Culture

Key Takeaways:

We propose a new way to measure how forward-looking consumers are based on their buying behavior, conditioning on their inventories at home.

Our method applies to storable goods such as laundry detergent, disinfectant spray, disinfectant wipes, toilet papers, etc.

Our estimates suggest that a consumer's planning horizon is roughly about 8 weeks.

Consumer buying behavior heavily depends on their expectation about future prices.

Anticipating shortages and high prices in the near future, "panic buying" can be explained as an outcome of rational stockpiling behavior by forward-looking consumers.

CATONSVILLE, MD, April 2, 2020 - Consumer stockpiling and hoarding took center stage in recent months as the COVID-19 virus has spread around the world, and with it, panic buying on the part of millions. News broadcasts and social media feeds have been filled with examples of the worst aspects of human nature.

Two marketing researchers, who have been studying this phenomena in-depth long before the current pandemic, have completed research and produced a study that reveals that a consumer's decision on how much to buy in each shopping trip depends on their current inventory, and what they expect prices to look like in the near future.

The forthcoming research study in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science, is titled "Identification and Estimation of Forward-Looking Behavior: The Case of Consumer Stockpiling." It is authored by Andrew Ching of Johns Hopkins University and Matthew Osborne of the University of Toronto.

"In particular, because the study finds that the extent by which consumers discount the future suggests that they only plan weeks ahead," said Ching. "The research focused on how consumers respond to price promotions in storable goods markets like basic food supplies, toilet papers, hand sanitizer, laundry detergent, etc. We learned that by properly factoring in the consumer's 'cost' of storage, combined with the number of packages stored, it is possible to determine how far ahead they plan. Our framework allows retailers to better determine price promotion strategies for products."

"A key parameter that determines how far ahead consumers plan is the discount factor, which measures the strength of forward-looking behavior," said Osborne. "Looking at what is happening now in supermarkets, our research suggests that in order to 'calm' people, we need to find a way to change consumer expectation about future prices and product availability in the near future."

"It would be very helpful if large retail chains and online retailers were to restock as soon as possible, and to assure consumers that they will not materially change regular prices and promotion frequencies," added Ching. "Putting a temporary limit on how much of a particular item consumers can buy, helps ensure product availability for more shoppers. Given that most consumers join a retailer's loyalty program, it is even possible for big retailers to learn consumers' recent purchase histories, and put a temporary limit on how many units one could buy per week, etc."

"Such a policy will help to smooth the product availability for the near term and will bring consumer expectations about future prices and availability in line with the pre-crisis period," said Osborne. "Our model suggests that consumer buying behavior will then return to normal. In addition, online retail marketplaces (e.g., Ebay, Amazon) or Department of Justice can also be more aggressive in monitoring for 'price gouging.' This should also help consumers to adjust their expectations."

URBANA, Ill. - You know that feeling in your gut? We think of it as an innate intuition that sparks deep in the belly and helps guide our actions, if we let it. It's also a metaphor for what scientists call the "gut-brain axis," a biological reality in which the gut and its microbial inhabitants send signals to the brain, and vice versa.

It's not a surprise that the brain responds to signals in the gut, initiating motor functions involved with digestion. Directed by the brainstem, these types of basic biological actions are largely automatic. But what if the higher brain - the thinking, emotional centers - were influenced by signals in the gut, too? New University of Illinois research in rats shows the entire brain responds to the gut, specifically the small intestine, through neuronal connections.

To map the connections, researchers inserted neuron-loving viruses in the rats' small intestines and traced the viruses as they moved from neuron to neuron along the Vagus and spinal nerves and throughout the brain. The idea was virus movement mimicked the movement of normal signals through neurons from the gut to the brain and back.

"We saw a lot of connections in the brainstem and hindbrain regions. We knew these regions are involved in sensing and controlling the organs of the body, so there weren't any big surprises there. But things got more interesting as the viruses moved farther up into parts of the brain that are usually considered emotional centers or learning centers, cognitive places. They have all these multifaceted functions. So thinking about how information from the small intestine might be nudging those processes a little bit is really cool," says Coltan Parker, doctoral student in the Neuroscience Program at Illinois and lead author on a study published in Autonomic Neuroscience: Basic and Clinical.

The study represents the first complete map of neuronal connections between the small intestine - what Parker and his co-authors call an "underloved" part of the digestive system - and the entire brain. The involvement of cognitive and emotional centers hints at how the thinking brain sometimes overrides our feeling of being full, provides fodder to explore relationships between depression and digestive troubles, and more.

"Now we're actually finding the neuro-anatomy that might be involved in that 'feeling in your gut,'" says Megan Dailey, study co-author and program administrator in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at Illinois.

In addition to showing just how extensive the connections are between the small intestine and the brain, the study uncovered a rarely documented feature of the neurons themselves.

Scientists have long assumed sensations from the gut, or anywhere in the body, traveled to the brain along one set of neurons (the sensory neurons), with instructions from the brain traveling back along a separate set of neurons (the motor neurons). But in their mapping study, Illinois researchers discovered some of the neurons - about half - were transmitting both sensory and motor signals.

They were capable of cross-talk within the same neuron.

"From the cortex to the brainstem, in pretty much every region we investigated, there was that 50% overlap of sensory-motor signals. It was throughout the brain, consistently," says study co-author Elizabeth Davis. Davis is a 2018 graduate of the Illinois Neuroscience Program and is currently studying as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Southern California.

The same pattern - 50% of neurons having both sensory and motor signaling capabilities - had only been shown one other time, in a study mapping neuronal connections between fat tissue and the brain. The researchers point out new evidence of the same crosstalk pattern could suggest a general architecture of neuronal networks between the body and brain.

"This study shows that sensorimotor feedback loops are abundant across all levels of the brain. Up until now, it has really been unknown how information in the small intestine, about nutrients or anything else, can get up to the brain and affect cognitive-emotional processes, and then how those processes can come back down and affect the gut," Parker says. "With more research, we may finally begin to understand how hunger makes us 'hangry,' or how a stressful day becomes an irritable bowel."

Evolution is a tinkerer, not an engineer. "Evolution does not produce novelties from scratch. It works with what already exists," wrote Nobel laureate François Jacob in 1977, and biologists continue to find this to be true.

Case in point: A team of scientists led by researchers at UC Santa Barbara has discovered that multiple opsin proteins, known for decades to be required for vision, also function as taste receptors. The finding, which appears in Current Biology, represents a light-independent function for opsins, and raises questions about the purpose these proteins served in ancient organisms.

"This is the first example of a role of opsins in taste, or in any form of chemical sensation," said coauthor Craig Montell, a distinguished professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology.

Scientists in the late 1800s discovered the light-sensing role of rhodopsin -- which consists of an opsin bound to retinal, a form of vitamin A -- and it has since become the most studied sensory receptor. Until recently, researchers believed that the family of rhodopsin proteins was involved only in light reception. However, in 2011, Montell and his colleagues found that an opsin enables the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster to detect small temperature changes within its comfortable range.

Animals have many types of sensory proteins that respond to stimuli from the environment. Some require a strong stimulus, such as scalding heat, to activate. Rhodopsins are able to respond to very subtle changes or very low levels of stimuli-- like those in very dim light conditions -- and then initiate a molecular cascade that amplifies the signal, ultimately activating a sensory response.

Researchers in Montell's lab used aristolochic acid -- a toxic, bitter compound found in some plants -- to study taste receptors in fruit flies. High concentrations of this bitter chemical activate the flies' taste neurons by directly opening a channel protein called TRPA1, which lets calcium and sodium into the cells. This leads to a bitter taste the animals avoid. However, the flies also avoid even highly diluted aristolochic acid, which isn't a strong enough signal to open the channels directly.

Montell and lead author Nicole Leung, who recently completed her predoctoral studies at UC Santa Barbara, suspected opsin molecules might be at work in detecting subtle chemical signals as well, via a signal amplification process.

They presented flies with a choice between sugar alone or sugar spiked with dilute aristolochic acid. Unsurprisingly, the flies rejected the sugar laced with the bitter chemical and ate the pure sugar.

The scientists then raised fruit flies with mutations that prevented them from synthesizing different opsin proteins. They found that flies with defects in any one of three types of opsins couldn't detect the small concentrations of acid, and ate nearly equal amounts of the sugar laced with the bitter compound as the pure sugar. However, the mutant animals were still sensitive to large amounts of the bitter compound, which they continued to avoid. According to Montell, the large amounts of the bitter chemical directly activated the TRPA1 channel, which was still present in the flies missing the opsins.

The team showed that aristolochic acid activated these opsins by binding to the same site that retinal normally does in rhodopsin. Much like rhodopsins turned on by very dim light, the chemically-activated opsins then initiated a molecular cascade that amplified the small signals. This enabled the flies to detect concentrations of the compound that would otherwise be insufficient to trigger a response in their sensory neurons.

"Rhodopsins were discovered back in the 1870s," Montell said, "so to discover that opsins have roles in taste after 150 years or so is pretty exciting."

Montell speculates that chemoreception may have been the original role of opsin proteins. Chemical reception, he said, is a more basic requirement for life than is light reception. Knowing what to eat and what dangerous chemicals to avoid serves a more ancient survival function than does the ability to detect light. Perhaps by chance, he ventured, a retinal became bound to an opsin and conferred light sensitivity to the opsin.

Following Montell's 2011 discovery that opsins function in temperature sensation, another group found that opsins play a role in hearing in flies. Now, with the demonstration that opsins are taste receptors as well, Montell suspects they may be involved in still additional senses.

"In every case, they provide a mechanism for sensing low levels of stimuli by initiating an amplification cascade," he said.

The new finding likely extends beyond the fruit flies the scientists studied. "The ramifications are that maybe opsins represent a new class of taste receptor in mammals, including humans," said Montell, a hypothesis the team is currently investigating.

A new study by researchers at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) found that human-induced environmental stressors have a large effect on the genetic composition of coral reef populations in Hawai'i. They confirmed that there is an ongoing loss of sensitive genotypes in nearshore coral populations due to stressors resulting from poor land-use practices and coastal pollution. This reduced genetic diversity compromises reef resilience. 

The study identified closer genetic relationships between nearshore corals in Maunalua Bay, Oahu and those from sites on West Maui, than to corals from the same islands, but further offshore. This pattern can be described as isolation by environment in contrast to isolation by distance. This is an adaptive response by the corals to watershed discharges that contain sediment and pollutants from land.

"While the results were not surprising, they clearly demonstrate the critical need to control local sources of stress immediately while concurrently addressing the root causes of global climate change," said Robert Richmond, research professor and director of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory and co-author of the study. "Additionally, this innovative science shows the need to track biodiversity at multiple levels."

This research provides valuable information to coral reef managers in Hawai'i and around the world who are developing approaches and implementation plans to enhance coral reef resilience and recovery through reef restoration and stressor reduction.

"This study shows the value of applying molecular tools to ecological studies supporting coral reef management," stated Kaho Tisthammer, lead researcher on this paper.

While the loss of coral colonies and species is easy to see with the naked eye, molecular tools are needed to uncover the effects of stressors on the genetic diversity within coral reef populations.

In the final few minutes of a spacecraft landing it is moving at hypersonic speeds through many layers of atmosphere. Knowing the air density outside of the vehicle can have a substantial effect on its angle of descent and ability to hit a specific landing spot. But air density sensors that can withstand the harsh hypersonic conditions are uncommon. A student from The Netherlands, working with an aerospace engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, developed an algorithm that can run onboard a vehicle, providing important real-time data to aid in steering the craft, particularly during the crucial entry, descent, and landing stage.

"The algorithm we created can run in-flight, onboard the vehicle and estimate what the atmosphere outside is like," said Hamza El-Kebir, an undergraduate at Delft University of Technology. "So this is a complete game changer, because now you can use prior knowledge about the vehicle's motion to estimate the air density, inform your decisions in flight, and make minor alterations in your course. This can provide more certainty that you're going to hit that spot, instead of dealing with really conservative guidance."

El-Kebir conducted the research with Melkior Ornik, assistant professor in the Dept. of Aerospace Engineering at U of I, during a semester abroad program and will begin graduate school at Illinois in the fall. He said his work is new because it uses data from sensors that weren't intended to provide air density data. "It extracts that density information from it by using really nifty algorithms that don't require any real knowledge of the aerodynamics or the atmosphere."

Ornik explained how the algorithm learns the air density. "The algorithm starts from almost nothing. It doesn't know anything about the air density. It gathers data from accelerometers and gyroscopes available on any vehicle to gather data, and combines it with prior knowledge about maximal rate of acceleration to obtain a time-varying estimate of air density. And it gets, in a sense, smarter over time. It changes its estimations onboard, based on the input data it receives."

El-Kebir and Ornik used data acquired from the entry, descent, and landing of the Phoenix lander--a Mars science probe--representing the last 220 seconds, the ballistic phase, until parachute deployment.

"There's no steering at the later portion of that stage, so it's really important to immediately know the air density in the rarified flow regime--from about 80 kilometers and up. When it enters that later portion, its flight path angle gets fixed and the vehicle just descends, and is barely affected by the direction of the wind," El-Kebir said.

What if the Phoenix had the algorithm?

"If you know the air density, you can estimate your angle of attack with respect to the wind. You could also predict what the density will be like in the future, so you can make decisions. There was no control on Phoenix during the ballistic stage. If it had the knowledge of air density, it would have had an edge. They could have leveraged the data and landed more accurately."

Ornik said there is often an assumption that there exists a fixed model that we know in advance and we figure out control methods that lead the vehicle to land. "That is often a strong assumption. It's often wrong because it's not just about air density. Due to the speed and the impact with air, hypersonic vehicles change shape slightly during the flight and that changes their dynamics during flight."

"So we don't have a unified model that describes the whole flight because the dynamics change gradually over time. We know the maximal rate of change, so with this algorithm, we can exploit that knowledge to create an estimate," Ornik said.

El-Kebir said there are other fields this knowledge can be applied to, even outside of aerospace and even vehicles. He is looking at ways to use it in electrosurgery to predict the temperature field during a surgical operation so that the surgeon can know how deep the cut is.

Reasonably good evidence suggests that most diets result in similar modest weight loss and improvements in cardiovascular risk factors over a period of six months, compared with a usual diet, finds a study published by The BMJ today.

Weight reduction at the 12 month follow-up diminished, and improvements in cardiovascular risk factors largely disappeared, except in association with the Mediterranean diet, which saw a small but important reduction in 'bad' LDL cholesterol.

As such, at least for short-term benefits, the researchers suggest that people should choose the diet they prefer without concern about the size of benefits.

Obesity has nearly tripled worldwide since 1975, prompting a plethora of dietary recommendations for weight management and cardiovascular risk reduction.

But so far, there has been no comprehensive analysis comparing the relative impact of different diets for weight loss and improving cardiovascular risk factors, such as blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

To address this, a team of international researchers set out to determine the relative effectiveness of dietary patterns and popular named diets among overweight or obese adults.

Their findings are based on the results of 121 randomised trials with 21,942 patients (average age 49) who followed a popular named diet or an alternative control diet and reported weight loss, and changes in cardiovascular risk factors.

The studies were designed differently, and were of varying quality, but the researchers were able to allow for that in their analysis.

They grouped diets by macronutrient patterns (low carbohydrate, low fat, and moderate macronutrient - similar to low fat, but slightly more fat and slightly less carbohydrate) and according to 14 popular named dietary programmes (Atkins, DASH, Mediteranean, etc).

Compared with a usual diet, low carbohydrate and low fat diets resulted in a similar modest reduction in weight (between 4 and 5 kg) and reductions in blood pressure at six months. Moderate macronutrient diets resulted in slightly less weight loss and blood pressure reductions.

Among popular named diets, Atkins, DASH, and Zone had the largest effect on weight loss (between 3.5 and 5.5 kg) and blood pressure compared with a usual diet at six months. No diets significantly improved levels of 'good' HDL cholesterol or C reactive protein (a chemical associated with inflammation) at six months.

Overall, weight loss diminished at 12 months among all dietary patterns and popular named diets, while the benefits for cardiovascular risk factors of all diets, except the Mediterranean diet, essentially disappeared.

The researchers point to some study limitations that could have affected the accuracy of their estimates. But say their comprehensive search and thorough analyses supports the robustness of the results.

As such, they say moderate certainty evidence shows that most macronutrient diets result in modest weight loss and substantial improvements in cardiovascular risk factors, particularly blood pressure, at six but not 12 months.

Differences between diets are, however, generally trivial to small, implying that for short-term cardiovascular benefit people can choose the diet they prefer from among many of the available diets without concern about the magnitude of benefits, they conclude.

The extensive range of popular diets analysed "provides a plethora of choice but no clear winner," say researchers at Monash University, Australia in a linked editorial.

As such, they suggest conversations should shift away from specific choice of diet, and focus instead on how best to maintain any weight loss achieved.

As national dietary guidelines fail to resonate with the public, taking a food-based approach with individuals and encouraging them to eat more vegetables, legumes, and whole grains and less sugar, salt and alcohol is sound advice, they add.

"If we are to change the weight trajectory of whole populations, we may learn more from understanding how commercial diet companies engage and retain their customers, and translate that knowledge into more effective health promotion campaigns," they conclude.

HOUSTON -- A one-year follow-up study led by The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center revealed a majority of patients with mantle cell lymphoma resistant to prior therapies may benefit from treatment with CD19-targeting chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy. Findings were published in the April 1 online issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The multi-center, 20-site, Phase II ZUMA-2 study reported that 93% of patients responded to the CAR T-cell therapy KTE-X19, with 67% achieving a complete response. At a median one year-follow up, 57% of patients were in complete remission, and the estimated progression-free survival and overall survival were 61% and 83%, respectively. At the time of this analysis, 76% of all treated patients in the study were alive.

In CAR T-cell therapy, patients' T cells are extracted through a process called leukapheresis and genetically reengineered with CAR molecules that help T cells attack cancer cells. The reengineered T cells are infused back into the patient. In this study, a type of CAR T-cell therapy known as KTE-X19 was manufactured and administered to patients.

"ZUMA-2 is the first multi-center, Phase II study of CAR T-cell therapy for relapsed/refractory mantle cell lymphoma, and these efficacy and safety results are encouraging," said Michael Wang, M.D.. professor of Lymphoma & Myeloma. "Although this study continues, our reported results, including a manageable safety profile, point to this therapy as an effective and viable option for patients with relapsed or refractory mantle cell lymphoma."

All patients had relapsed or refractory disease after receiving up to five therapies, and all patients had received Bruton's tyrosine kinase (BTK) inhibitor therapy. BTK inhibitor therapy has greatly improved outcomes in patients with relapsed or refractory mantle cell lymphoma, yet patients who have disease progression after receiving the treatment are likely to have poor outcomes, with median overall survival of just six to 10 months. Few patients in this category qualify to proceed to an allogeneic stem cell transplant.

In this study, the patients' median age was 65 years, and 84% were male. More than 80% of the patients had stage IV disease, and more than half were diagnosed as intermediate to high-risk in a mantle cell lymphoma prognostic index.

The study reported grade three or greater side effects, with the most common being neutropenia and thrombocytopenia. The majority of patients experienced cytokine release syndrome, a common side effect of CAR T-cell therapy, but the syndrome was effectively managed in all patients.

MINNEAPOLIS - Depression is common in people with Parkinson's disease and contributes to faster physical and mental decline, but it is often overlooked and undertreated. Cognitive-behavioral therapy has shown promising results for treating depression in people with Parkinson's, yet many people don't have access to therapists who understand Parkinson's and can provide this evidence-based depression treatment.

The good news is that participating in cognitive-behavioral therapy by telephone may be effective in reducing depression symptoms for people with Parkinson's, according to a study published in the April 1, 2020, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

"These results are exciting because they show that specialized therapy significantly improves depression, anxiety and quality of life in people with Parkinson's disease and also that these results last for at least six months," said study author Roseanne D. Dobkin, Ph.D., of Rutgers-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, N.J., and a member of the American Academy of Neurology. "While these findings need to be replicated, they also support the promise of telemedicine to expand the reach of specialized treatment to people who live far from services or have difficulty traveling to appointments for other reasons."

The study involved 72 people with an average age of 65 who had Parkinson's disease for an average of six years and depression for nearly three years. The majority were taking antidepressants, and many were already receiving other kinds of talk therapy.

For three months, half of the people took part in weekly, one-hour sessions of cognitive-behavioral therapy by telephone, while also continuing their usual medical and mental health care. The cognitive-behavioral sessions focused on teaching new coping skills and thinking strategies individually tailored to each participant's experience with Parkinson's disease. Their care partners, such as a spouse, another family member, or a close friend, were trained to help their partner use these new skills in between sessions. After the three months were up, participants could choose to continue the sessions up to once a month for six months.

The other half of the people received their usual care, which, for many, included taking antidepressants and/or receiving other forms of talk therapy in their community.

At the beginning of the study, the participants had an average score of 21 on a measure of depression symptoms where scores of 17 to 23 indicate moderate depression. After three months of cognitive-behavioral therapy, scores for that group fell to an average of 14, which indicates mild depression. The people receiving their usual care had no change in their scores.

Six months after finishing the weekly cognitive-behavioral sessions, those participants had maintained their improvements in mood.

A total of 40% of those who engaged in cognitive-behavioral therapy met the criteria for being "much improved" in their depression symptoms, while none of the people who simply continued their usual care did.

"Depression affects up to 50% of people with Parkinson's disease and may occur intermittently throughout the course of illness. Additionally, in many instances, depression is a more significant predictor of quality life than motor disability. So easily accessible and effective depression treatments have the potential to greatly improve people's lives," Dobkin said.

A limitation of the study was that it did not include people with very advanced Parkinson's disease or those who also had dementia, so the results may not apply to them. Also, while insurance coverage for telemedicine is growing, it is not yet available in all cases or all states.

People with Parkinson's disease who engage in cognitive behavioral therapy -- a form of psychotherapy that increases awareness of negative thinking and teaches coping skills -- are more likely to overcome depression and anxiety, according to a Rutgers study.

The study was published in the journal Neurology.

About 50 percent of people diagnosed with Parkinson's disease will experience depression, and up to 40 percent have an anxiety disorder.

"The psychological complications of Parkinson's disease have a greater impact on the quality of life and overall functioning than the motor symptoms of the disease," said lead author Roseanne Dobkin, a professor of psychiatry at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. "Untreated, depression can accelerate physical and cognitive decline, compromise independence and make it more difficult for individuals to proactively manage their health, like taking medication, exercising and visiting the physical therapist."

Depression in Parkinson's patients is underrecognized and often goes untreated. Among those who receive treatment, antidepressant medication is the most common approach, though many patients continue to struggle with depressive symptoms. The researchers investigated how adding cognitive behavioral therapy to the care individuals were already receiving would affect their depression.

Cognitive behavioral therapy sessions helped patients re-examine their usual ways of coping with the daily challenges of Parkinson's. Therapy was individually tailored, targeting negative thoughts - such as "I have no control" - and behaviors including social withdrawal or excessive worrying. Treatment also emphasized strategies for managing the disease, such as exercise, medication adherence and setting realistic daily goals.

The researchers enrolled 72 people diagnosed with both Parkinson's and depression. All participants continued their standard treatment. In addition, half the participants (37 people) also received cognitive behavioral therapy over the telephone weekly for three months, then monthly for six months. By the end of treatment, individuals receiving only standard care showed no change in their mental health status, whereas 40 percent of the patients receiving cognitive behavioral therapy showed their depression, anxiety and quality of life to be "much improved."

The convenience of phone treatment reduced barriers to care, allowing patients access to personalized, evidence-based mental health treatment, without having to leave their homes, Dobkin said.

"A notable proportion of people with Parkinson's do not receive the much needed mental health treatment to facilitate proactive coping with the daily challenges superimposed by their medical condition," she said. "This study suggests that the effects of the cognitive behavioral therapy last long beyond when the treatment stopped and can be used alongside standard neurological care to improve global Parkinson's disease outcomes."

Every spring, American robins migrate north from all over the U.S. and Mexico, flying up to 250 miles a day to reach their breeding grounds in Canada and Alaska. There, they spend the short summer in a mad rush to find a mate, build a nest, raise a family, and fatten up before the long haul back south.

Now climate change is making seasonal rhythms less predictable, and springtime is arriving earlier in many parts of the Arctic. Are robins changing the timing of their migration to keep pace, and if so, how do they know when to migrate? Although many animals are adjusting the timing of their migration, the factors driving these changes in migratory behavior have remained poorly understood.

A new study, published in Environmental Research Letters, concludes that robin migration is kicking off earlier by about five days each decade. The study is also the first to reveal the environmental conditions along the migration route that help the birds keep up with the changing seasons. Lead author Ruth Oliver completed the work while earning her doctorate at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

At Canada's Slave Lake, a pit stop for migrating birds, researchers have been recording spring migration timing for a quarter century. Their visual surveys and netting censuses revealed that robins have been migrating about five days earlier per decade since 1994.

In order to understand what factors are driving the earlier migration, Oliver and Lamont associate research professor Natalie Boelman, a coauthor on the paper, knew they needed to take a look at the flight paths of individual robins.

Their solution was to attach tiny GPS "backpacks" to the birds, after netting them at Slave Lake in mid-migration. "We made these little harnesses out of nylon string," Oliver explained. "It basically goes around their neck, down their chest and through their legs, then back around to the backpack." The unit weighs less than a nickel -- light enough for the robins to fly unhindered. The researchers expect that the thin nylon string eventually degrades, allowing the backpacks to fall off.

The researchers slipped these backpacks onto a total of 55 robins, tracking their movements for the months of April through June. With the precise location from the GPS, the team was able to link the birds' movements with weather data on air temperature, snow depth, wind speed, precipitation, and other conditions that might help or hinder migration.

The results showed that the robins start heading north earlier when winters are warm and dry, and suggest that local environmental conditions along the way help to fine-tune their flight schedules.

"The one factor that seemed the most consistent was snow conditions and when things melt. That's very new," said Oliver. "We've generally felt like birds must be responding to when food is available -- when snow melts and there are insects to get at -- but we've never had data like this before."

Boelman added that "with this sort of quantitative understanding of what matters to the birds as they are migrating, we can develop predictive models" that forecast the birds' responses as the climate continues to warm. "Because the timing of migration can indirectly influence the reproductive success of an individual, understanding controls over the timing of migratory events is important."

For now, it seems as though the environmental cues are helping the robins to keep pace with the shifting seasons. "The missing piece is, to what extent are they already pushing their behavioral flexibility, or how much more do they have to go?" said Oliver.

Because the study caught the birds in mid-migration, the tracking data doesn't reflect the birds' full migration path. To overcome this limitation, the researchers plan to analyze tissue from the robins' feathers and claws, which they collected while attaching the GPS harnesses, to estimate where each bird spent the previous winter and summer.

Over the long term, Oliver says, she hopes to use the GPS trackers to sort out other mysteries as well, such as how much of the change in migration timing is due to the behavioral responses found in the study versus natural selection to changing environments, or other factors.

"This type of work will be really cool once we can track individuals throughout the course of their life, and that's on the near-term horizon, in terms of technological capabilities," she said. "I think that will really help us unpack some of the intricacies of these questions."

In an effort to provide safer working environments for nuclear medicine professionals and their patients, clinics across five continents have shared their approaches to containing the spread of COVID-19 in a series of editorials, published ahead of print in The Journal of Nuclear Medicine. This compilation of strategies, experiences and precautions is intended to support nuclear medicine clinics as they make decisions regarding patient care.

Clinicians from Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and North America provided summaries of the steps their individual hospitals and clinics have taken to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. According to editorial author, Ken Herrmann, MD, MBA, chair of nuclear medicine at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany, the most common steps taken by clinics have been to triage patients upon arrival, reduce elective nuclear medicine studies, improve hygiene practices and establish rotations of medical personnel to create back-up teams should a staff member become infected.

For patients undergoing essential nuclear medicine procedures, incidental findings can suggest signs of COVID-19, according to editorial author Domenico Albano, MD, nuclear medicine physician at the University of Brescia and Spedali Civili Brescia in Italy. Reporting on local experience in a region with high COVID-19 prevalence, Albano and colleagues found six out of 65 asymptomatic PET/CT patients and one of 12 radioiodine patients showed signs of interstitial pneumonia. Five of the seven patients were confirmed to have COVID-19; the remaining two did not receive immediate testing but underwent quarantine and careful monitoring.

"Our observations show that it is mandatory for healthcare personnel to employ hygienic measures, minimize patient contact and optimize distance, and use protective equipment for general clinical services in regions with high COVID prevalence," said Albano. "It is also important to consider potential COVID-19 related findings during reading, and to report such findings to the patient and his referring physicians immediately, for appropriate action."

Of particular interest to the nuclear medicine community is the safety of performing ventilation/perfusion studies. "Previous literature has documented a small degree of leakage of the aerosol from the closed delivery system into the room with the potential for expired air and aerosolized secretions to contaminate personnel within the imaging suite," noted Lionel S. Zuckier, MD, MBA, FRCPC, editorial author and chief of the division of nuclear medicine at Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, New York. "In addition, patients frequently cough following inhalation of the radiopharmaceutical, which may further expose nuclear medicine workers to aerosolized secretions."

Given these circumstances, ventilation/perfusion studies have the potential to result in aerosolized secretions that can contribute to the spread of COVID-19. Zuckier and colleagues recommend eliminating the ventilation portion from lung perfusion/ventilation scans to reduce the risk of spreading COVID-19.

Additional steps taken by clinics to combat the spread of COVID-19 include limiting or cancelling research studies and scheduling symptomatic patients needing essential studies for the end of the day (allowing for thorough cleaning after the study). Some clinics have conducted refresher courses in infection control management and basic emergency management, while others have stressed the need for kindness and consideration in this unprecedented time.

Concerns were also voiced by nuclear medicine clinics around the world regarding potential nuclear reactor production restrictions and international travel limitations. Strategies to tackle these issues are being addressed by nuclear medicine and molecular imaging society leadership worldwide.

"These are difficult times; none of us has ever experienced anything like the current pandemic," remarked Johannes Czernin, MD, JNM editor-in-chief and chief of the Ahmanson Translation Imaging Division at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles in California. "We thank the hundreds of thousands of health care workers worldwide who have not hesitated for a moment to come in and do their job at times of great personal risk. These are selfless people who help and support each other; cover for each other; volunteer to step in and up as needed."

Bethesda, Maryland (April 1, 2020) -- Today, the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) published new COVID-19 recommendations in Gastroenterology, the official journal of the AGA: AGA Institute Rapid Recommendations for Gastrointestinal Procedures During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

This rapid recommendation document was commissioned and approved by the AGA Institute Clinical Guidelines Committee, AGA Institute Clinical Practice Updates Committee, and the AGA Governing Board to provide timely, methodologically rigorous guidance on a topic of high clinical importance to the AGA membership and the public.

KEY GUIDANCE FOR GASTROENTEROLOGISTS

Treat all patients like they have coronavirus: In the absence of accurate and reliable testing for COVID-19 infection and the prolonged asymptomatic shedding that precedes symptoms, all patients should be considered at risk.

Boost PPE for endoscopic procedures: All health care workers should use N95 (or N99 or PAPR) masks instead of surgical masks and double gloves instead of single gloves as part of personal protective equipment (PPE), regardless of patient's COVID-19 status. There is strong evidence to support this recommendation for upper GI procedures, and lower-certainty evidence for lower GI procedures (i.e., colonoscopy). Also, negative pressure rooms, when available may help mitigate the spread of infection. Data on extended use and re-use of masks was also reviewed with insufficient evidence to comment on the safety of extended use (up to 8 hours) or re-use of masks. Indirect laboratory testing of masks suggests loss of durability and fit of N95 masks after 5 donnings.

Details: Endoscopies can generate aerosolized viral particles that can stay viable for up to 3 hours, depending on airflow dynamics. Furthermore, viral particles can stay viable for 72 hours on plastic surfaces and can easily promote spread through direct contact. SARS-CoV2 RNA can also be shed from stool though the risks associated with exposure are uncertain. Therefore, individuals performing endoscopic procedures are at higher risk of developing infection.

Triage GI procedures: Triaging of GI procedures is necessary to minimize risk to health care providers and patients and to limit the spread of infection during a pandemic. We provide a framework for decision-making that is focused on the impact of the delay on patient-important outcomes. Decisions to defer procedures should be made on a case-by-case basis using telemedicine as an adjunctive tool to help triage.

In the fight against neurodegenerative diseases such as frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer's and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, the tau protein is a major culprit. Found abundantly in our brain cells, tau is normally a team player -- it maintains structure and stability within neurons, and it helps with transport of nutrients from one part of the cell to another.

All that changes when tau misfolds. It becomes sticky and insoluble, aggregating and forming neurofibrillary tangles within neurons, disrupting their function and ultimately killing them. Worse, it probably can take relatively few misfolded tau proteins from one cell to turn its neighbors into malfunctioning, dying brain cells.

"This abnormal form of tau starts to spread from cell to cell," said UC Santa Barbara neuroscientist Kenneth S. Kosik. "It's reminiscent of a serious problem that's known in biology, called prion diseases, such as mad cow disease."

Importantly, unlike true prion diseases, which are spread by contact with infected tissue or bodily fluid, prion-like diseases such as frontotemporal dementia and other tauopathies aren't contagious -- they can't be spread from person to person or by coming into contact with infected tissue. However, the replication is eerily familiar: A misfolded tau protein gets out of a cell and gets taken up by a normal neighboring cell. It then acts as a template in that cell, Kosik explained, which subsequently produces misfolded tau. Over and over again, the cells produce and secrete the toxic knockoff version of tau until whole regions of the brain are affected, which over time will rob a person of their cognitive and physical functions.

What if the spread could be contained? If caught early enough, controlling the proliferation of pathological tau could keep the neurodegenerative disease from progressing, and give the patient a shot at a normal life. But in order to do that, scientists first have to understand how the protein gets around.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, Kosik and his team have uncovered one such mechanism by which tau travels from neuron to neuron. Not only does it shed light on the extensively studied but rather poorly understood tau propagation in neurodegenerative disease, it hints at a way to control the spread of pathological tau.

"The discovery of a mechanism by which tau transits from cell to cell provides a clue that will open up a deep structural approach to the design molecules that can prevent tau spread," said Kosik, who is the Harriman Professor of Neuroscience Research in UC Santa Barbara's Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology.

The major player in this mechanism of uptake and spread, it turns out, is the low-density lipoprotein called LRP1 (low density lipoprotein receptor-related protein 1). It's located on the brain cell membrane and is involved is several biological processes, among them helping the neuron take in cholesterol, which is used as part of cellular structure.

LRP1, the researchers discovered, takes up tau in neighboring cells after it escapes from a cell into the extra-cellular space. One of several low density lipoprotein receptors, LRP1 was singled out by process of elimination: By systematically inhibiting the expression of each of the members of this family via CRISPRi technology, and exposing them to tau, the researchers determined that genetic silencing of LRP1 effectively inhibited tau uptake.

"This protein is an interesting one in its own right because it's a little bit like an extracellular trash can," Kosik said. "It doesn't just pick up tau; if there's other rubbish out there, it also picks it up."

But what about tau is LRP1 recognizing? Digging deeper, the scientists found that a stretch of the amino acid lysine on the tau protein acts as kind of the secret handshake that opens the doors to the neuron.

"So these are all clues," Kosik said.

Stopping the Spread

"Since our cellular work showed that tau can interact with the cell-surface receptor LRP1 and that this causes tau's endocytosis, our hypothesis was that if we reduce LRP1 expression in the mice we should reduce the ability for neighboring neurons to take up tau," explained the study's lead author, postdoctoral researcher Jennifer Rauch.

To back their in-vitro studies, the researchers injected tau into mice, some of which had their LRP1 genes downregulated by a LRP1 suppressor RNA. The tau proteins were bound by a small string of amino acids to a green fluorescent protein to help the scientists observe tau after it was injected.

"As soon as this construct is in a cell, the amino acid connector gets cut, and the fluorescent protein and tau separate from each other," Kosik explained. What they found was that in the animals with normal LRP1, the tau had a tendency to spread; in the LRP1-suppressed mice, the protein stayed put, greatly reducing the likelihood that it would be taken up and replicated by other, normal neurons. "This is the first time we've seen the complete obliteration of tau spread," he said.

"When we reduce LRP1 expression, we see reduced tau spread in the animals," said Rauch, who has previously worked on the role of heparan sulphate proteoglycans on tau uptake. She pointed out a recent study that included Kosik and graduate student Juliana Acost-Uribe that described a patient with a severe genetic form of early-onset Alzheimers's but was spared getting the disease due to a second mutation that appeared to prevent tau spread. The team is keen to learn how this patient's second mutation might prevent tau spread possibly by interacting with LRP1.

"Next," Rauch said, "we are focusing on trying to decipher the interface of the tau-LRP1 interaction and understand if this could be a drug-able target."

Neolithic populations have long been credited with bringing about a revolution in farming practices across Europe. However, a new study suggests it was not until the Bronze Age several millennia later that human activity led to significant changes to the continent's landscape.

Scientists from the University of Copenhagen and the University of Plymouth led research tracing how the two major human migrations recorded in Holocene Europe - the northwestward movement of Anatolian farmer populations during the Neolithic and the westward movement of Yamnaya steppe peoples during the Bronze Age - unfolded.

In particular, they analysed how they were associated with changes in vegetation - which led to Europe's forests being replaced with the agricultural landscape still much in evidence today.

Their results, published in PNAS, show the two migrations differ markedly in both their spread and environmental implications, with the Yamnaya expansion moving quicker and resulting in greater vegetation changes than the earlier Neolithic farmer expansion.

The study - also involving the University of Gothenburg and the University of Cambridge - used techniques commonly applied in environmental science to model climate and pollution, and applied them to instead analyse human population movements in the last 10 millennia of European history.

It showed that a decline in broad-leaf forest and an increase in pasture and natural grassland vegetation was concurrent with a decline in hunter-gatherer ancestry, and may have been associated with the fast movement of steppe peoples during the Bronze Age.

It also demonstrated that natural variations in climate patterns during this period are associated with these land cover changes.

The research is the ?rst to model the spread of ancestry in ancient genomes through time and space, and provides the ?rst framework for comparing human migrations and land cover changes, while also accounting for changes in climate.

Dr Fernando Racimo, Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen and the study's lead author, said: "The movement of steppe peoples that occurred in the Bronze Age had a particularly strong impact on European vegetation. As these peoples were moving westward, we see increases in the amount of pasture lands and decreases in broad leaf forests throughout the continent. We can now also compare movements of genes to the spread of cultural packages. In the case of the Neolithic farming revolution, for example, the two track each other particularly well, in both space and time."

The research made use of land cover maps showing vegetation change over the past 11,000 years, which were produced through the University of Plymouth's Deforesting Europe project.

Scientists working on that project have previously shown more than half of Europe's forests have disappeared over the past 6,000 years due to increasing demand for agricultural land and the use of wood as a source of fuel.

Dr Jessie Woodbridge, Research Fellow at the University of Plymouth and co-author on the study, added: "European landscapes have been transformed drastically over thousands of years. Knowledge of how people interacted with their environment in the past has implications for understanding the way in which people use and impact upon the world today. Collaboration with palaeo-geneticists has allowed the migration of human populations in the past to be tracked using ancient DNA, and for the first time allowed us to assess the impact of different farming populations on land-cover change, which provides new insights into past human-environment interactions."

EVANSTON, Ill. -- The Golden Age of Hollywood is known for its glitz, glamour and classic movies. Northwestern University researchers have peeled back the gilded sheen to reveal an industry tarnished by severe gender inequity.

By analyzing a century of data (1910 to 2010) in the American Film Institute Archive and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), the researchers found that female representation in the film industry hit an all-time low during the so-called Golden Age. Women representation in the industry still is struggling to recover today.

"A lot of people view this era through rose-colored glasses because Hollywood was producing so many great movies," said Northwestern's Luís Amaral, who led the study. "They argue that types of movies being made -- such as Westerns, action and crime -- caused the decrease in female representation. But we found the decrease occurred across all genres, including musicals, comedy, fantasy and romance."

The study will be published on April 1 in the journal PLOS ONE.

Amaral is the Erastus Otis Haven Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering.

Consistent findings across all genres and jobs

To conduct the study, Amaral and his team analyzed 26,000 movies produced between 1910 and 2010.

The team looked across all genres -- action, adventure, biography, comedy, crime, drama, documentary family, fantasy, film-noir, history, horror, music, musical, mystery, romance, sci-fi, sport, thriller, war, Western and short -- to measure how many women worked as actors, screenwriters, directors and producers.

Across all genres and all four job types, the resulting graphs form the exact same "U-shape" pattern. Roles for women increased from 1910 to 1920 and then sharply dropped. Around 1950, the roles steadily increase until 2010.

"In general, we found that the percentage of women compared to men in any role was consistently below 50% for all years from 1912 until now," said study coauthor Murielle Dunand, a former intern in Amaral's laboratory and current student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

'Men hire men'

Amaral said his findings reflect what was happening in the film industry.

Before Hollywood's Golden Age, the industry was fueled by independent filmmakers, and women participation was steadily increasing. From 1910 to 1920, according to Amaral's data, women actors comprised roughly 40% of casts. Women wrote 20% of movies, produced 12% and directed 5%. By 1930, acting roles for women were cut in half; producing and directing roles hit close to zero.

Amaral and Dunand said the data suggest that the studio system, which emerged between 1915 and 1920, is most likely responsible for the shift. The industry condensed from a somewhat diverse collection of independent filmmakers scattered across the country to just five studios (Warner Bros., Paramount, MGM, Fox and RKO Pictures), which controlled everything.

"As the studio system falls under the control of a small group of men, women are receiving fewer and fewer jobs," Amaral said. "It looks like male producers hire male directors and male writers. This is association, not causation, but the data is very suggestive."

Women improve conditions for other women

Then, two groundbreaking lawsuits caused the studio system to break apart. First, Oscar-nominated actor Olivia de Havilland, who had an exclusive contract with Warner Bros., sued the studio in 1943 to be freed from her contract and won. In 1948, the U.S. federal government sued Paramount Pictures in an antitrust case. At the time, movie studios owned their own theaters and distributed their own movies. When Paramount lost, studios could no longer exclusively produce, distribute and exhibit their films.

"These legal changes took the power away from a handful of men and gave more people the power to start changing the industry," Amaral said. "There is a connection between increased concentration of power and decreased participation of women."

Among the insights hidden in the data, Amaral found that women producers tend to hire greater proportions of women to work in their films.

"Producers affect the gender of the director," he said. "Women with power in Hollywood are making conditions better for other women."