Culture

ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. (Nov. 21, 2019) -An Army-led research team developed new algorithms and filled in knowledge gaps about how robots contribute to teams and what robots know about their environment and teammates.

Dr. Kristin Schaefer-Lay, an engineer with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory, is part of a multidisciplinary team of reseachers from the Army, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Minnesota and the University of Central Florida -- amongst others, who developed specific algorithms and novel artificial intelligence approaches to support the development of a shared context between team members through effective bidirectional communication.

"The idea of integrating context to AI development is a difficult process," Schaefer-Lay said. "Researchers tend to have very different ideas about what is meant by context and the best practices for integrating context into AI development."

A number of researchers and institutions have looked a smaller pieces of this problem set, but this team looked at a more holistic approach for how to develop and integrate different types of context related to environmental context, mission context and social context to advance human-autonomy teaming through advanced bidirectional communication capabilities.

This has directly advanced science in robotics and AI processes in the areas of natural language communication, world model development, multi-modal communication and human-autonomy teaming, Schaefer-Lay said.

The collaborative team seeks to identify critical scientific advances made by the Army's Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance, or RCTA, on techniques for developing and advancing context-driven artificial intelligence to support future human-autonomy teams.

Strategic investments in Army-led foundational research as part of the RCTA resulted in advanced science in four critical areas of ground combat robotics that effect the way U.S. Warfighters see, think, move and team. This research supports the Army Modernization Priority for the Next Generation Combat Vehicle by advancing science for integrating context-driven artificial intelligence within human-autonomy teams.

"Government investment in ground combat robotics is critical to ensuring U.S. maneuver forces maintain a marked combat advantage," Schaefer-Lay said.

The researchers published their findings in the Sept. 30, 2019, edition of the AI Magazine as part of an invited issue on AI and Context: "Integrating Context into Artificial Intelligence: Research from the Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance."

Integration of context-driven AI is important for future robotic capabilities to support the development of situation awareness, calibrate appropriate trust, and improve team performance in collaborative human-robot teams.

This article highlights advances in context-driven AI for human-robot teaming.

Avenues of research discussed include how context enables robots to fill in the gaps to make effective decisions more quickly, supports more robust behaviors, and augments robot communications to suit the needs of the team under a variety of environments and team organizations and across missions.

The article''s findings will be used to support the laboratory's continued research in the Human-Autonomy Teaming Essential Research Program. In particular, this research will help to develop effective bidirectional communication methods and interventions for calibrating appropriate team trust and shared situation awareness in high risk, complex operations.

It is not enough to just develop new algorithms and approaches, Schaefer-Lay said, "but it is important to understand the impact these have on effective teaming across operations."

The advancement of this research line will extend to include larger teams and crew station technologies that support the Next Generation Combat Vehicle, she said.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- The gas turbines powering aircraft engines rely on ceramic coatings that ensure structural stability at high temperatures. But these coatings don't control heat radiation, limiting the performance of the engine.

Researchers at Purdue University have engineered ceramic "nanotubes" that behave as thermal antennas, offering control over the spectrum and direction of high-temperature heat radiation.

The work is published in Nano Letters, a journal by the American Chemical Society. An illustration of the ceramic nanotubes will be featured as the journal's supplementary cover in a forthcoming issue.

"By controlling radiation at these high temperatures, we can increase the lifetime of the coating. The performance of the engine would also increase because it could be kept hotter with more isolation for longer periods of time," said Zubin Jacob, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue.

The work is part of a larger search in the field for a wide range of materials that can withstand higher temperatures. In 2016, Jacob's team developed a thermal "metamaterial" - made of tungsten and hafnium oxide - that controls heat radiation with the intention of improving how waste heat is harvested from power plants and factories.

A new class of ceramics would expand on ways to more efficiently use heat radiation.

Jacob's team, in collaboration with Purdue professors Luna Lu and Tongcang Li, built nanotubes out of an emerging ceramic material called boron nitride, known for its high thermal stability.

These boron nitride nanotubes control radiation through oscillations of light and matter, called polaritons, inside the ceramic material. High temperatures excite the polaritons, which the nanotubes - as antennas - then couple efficiently to outgoing heat radiation.

The antennas could bring the ability to accelerate the radiation, perform enhanced cooling of a system or send information in very specific directions or wavelengths, Jacob said.

The researchers plan to engineer more ceramic materials with polaritonic features for a host of different applications.

"Polaritonic ceramics can be game changing and we want them to be used widely," Jacob said.

This research was performed in the Purdue Discovery Park Birck Nanotechnology Center and is supported through Nascent Light-Matter Interactions, a program by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The program is led by Purdue University's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Despite restrictions on paid advertising cannabis on social media, most teenagers reported seeing marijuana marketing on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, according to a public health study authored by University of Massachusetts Amherst injury prevention researcher Jennifer Whitehill.

Some 94% of adolescents surveyed said they had been exposed to marijuana marketing either on social media, print media or on a billboard. Because cannabis is an illegal drug under federal law, federal restrictions prohibit or severely restrict cannabis companies from running ads, even in states where marijuana sales have been legalized for adults age 21 and over. Nationwide, as with alcohol, the sale of marijuana to anyone under age 21 is illegal. For both alcohol and marijuana marketing, additional state and federal advertising regulations exist, especially when a certain portion of the audience is under the age of 21. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram prohibit marijuana ads, but cannabis companies can develop a social media presence by establishing a business profile and sharing posts and tweets.

These are the latest findings from the first U.S. study to examine youth exposure to marijuana marketing in states that have legalized cannabis for adult recreational use. Whitehill and colleagues found that exposure to marijuana marketing on social media is not only widespread but also associated with recent use of marijuana by adolescents. For example, teens who reported seeing marijuana promotions on Instagram were more than twice as likely to have used marijuana in the past year, compared to youth who did not see such promotions.

The research, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, suggests that "current restrictions on social media content do not go far enough because it's clearly making its way to youth," says Whitehill, assistant professor of health promotion and policy in the School of Public Health and Health Sciences. Whitehill is part of the Cannabis Advertising and Social Media study team, led by Dr. Megan Moreno, professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. The investigative team also includes researchers from the Boston University School of Public Health and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"Youth who can't buy or use non-medical marijuana shouldn't have to see these promotions, particularly on a platform like Instagram, whose audience is mostly youth," Moreno says. A related study by the same team looking at social media engagement, rather than exposure, found that one in three youth in states with legal recreational marijuana engage with marijuana brands by following, liking or otherwise interacting with them. This social media engagement was linked to higher rates of marijuana use.

The investigators point out that "decades of research on alcohol and tobacco - other legal substances with abuse potential - show strong correlations between youth exposure to marketing and both earlier initiation and higher consumption among those already using."

With retail cannabis shops already operating in seven states and the $10 billion-plus cannabis market expected to grow as more states follow suit, the impact of cannabis marketing - especially in the understudied social media arena - has crucial public health implications and requires further study, Whitehill says.

Using an online panel, the study surveyed 469 youth, ages 15 to 19, in California, Colorado, Nevada and Washington - four of the 11 states with legalized adult marijuana use. Participants were asked about their social media use, marijuana use and exposure to marijuana marketing. "First we found out what social media platforms they used, and then we asked, when you use this platform, do you see marijuana ads or promotions," Whitehill explains.

Tellingly, more youth reported seeing marijuana promotions on social media than billboards. "Across marijuana users and nonusers, 73% said they had seen marijuana advertisements outdoors on billboards," Whitehill says. "But the figure was even higher on social media, with 79% reporting exposure - even in a space where they are not supposed to be seeing cannabis marketing."

The study was co-authored by Pamela Trangenstein of the University of North Carolina, David Jernigan of Boston University and Marina Jenkins of the University of Wisconsin.

The researchers conclude, "Current policies to help prevent exposure to cannabis marketing online are not effective. While larger, longitudinal studies about exposure to cannabis marketing on social media and onset of adolescent cannabis use are needed, states should consider adopting the most restrictive cannabis marketing policies feasible, combined with an accountability and enforcement infrastructure that will help protect the current generation of adolescents."

East Hanover, NJ. November 21, 2019. A team of researchers published new findings about the role of sensory processing and disease characteristics in the functional status of individuals with multiple sclerosis. This is one of the first studies to look at the implications of sensory processing deficits in this population. The article, "The role of sensory processing difficulties, cognitive impairment, and disease severity in predicting functional behavior among patients with multiple sclerosis", (doi: 10.1080/09638288.2019.1653998) was epublished on August 27, 2019 by Disability and Rehabilitation.

The authors are Batya Engel-Yeger, PhD, OT, of the University of Haifa, John DeLuca, PhD, and Patrick Hake of Kessler Foundation, and Yael Goverover, OTR/L, PhD, of New York University and Kessler Foundation. Link to abstract: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09638288.2019.1653998

Little research has been done on the sensory processing difficulties affecting persons with multiple sclerosis, and the impact of these difficulties on their daily activities. This team of researchers examined the association between sensory processing deficits and cognitive impairments in individuals with MS, and the effects of sensory processing difficulties on functional behavior and disease severity.

Researchers enrolled 61 participants with multiple sclerosis, aged 23 to 63 years, and 36 healthy controls. The MS participants comprised 43 participants with cognitive impairments and 18 without impairments. Data collected included the Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile, Functional Behavior Profile, and MS Functional Composite scores. Testing revealed the presence of differences in sensory processing including low ability to register sensory input, high sensory sensitivity, and sensory avoidance.

Compared with healthy controls, the participants with MS were more likely to score higher on tests for sensory difficulties; there were no differences between the two MS groups. For the functional behavior profile, the control group had higher scores than both MS groups. Analyses of sensory findings, cognitive status, functional behavior profiles and disease severity showed a lack of effect of cognitive status on functional behavior. Disease severity and sensory processing deficits, however, did affect functional performance of everyday life activities.

"This study underscores the influence of sensory processing in MS, and the importance of screening patients for these disorders," said Dr. Goverover. "Further research is needed to explore whether sensory processing difficulties could be of predictive value for disease severity and cognitive decline," she continued. "This approach may lead to interventions that improve function and support the full participation of people with MS in everyday life."

MINNEAPOLIS, MN- November 21, 2019 - New University of Minnesota Medical School research finds postpartum women are generally getting prescribed more narcotics than they need.

The study, co-authored by Cresta Jones, MD, FACOG, who is an associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Women's Health, was published in "American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology MFM." Designed to evaluate what is being done to treat women's pain after delivery in different types of hospitals across the country, the study looked at what medications are being prescribed, how much of those medications are being prescribed and if there are differences between hospitals, as well as between providers within those hospitals.

Dr. Jones found that there is a huge opportunity for improving patient care after deliveries. Her research showed very apparent, regional differences for what is being prescribed and how much of those medications are being prescribed. However, despite those differences, she found that there is a general trend among all hospitals of patients being prescribed more narcotics after delivery than they need, leaving them with excess pills.

"Before we are able to attack the nationwide opioid problem, we need to know where the problem is," Dr. Jones said. "We need to figure out what is going on in different places throughout the country when it comes to postpartum opioid prescriptions, and then use that information to initiate further research that figures out the appropriate prescription standards for women after delivery."

Dr. Jones believes that establishing a standard guideline will keep patients and their families safer.

"We know that a small percentage of women who leave the hospital with opioids can go on to develop opioid use disorder. We also know that many individuals who suffer from opioid misuse from prescription pills get them from friends and family," she said. "We don't want to increase that problem."

A standard guideline would allow patients to get the medications they need without putting them and their families in danger of unnecessary opioids.

"Our hope is to eventually adopt a standard guideline for postpartum opioid prescriptions, so we can train the next generation of new learners in the medical field to use the right amount of opioids and keep our patients safe," Dr. Jones said.

Wound healing events in mucous tissues during early infection by Simian Immunodeficiency Virus, or SIV, guard some primate species against developing AIDS, a recent study has learned. The research looked at why certain species can carry the virus throughout their lives, and still avoid disease progression.

SIV is closely related to the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. It is used as a laboratory model for many studies seeking AIDS and HIV cures and preventions.

Despite effective treatments to manage HIV, the virus remains a major global health threat. Approximately 37.9 million people in the world are living with an HIV infection. Each year about 770,000 people die of AIDS. As yet, there are no clinically available vaccines against HIV, or cures for the infection.

In this latest study, reported this month in Nature Communications (please see paper), scientists sought to uncover, in natural hosts, successful virus-fighting tactics that could inform the design of better antiviral drugs to treat HIV in people. They found that the biological events involved in wound healing of mucosal tissues create an environment inside the body that protects against the destructive consequences of SIV infection. (Mucosal tissues are part of the body's defense against germs.) Aspects of this wound-healing immune response could become targets for developing new therapies to prevent AIDS in people with HIV infections.

The multi-institutional study was led by Michael Gale, Jr., professor of immunology at the University of Washington School of Medicine and director of the Center for Innate Immunity and Immune Disease, and Fredrik Barrenas and Jan Komorowski of the University of Uppsala, Sweden and the Institute of Computer Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences.

The research team combined data from their experiments and from other published studies to generate their findings.

To evaluate the virus-host interactions and immune response in the early stages of SIV and HIV infection, the researchers developed a systems biology approach - a way of representing and interpreting complex interactions - called Conserved Gene Signature Analysis. They also conducted additional types of bioinformatics analyses, which incorporate methods and tools from computer science, biology, math, statistics, information engineering and other fields.

As part of their study, the researchers compared virus host interactions and immune response to SIV, including gene expression profiles, from the African green monkey, a natural host for HIV, with those from an AIDS-susceptible species, the rhesus macaque. Similar data from human HIV infections was also evaluated.

"The use of public datasets were a key component of this research and highlights the importance of the scientific community sharing their data in public forums," Barrenas said.

The researchers explained that both HIV and SIV infect immune cells called T helper cells. These cells are abundant in the intestine and in specialized tissues elsewhere in the body. The HIV infection provokes an immune response that injures tissues surrounding the intestine. This injury allows the bacteria that normally reside in the gut to penetrate the tissue and invade other sites in the body. This causes further inflammation and damage.

The situation attracts more immune cells, some of which get infected with HIV. Others undergo a program of spontaneous cell death. Deterioration of the immune system and further decline of infection-fighting T cells can follow. If the infection progresses to AIDS, the syndrome lowers the ability to resist opportunistic pathogens and fend off cancer.

The researchers found that, in contrast, African green monkeys in the early stages of SIV infection quickly activate and maintain regenerative wound healing mechanism in their mucosal tissue. For example, in the monkeys, a white-cell mediated remodeling of tissue occurs. Some of the repair mechanisms, the researchers say, are evolutionarily conserved. One biological pathway, for instance, is roughly reminiscent of one observed in a salamander that can regenerate certain lost parts.

The green monkey's ability to activate mucous tissue wound healing, the research team found, interrupts the course of the disease such that the onset of AIDS is avoided.

"We think the regenerative wound healing process likely preserves the tissue integrity," said Gale, "and could prevent the inflammatory insults that underlie immune exhaustion, cell death and AIDS that happen due to SIV or HIV infection."

Gale added, "This maintenance of tissue integrity would be a valuable therapeutic strategy to avoid systemic immune activation and progression to AIDS. Our findings indicate that the use of therapies that stimulate the wound healing response during early infection could have a protective effect against disease from HIV infection."

A new paper in the Journal of Neuropathology & Experimental Neurology finds a gene that may help explain a large part of the genetic risk for developing Alzheimer disease.

Late-onset Alzheimer disease, the most common form of the illness, is a devastating neurological condition with aspects of heritable risk that are incompletely understood. Unfortunately, the complexity of the human genome and shortcomings of earlier research are limiting factors, so that some genetic phenomena were not surveyed completely in prior studies. For example, there are many incompletely mapped genomic regions, and areas with repetitive sequences, that could not be studied previously.

Although Alzheimer's is known to be largely heritable, a substantial proportion of the actual genetic risk for the disease has remained unexplained, despite extensive studies. This knowledge gap is known to researchers are the "missing (or hidden) heritability" problem. For example, while heritability explained 79% of late-onset Alzheimer disease risk in a Swedish twin study, common risk variants identified by pervious genetic studies explained only 20% to 50% of late-onset Alzheimer disease. In other words, a relatively large amount of genetic influence on late-onset Alzheimer disease risk was not explained by prior genetic studies.

Recent advances in sequencing technologies have enabled more comprehensive studies. Such developments allow for more precise and accurate identification of genetic material than was available in earlier gene variant studies.

In the present study, researchers analyzed Alzheimer's Disease Sequencing Project data derived from over 10,000 people (research volunteers who agreed to have their genetic data evaluated in combination with their disease status), with the goal of identifying genetic variation associated with late-onset Alzheimer disease.

Preliminary results found evidence of late-onset Alzheimer disease -linked genetic variation within a segment of a gene called Mucin 6. Although the underlying mechanisms are mostly still unknown, researchers here believe that it's possible to draw credible and testable hypotheses based on these results. For example, the genetic variant that was associated with Alzheimer's disease risk may implicate a biochemical pathway in the brain that then represents a potential therapeutic target, a topic for future studies.

Corresponding authors were Yuriko Katsumata and Peter Nelson, both from the University of Kentucky. Dr. Nelson said of this study, "Our findings were made in a group of patients that is relatively small for a genetics study--some recent studies included hundreds of thousands of research subjects! That small sample size means two things: first, we should exercise caution and we need to make sure the phenomenon can be replicated in other groups; and second, it implies that there is a very large effect size--the genetic variation is strongly associated with the disease."

A research case report describing lung injury related to e-cigarette use in a 17-year-old Canadian may be the first documented case of a new form of damage from vaping products. The article, published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) provides new evidence on forms of lung injury that can result from vaping.

Recently, several cases of "e-cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung injury" (EVALI) have been described. However, this patient presented with a new type of vaping-related injury that is similar to "popcorn lung," a condition seen in workers exposed to the chemical flavouring diacetyl, an ingredient used in microwave popcorn. If inhaled, the chemical causes bronchiolitis, which is characterized by the small airways of the lungs becoming inflamed and obstructed.

A team of authors from Lawson Health Research Institute in London, Ontario, and University Health Network (UHN) in Toronto, who were all involved in the care of the patient, report on the case of life-threatening bronchiolitis. The article describes a previously healthy 17-year-old male who initially presented for care after a week of persistent and intractable cough and was eventually hospitalized and put on life support. After ruling out other causes, the authors suspected flavoured e-liquids as the cause. The youth's family reported that he vaped daily using a variety of flavoured cartridges and used tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) regularly.

"This novel disease pattern of airway injury associated with vaping leading to chronic obstruction appears to be distinct from the alveolar injury characterizing the EVALI cases recently reported in the US, and the 7 confirmed or probable cases in Canada, highlighting the need for further research and regulation of e-cigarettes," writes lead author Dr. Karen Bosma, Associate Scientist at Lawson and Intensivist at London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC).

The CMAJ case study provides detailed medical information on the extent and type of injury as well as treatment, although the Middlesex-London Health Unit reported on the youth's condition earlier this fall to extend an early warning of the risks of vaping.

"This case of life-threatening acute bronchiolitis posed a diagnostic and therapeutic challenge," write the authors. "Given the patient's intense vaping exposure to flavoured e-liquid and negative workup for other causes of bronchiolitis, we suspected that bronchiolitis obliterans might have been developing in this patient as in microwave popcorn factory workers exposed to occupational inhalation of diacetyl."

The authors referred the patient to a lung transplant centre for further evaluation and reported the case to authorities (Government of Canada's consumer product incident report system) as an adverse reaction to a consumer product, e-cigarettes. They also alerted Health Canada for further investigation.

The youth narrowly avoided the need for a double lung transplant, but now has evidence of chronic damage to his airways. He is still recovering from his lengthy stay in the intensive care unit, and is abstaining from e-cigarettes, marijuana and tobacco.

Emerging reports indicate that e-cigarettes are causing a variety of lung illnesses and injuries. According to a 2017 report, e-cigarettes are the most commonly used nicotine products among Canadian youth, with an estimated 272,000 Canadians aged 15 to 24 years reporting e-cigarette use within the last 30 days.

"This case may represent the first direct evidence of the lung disease most expected to result from e-cigarette use," writes Dr. Matthew Stanbrook, Deputy Editor, CMAJ, in a linked editorial.

Stanbrook urges the federal government to ban these harmful substances and ignore the fear-mongering from the tobacco industry that people will revert to smoking cigarettes.

"From the start, CMAJ has called for a ban on flavourings in e-liquids, restrictions on e-cigarette advertising equivalent to those for tobacco products, and an effective standard for quality and safety to be imposed on every e-cigarette product sold. We do so again now," Dr. Stanbrook writes.

When scientists discovered a worm deep in an aquifer nearly one mile underground, they hailed it as the discovery of the deepest-living animal ever found. Now American University researchers, reporting in Nature Communications, have sequenced the genome of the unique animal, referred to as the 'Devil Worm' for its ability to survive in harsh, subsurface conditions. The Devil Worm's genome provides clues to how an organism adapts to lethal environmental conditions. Future research into how it evolved could help humans learn lessons for how to adapt to a warming climate.

In 2008, Gaetan Borgonie from the University of Ghent and Princeton University geoscientist Tullis Onstott discovered the microscopic Devil Worm while investigating subterrestrial bacterial communities in active gold mines in South Africa. Borgonie and his team were stunned to discover the worm, a complex, multi-cellular animal thriving in an environment thought only livable for microbes, with high temperatures, little oxygen and high amounts of methane.

Researchers named the worm Halicephalobus mephisto, in honor of Mephistopheles, a subterranean demon from the medieval German legend Faust.

Evolutionary adaptation to heat

The Devil Worm is the first subterrestrial animal to have its genome sequenced. The genome offers evidence of how life can exist below Earth's surface and opens up a new way of understanding how life can survive beyond Earth, said John Bracht, assistant professor of biology at American University who led the genome sequencing project.

The sequencing revealed that the genome encodes an unusually large number of heat-shock proteins known as Hsp70, which is notable because many nematode species whose genomes are sequenced do not reveal such a large number. Hsp70 is a well-studied gene that exists in all life forms and restores cellular health due to heat damage.

Many of the Hsp70 genes in the Devil Worm's genome were copies of themselves. The genome also has extra copies of AIG1 genes, known cellular survival genes in plants and animals. More research will be needed, but Bracht believes the presence of copies of the gene signifies the worm's evolutionary adaptation.

"The Devil Worm can't run away; it's underground," Bracht explained. "It has no choice but to adapt or die. We propose that when an animal cannot escape intense heat, it starts making additional copies of these two genes to survive."

By scanning other genomes, Bracht identified other cases where the same two gene families, Hsp70 and AIG1, are expanded. The animals he identified are bivalves, a group of mollusks including clams, oysters and mussels. They are heat-adapted like the Devil Worm. This suggests that the pattern identified in the Devil Worm may extend more generally to organisms unable to escape environmental heat. This work was also recently published in the Journal of Molecular Evolution with an AU Biology undergraduate first author, Megan Guerin.

'The aliens have landed at AU'

Bracht got the chance to sequence the unique worm's genome as a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University. He carried the project over to American University when he joined the biology faculty in 2014. Two biology master's students working in his lab, Deborah Weinstein and Sarah Allen, contributed research and writing of the Nature Communications paper and are first and second authors, respectively, on the manuscript. Kathryn Walters-Conte, Ph.D., director of AU’s Master’s in Biotechnology program, also contributed to the paper.

Nearly a decade ago, the Devil Worm was unknown and living below the Earth's surface. Now it's a subject of study in science laboratories, including Bracht's. When Bracht brought Devil Worms from a laboratory in South Africa that cultures them to his laboratory at AU, he recalls saying to his students that aliens landed at AU. The metaphor isn't a stretch. NASA supports research of the Devil Worm for what it can teach scientists about the search for life beyond Earth.

"Part of this work entails looking for 'biosignatures' of life--stable chemical clues left behind by living things. We focus on a ubiquitous biosignature of organic life--genomic DNA--obtained from an animal that has adapted to an environment once considered uninhabitable to complex life: the deep terrestrial subsurface," Bracht said. "It is work that might prompt us to broaden the search for extraterrestrial life to 'uninhabitable' exoplanets' deep subterrestrial regions."

Nematodes are well suited to studies of evolutionary adaptation, Bracht said. They have adapted to a diverse set of environments and are among the most abundant animals on earth. Future work involving the Devil Worm in Bracht's lab will pinpoint Hsp70's function, such as inactivating the gene to test its response to heat stress. Other work could involve gene-transfer studies in C.elegans, a type of heat-intolerant microscopic roundworm, to see if it becomes heat-resilient.

Two-thirds (68%) of Indigenous people living off reserve in Canada have excellent mental health, according to a nationally representative study conducted by the University of Toronto and Algoma University.

"These findings underline the incredible strength and resiliency of Indigenous people. Most previous research has focused solely on deficits. In contrast, our findings show that despite stark economic inequalities and a history of residential schools, the majority of Indigenous people are free of addictions, suicidal thoughts and mental illness," according to co-author Rose Cameron who is an Anishinaabekwe elder and an Associate Professor and Director of the Social Work program at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, Canada. "However, we know that there is still an urgent need to address poverty and support those who are struggling in order to bring the community up to parity with the wider Canadian population," in which 73.5% reported excellent mental health.

"Supportive social connections are a key to well-being; Among our Indigenous respondents, those with at least one person who provided them with a sense of emotional security and well-being were much more likely to be in excellent mental health than those without a confidant [70% vs 29%]," reported co-author Siwon Lee, a recent Master of Public Health graduate of the University of Toronto. "Interventions are needed to promote social support and to decrease social isolation and loneliness."

"Poverty was a serious impediment to mental well-being. Only 53% of Indigenous respondents whose income was in the bottom 10% had complete mental health compared to 73% of those whose income was above the Canadian average," reported lead author Esme Fuller-Thomson, Professor at the University of Toronto's Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work and Director of the Institute for Life Course & Aging. "As a nation, we need a concerted effort to improve the financial situation of our most economically disadvantaged population."

"Our study found that those with post-secondary degrees were more likely to be in excellent mental health compared to their counterparts with less education. Education opens doors to better careers, higher income, better access to mental-health care and more opportunities in life. Currently, many isolated reserves do not have local high schools, which forces children as young as 14 to leave their family, home and community and move to larger towns and cities in order to study. These inequities need to be addressed if we hope to improve the high-school graduation rate of Indigenous youth in Canada," said co-author Senyo Agbeyaka, a Masters of Social Work graduate of the University of Toronto.

"This study concluded that Indigenous men were much more likely than women to be in excellent mental health. Some of the excess vulnerability is due to the fact that women had experienced more childhood adversities and chronic pain, which makes it difficult to experience mental flourishing." reported co-author Philip Baiden, a PhD graduate of the FIFSW who is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington.

The definition of excellent mental health in this study had three components: 1) Respondents must report daily or almost daily happiness or life satisfaction in the past month; 2) They must report social and psychological wellbeing on an almost daily basis in the past month, and: 3) They had to be free of all mental illness, serious suicidal thoughts and substance dependence in the preceding year.

"For those who are experiencing mental-health problems, culturally adapted cognitive behavioural therapy [CBT] is a very promising intervention. It has been shown to be extremely effective in treating psychological distress among Indigenous individuals around the world," said co-author Talib M. Karamally, a recent Master of Industrial Relations and Human Resources graduate at the University of Toronto.

"In sum, there are multiple factors that are associated with optimal mental health among Indigenous people, in particular, having a university degree, social support and being free of chronic pain and insomnia. While it is encouraging that the prevalence of excellent mental health is quite high, there are many policy changes that could hasten better outcomes for Aboriginal peoples who are vulnerable." Cameron said.

BEER-SHEVA, Israel...November 21, 2019 - This holiday shopping season, consumers may make better shopping decisions using their PCs rather than smart phones or other mobile devices, according to new research from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

"The issue is not actually screen size," says Prof. Lior Fink, head of the Mobile Behavior Lab and a member of the BGU Department of Industrial Engineering and Management. "It is actually the fact that sites adjusted for mobile viewing reduce the information offered on the results page and require more digging around in the site for information. Sites adjusted for PC viewing give more information right up front."

This is the first study that differentiates between screen size and information reduction, which are often mixed up. The findings will be presented next month at the International Conference on Information Systems, the top academic conference in the field.

In 2018, phones accounted for 47% of traffic to online stores and 36% of sales according to Adobe Analytics. Last Black Friday was the first during which there were more than $2 billion in online U.S. sales via phones.

"Most e-commerce providers use 'responsive web design' to adapt the presentation of information to the device used." Fink explains. "While mobile friendly presentation improves visibility, it reduces the amount of information and causes consumers to make decisions that are less consistent with their preferences."

From a pure decision-making perspective, the study shows it is better to simply present the same information irrespective of the device used. Consumers will find the information more difficult to view on mobile devices, but their decisions will be more accurate.

Prof. Fink and his master's student Daniele Papismedov conducted two experiments in the Mobile Behavior Lab focused on choosing a fictitious hotel room among 11 room options. Participants viewed the information either on a PC or on a mobile device. They viewed eight informational features about each room option on the PC display and only three on a mobile display. While all the information was available in both displays, it was more readily available on the PC display. The assignments to a specific device and to a specific display were independent of each other.

The experiments showed that when the same information was presented on both screens right up front, equally accurate decisions were made. As a result, the research showed that participants made decisions that were less accurate and less aligned with their preferences as a consequence of the mobile display but not as a consequence of the mobile device.

Whether it is selecting a hotel room, a new outfit or a new television, the researchers believe that shoppers will have a more accurate shopping experience in line with their preferences using a PC rather than a mobile friendly format.

PITTSBURGH, Nov. 20, 2019 - A qualitative study by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine found that women in their 60s report various reasons behind why they lack libido.

The study, published today in Menopause, distilled interviews with dozens of women about their lack of desire for sex into several major themes -- including sexual dysfunction in their partners.

"If a woman is having sexual problems, what's going on with her partner may be contributing. Sex doesn't occur in a vacuum," said lead author Holly Thomas, M.D., M.S., assistant professor of medicine at Pitt.

Up to 40% of women over age 60 have low libido, and about 10% of them report feeling bothered by it.

To understand what's causing these women to have lower libido than they'd like, Thomas and her team conducted three 12-woman focus groups and interviewed 15 other women privately, depending on which setting the participant preferred.

Through these conversations, five major themes emerged:

Postmenopausal vaginal symptoms.

Erectile dysfunction in partner.

Fatigue or bodily pain.

Life stressors.

Body image.

The most surprising thread here, Thomas said, was that so many women identified sexual dysfunction in their male partners as a major contributor to their own lack of desire for sex.

"Some women find workarounds, but others get stonewalled by their partner because he feels defensive," Thomas said. "As women we're encouraged to be accommodating, so we learn to tamp down our own needs and desires, and prioritize those of others."

Another revelation was that for some women, despite having retired from their jobs and successfully ejected their adult children from their houses, they were still too stressed to view sex as a priority.

For instance, one woman bemoaned the emotional burden of caring for her ailing mother while simultaneously supporting her daughter through recovery from a substance use disorder.

There were several limitations of this study, most notably the small, racially homogeneous sample and the lack of quantitative data.

Still, since most of the research on low libido in older women has focused on hormones, Thomas said, hearing detailed accounts from the women themselves produces novel ideas that may not come out of a large survey.

As an alternative to government-issued money, the cryptocurrency Bitcoin offers relative anonymity, no sales tax and freedom from bank and government interference. But some people argue that these benefits have an enormous environmental impact, particularly with regard to Bitcoin mining -- the process used to secure the cryptocurrency. Now, researchers reporting in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology have estimated that past and future environmental impacts of Bitcoin mining could be lower than previously thought.

In contrast to traditional banks, which keep records of balances and transactions at a centralized location, in Bitcoin all transactions are stored digitally as "blocks" in a chain that is kept by a network of peers. Using special computers, Bitcoin miners in this network compete to solve a mathematical puzzle. The winner, who earns the right to add the next block of data to the chain, is rewarded with new Bitcoin currency. This mining requires substantial electricity to power the special computers, but current estimates of the impact associated with this energy use suffer from a lack of accurate data. Susanne Köhler and Massimo Pizzol wanted to conduct a life cycle assessment to better understand the total environmental impact of Bitcoin mining.

The researchers estimated the electricity consumption and carbon dioxide emissions in 2018 for each stage of Bitcoin mining, from the extraction of raw materials to make the equipment to its production, use and recycling. They calculated that the Bitcoin network consumed 31.3 Terawatt-hours of electricity and generated 17.3 megatons of carbon dioxide equivalents in 2018, which were lower than previous estimates. About 99% of the environmental impact came from the use of the mining equipment, with minimal contributions from production and recycling. The location of the miners had the largest impact on the environment, with areas that use mostly fossil fuels for electricity, such as Inner Mongolia, China, contributing more to the carbon footprint than regions using renewable resources, such as Sichuan, China. The analysis also predicted that the environmental impact per miner will shrink if mining equipment becomes more efficient, use of renewable energy sources increases, or miners relocate to cooler climates, where less energy is needed to cool the computers. However, the overall number of miners is likely to continue increasing, at least in the short term, the researchers say.

Over the last 60 years, the percentage of children in the United Kingdom living in homes headed by a single mother has risen steadily. A new study examined how the impact of single motherhood on children's verbal cognitive abilities has changed and how the age of children when their parents separate affects those abilities. The study concluded that children who lived with a single mother before age 11 had lower verbal cognitive ability even after considering mothers' education and their age at the time of the child's birth.

The study was done by researchers at the University of Bristol, Universidad de Alcalá, and the University of Bath. It is published in Child Development, a journal of the Society for Research in Child Development.

"Our study shows that almost all of the relationships between single motherhood and negative consequences for children's cognitive attainment can be explained by families' reduced economic circumstances," explains Susan Harkness, professor of public policy at the University of Bristol, who led the study. "Although single motherhood has become much more common in the U.K., deficits associated with parenting--as opposed to reduced economic circumstances--have all but disappeared over the last 40 years."

Researchers used data from three large, nationally representative studies of British children born in 1958, 1970, and 2000; each study included more than 10,000 children and measured children's verbal ability on standardized tests at age 10 (1970 study) or 11 (1958 and 2000 studies). The studies also collected information on economic and family characteristics, as well as family members' health and well-being.

Prior studies, which used data from children born in the 1940s to the 1970s, compared children of single mothers with children in families that are otherwise similar but not headed by a single mother, so the indirect effect of single motherhood on children's outcomes is not well understood. In this study, researchers sought to determine how the family environment is affected by single motherhood, specifically, to what extent the economic and parenting resources of children in single- and two-parent families differ. They then assessed how children in single-mother families might have done had their parents not separated, and how economic resources and differences in parenting affected children's attainment.

The study examined how being born to a single mother, having parents separate after birth but before age 7, and having parents separate between ages 7 and 11 affected children's verbal ability at age 11. It also assessed how single motherhood affected economic resources and parenting, and the impact that this in turn had on children's verbal ability. Children's cognitive ability is strongly related to a range of later life outcomes, including the likelihood of dropping out of school, earnings, occupational attainment, crime, substance abuse, and mental health.

The study found that:

Children who lived with a single mother before age 11 had lower verbal cognitive attainment than children whose parents stayed together.

For children born in 2000, the age at which their parents separated mattered to their attainment: Those whose parents separated before they were 7 had less optimal cognitive outcomes than those whose parents separated when they were between 7 and 11; the study saw no statistically significant effects for the latter group. This pattern differs from that of children born in 1958 or 1970; for these children, the age at which their parents separated had little effect on their attainment.

Few differences were identified in the parenting behavior of single- and two-parent families, and this contributed little to the observed differences in attainment, leading the researchers to conclude that lower attainment is largely due to single-mother families' lower economic resources.

"Overall, our findings suggest two policy responses in the U.K.: supporting the incomes of single-parent families, particularly those with very young children, and addressing the growing gap in attainment between all children whose parents have adverse economic characteristics, whether partnered or not," said Paul Gregg, professor of public policy at the University of Bath, who coauthored the study.

Air pollution doesn't just come from cars on the road, generating electricity from fossil fuels also releases fine particulate matter into the air.

In general, fine particulate matter can lead to heart attacks, strokes, lung cancer and other diseases, and is responsible for more than 100,000 deaths each year in the United States.

Now University of Washington researchers have found that air pollution from electricity generation emissions in 2014 led to about 16,000 premature deaths in the continental U.S. In many states, the majority of the health impacts came from emissions originating in other states. The team also found that exposures were higher for black and white non-Latino Americans than for other groups, and that this disparity held even after accounting for differences in income.

The researchers published their results Nov. 20 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

"Our data show that even if states take measures to change their own electricity production methods, what happens across state lines could dramatically affect their population," said senior author Julian Marshall, a UW professor of civil and environmental engineering.

The team first examined how emissions from electricity generation plants could move across the continental U.S.

"We looked at emissions from different types of power plants -- including coal, natural gas, diesel and oil power plants -- and modeled how the pollutants would travel based on things like wind patterns or rain. We also consider how emissions can react in the atmosphere to form fine particle air pollution," said lead author Maninder Thind, a UW civil and environmental engineering doctoral student. "That gave us a map of pollution concentrations across the country. Then we overlaid that map with data from the census to get an estimate of where people live and how this pollution results in health impacts."

Then, using mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics, the team estimated premature deaths due to electricity generation emissions. In 2014, there were about 16,000 premature deaths. The researchers estimate that 91% of premature deaths were the result of emissions from coal-fired power plants. The number of deaths in each state varied, with Pennsylvania having the highest number -- about 2,000 -- and Montana and Idaho having the lowest number, with fewer than 10 deaths each.

Emissions from electricity generation don't stop at state lines -- many states "imported" or "exported" pollution. In 36 states, more than half of premature deaths were the result of emissions from other states.

Overall, the team found that emissions affected black Americans the most, leading to about seven premature deaths per 100,000 people in that group. White non-Latino Americans were the second most affected group with about six premature deaths per 100,000 people. Other groups averaged about four premature deaths per 100,000 people.

"A lot of people may expect that the disparity we see for race or ethnicity comes from an underlying difference in income. But that's not what we see," said co-author Christopher Tessum, a research scientist in the UW's civil and environmental engineering department. "We find that differences by race or ethnicity tend to be larger than differences by income group."

While the researchers found that overall, lower-income households experienced more exposure to emissions, the disparities they saw between race groups still held when they accounted for income.

The amount of power plant pollution that people breathe can vary by where they live. These disparities may be influenced by societal trends. For example, where people live often reflects segregation or other conditions from decades earlier.

These trends don't always hold when looking at individual areas. For example, exposures for Native Americans are lower than other groups overall, but in Kansas and Oklahoma, this group is the most exposed. The state with the largest disparities by race is Kentucky, where black people are the most exposed.

"We've seen in our previous research that our society is more segregated by race than by income, and now it's showing up again with air pollution from electricity generation emissions," Marshall said. "These results can help local, state or national governments make more informed decisions that will improve everyone's air quality and quality of life."

Inês Azevedo, a professor of energy resources engineering at Stanford University, is also a co-author on this paper. This publication was developed as part of the Center for Air, Climate, and Energy Solutions, which was supported under an Assistance Agreement awarded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.