The Los Alamos seismology team, led by Paul Johnson, has published several papers in the past few years pioneering the use of machine learning to unpack the physics underlying earthquakes in laboratory experiments and real-world seismic data.

When most people think of cooling, they automatically imagine air conditioning (AC), or cooling the air in a room. But, there is a much more efficient way to cool people, using your body's radiation.

To demonstrate the effect of radiant cooling, Forrest Meggers, assistant professor of architecture and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, and a team of researchers built a "Cold Tube," in Singapore last year. It was an outdoor pavilion lined with novel insulated radiant panels that held cold water pipes inside. Because your body is constantly exchanging radiation with objects around you, and radiation flows from hot to cool surfaces, the participants who walked through the exhibit shed their radiation toward the panels, similar to what would happen if you stood near a freezer. The participants reported feeling cool, despite the air itself having temperature and humidity levels that would ordinarily feel sweltering. The new research showed that people could feel comfortable in hot and humid outdoor environments using only radiant cooling, which could use far less energy than cooling large volumes of air.

The researchers, collaborating with scholars at the University of British Columbia, University of Berkeley, ETH Zurich in Singapore, and the University of Pennsylvania, published their results August 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

In this Q&A, Meggers and first author of the paper, Dr. Eric Teitelbaum, now a senior engineer at AIL Research, comment on why this research is so relevant not just in a warming world, but also in a contagious one, where equipping indoor spaces with outdoor levels of air flow is part of the strategy to contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

Your recent work published in PNAS showed that people can be kept cool in very hot and humid environments without air conditioning. What is the benefit of cooling surfaces, such as walls and tables, instead of cooling the air? How are the findings relevant to keeping people safe from viruses like COVID-19?

Meggers: Today, around the world, people are trying to achieve higher outdoor air flow indoors to dilute the amount of virus in the air. With air conditioning (AC), dehumidification and cooling occur simultaneously. The benefit of the Cold Tube technology is that it decouples cooling from the providing of fresh air, meaning people can keep their windows open, while maintaining comfort, and without expending massive amounts of energy to cool and dehumidify the air flow.

Teitelbaum: The way buildings are built today, using exclusively AC for cooling, we can't increase the amount of fresh air we deliver to buildings at will because outdoor air flow is coupled with the amount of air conditioning buildings need to provide. If you want more outdoor air flowing into the building, you also need additional capacity to dehumidify and cool that air. Most systems weren't built with the capacity to flow the amount of air that, in many cases, is being recommended to dilute indoor air pollutants and prevent the spread of COVID-19. And if they can, it requires massive amounts of energy.

Meggers: In the Cold Tube, occupants were cooled entirely by thermal radiation, which means energy was primarily used for cooling the water inside the walls, not cooling the air. Through most summer conditions, we could cool people using surfaces, while leaving all the windows open. Achieving 100% outdoor air would do a lot to stymie the spread of the virus, and the efficiency benefits scale proportionally with how much outdoor air you want. Air should be only for breathing, not cooling.

How does this help mitigate climate change?

Teitelbaum: This system uses at least 50% less energy than a comparably-sized air conditioner. Letting the air warm up by five degrees while cooling surfaces, can lower energy demand by up to 40% and maintain occupant comfort. Allowing even hotter air temperatures would result in higher energy savings.

What is the biggest misconception about air conditioning?

Meggers: Air conditioning does not equal cooling. It's a highly engrained method of cooling buildings, but it's not the only one. Additionally, your window air conditioners are just cooling existing air in the room; they don't bring new, fresh air into your room. Air conditioning units have become so normalized and integrated into daily life but, in reality, they are huge machines that require a lot of energy, and should not be treated like turning on a light switch. A seemingly simple window unit requires 10-1000x more energy than a ceiling fan, and leaving the AC on is comparable in energy to leaving the light on in 100 rooms.

In terms of urban planning and outdoor air quality, how does this alternative to air conditioning provide dual-benefits and help mitigate the urban heat island effect?

Meggers: Most of my coauthors and I have traveled around Southeast Asia and have seen firsthand how quickly AC units have been deployed at scale. Adding AC window or split units to buildings is done with little contemplation of the effects on surface temperatures, and the climate and heat in a city. The units work by rejecting the heat from the air in a room to the outside. Rejecting heat outside the buildings, along the façade, leads to sidewalks and areas around buildings becoming very hot, and many spaces becoming unusable. Our technology does exactly the opposite; it provides opportunities to regain thermal acceptability in various parts of the city without having to build a huge park. You can install these cooling panels outside in hot and humid environments, and build "cool havens" where people can gather, eat, and play.

Is there anything else you want to talk about in regards to this paper or today's context for it?

Teitelbaum: It will take more than an 8-month experiment to change the way people think about comfort systems and energy efficiency in the built environment. Much of the C.H.A.O.S lab's research has focused on expanding the knowledge bubble of thermal radiation's influence on comfort and efficiency. The Cold Tube experiment created a lot of new knowledge, which is a great academic success. Commercially, while there are companies that manufacture similar technologies, there is still a need to continue to demonstrate and experiment with new concepts to not only further the technology, but also this paradigm shift. The shift away from air conditioning towards more holistic comfort design would help us act as stewards of the planet as well as our own built environments. In many parts of the world, such as Singapore and other tropical areas that are increasingly seeking ways to condition spaces, significantly more energy goes towards dehumidifying the air than just cooling the air. This is one of the places that we believe our comfort paradigm will have the greatest efficiency increases and impact, since no dehumidification is required for people to feel comfortable.

New research from the CHILD Cohort Study has shed light on the influence of vitamin D supplementation on a baby's developing gut microbiome.

The study, published in the journal Gut Microbes, found that vitamin D supplementation is associated with compositional changes in a baby's microbiome--notably a lower abundance of the bacteria Megamonas--at three months of age.

"Vitamin D plays an important role in early life, supporting bone metabolism and the healthy development of a baby's immune system," said senior author Anita Kozyrskyj, a professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Alberta and a CHILD Cohort Study investigator. "Most infants in North America receive vitamin D, either as a supplement to breastfeeding or as an ingredient in commercial infant formulas, so we wanted to understand the association between vitamin D and the presence or abundance of key bacteria within a baby's intestinal tract."

The researchers examined fecal samples taken during home visits from 1,157 infants who are part of the CHILD Cohort Study--a national study that is following nearly 3,500 Canadian children from before birth to adolescence with the primary goal of discovering the root causes of allergies, asthma, obesity and other chronic diseases.

They found that direct vitamin D supplementation of infants with vitamin D drops was associated with a lower abundance of Megamonas, regardless of how a baby was fed (breastfed or formula fed). "While little is known about Megamonas in infancy, our previous research suggests there may be a link between this bacterium and asthma or respiratory viral infections, so vitamin D may offer additional benefits for childhood health that should be studied further," added Kozyrskyj, also a member of the Women and Children's Health Research Institute.

The researchers also assessed the association between infant and maternal vitamin D supplementation and the presence of Clostridioides difficile (C. difficile) in a baby's gut. "Some infants carry the diarrhea-causing bacterium C. difficile in their guts without any symptoms. However, when the levels of gut bacteria become imbalanced, this particular bacterium can multiply, causing illness and increasing the susceptibility to chronic disease later in childhood," commented first author Kelsea Drall, an MSc graduate from the U of A and an AllerGen trainee.

The study found that nearly 30 per cent of the infants carried C. difficile, but there was a lower incidence of the bacterium among exclusively breastfed infants. However, neither infant supplementation with vitamin D drops nor maternal vitamin D supplementation during pregnancy or after delivery was associated with C. difficile colonization. "Interestingly, maternal consumption of vitamin D-fortified milk was the only factor that reduced the likelihood of C. difficile colonization in infants," added Drall.

According to Kozyrskyj, an infant's gut microbiota undergoes rapid change in early life. Therefore, it is critical to understand the factors associated with microbial communities populating the infant gut during this key developmental period.

"Low vitamin D levels have been associated with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)--a common lung infection among infants--and more recently, susceptibility to COVID-19 disease," she pointed out. "In the CHILD Cohort Study, we have a unique opportunity to follow our study children as they get older to understand how microbial changes observed as a result of dietary interventions may be associated with later health outcomes such as asthma and viral infections."

New research led by Flinders University PhD candidate Jasmine Petersen examining commercial physical activity apps has found that the social components of these apps hold great potential to increase physical activity engagement.

Sharing physical activity outcomes and progress to app communities and social networking platforms provides the necessary encouragement for people to engage more enthusiastically with their apps.

"Sharing posts and receiving encouragement provides the social support many people need to stay motivated with exercise programs - and this doesn't change across different age groups," says study co-author Dr Ivanka Prichard, from Flinders University's Caring Futures Institute.

The study - Psychological mechanisms underlying the relationship between commercial physical activity app use and physical activity engagement, by Jasmine Petersen, Lucy Lewis, Eva Kemps and Ivanka Prichard - is published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise. (DOI: 10.1016/j.psychsport.2020.101719)

The study examined close to 1300 adults (88% female, aged between 18 and 83 years), over half of whom used a commercial physical activity app (e.g. Fitbit, Garmin, Strava). Results found that more competitive individuals responded best to the apps, engaging in significantly higher levels of physical activity due to the game-like incentives and rewards built into the apps.

Dr Prichard says this suggests that people with a general disposition toward competition may benefit most from using activity apps.

"App users are motivated by both the enjoyment derived from physical activity (intrinsic motivation) and the personal value placed on the outcomes of physical activity (identified regulation), and these combined motivations result in greater engagement in physical activity," says Ms Petersen.

This study shows that the social components of physical activity apps are particularly beneficial in promoting engagement in physical activity due to their capacity to facilitate social support, and positively influence motivation and beliefs in one's ability to perform physical activity.

However, it was also found that online interactions can have a negative effect on exercisers if social networking is used to make direct comparisons.

"Engagement in comparisons was associated with lower self-efficacy and higher external regulation, and in turn, lower physical activity," says Dr Prichard, emphasising the importance of exercising for enjoyment and the benefits that exercise can provide to general health.

The team are now following up participants to see how commercial physical activity apps might support physical activity behaviour in light of COVID-19 restrictions.

Osaka, Japan - Researchers at Osaka University have discovered a new method to easily add lanthanide cubanes into a previously synthesized metallo-supramolecular framework. By simply soaking a crystal in a cubane-containing solution, the molecules become intercalated via a single-crystal-to-single-crystal transformation. This research may help chemists design cost-effective methods of storing energy or develop new catalysts.

Once thought too unstable to exist, cubanes are synthetic molecules with atoms arranged to form a cube. The extremely strained right-angle bonds store a great deal of chemical energy, like tightly wound springs. However, once created by chemists, cubanes can keep their shape for a long time. These properties make cubanes attractive candidates for storing energy, as well as for accelerating reactions as catalysts.

Now, scientists at Osaka University have shown how to immobilize cubanes made from lanthanide elements into crystal frameworks. "We discovered a facile synthetic method for lanthanide hydroxide clusters, which may be used as functional materials," says first author Nobuto Yoshinari.

Lanthanides are a group of chemically similar elements, known to many people for their special section on most versions of the periodic table. The researchers found that by immersing a crystal of K6[Rh4Zn4O(L-cys)12] in a solution containing Ln4(OH)4 (lanthanide hydroxide) cubane molecules, the cubane molecules became attached inside the empty pockets of the crystal without disrupting its structure. A metal-organic framework (MOF) was obtained when using the heavier lanthanides, while the lighter elements yielded ionic solid structures.

"Previously, lanthanide hydroxide clusters have been synthesized under harsh conditions, but our new method requires only the soaking of the host crystals into a lanthanide salt solution at room temperature," senior author Takumi Konno explains.

The team tested the catalytic activity of the frameworks when speeding up a hydrolysis reaction. They found that the effectiveness of the catalyst depended on which element from the lanthanide series was used. The researchers also measured the magnetic susceptibility of the metal ions inside the frameworks, and found a cooling effect when exposed to a decreasing magnetic fields. The lanthanide hydroxide clusters created inside the crystal framework are expected to be useful for a wide range of applications, including materials for magnetic cooling as well as advanced heterogeneous catalysts.

A team of international physicists led by Lia Krusin-Elbaum of the City College of New York, has created a new topological magnetic superlattice material, that at a high temperature can conduct electrical current without dissipation and lost energy. The finding, detailed in a paper published in Nature Physics, could be the basis of research leading to an entire new quantum materials class that can potentially provide a platform for error-free quantum computing.

The material in the form of crystals is created in a laboratory chamber. Atoms, in this process, naturally arrange into well-organized layers - a novel ordered magnetic superlattice - which the City College team tests in the Krusin Lab for quantized electrical transport.

The research centers around the Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect (QAHE), which describes an insulator that conducts dissipationless current in discrete channels on its surfaces. Because QAHE current does not lose energy as it travels, it is akin to a superconducting current and has the potential if industrialized to advance energy-efficient technologies.

"The main advance of this work is that the new higher temperature QAHE regime is robust, eminently tunable through electron irradiation and thermal vacancy redistribution, and can be modified on-demand by adjusting the superlattice sequence, leading to a platform for topological superconductivity," said Krusin-Elbaum, professor in CCNY's Division of Science.

Krusin-Elbaum and her graduate student Haiming Deng said they can advance this platform to other topological magnets. The ultimate goal would be to help transform future quantum electronics with the material. The CCNY-based Harlem Center for Quantum Materials is a partner in the research. It strives to solve fundamental problems in novel functional materials systems that have vital scientific and technological importance.

Irvine, Calif. - University of California, Irvine materials science researchers are learning about resilience from the mantis shrimp. The ancient crustaceans are armed with two hammerlike raptorial appendages called dactyl clubs that they use to bludgeon and smash their prey. These fists, able to accelerate from the body at over 50 mph, deliver powerful blows yet appear undamaged afterward.

The UCI researchers discovered that the clubs have a uniquely designed nanoparticle coating that absorbs and dissipates energy. The findings, published today in Nature Materials, have significant implications for engineered materials in the automotive, aerospace and sports industries.

"Think about punching a wall a couple thousand times at those speeds and not breaking your fist," said David Kisailus, UCI professor of materials science & engineering, who has been studying the mantis shrimp for more than a decade. "That's pretty impressive, and it got us thinking about how this could be."

He and postdoctoral scholar Wei Huang used transmission electron and atomic force microscopy to examine the nanoscale architecture and material components of the clubs' surface layer. They determined that the nanoparticles are bicontinuous spheres, made of intertwined organic (protein and polysaccharide) and inorganic (calcium phosphate) nanocrystals.

The 3D inorganic nanocrystals are mesocrystalline, essentially stacked together like Lego pieces, with small orientational differences where they join together. The crystalline interfaces are crucial to the resilience of the surface layer, because they fracture and break during high-speed impact, decreasing the penetration depth by half.

"The high-resolution TEM really helped us understand these particles, how they're architected and how they react under different types of stress," Kisailus said. "At relatively low strain rates, the particles deform almost like a marshmallow and recover when the stress is relieved."

He noted that the behavior of the structures under high-strain impact is much different. "The particles stiffen and fracture at the nanocrystalline interfaces," Kisailus said. "When you break something, you're opening up new surfaces that dissipate significant amounts of energy."

The team, which included researchers from Purdue University, Oxford Instruments and Bruker Corp., was also able to measure and characterize the impressive damping capabilities of the coating.

"The stiff inorganic and soft organic materials in an interpenetrating network confer impressive damping properties to the coating without compromising stiffness. It's a rare combination that outperforms most metals and technical ceramics," Kisailus said.

He added that he's now focused on translating these findings to new applications in a variety of fields: "We can imagine ways to engineer similar particles to add enhanced protective surfaces for use in automobiles, aircraft, football helmets and body armor."

Imagine if every time you looked at a face, one side of the face always appeared distorted as if it were melting, resembling a painting by Salvador Dalí. This is the case for people who have a rare condition known as hemi-prosopometamophosia (hemi-PMO), which makes looking at faces discomforting. According to a new study published in Current Biology, some people with hemi-PMO see distortions to the same half of a person's face regardless of how the face is viewed. The results demonstrate that our visual system standardizes all the faces we perceive using the same process so they can be better compared to faces we have seen before.

"Every time we see a face, the brain adjusts our representation of that face so its size, viewpoint, and orientation is matched to faces stored in memory, just like computer face recognition systems such as those used by Facebook and Google," explains co-author Brad Duchaine, a professor of psychological and brain sciences and the principal investigator of the Social Perception Lab at Dartmouth College. "By aligning the perceived face with faces stored in memory, it's much easier for us to determine whether the face is one we've seen before," he added.

Hemi-PMO is a rare disorder that may occur after brain damage. When a person with this condition looks at a face, facial features on one side of the face appear distorted. The existence of hemi-PMO suggests the two halves of the face are processed separately. The condition usually dissipates over time, which makes it difficult to study. As a result, little is known about the condition or what it reveals about how human face processing normally works.

The current study focused on a right-handed man in his early sixties ("Patient A.D.") with hemi-PMO whose symptoms have persisted for years. Like many with this condition, his distortions were caused by damage to a fiber bundle called the splenium that connects visual areas in the left hemisphere and right hemisphere of his brain. Five years ago while A.D. was watching television, he noticed that the right halves of people's faces looked like they had melted. Yet, the left sides of their faces looked normal. He looked in the mirror at his own face and noticed that the right side of his reflection was also distorted. In contrast, A.D. sees no distortions in other body parts or objects.

The study involved two experiments. In the first, A.D. was presented with images of human faces and non-face images such as objects, houses and cars, and asked to report on distortions. For 17 of the 20 faces, he saw distortions. The distortions were always on the right side of the face and facial features usually appeared to drooped. For example, in one of the faces, A.D. reported that the right eye looked a lot bigger than the left eye while the right eyebrow, right side of the nose, and right side of the lips all hung down unnaturally. Two of the face photographs that did not elicit a distortion showed right profile views in which the right side of the face was not visible. Consistent with his daily experiences, A.D. did not see distortions in any of the non-face images. These results show that his condition affects brain processes specialized for faces.

For the second part of the study, A.D. reported on distortions that he saw in 15 different faces that were presented in a variety of ways: in the left and right visual field, at different in-depth rotations, and at four picture plane rotations-- 0 degrees or upright, 90 degrees, 180 degrees or upside down, and 270 degrees. Regardless of how the faces were presented, A.D. continued to report that the distortions affected the same facial features. For example, even when a face was presented upside down, A.D. still saw the facial features distorted on the right side of the face even though the distortion now appeared on the left-hand side of the stimulus (the red-shaded region in the faces in the reproduction of Figure 4E below). The consistency of the location of A.D.'s distortion demonstrates that faces, regardless of viewpoint or orientation, are aligned to the same template similar to what computer face recognition systems do. In A.D.'s case, the output from that process is disrupted as it is passed from one brain hemisphere to the other due to his splenium lesion.