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Whether they're aiming to avoid high financial management fees, control their own investments, or enjoy the thrill of playing the market, more consumers are opening investment accounts and making their own stock picks.

But a new study from the UBC Sauder School of Business has found that less experienced investors are failing to diversify -- and could be putting themselves at serious financial risk. The effect is so pronounced that many amateur investors would be better off choosing stocks at complete random.

For the study, researchers first asked participants to create portfolios of financial assets using tables of previous returns, and then assessed the participants' level of financial literacy. The researchers found the investors with poor financial literacy tended to choose positively correlated assets - for example, stocks in oil companies and forestry -- which tend to fluctuate in value together.

"An amateur investor might buy stocks in lumber, mining, oil and banks, and believe they are diversifying because they're investing in different companies and sectors," said David Hardisty, study co-author and assistant professor at UBC Sauder. "But because all of those equities tend to move in unison, it can be quite risky, because all the assets can potentially plunge at the same time."

More experienced investors know to hedge their bets by including negatively correlated assets, which are likely to move down when others go up -- or uncorrelated assets (ones that move up and down independently of the others) in order to mitigate losses.

The researchers also found that the amateur investors were actively preferring correlated assets because they seemed less complicated and more predictable.

"If it seems predictable, it seems safer and easier to track," explains Hardisty. "Whereas if you have a combination of assets that all go in different directions, it seems chaotic, unpredictable and riskier."

Ironically, when the study participants were encouraged to take more risk when creating a portfolio, the amateur investors ended up making safer, more diversified selections, compared to when they were encouraged to avoid risk.

"This shows that amateur investors rely on a definition of risk that greatly differs from the objective definition of portfolio risk," said Yann Cornil, assistant professor at UBC Sauder and co-author of the study. "This can lead them to make objectively low-risk investments when they intend to take risk, or to make high-risk investments when they intend to reduce risk."

The researchers found that when amateur investors are shown the aggregate returns of portfolios (and not merely the returns of each asset composing the portfolio), they can see that having negatively correlated or uncorrelated assets is the winning investment strategy -- even if it might seem counterintuitive to play both sides.

"If you don't diversify, when one asset does well the other ones are also going to do well. But if one does badly it's likely the others will all do badly -- and in investing, you want to avoid those worst-case scenarios," says Hardisty, who hopes the research will encourage investors to educate themselves on investment strategies, and use the diversification tools that online investment services provide to properly balance their portfolios.

"In the best-case scenario you could make lots of money and have an extra vacation or buy a car or something like that," he explains of the positively correlated accounts. "But if your whole portfolio crashes you could risk losing your life savings. So, the best-case scenario isn't that much better, but the worst-case scenario is a whole lot worse."

How many stars are there in the observable universe? It was once deemed an impossible question, but astronomers have gleaned an answer--about one billion trillion of them.

Now, scientists at Harvard Medical School and Joslin Diabetes Center have embarked on what could be a similarly daunting quest: How many genes are there in the human microbiome?

In a study published Aug. 14 in the journal Cell Host & Microbe, a team of microbiologists and bioinformaticians offer a first glimpse of the array of genes that make up the bacterial universe residing in each of us.

The findings thus far: There may be more genes in the collective human microbiome than stars in the observable universe, and at least half of these genes appear to be unique to each individual--a diversity far exceeding the researchers' expectations.

The research is believed to be the largest analysis of its kind to date and the first one to include DNA samples from bacteria that reside both in the mouth and the gut. Past studies have focused on one or the other.

Even so, the work marks only the beginning of efforts to analyze the entire genome of the human microbiome.

"Ours is a gateway study, the first step on a what will likely be a long journey toward understanding how differences in gene content drive microbial behavior and modify disease risk," said study first author Braden Tierney, a graduate student at Harvard Medical School.

Microbial fingerprinting for more precise therapies

Scientists estimate that the human microbiome--the collective body of microbes that populate our guts, mouths, skin and other parts of the body--contains trillions of bacteria, most of them harmless, many beneficial and some disease causing. Mounting evidence has revealed the role of these microbes as powerful modulators of disease and health. Changes in both bacterial count and bacterial content have been linked to development of conditions ranging from garden variety dental caries and gut infections to more serious ones, including chronic inflammatory bowel disease, diabetes and multiple sclerosis.

Most research to date has focused on mapping the types of bacteria that inhabit our bodies in an effort to determine whether and how the presence of a given bacterial species might affect disease risk. By contrast, the new research delves far deeper, looking at the genes that make up the various microbial species and strains.

Studying bacterial species alone is bound to provide only partial clues into these microorganisms' role in disease and health, the researchers say. Given that genetic content varies greatly between the same microbes, understanding how and whether individual microbial genes affect disease risk is just as important.

"Just like no two siblings are genetically identical, no two bacterial strains are genetically identical, either," said study co-senior author Chirag Patel, assistant professor of biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School's Blavatnik Institute. "Two members of the same bacterial strain could have markedly different genetic makeup, so information about bacterial species alone could mask critical differences that arise from genetic variation."

Cataloguing the array of microbial genes could inform the design of precision-targeted treatments, said study senior co-author Alex Kostic, assistant professor of microbiology at Harvard Medical School and an investigator at the Joslin Diabetes Center.

"Such narrowly targeted therapies would be based on the unique microbial genetic make-up of a person rather than on bacterial type alone," Kostic said.

Additionally, profiling the unique genes that make up a person's microbiome could act as a form of microbial fingerprinting that provides valuable clues about past exposures to different pathogens or environmental influences, as well as disease predispositions, Kostic added.

A microbe's evolutionary organ

In the study, the researchers set out to estimate the size of the universe of microbial genes in the human body, gathering all publicly available DNA sequencing data on human oral and gut microbiomes. In total, they analyzed the DNA of some 3,500 human microbiome samples, of which more than 1,400 were obtained from people's mouths and 2,100 from people's guts.

There were nearly 46 million bacterial genes in the 3,500 samples--about 24 million in the oral microbiome and 22 million in the gut microbiome, the researchers found.

More than half of all the bacterial genes (23 million) occurred only once, rendering them unique to the individual. The researchers termed these unique genes "singletons." Of the 23 million singletons, 11.8 million came from oral samples and 12.6 million came from intestinal samples.

Compounding the intrigue, these singleton genes also appeared to behave differently from other genes, the researchers observed: they performed different functions.

Commonly shared genes, the analysis showed, appeared to be involved in more or less basic functions critical to a microbe's day-to-day survival, such the consumption and breakdown of enzymes, energy conversion and metabolism. Unique genes, by contrast, tended to carry out more specialized functions, such as gaining resistance against antibiotics and other pressures and helping to build a microbe's protective cell wall, which shields it from external assaults.

This finding, the team said, suggests that singleton genes are key parts of a microbe's evolutionary survival kit.

"Some of these unique genes appear to be important in solving evolutionary challenges," Tierney said. "If a microbe needs to become resistant to an antibiotic because of exposure to drugs or suddenly faces a new selective pressure, the singleton genes may be the wellspring of genetic diversity the microbe can pull from to adapt."

But what fuels such gene diversity?

The answer to this question remains the subject of further research, the investigators said, but they believe there are at least two important drivers of genetic variation.

One is the microbes' love of freely swapping DNA material with their neighbors--a phenomenon known as horizontal gene transfer. To test this hypothesis, the researchers performed a special type of analysis that detects the shared molecular content between two organisms. To their surprise, they found little evidence that horizontal gene transfer was a main source of genetic uniqueness. Indeed, less than 1 percent of unique genes detected in oral samples and just under 2 percent of those found in the gut appeared to have arisen through this neighborly gene exchange.

Therefore, the researchers hypothesize, another, more powerful, driver of genetic diversity could be bacteria's ability to evolve their DNA rapidly in response to changes in the host environment. The current study was not designed to detect the precise environmental changes that drive this variation, but examples of such changes may include what type of food a person consumes, what medication they use, the lifestyle choices they make, what environmental exposures they encounter and any physiologic changes in the host, including upregulation and downregulation in various host genes or whether a person develops a disease.

So how many genes in the collective human microbiome?

By one calculation, that number could be around 232 million, the study estimated. Another estimate, however, yielded a number comparable to the number of atoms in the universe.

Indeed, the true number may be unknowable, Patel said.

"Whatever it may be, we hope that our catalog, along with a searchable web application, will have many practical uses and seed many directions of research in the field of host-microbe relationships."

Facing the threat of domestic violence, being a survivor of sexual assault, struggling with depression or thoughts of suicide are four topics that are difficult to broach with anyone. Including those who can help you.

A new study reveals up to 47.5 percent of patients who feel they face one or more of these four threats do not disclose this critical information to care providers out of embarrassment, fear of judgement or the possible long-term implications of sharing such information.

Scientists at University of Utah Health, Middlesex Community College, University of Michigan and University of Iowa collaborated on the study, which was published online in JAMA Network Open on August 14.

Understanding how to make patients feel more comfortable with clinicians is key to helping patients address such life-threatening risks, says the study’s senior author Angela Fagerlin, Ph.D.

“For primary care providers to help patients to achieve their best health, they need to know what the patient is struggling with,” says Fagerlin. Patients who withhold they have been sexually assaulted are potentially at risk for post-traumatic stress disorder and sexually-transmitted diseases, she explains. “These are numerous ways providers can help patients with such as getting resources, therapy and treatment.” She is chair of the department of Population Health Sciences at U of U Health and an investigator with the VA Salt Lake City Health System’s Informatics Decision-Enhancement and Analytic Sciences (IDEAS) Center for innovation.

The study reflects responses from over 4,500 people in two national online surveys from 2015. Participants in one survey averaged 36 years old, while participants from the second had a median age of 61. They reviewed a list of types of medically relevant information and asked to indicate whether they had ever withheld this information from a clinician. They were also asked to recall why.

The surveys show that 40 to 47.5 percent of participants chose not to tell their provider that they had experienced at least one of the four threats. Over 70 percent said the reason why was embarrassment or fear of being judged or lectured.

If the patient was female or younger then the odds were higher they would keep this information to themselves. What compounds this issue is that multiple studies in recent years have highlighted how health care providers downplay or fail to take seriously women’s medical complaints.

One limitation noted by the study’s first author Andrea Gurmankin Levy, Ph.D., MBe, a professor in social sciences at Middlesex Community College in Middletown, Connecticut, is that study participants may have not shared in their survey responses all the information they withheld, meaning that this phenomenon may be even more prevalent than the study reveals.

Levy says the survey reinforces the point that there is discomfort and a lack of trust between patients and providers. If patients filled out a questionnaire about sensitive information when they arrive at the provider’s office, might that improve the information flow? She wonders, “Is it easier to tell a piece of paper something sensitive than to look into your clinician’s eyes and say it?”

The next step in Fagerlin and Levy’s research may be contacting patients as they leave an appointment with their provider. Person-to-person interviews would permit the research team to get patients to respond while their memories are still clear.

“If we are there, we can ask them right in the moment so they can more easily put their finger on exactly what was at issue - why they didn’t share such crucial information,” Levy says.

This is the second article by this team to draw upon the 2015 surveys. The first, published in November 2018 revealed that 60 to 80 percent of those surveyed did not share pertinent information with their provider regarding daily issues like diet and exercise. One third did not speak up when they disagreed with their provider’s recommendations.

Both surveys raise concerns about communication and trust between patients and their care givers. Improving rapport falls both on providers’ and patients’ shoulders, the authors say. Providers need to establish an atmosphere where the patient feels neither judged nor rushed but rather are able to share concerns fundamental to their well-being. In addition, patients will benefit by sharing sensitive information with their providers.

Journal

JAMA Network Open

However, while too much inequality is harmful, the researchers also find that complete equality isn't always needed either, in order to bring about the greatest benefits to the public. Some inequality within groups can actually help to ensure that everyone contributes sufficiently to the group, according to the findings. The results could help policy-makers who are responsible for ensuring continuing support for public goods and services such as taxes, healthcare and education.

The research, including co-first authors Dr Oliver Hauser (University of Exeter) and Dr Christian Hilbe (IST Austria), developed a mathematical theory, which took into account to what extent people with differing incomes and productivities were able to cooperate with one another by measuring their willingness to contribute part of their income to the public good.

They discovered that in a very unequal society, those people with higher incomes were less inclined to contribute their proportional share towards public goods and services. This, in turn, also led people on the lowest incomes to contribute less. The breakdown of cooperation under high inequality has implications for funding of essential services for society.

"To ensure our public goods are maintained we need to understand what impact inequality plays," said Dr Hauser. "Many people view inequality as either categorically bad or good, but our research demonstrates that it is more complicated than that. We looked at it in a slightly different way - under what conditions does inequality become harmful and are there cases where it can also be beneficial? The main take-away from our research is that if inequality runs away with us, we are threatening the maintenance of public services. Eventually, too much inequality negatively affects everyone's outcomes - both for the poorest but even the rich."

The researchers showed that in groups of two people with unequal incomes, high inequality reduces the willingness to cooperate. Yet when people have different productivities (such as more experience or skills on a work task), some inequality in incomes can be beneficial to ensure they both continue to contribute.

"We found that when there is some inequality, both people still have enough influence to hold each other accountable for their contributions. We also discovered that those who are highly productive in the task are more motivated to contribute. They will give more of their income - even if that is a large amount," said Dr Hilbe.

"But there is a limit: once the inequality between the two people becomes too large, the influence over the other person is lost and the poorer player is at the mercy of the more powerful rich player. Neither of them has much incentive to cooperate anymore and cooperation breaks down quickly."

The research was also carried out by Professor Martin Nowak (Harvard University) and Professor Krishnendu Chatterjee (IST Austria). The team used game theory, computer simulations and a behavioural experiment to develop their model and find empirical support for its conclusions. Where previous studies have typically looked at individual interactions, the team's modelling technique looked at group interactions across millions of different scenarios which makes the finding of this study unique -- particularly towards understanding societal interaction.

"Our research demonstrates the impact that inequality can have on support for public goods," said Dr. Chatterjee. "We hope that more research will be carried out in this area in the future to better understand the forces that affect our decision-making, particularly in the critical area of supporting the goods and services which serve society. Now we have a more realistic model to emulate societal interaction and the analytical, theoretical and behavioural results are all in excellent agreement. To me, this is the greatest aspect of this paper."

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Researchers at Oregon State University are paving the way toward greater safety for coastal residents and infrastructure by developing a better means of modeling the destructive force of tsunami waves.

Rare but potentially devastating, tsunamis can cause huge damage to coastal infrastructure, with part of the problem tracing to unstable soil around the structures.

Understanding the processes through which a tsunami destabilizes soil is a key to developing engineering techniques that can make buildings, roads and bridges better able to withstand the complicated forces at work within a tsunami.

Collaborators led by Ben Mason and Harry Yeh of the OSU College of Engineering used a centrifuge that once tested Apollo astronauts' resistance to G-forces, attaching a container apparatus filled with soil and water for a scalable simulation of the effects of inundation.

The centrifuge technique replicates inundation physics over a parcel of soil 21 meters long, nearly 10 meters deep and more than 14 meters wide - much larger than can be simulated in a traditional wave tank.

"This is the first time anything like this has been done," Mason said. "The challenge of figuring out the logistics and mechanical engineering to design the container is a pretty striking aspect of this research."

Findings were published in Nature Scientific Reports.

A centrifuge is a device that puts something in rotation around a fixed axis, i.e. swings it in a circle.

"Imagine holding a 5-gallon bucket of water that you start spinning around with, and if you spin fast enough, the water will stay in the bucket regardless of its position, and if you slow down, it will pour out," Mason said. "That's exactly the concept we were working with."

The centrifuge in the study, housed at the UC Davis Center for Geotechnical Modeling after originally being part of NASA's Ames Research Center, has a radius of 9.1 meters. Attached to the arm was the apparatus Mason and collaborators built, part of it filled with water, the other part with soil, with gates to allow for flow simulating a tsunami wave.

"We're trying to mimic the entire process of a tsunami coming onshore and then drawing back," Mason said. "If you're putting soil in a wave flume to try to do that, it gets really, really expensive, and also because at Earth's gravity, you can't have a very deep layer of soil - tsunamis' spatiotemporal scales make it hard to do lab experiments that scale up. That's our key advantage: We can simulate a much larger expanse of earth, and once the box is built, it's much quicker to build soil models in the centrifuge."

"In the centrifuge, we can use high-speed video to learn a lot about what's happening in the soil, such as scouring, and under the surface, how pore water pressure changes with time as the water moves across," Mason said. "All of these things are important for understanding what we can expect the soil around coastal infrastructure to do, and then how do we protect that infrastructure when the next tsunami occurs."

Bats with skulls and teeth adapted to a wide range of diets are helping scientists understand how major groups of mammals first evolved.

***A video quiz of the bats is available to embed from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X42lf4Uk4c4 ***

By analysing the skulls of a group of bats that feed on everything from nectar to blood, researchers from the US and Imperial College London have identified how the bats have tweaked their development to adapt to different diets.

The insights, published in the journal Developmental Dynamics, could suggest how mammals as a whole evolved their diversity of diets and specialised skulls.

Many groups of bats hunt insects using echolocation, based on sound waves. But one group of bats in Central America and the Caribbean, known as New World leaf-nosed bats, have evolved a wide range of diets, and have the skulls and teeth to match.

For example, some species in the group have evolved very long snouts to feed on flower nectar, whereas others have evolved very flat faces to eat large fruit. Some species have evolved skulls and teeth that allow them to catch and eat small birds and rats, and others are able to drill into mammal skin and drink blood.

This diversity reflects the range of specialised diets (and skulls) seen across mammals as a whole - for example the fruit-eating bat faces resemble those of primates, and the bird- and rodent-eating bat faces resemble those of wolves and other carnivores.

However, Georges Cuvier, French naturalist and the founding father of palaeontology, already in the eighteenth century recognised that members of the same group of mammals (e.g. carnivores or rodents) tend to have very similar anatomical features, especially in their skulls and teeth. Across mammals each major group usually has one specialisation - for example all primates have flat faces - whereas all this diversity is contained within one group for the New World leaf-nosed bats.

This makes these bats an ideal model for studying the evolution of mammals as a whole. While the bats are still very closely related, having only evolved in the last 15-20 million years, mammals diversified into their different groups not long after they first evolved, 100-120 million years ago.

Senior author Dr Arkhat Abzhanov, from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial and the Natural History Museum in London, said: "These bats can give us some idea how early mammalian diversity evolved without having to compare dogs, whales and monkeys, but instead by comparing relatively closely related species.

"Through our research, we found that differences observed during embryonic and juvenile development of bats can explain their adult specialised faces. This makes them an excellent group for further, more detailed study."

The research team led by Dr Abzhanov, which included members from Harvard University, Yale University and the American Museum of Natural History, investigated the skulls of adult, juvenile and embryonic bats.

Using high-resolution micro-CT scans to capture 3D skull shapes, they examined the differences between each of the components of the skulls of different species, such as relative sizes and shapes of jaws and teeth.

They found that for highly specialised skulls, such as those for feeding on nectar or blood, a process called heterochrony strongly influenced their development.
Heterochrony refers to changes in the pace of development, or timing and order of important steps in development, while the animal is still growing as an embryo and a juvenile.

For example, the long snout of nectar-feeding bats is formed late in development as the snout-forming phase is greatly extended when compared to the normal timing in the ancestral insect-feeding bats. Fruit-eating bats evolved their unique primate-like faces by accelerating through the same developmental stages.

Dr Abzhanov added: "Interestingly, their development as embryos and juveniles closely tracks predicted evolutionary changes from their common ancestor. This phenomenon, known as recapitulation, should allow us to uncover some of the underlying genetic mechanisms, for bats and potentially for mammals as a whole."

The periodic table has been a vital foundational tool for material research since it was first created 150 years ago. Now, Martin Rahm from Chalmers University of Technology presents a new article which adds an entirely new dimension to the table, offering a new set of principles for material research. The article is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The study maps how both the electronegativity and the electron configuration of elements change under pressure. These findings offer materials researchers an entirely new set of tools. Primarily, it means it is now possible to make quick predictions about how certain elements will behave at different pressures, without requiring experimental testing or computationally expensive quantum mechanical calculations.

"Currently, searching for those interesting compounds which appear at high pressure requires a large investment of time and resources, both computationally and experimentally. As a consequence, only a tiny fraction of all possible compounds has been investigated. The work we are presenting can act as a guide to help explain what to look for and which compounds to expect when materials are placed under high pressure," says Martin Rahm, Assistant Professor in Chemistry at Chalmers, who led the study.

At high pressures the properties of atoms can change radically. The new study shows how the electron configuration and electronegativity of atoms change as pressure increases. Electron configuration is fundamental to the structure of the periodic table. It determines which group in the system different elements belong to. Electronegativity is also a central concept to chemistry and can be viewed as a third dimension of the periodic table. It indicates how strongly different atoms attract electrons. Together, electron configuration and electronegativity are important for understanding how atoms react with one another to form different substances. At high pressure, atoms which normally do not combine can create new, never before seen compounds with unique properties. Such materials can inspire researchers to try other methods for creating them under more normal conditions, and give us new insight into how our world works.

"At high pressure, extremely fascinating chemical structures with unusual qualities can arise, and reactions that are impossible under normal conditions can occur. A lot of what we as chemists know about elements' properties under ambient conditions simply doesn't hold true any longer. You can basically take a lot of your chemistry education and throw it out the window! In the dimension of pressure there is an unbelievable number of new combinations of atoms to investigate" says Martin Rahm.

A well-known example of what can happen at high pressure is how diamonds can be formed from graphite. Another example is polymerisation of nitrogen gas, where nitrogen atoms are forced together to bond in a three-dimensional network. These two high-pressure materials are very unlike one another. Whereas carbon retains its diamond structure, polymerised nitrogen is unstable and reverts back to gas form when the pressure is released. If the polymer structure of nitrogen could be maintained at normal pressures, it would without doubt be the most energy dense chemical compound on Earth.

Currently, several research groups use high pressures to create superconductors - materials which can conduct electricity without resistance. Some of these high-pressure superconductors function close to room temperature. If such a material could be made to work at normal pressure, it would be revolutionary, enabling, for example, lossless power transfer and cheaper magnetic levitation.

"First and foremost, our study offers exciting possibilities for suggesting new experiments that can improve our understanding of the elements. Even if many materials resulting from such experiments prove unstable at normal pressure, they can give us insights into which properties and phenomena are possible. The steps thereafter will be to find other ways to reach the same results," says Martin Rahm.

Read the article 'Squeezing All Elements in the Periodic Table: Electron Configuration and Electronegativity of the Atoms under Compression' in the Journal of the American Chemistry Society.

High pressure research:

The research has theoretically predicted how the nature of 93 of the 118 elements of the periodic table changes as pressure increases from 0 pascals up to 300 gigapascals (GPa). 1 GPa is about 10,000 times the pressure of the Earth's surface. 360 GPa corresponds to the extremely high pressure found near the Earth's core. Technology to recreate this pressure exists in different laboratories, for example, using diamond anvil cells or shock experiments.

"The pressure that we are used to on Earth's surface is actually rather uncommon, seen from a larger perspective. In addition to facilitating for high pressure material synthesis on Earth, our work can also enable a better understanding of processes occurring on other planets and moons. For example, in the largest sea in the solar system, many miles under the surface of Jupiter's moon Ganymede. Or inside the giant planets, where the pressure is enormous," says Martin Rahm.

The work was done using a mathematical model, in which each atom was placed in the middle of a spherical cavity. The effect of increased pressure was simulated through gradual reduction of the volume of the sphere. The physical properties of the atoms in different stages of compression could then be calculated using quantum mechanics.

KAIST medical scientists have developed an advanced method for perfectly detecting low-level somatic mutation in patients with intractable epilepsy. Their study showed that deep sequencing replicates of major focal epilepsy genes accurately and efficiently identified low-level somatic mutations in intractable epilepsy.

According to the study, their diagnostic method could increase the accuracy up to 100%, unlike the conventional sequencing analysis, which stands at about 30% accuracy. This work was published in Acta Neuropathologica.

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder common in children. Approximately one third of child patients are diagnosed with intractable epilepsy despite adequate anti-epileptic medication treatment.

Somatic mutations in mTOR pathway genes, SLC35A2, and BRAF are the major genetic causes of intractable epilepsies. A clinical trial to target Focal Cortical Dysplasia type II (FCDII), the mTOR inhibitor is underway at Severance Hospital, their collaborator in Seoul, Korea. However, it is difficult to detect such somatic mutations causing intractable epilepsy because their mutational burden is less than 5%, which is similar to the level of sequencing artifacts. In the clinical field, this has remained a standing challenge for the genetic diagnosis of somatic mutations in intractable epilepsy.

Professor Jeong Ho Lee's team at the Graduate School of Medical Science and Engineering analyzed paired brain and peripheral tissues from 232 intractable epilepsy patients with various brain pathologies at Severance Hospital using deep sequencing and extracted the major focal epilepsy genes.

They narrowed down target genes to eight major focal epilepsy genes, eliminating almost all of the false positive calls using deep targeted sequencing. As a result, the advanced method robustly increased the accuracy and enabled them to detect low-level somatic mutations in unmatched Formalin Fixed Paraffin Embedded (FFPE) brain samples, the most clinically relevant samples.

Professor Lee conducted this study in collaboration with Professor Dong Suk Kim and Hoon-Chul Kang at Severance Hospital of Yonsei University. He said, "This advanced method of genetic analysis will improve overall patient care by providing more comprehensive genetic counseling and informing decisions on alternative treatments."

Professor Lee has investigated low-level somatic mutations arising in the brain for a decade. He is developing innovative diagnostics and therapeutics for untreatable brain disorders including intractable epilepsy and glioblastoma at a tech-startup called SoVarGen. "All of the technologies we used during the research were transferred to the company. This research gave us very good momentum to reach the next phase of our startup," he remarked.

A new study provides the most accurate estimate of the frequency that planets that are similar to Earth in size and in distance from their host star occur around stars similar to our Sun. Knowing the rate that these potentially habitable planets occur will be important for designing future astronomical missions to characterize nearby rocky planets around sun-like stars that could support life. A paper describing the model appears August 14, 2019 in The Astronomical Journal.

Thousands of planets have been discovered by NASA's Kepler space telescope. Kepler, which was launched in 2009 and retired by NASA in 2018 when it exhausted its fuel supply, observed hundreds of thousands of stars and identified planets outside of our solar system--exoplanets--by documenting transit events. Transits events occur when a planet's orbit passes between its star and the telescope, blocking some of the star's light so that it appears to dim. By measuring the amount of dimming and the duration between transits and using information about the star's properties astronomers characterize the size of the planet and the distance between the planet and its host star.

"Kepler discovered planets with a wide variety of sizes, compositions and orbits," said Eric B. Ford, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and one of the leaders of the research team. "We want to use those discoveries to improve our understanding of planet formation and to plan future missions to search for planets that might be habitable. However, simply counting exoplanets of a given size or orbital distance is misleading, since it's much harder to find small planets far from their star than to find large planets close to their star."

To overcome that hurdle, the researchers designed a new method to infer the occurrence rate of planets across a wide range of sizes and orbital distances. The new model simulates 'universes' of stars and planets and then 'observes' these simulated universes to determine how many of the planets would have been discovered by Kepler in each `universe.'

"We used the final catalog of planets identified by Kepler and improved star properties from the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft to build our simulations," said Danley Hsu, a graduate student at Penn State and the first author of the paper. "By comparing the results to the planets cataloged by Kepler, we characterized the rate of planets per star and how that depends on planet size and orbital distance. Our novel approach allowed the team to account for several effects that have not been included in previous studies."

The results of this study are particularly relevant for planning future space missions to characterize potentially Earth-like planets. While the Kepler mission discovered thousands of small planets, most are so far away that it is difficult for astronomers to learn details about their composition and atmospheres.

"Scientists are particularly interested in searching for biomarkers--molecules indicative of life--in the atmospheres of roughly Earth-size planets that orbit in the 'habitable-zone' of Sun-like stars," said Ford. "The habitable zone is a range of orbital distances at which the planets could support liquid water on their surfaces. Searching for evidence of life on Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars will require a large new space mission."

How large that mission needs to be will depend on the abundance of Earth-size planets. NASA and the National Academies of Science are currently exploring mission concepts that differ substantially in size and their capabilities. If Earth-size planets are rare, then the nearest Earth-like planets are farther away and a large, ambitious mission will be required to search for evidence of life on potentially Earth-like planets. On the other hand, if Earth-size planets are common, then there will be Earth-size exoplanets orbiting stars that are close to the sun and a relatively small observatory may be able to study their atmospheres.

"While most of the stars that Kepler observed are typically thousands of light years away from the Sun, Kepler observed a large enough sample of stars that we can perform a rigorous statistical analysis to estimate of the rate of Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of nearby sun-like stars." said Hsu.

Based on their simulations, the researchers estimate that planets very close to Earth in size, from three-quarters to one-and-a-half times the size of earth, with orbital periods ranging from 237 to 500 days, occur around approximately one in four stars. Importantly, their model quantifies the uncertainty in that estimate. They recommend that future planet-finding missions plan for a true rate that ranges from as low about one planet for every 33 stars to as high as nearly one planet for every two stars.

"Knowing how often we should expect to find planets of a given size and orbital period is extremely helpful for optimize surveys for exoplanets and the design of upcoming space missions to maximize their chance of success," said Ford. "Penn State is a leader in brining state-of-the-art statistical and computational methods to the analysis of astronomical observations to address these sorts of questions. Our Institute for CyberScience (ICS) and Center for Astrostatistics (CASt) provide infrastructure and support that makes these types of projects possible."

A new paper in The Economic Journal, published by Oxford University Press, finds that female executives decrease the wage-gap for women at the top of a firm while widening it at the bottom.

This study also finds that the lack of women at the executive level has a negative impact on firm performance, especially in conditions with a greater share of female workers. The researchers suggest that if all firms with at least 20% of female workers were led by female CEO's, they could see their sales per worker increase by 14%.

The reason is that female executives are better able to assess the qualities of female workers and assign them to tasks more in line with their ability, thus boosting firm's performance and reversing the statistical discrimination they endure under male executives.

Researchers studied three sources of data from Italian manufacturing firms from 1980-1997, with a focus on the period between, 1988 and 1997. This overall data set includes information on about a million workers per year.

The researchers focused on 795 firms where women represented about 21% of the workforce and accounted for 2.5% of executives. They found that the impact of female leadership reduced the pay gap for women at the top of the wage distribution but widened it at the bottom. Specifically, female executives increased wages for women in the top 25% by about 10% and decreased wages for women in the bottom 25% by about 3%. There is an opposite impact on men, with wages decreasing for the top 25% and increasing for the bottom 25%.

"We explain our results with a model where executives learn about the skills of their workers and they are better at assessing workers of their same gender." said the paper's lead Luca Flabbi. "In a world dominated by male executives, female workers prove it hard to show their skills, and therefore to climb the firm's hierarchy. In firms with many women, therefore there is a lot of unexploited talent. When a woman becomes the CEO, she is better able to assess the qualities of the female workers and assign them to tasks more in line with their ability, thus boosting firm performance."

New research led by scientists at The Rockefeller University in New York may help explain why Zika virus infection causes birth defects in some children but not others. The study, which will be published August 14 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, suggests that the risk of developing an abnormally small head (microcephaly) depends on the types of antibody produced by pregnant mothers in response to Zika infection.

The Zika virus is spread by mosquitoes in tropical and subtropical regions, and, in most adults, the symptoms of infection are fairly mild. But the widespread Zika outbreak in Brazil in 2015–2016 revealed that infection during pregnancy can cause a wide range of fetal abnormalities, with microcephaly occurring in around 5% of live births by Zika-infected mothers. “Why some Zika virus–infected pregnant women deliver apparently healthy newborns while others have babies with microcephaly is unknown,” says Davide F. Robbiani, a Research Associate Professor at The Rockefeller University, who co-led the study with Professor Michel C. Nussenzweig.

Various factors have been proposed to increase the risk of microcephaly, including previous exposure to viruses that are similar to Zika, such as dengue virus or West Nile virus. Antibodies generated by the body’s immune system to combat these viruses may recognize the Zika virus but, instead of neutralizing it, help it to enter the mother’s cells and possibly cross the placenta to infect the unborn fetus.

With the help of researchers and physicians in Brazil, Robbiani and colleagues analyzed blood samples collected during the 2015–2016 outbreak from Zika-infected mothers who had given birth to either healthy or microcephalic children.

Through a series of laboratory tests, the researchers saw no significant differences in the activity of antibodies produced against dengue or other Zika-related viruses, suggesting that prior exposure to these viruses does not increase the risk of Zika-associated birth defects.

However, when Robbiani and colleagues analyzed the activity of antibodies produced against the Zika virus itself, they saw several differences in the antibodies produced by the mothers of babies with microcephaly. Antibodies from these mothers were actually more effective at neutralizing the Zika virus than the antibodies produced by mothers of healthy newborns. Surprisingly, however, these antibodies also showed an enhanced ability to boost the entry of Zika virus into human cells grown in the laboratory.

The researchers confirmed their findings in macaques infected with the Zika virus. Pregnant monkeys that produced antibodies capable of enhancing the entry of Zika virus into cells were more at risk of giving birth to babies suffering from Zika-induced brain damage.

“Though our results only show a correlation at this point, they suggest that antibodies may be implicated in Zika fetal disease,” Robbiani says. “Antibodies may exist that, instead of protecting, enhance the risk of Zika microcephaly, so the next step will be to figure out which antibodies are responsible for this, and how they promote fetal damage. This has significant implications for vaccine development; a safe Zika vaccine would have to selectively elicit antibodies that are protective, while avoiding those that potentially enhance the risk of microcephaly.”

Beachgoers are becoming increasingly aware of the potentially harmful effects UV filters from sunscreens can have on coral and other marine organisms when the protective lotions wash off their bodies into the ocean. Now, researchers have studied how sunscreens release different compounds -- trace metals and inorganic nutrients -- into Mediterranean seawater, with unknown effects on marine ecology. They report their results in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Millions of people are hitting the beach slathered in sunscreen this summer. Some might choose "coral-safe" sunscreens that lack oxybenzone and octinoxate, the two substances most widely linked to coral reef damage. However, scientists don't yet know what effects other trace compounds in sunscreens might have on marine ecosystems. As a first step, researcher Araceli Rodríguez-Romero and colleagues wanted to determine how quickly sunscreen releases trace metals and nutrients into seawater, and how sunscreen from beachgoers' bodies could impact the overall levels of the compounds in coastal waters.

The researchers added a commercial, titanium-dioxide-containing sunscreen to samples of Mediterranean seawater and observed how droplets of the lotions released various metals and nutrients into the water. Some compounds entered the seawater more quickly after UV treatment, which simulated sun exposure. Aluminum, silica and phosphorous had the highest release rates under both light and dark conditions. The team used these data to develop a model that predicts the release of compounds from sunscreen under different conditions. Then, they used the model to estimate that, on a typical summer day at the beach, beachgoers could increase the concentration of aluminum in coastal waters by 4% and of titanium by almost 20%. More research is needed to determine how these metals and nutrients, which are normally present at very low amounts in seawater, could be affecting marine ecosystems, the researchers say.

A team of computer scientists at UC San Diego and the University of Illinois has developed an app that allows state and federal inspectors to detect devices that steal consumer credit and debit card data at gas pumps. The devices, known as skimmers, use Bluetooth to transmit the data they steal.

"All criminals have to do is download the data from the comfort of their vehicle," said Nishant Bhaskar, a Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of California San Diego and the study's first author.

The app, called Bluetana, detects the Bluetooth signature of the skimmers, and allows inspectors to find the devices without needing to open up the gas pumps.

Bluetana was developed with technical input from the United States Secret Service and is only available to law enforcement officials and gas pump inspectors. It will not be available to the general public. It is now used by agencies in several states.

"Our goal is to give field agents the best tools for the job available today," said Kirill Levchenko, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois who earned his Ph.D. at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. "We've found that Bluetana helps agents find more gas stations with skimmers--and to find more skimmers at those gas stations."

The researchers found that, compared to similar apps currently available for smartphones, Bluetana is likely to discover more skimmers and results in a much lower false positive rate. "Bluetooth technology used in these skimmers are also used for legitimate products commonly seen at and near gas stations such as speed-limit signs, weather sensors and fleet tracking systems," said Bhaskar. "These products can be mistaken for skimmers by existing detection apps."

Bluetana uses an algorithm developed by the researchers to distinguish skimmers from legitimate Bluetooth devices. The researchers designed the algorithm based on the results of a field study during which the researchers analyzed scans of Bluetooth devices taken by officials at 1,185 gas stations in six U.S. states.

"Bluetana extracts more meaningful data from the Bluetooth protocol, such as signal strength, than existing skimmer detection applications. In a few cases, our app was able to find devices missed by visual inspection," said Maxwell Bland, a Ph.D. student in computer science at UC San Diego and study coauthor.

In one year of operation, Bluetana has led to the discovery of 42 Bluetooth-based skimmers across three U.S. states, all of which were recovered by law enforcement agents. "We were surprised that there were so many skimmers in the field that had not been discovered by other detection methods such as regular manual inspections," said Aaron Schulman, a UC San Diego assistant professor in computer science. "We even found two skimmers that were installed in gas pumps and had evaded detection for six months."

Researchers will present their work on Bluetana at the USENIX Security 2019 conference Aug. 14, 2019 in the San Francisco Bay Area.

What do skimmers do and how much are they worth to criminals?

Skimmers have a high return on investment for criminals: skimmed debit card numbers can be used to withdraw cash and skimmed credit card numbers to make expensive purchases. A skimming device costs $20 or less to manufacture and can bring in more than $4,000 per day, depending on how many people use the gas pump and how the criminal converts the stolen numbers to cash.

Criminals break into the pumps, many of which can be opened using a universal master key, to install the skimmers. Skimmers are connected to both the keypad and the magnetic stripe reader inside the gas pump. This allows the devices to collect not only customers' card numbers, but also their billing ZIP code and PIN, in the case of a debit card transaction.

It takes Bluetana, on average, three seconds to detect a skimmer. By contrast, law enforcement officials can take 30 minutes on average to find skimmers during manual inspections.

"UC San Diego is an important and active partner on our Southern California Electronic Crimes Task Force, and has been able to provide technological solutions to current investigative needs," said Special Agent in Charge James Anderson of the Secret Service. "Our office looks forward to presenting them with other investigative challenges."

Next steps

As more gas stations adopt payment systems exclusively for credit and debit cards with chips, criminals will use technologies to capture information from these types of cards. Researchers will have to follow suit. Visa and MasterCard are mandating that all gas stations in the United States use the chip-based systems by October 2020.

"Bluetana is not the last word," Levchenko said. "As criminals evolve, our techniques will need to evolve also."

CLEVELAND, Ohio (August 14, 2019)--Hormone changes are known to alter insulin sensitivity and glucose metabolism, as well as interfere with women's sleep patterns. But little was known about the association between diabetes and sleep disturbances during the menopause transition until now, as a new study concludes that women with diabetes are at greater risk for sleep disturbances. Study results are published online today in Menopause, the journal of The North American Menopause Society (NAMS).

Estrogen and progesterone are known to influence cell response to insulin. As a result, it has been suspected that the hormone changes of the menopause transition could cause fluctuations in a woman's blood sugar levels, putting her at greater risk of diabetes. Statistically, midlife women have a higher prevalence rate of type 2 diabetes during the menopause transition.

Similarly, hormone changes have been shown to affect a woman's quality of sleep. Mainly because of night sweats and hot flashes caused by hormone changes, about 42% of premenopausal and 60% of postmenopausal women reportedly have sleep disturbances. For those with diabetes, sleep difficulties could be worsened by various diabetes symptoms and related medications that cause, among other problems, more frequent urination that could wake women up multiple times during the night. At the same time, sleep is identified as a key factor in trying to prevent and manage diabetes.

Despite all these acknowledged associations, few studies to date have evaluated the possible association between diabetes and sleep disturbances during the menopause transition. However, a new study based on data from two larger Internet survey studies showed that the mean total number of sleep-related symptoms was significantly higher in those with type 2 diabetes than those without the disease. The severity of the sleep problems was also greater for women with diabetes. Although this association was demonstrated in four major racial/ethnic groups in the United States it was particularly pronounced in Asian women.

Study results appear in the article "Sleep-related symptoms of midlife women with and without type 2 diabetes mellitus."

"This study suggests worse sleep-related symptoms in postmenopausal Asian women with type 2 diabetes compared with those without diabetes," says Dr. Stephanie Faubion, NAMS medical director. "Further study is needed, given the limitations of the analysis, but this report highlights the fact that sleep problems are common in midlife women. Sleep is an important determinant of health, and women with poor sleep should be seen and evaluated for common and treatable sleep disorders such as insomnia, obstructive sleep apnea, and restless legs syndrome.

Research published this Wednesday (August 14th) in Scientific Reports describes Clevosaurus hadroprodon, a new reptile species from Rio Grande do Sul state in southern Brazil. Its fossils remains--jaws and associated skull bones--were collected from Triassic rocks (c. 237-228 million-years old) making it the oldest known fossil of its kind in Gondwana, the southern supercontinent that would eventually become Africa, Antarctica, Australia, India, and South America.

Clevosaurus hadroprodon was a small animal, similar in size with common house geckos. It belongs to the Sphenodontia, a group of lepidosaurs (which also includes snakes, lizards and amphisbaenians), that was very diverse and widespread during the Mesozoic era (the "Age of Dinosaurs"), but today has only one remaining living species in New Zealand. Clevosaurus hadroprodon is the oldest member of the Clevosauridae, a group of small sphenodonts that were the first globally distributed lepidosaurs with fossils from the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic of North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and South America.

The dentition of Clevosaurus hadroprodon is an unexpected mix of primitive and derived teeth. It is the oldest occurrence of the typical fully acrodont dentition (teeth fused to the top of the jaw bones) of sphenodontians, but most of its teeth are relatively simple and blade-like, which differs from other, only slightly younger Clevosaurus species that possess well-developed medial-posteromedial (side-to-side) expansions of the teeth for complex grinding. "However, Clevosaurus hadroprodon also possess a large, blunt, tusk-like tooth in the first tooth position of the both premaxilla (upper jaw) and of dentary (lower jaw). This feature is typically observed only in later sphenodontian lineages" says Annie Schmaltz Hsiou, Associate Professor at the University of São Paulo and head of the study. The name "hadroprodon" is Greek for "larger first tooth" in reference to these tusk-like teeth.

"Clevosaurus hadroprodon is an important discovery because it combines a relatively primitive sphenodontian-type tooth row with the presence of massive tusk-like teeth that were possibly not for feeding, but rather used for mate competition or defense. If correct, this means that non-feeding dental specializations predated changes in the sphenodontian dentition related to feeding strategies. This is a very exciting discovery." says co-author Randall Nydam, Professor at Midwestern University (US).

In addition to its unique dentition, the authors stress that Clevosaurus hadroprodon also adds to the growing evidence that the early diversification of sphenodontians occurred in the widely separated regions of Gondwana destined to become South American and India. This illustrates the importance of the role of the Gondwanan lepidosaur fauna in our growing understanding of the earliest stages of sphenodontian evolution and the global biogeographic distribution of lepidosaurs.