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Unlike conventional cancer drugs that attack and kill cancer cells directly, anti-cancer immunotherapy, which kills cancer cells by strengthening the body's immunity, is a novel type of cancer treatment currently attracting increased attention. Unfortunately, a minority of cancer patients who have some degree of pre-existing immunity only benefit from anti-cancer immunotherapy.

Recently, 'doxorubicin', a cancer treatment drug, has been shown to boost patients' immune response by releasing various components when cancer cells are killed. However, as the toxicity and inflammatory responses induced by doxorubicin can affect normal cells in addition to cancer cells, it can lower patients' immunity levels, which limits its effectiveness for immunotherapy.

To tackle this issue, a research team led by Dr. Ju Hee Ryu of the Center for Theragnosis at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) has developed an anti-cancer prodrug that can improve anti-cancer immunotherapy by reacting only with cancer cells, thereby minimizing the toxicity to normal cells, including immune cells, and boosting patient immunity.

Last year, the Center for Theragnosis at KIST reported the development of an anti-cancer drug that targets cancer cells by suppressing the resistance to doxorubicin without reacting with normal cells. In contrast, Dr. Ryu's research team has developed a prodrug for anti-cancer immunotherapy that utilizes the immunity-boosting potential of doxorubicin.

The developed prodrug exhibits anticancer effects when activated by abundant enzymes present in cancer cells. As these enzymes are not present in normal cells, they do not experience toxicity and inflammatory responses. The ability to target cancer cells exclusively increases patient immunity, inducing an active anticancer immune response when doxorubicin is activated in cancer cells.

The developed anti-cancer drug significantly improved the anti-cancer immune response in nonclinical animal models and reduced side effects associated with inflammatory responses and toxicity in normal tissues. Therefore, the drug dosage can probably be increased to enhance its effectiveness for chemotherapy without causing notable side effects.

In addition, because the prodrug was developed by utilizing a drug already in clinical use, the commercialization process is expected to be relatively straightforward in terms of clinical trials and mass production.

Dr. Ju Hee Ryu of KIST said, "Because the immunity level of most patients must be raised to a certain level to enjoy the remarkable therapeutic effect of immunotherapy, an anti-cancer prodrug that can maintain the anti-cancer immune response of the drug while reducing the toxicity and inflammatory responses in normal tissues represents a significant step forward for immunotherapy."

PHILADELPHIA-- In addition to sickening and taking the lives of millions across the globe, COVID-19 complicated patient care in a range of less-direct ways, from increased incidence of heart attacks to decreased cancer screenings. The virus also increased the risk of complications and death among trauma patients with injuries from car crashes, falls or other accidents, or who were victims of violent injuries such as gunshots and stabbings, according to new research conducted by the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania published recently in The Journal of Trauma and Acute Surgery.

The findings reveal that patients in trauma centers across the state of Pennsylvania who also tested positive for COVID-19 had six times higher risk of death than patients with similar injuries without COVID. COVID-positive patients also demonstrated double the likelihood of complications such as venous thromboembolism, renal failure, need for intubation, and unplanned ICU admission, as well as more than five times the odds of pulmonary complications. These risks were even greater in patients over age 65.

"COVID-19 had the largest impact on patients whose injuries were relatively minor, and who we would have otherwise expected to do well," said lead author Elinore Kaufman, MD, MSHP, an assistant professor in the Division of Trauma, Surgical Critical Care and Emergency Surgery at Penn Medicine. "Our findings underscore how important it is for hospitals to consistently test admitted patients, so that providers can be aware of this additional risk and treat patients with extra care and vigilance."

Researchers conducted a retrospective study of 15,550 patients admitted to Pennsylvania trauma centers from March 21, 2020, (when Governor Tom Wolf ordered the closure of non-essential businesses statewide) to July 31, 2020. Of the 15,550 patients, 8,170 were tested for the virus, and 219 tested positive. During this period, the researchers evaluated length of stay, complications, and overall outcomes for patients who tested positive for COVID, compared to patients who did not have the virus. They found that rates of testing increased over time, from 34 percent in April 2020 to 56 percent in July. Rates of testing varied substantially across centers, however, with a median of 56.2 percent and a range of 0 percent to 96.4 percent.

"First, we need to investigate how to best care for these high-risk patients, and establish standard protocols to minimize risks," said senior author Niels D. Martin, MD, chief of Surgical Critical Care and an associate professor in the division of Trauma, Surgical Critical Care and Emergency Surgery. "Second, we need more data on the risks associated with patients who present symptoms of COVID, versus those who are asymptomatic, so we can administer proven treatments appropriately and increase the likelihood of survival with minimal complications."

A few males are enough to fertilise all the females. The number of males therefore has little bearing on a population's growth. However, they are important for purging bad mutations from the population. This is shown by a new Uppsala University study providing in-depth knowledge of the possible long-term genetic consequences of sexual selection. The results are published in the scientific journal Evolution Letters.

The study supports the theory that in many animal species selection acting on males can impose the fortuitous benefit to the population of causing offspring to inherit healthy genes. Stiff competition among males results in selective elimination of individuals with many deleterious mutations, preventing them from passing on said mutations. This may exert positive long-term effects on a sexually reproducing population's growth and persistence.

"When deleterious mutations are purged from a population through rigorous selection in males, resulting in fewer males reproducing, the process can take place with little or no effect on population growth. This is because relatively few males suffice to fertilise all the females in a population, hence, whether those females are fertilized by few males or many males makes little or no difference to the number of offspring those females can produce, especially in species where the male doesn't look after its own offspring. By contrast, such rigorous selection in females would result in fewer females reproducing, hence fewer offspring produced, which could lead to a massive population decline or even extinction," says Karl Grieshop, evolutionary biologist at Canada's University of Toronto and the study's lead author.

The researchers used 16 genetic strains of seed beetle (Callosobruchus maculatus) to investigate how the inferred number of deleterious mutations in each affected the reproductive ability (fitness) of females and males. Through intensive inbreeding of strains followed by crosses among them, it was possible to quantify the cumulative effects of each strain's unique set of mutations. By comparing the inbred strains to the crosses among them, the scientists were able to see that these mutations harmed both females and males nearly equally. However, when looking only at the crosses among strains, which is the more genetically variable setting that is more relevant to how selection would act in nature, these mutational effects were only manifest in male fitness. In the females, the deleterious effects of the mutations they carried were not detectable in this more genetically variable background, and would therefore not be purged effectively via female-specific selection in nature.

"This indicates that although these mutations do have a detrimental effect on females' reproduction, they are more effectively removed from the population by selection acting on male carriers than female carriers. Previous research from our group and others has succeeded in showing this effect by artificially inducing mutations, but this is the first direct evidence that it ensues for naturally occurring variants of genes," Grieshop says.

In the researchers' view, their study sheds new light on the old question of why so many multicellular organisms use sexual reproduction.

"Production of males causes a decrease in the reproductive capacity of a species, since males themselves contribute less than females to the production of offspring. The question, then, is why a species evolves to reproduce sexually, instead of just producing females through asexual reproduction. Our study shows that production of males, which may engage in intense competition for the chance to mate, enables faster purging of deleterious mutations from the population, which could thereby enable a healthier set of genes and higher reproductive capacity relative to asexual reproduction," says David Berger, researcher and team leader at Uppsala University's Department of Ecology and Genetics.

Tokyo, Japan - Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have discovered that a specific chemical feature of a key protein known as tau may cause it to accumulate in the brain and trigger illnesses like Alzheimer's. They found that disulfide bonds on certain amino acids act to stabilize tau and cause it to accumulate, an effect that got worse with increased oxidative stress. The identification of chemical targets triggering tau accumulation may lead to breakthrough treatments.

The tau protein is key to the healthy function of biological cells. It helps form and stabilize microtubules, the thin filaments that crisscross cell interiors to help keep them structurally rigid and provide 'highways' to shuttle molecules between organelles. However, when they are not formed correctly, they can accumulate and form sticky clumps. In the brain, these aggregates block the firing of neurons and cause a wide range of neurodegenerative diseases known as tauopathies, one of which is Alzheimer's disease. It is vastly important that scientists find the 'switch' that transforms tau from an indispensable part of cell function to a deadly pathology.

A team led by Associate Professor Kanae Ando of Tokyo Metropolitan University has been using model organisms like the Drosophila fruit fly to uncover how specific features of the tau protein cause it to stop working properly. Flies can be genetically altered to express the same tau protein as in humans. By systematically modifying parts of the gene encoding for tau, they have been trying to pinpoint how certain features of mutant tau proteins affect their behavior.

In their most recent work, they found that alterations to amino acid residues in the protein known as cysteines in two different locations (C291 and C322) had a drastic effect on the amount and toxicity of tau. In a further breakthrough, the team pinned down the specific chemical feature responsible for making them toxic to normal cell function, that is, disulfide bonds formed by these cysteine groups. The toxic accumulation of tau got worse when cells were put in an environment with elevated levels of reactive oxygen species, as thiol groups on the cysteines were oxidized to form disulfide links. Biochemical environments with elevated oxidative stress are similar to those seen in patients with tauopathies. The co-expression of antioxidants to counter this effect helped natural processes clear away tau proteins, resulting in dramatically lower tau levels.

The team hope that knowledge of exactly which chemical groups are responsible for tau toxicity may lead to novel therapies which reduce or prevent tau accumulation, helping sufferers of tauopathies around the world.

A near-perfectly preserved ancient human fossil known as the Harbin cranium sits in the Geoscience Museum in Hebei GEO University. The largest of known Homo skulls, scientists now say this skull represents a newly discovered human species named Homo longi or "Dragon Man." Their findings, appearing in three papers publishing June 25 in the journal The Innovation, suggest that the Homo longi lineage may be our closest relatives--and has the potential to reshape our understanding of human evolution.

"The Harbin fossil is one of the most complete human cranial fossils in the world," says author Qiang Ji, a professor of paleontology of Hebei GEO University. "This fossil preserved many morphological details that are critical for understanding the evolution of the Homo genus and the origin of Homo sapiens."

The cranium was reportedly discovered in the 1930s in Harbin City of the Heilongjiang province of China. The massive skull could hold a brain comparable in size to modern humans' but had larger, almost square eye sockets, thick brow ridges, a wide mouth, and oversized teeth. "While it shows typical archaic human features, the Harbin cranium presents a mosaic combination of primitive and derived characters setting itself apart from all the other previously-named Homo species," says Ji, leading to its new species designation of Homo longi.

Scientists believe the cranium came from a male individual, approximately 50 years old, living in a forested, floodplain environment as part of a small community. "Like Homo sapiens, they hunted mammals and birds, and gathered fruits and vegetables, and perhaps even caught fish," remarks author Xijun Ni, a professor of primatology and paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Hebei GEO University. Given that the Harbin individual was likely very large in size as well as the location where the skull was found, researchers suggest H. longi may have been adapted for harsh environments, allowing them to disperse throughout Asia.

Using a series of geochemical analyses, Ji, Ni, and their team dated the Harbin fossil to at least 146,000 years, placing it in the Middle Pleistocene, a dynamic era of human species migration. They hypothesize that H. longi and H. sapiens could have encountered each other during this era.

"We see multiple evolutionary lineages of Homo species and populations co-existing in Asia, Africa, and Europe during that time. So, if Homo sapiens indeed got to East Asia that early, they could have a chance to interact with H. longi, and since we don't know when the Harbin group disappeared, there could have been later encounters as well," says author Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Nature History Museum in London.

Looking farther back in time, the researchers also find that Homo longi is one of our closest hominin relatives, even more closely related to us than Neanderthals. "It is widely believed that the Neanderthal belongs to an extinct lineage that is the closest relative of our own species. However, our discovery suggests that the new lineage we identified that includes Homo longi is the actual sister group of H. sapiens," says Ni.

Their reconstruction of the human tree of life also suggests that the common ancestor we share with Neanderthals existed even further back in time. "The divergence time between H. sapiens and the Neanderthals may be even deeper in evolutionary history than generally believed, over one million years," says Ni. If true, we likely diverged from Neanderthals roughly 400,000 years earlier than scientists had thought.

The researchers say that findings gathered from the Harbin cranium have the potential to rewrite major elements of human evolution. Their analysis into the life history of Homo longi suggest they were strong, robust humans whose potential interactions with Homo sapiens may have shaped our history in turn. "Altogether, the Harbin cranium provides more evidence for us to understand Homo diversity and evolutionary relationships among these diverse Homo species and populations," says Ni. "We found our long-lost sister lineage."

CAMBRIDGE, MA - Boosting production of biofuels such as ethanol could be an important step toward reducing global consumption of fossil fuels. However, ethanol production is limited in large part by its reliance on corn, which isn't grown in large enough quantities to make up a significant portion of U.S. fuel needs.

To try to expand biofuels' potential impact, a team of MIT engineers has now found a way to expand the use of a wider range of nonfood feedstocks to produce such fuels. At the moment, feedstocks such as straw and woody plants are difficult to use for biofuel production because they first need to be broken down to fermentable sugars, a process that releases numerous byproducts that are toxic to yeast, the microbes most commonly used to produce biofuels.

The MIT researchers developed a way to circumvent that toxicity, making it feasible to use those sources, which are much more plentiful, to produce biofuels. They also showed that this tolerance can be engineered into strains of yeast used to manufacture other chemicals, potentially making it possible to use "cellulosic" woody plant material as a source to make biodiesel or bioplastics.

"What we really want to do is open cellulose feedstocks to almost any product and take advantage of the sheer abundance that cellulose offers," says Felix Lam, an MIT research associate and the lead author of the new study.

Gregory Stephanopoulos, the Willard Henry Dow Professor in Chemical Engineering, and Gerald Fink, the Margaret and Herman Sokol Professor at the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research and the American Cancer Society Professor of Genetics in MIT's Department of Biology, are the senior authors of the paper, which appears today in Science Advances.

Boosting tolerance

Currently, around 40 percent of the U.S. corn harvest goes into ethanol. Corn is primarily a food crop that requires a great deal of water and fertilizer, so plant material known as cellulosic biomass is considered an attractive, noncompeting source for renewable fuels and chemicals. This biomass, which includes many types of straw, and parts of the corn plant that typically go unused, could amount to more than 1 billion tons of material per year, according to a U.S. Department of Energy study -- enough to substitute for 30 to 50 percent of the petroleum used for transportation.

However, two major obstacles to using cellulosic biomass are that cellulose first needs to be liberated from the woody lignin, and the cellulose then needs to be further broken down into simple sugars that yeast can use. The particularly aggressive preprocessing needed generates compounds called aldehydes, which are very reactive and can kill yeast cells.

To overcome this, the MIT team built on a technique they had developed several years ago to improve yeast cells' tolerance to a wide range of alcohols, which are also toxic to yeast in large quantities. In that study, they showed that spiking the bioreactor with specific compounds that strengthen the membrane of the yeast helped yeast to survive much longer in high concentrations of ethanol. Using this approach, they were able to improve the traditional fuel ethanol yield of a high-performing strain of yeast by about 80 percent.

In their new study, the researchers engineered yeast so that they could convert the cellulosic byproduct aldehydes into alcohols, allowing them to take advantage of the alcohol tolerance strategy they had already developed. They tested several naturally occurring enzymes that perform this reaction, from several species of yeast, and identified one that worked the best. Then, they used directed evolution to further improve it.

"This enzyme converts aldehydes into alcohols, and we have shown that yeast can be made a lot more tolerant of alcohols as a class than it is of aldehydes, using the other methods we have developed," Stephanopoulos says.

Yeast are generally not very efficient at producing ethanol from toxic cellulosic feedstocks; however, when the researchers expressed this top-performing enzyme and spiked the reactor with the membrane-strengthening additives, the strain more than tripled its cellulosic ethanol production, to levels matching traditional corn ethanol.

Abundant feedstocks

The researchers demonstrated that they could achieve high yields of ethanol with five different types of cellulosic feedstocks, including switchgrass, wheat straw, and corn stover (the leaves, stalks, and husks left behind after the corn is harvested).

"With our engineered strain, you can essentially get maximum cellulosic fermentation from all these feedstocks that are usually very toxic," Lam says. "The great thing about this is it doesn't matter if maybe one season your corn residues aren't that great. You can switch to energy straws, or if you don't have high availability of straws, you can switch to some sort of pulpy, woody residue."

The researchers also engineered their aldehyde-to-ethanol enzyme into a strain of yeast that has been engineered to produce lactic acid, a precursor to bioplastics. As it did with ethanol, this strain was able to produce the same yield of lactic acid from cellulosic materials as it does from corn.

This demonstration suggests that it could be feasible to engineer aldehyde tolerance into strains of yeast that generate other products such as diesel. Biodiesels could potentially have a big impact on industries such as heavy trucking, shipping, or aviation, which lack an emission-free alternative like electrification and require huge amounts of fossil fuel.

"Now we have a tolerance module that you can bolt on to almost any sort of production pathway," Stephanopoulos says. "Our goal is to extend this technology to other organisms that are better suited for the production of these heavy fuels, like oils, diesel, and jet fuel."

What The Study Did: This study evaluated changes in hospitalization and death rates related to COVID-19 before and after U.S. states reopened their economies in 2020.

Authors: Pinar Karaca-Mandic, Ph.D., of the Carlson School of Management in Minneapolis, is the corresponding author.

To access the embargoed study:  Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ 

(doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2021.1262)

Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

What The Study Did: Researchers examined the association of closures of childcare facilities with the employment status of women and men with children in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Authors: Yevgeniy Feyman, B.A., of the Boston University School of Public Health, is the corresponding author.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2021.1297)

Editor's Note: The article includes funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

What The Study Did: This analysis describes the use of a multifaceted COVID-19 control plan to reduce spread of SARS-CoV-2 at a large urban university during the second wave of the pandemic.

Authors: Davidson H. Hamer, M.D., of the Boston University School of Public Health, is the corresponding author.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.16425)

Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.

Effective diagnostics, therapies and treatments for diseases and infections could increasingly involve re-engineering the body’s internal biomechanisms at their most basic chemical and molecular foundations.

Growing knowledge about the body’s biological processes is increasing the possibilities for restoring human health, says Xiao Wang, an associate professor of biomedical engineering in Arizona State University’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. He and a team of researchers are exploring ways to trigger and control cell differentiation and transition to unlock properties that may change bioengineers’ approach to diagnostics, vaccine development and therapeutic treatments.

Recent research led by Wang and Alexander Green, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University, reveals more about the potential for designing small add-on structures for biomolecules that can enhance their properties.

“There could be new and better kinds of applications for diagnostics, therapeutics and treatments, and for genome engineering,” Wang says. “These could be big contributions to biomedicine.”

The details about what the research may yield appear in the paper Predictable control of RNA lifetime using engineered degradation-tuning RNAs, published this week in the research journal Nature Chemical Biology.

Wang and Green’s focus is on messenger RNA, or mRNA, which carries genetic information from DNA, the molecule that contains the genetic blueprint needed to develop and maintain organisms — including humans.

Within cells, mRNA transmits messages from DNA to the protein-producing ribosomes, informing them of which proteins need to be synthesized at a given time. While DNA’s status as the information repository of the cell means that it is very stable, mRNA’s message-carrying role means it rapidly degrades. This degradation has made it harder to implement RNA-based therapies and diagnostics.

Wang, Green and their research team are devising methods of controlling degradation to produce predictable, precise and stable results. The new research paper describes how they are attempting to fine-tune the speed of mRNA degradation to boost the ability to perform biotechnological functions. To do this, they have identified specific RNA structural features to build a library of RNA components called degradation-tuning RNAs, or dtRNAs.

Attaching the dtRNAs to an RNA of interest through genetic engineering enables them to increase or decrease the RNA’s degradation rate, and fine-tune gene expression levels in vivo and in vitro — either inside a living organism or in a laboratory setting.

“We found that dtRNAs could be used with a variety of different types of RNAs and modify gene expression levels over a very wide range. These capabilities can increase the speed and sensitivity of medical diagnostics and give us better control over cell function,” says Green, who was an assistant professor in ASU’s Biodesign Institute and School of Molecular Sciences from 2015 to 2020 and is currently an adjunct professor with the school.

One of the more impactful results of these refining processes could be the development of mRNA-based vaccines that would be especially effective against viruses, Wang says.

“We can actually engineer the structure of RNA molecules in faster and more systematic ways that make them more efficient in how they behave,” he says.

These behavior changes will inform how effective Wang and Green’s bioengineering process will be at boosting the efficacy of diagnostics, vaccines, therapies and treatments.

Tokyo, Japan - A cell is composed of numerous organelles, each with a unique role that helps contribute to its overall functionality. The lysosome is an organelle that contains digestive enzymes and functions as a molecular garbage disposal and recycling center. Since the role of lysosome is crucial to maintain the cellular homeostasis, the lysosomal dysfunction causes neurodegenerative and metabolic diseases, cancer, as well as lysosomal storage disorders.

In a new article published in Autophagy, researchers at Tokyo Medical and Dental University (TMDU) performed a novel type of structural analysis to demonstrate how a certain molecular interaction is crucial for one lysosomal membrane protein to perform effectively.

LAMP1 (lysosomal-associated membrane protein 1) and LAMP2 the most abundant protein components of lysosome membranes. Both LAMP1 and LAMP2 are composed of a large lumenal domain, a transmembrane domain, and a short C-terminal cytoplasmic tail (Fig. 1). The lumenal domains of LAMPs are composed of two domains (N-domain and C-domain, which are membrane-distal and -proximal, respectively). Each domain has the unique ?-prims fold structure (a triangular prism). On the other hand, genetic experiments have shown that mice embryos without both LAMP-1 and 2 die a little more than two weeks after fertilization. Mice without LAMP-1 are born and can thrive, while those without LAMP-2 often die a few weeks after birth, suggesting that LAMP-2 is more important for lysosome activity. The research of the TMDU group further investigates this protein's biological role.

"Mice lacking LAMP-2 also display issues with autophagy progression," says one of the lead authors of the study Kazue Terasawa. "Expanding our knowledge of how LAMP-2 interacts and operates at the molecular level will ultimately help us understand autophagy better."

The researchers demonstrated LAMP2 molecules assemble by facing each other with one side the ?-prism (defined as side A, as shown in Fig. 1) of the C-domain (Fig. 2). The N-domain truncation permitted the nonspecific involvement of both sides of the ?-prims (side A and side B). In combination with some biochemical studies, "we believe that the homophilic interaction we demonstrated is crucial for function of LAMP-2, via ensuring a proper arrangement of the cytoplasmic tails, which is crucial for the function of LAMP2, on the lysosome membrane," says Miki Hara-Yokoyama, senior author.

Scientists of Tomsk Polytechnic University jointly with their colleagues have synthetized a unique molecule of verdazyl-nitronyl nitroxide triradical. Only several research teams in the world were able to obtain molecules with similar properties. The molecule is stable. It is able to withstand high temperatures and obtains promising magnetic properties. It is a continuation of scientists' work on the search for promising organic magnetic materials. The research findings are published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (IF: 14.612, Q1).

Magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM) is one of the most promising technologies for storage devices. Nowadays, the MRAM development is limited due to the fact it is impossible to create a smaller memory cell because of spontaneous magnetization reversal. Single-molecular magnets based on organic compounds are free from this disadvantage: few molecules are already capable to operate as a memory storage unit.

"At a certain temperature, a magnetic phase transition occurs, the consistent orientation of the magnetic vectors of molecules is observed, as a result, the matter becomes a united magnet. Thus, 20-40 molecules are quite enough to form a micromagnet.

Our task in the research laid in creation such a molecule that could be capable to give its magnetic properties at high temperatures, would be crystalline and would possess a small distance between radical centers,"

Pavel Petunin, Associate Professor of the TPU Research School of Chemistry and Applied Biomedical Sciences, an article author, explains.

When creating the molecule, the scientists worked with three radical centers in one molecule combined them in one conjugated structure. To synthetize the molecule, the scientists used a palladium-catalyzed reaction of a verdazyl radical with a gold complex of a nitronyl-nitroxyl radical. The course of the reaction was complicated due to the presence of unpaired electrons in starting compounds, as well as the combination of three radical centers in one molecule, which affects its stability. According to the scientists, there are no other ways to synthesize the molecule.

The research teams from TPU, the Vorozhtsov Novosibirsk Institute of Organic Chemistry of the Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, the Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Voevodsky Institute of Chemical Kinetics and Combustion of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and International Tomography Center of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences took part in the molecule synthesis. The research work was conducted within the project of the Russian Science Foundation No. 20-73-00236 "Stable Organic Radicals as Promising Building Blocks for New Materials".

"The published research not only makes a significant contribution to the development of stable verdazyl radicals but it is also a meaningful publication for TPU. Research teams of the TPU Research School of Chemistry and Applied Biomedical Sciences perfectly complete the mission, which was determined at the moment of the School creation. The Journal of the American Chemical Society is the most peer-reviewed chemical journal. Research teams around the globe are intending to publish their articles in this journal. It should be noted that it is a cycle of the research works of the research team. The authors have recently published their research work in the equally top-rated Angewandte Chemie academic journal (IF: 12.959, Q1)," Marina Trusova, Director of the TPU Research School of Chemistry and Applied Biomedical Sciences, says.

At the moment, the researchers have approached complicated molecules and are planning to synthetize almost impossible molecules: heterospin and high-spin dendrimers.

What does it take for people to commit to take action to promote social equality? And how might this differ for people from advantaged and disadvantaged groups?

An international team, including Linda Tropp at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and researchers in 23 countries, finds more mutual support for social change among advantaged and disadvantaged groups when inequality is actively addressed and the psychological needs of each group are met. The new research, led by the University of Zurich (UZH), was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

"What this research is showing is that people on both sides really need to acknowledge that they have different motivations and concerns when they interact with each other," says co-author Tropp, the lead researcher in the U.S. who has examined how members of different groups experience intergroup contact for more than 20 years.

Prior research has shown that advantaged groups prefer to discuss commonalities among groups rather than differences between groups, at the same time as they desire to feel accepted and not be labeled as biased. But if members of socially disadvantaged groups simply have pleasant, positive exchanges with people who are not themselves targets of discrimination, they may emerge from those contact experiences even less committed to fighting for social justice and improving their own group's social position.

As first author Tabea Hässler of UZH says, "They get the deceptive impression that their own group no longer suffers so much discrimination... It is therefore important that social inequalities and discrimination between different social groups are actively addressed and named." This helps to meet the needs of disadvantaged group members, such as racial minorities and LGBTIQ+ individuals, who are motivated to have a voice and feel empowered in their relations with advantaged groups.

Each group's psychological needs are therefore an important part of the equation. "If contact situations are structured where members of disadvantaged groups or minority groups feel empowered, that they have a voice and are being listened to and heard, that's the time when contact with members of advantaged groups may support their interest in collective action to challenge the status quo," says Tropp, professor of social psychology at UMass Amherst.

Similarly, when members of majority groups "feel welcome as allies in that cause and not presumed to be racist, then that can bolster their willingness to use some of their time and energy to try to promote social equality," she says.

To gather their data, 43 researchers around the world conducted a survey with more than 11,000 individuals from a range of identity groups, including heterosexual individuals and members of sexual or gender minorities, migrants and members of their respective host societies, as well as indigenous groups and religious minorities.

"Overall, our findings suggest that contact across group boundaries fosters social change when it meets the targeted needs of disadvantaged and advantaged groups," says Johannes Ullrich, professor of social psychology at UZH.

Tropp says one next step is to help prepare members of advantaged groups to engage in difficult conversations about power relations and discrimination.

"To the extent that the advantaged engage in those conversations with disadvantaged groups, talking about the structural inequalities that do exist and need to be addressed, then it's likely that both members of disadvantaged groups as well as advantaged groups will be more prepared to engage in efforts to challenge the inequalities that we have in our society," she says.

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Although the United States is the only wealthy nation that doesn't guarantee paid leave to mothers or fathers after the arrival of a new child, Americans endorse providing paid time off for parents nearly as much as people from other countries.

About 82% of Americans support paid maternity leave, just slightly less than the 86% who support it in 26 wealthy nations, a new study shows.

Where Americans differ from the rest of the world is that they are less supportive of government funding for paid leaves, prefer shorter leave times and are less supportive of paid leave for fathers.

"We find marked differences in how Americans want paid leave administered compared to the rest of the world - but very similar desires to have leave available," said Chris Knoester, co-author of the study and associate professor of sociology at The Ohio State University.

Knoester conducted the study with Richard Petts, professor of sociology at Ball State University, and Amelia Li, a doctoral student in sociology at Ohio State. Their findings were published this week in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology.

The researchers analyzed data from 35,488 people who participated in the International Social Survey Programme 2012. The participants come from 26 wealthy countries, including the United States, that belong to the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development.

Overall, the study found high levels of support for paid leave across the developed world, as well as support for relatively long paid leave periods and government funding for the time off, Knoester said.

Worldwide, about 75% of people wanted government support for paid maternity leave. In a previous study the authors published in Social Science Research, they found that about half wanted it for paternity leave.

Support for government funding was much lower in the United States - about half endorsed it for maternity leave, and only a third wanted it for paternity leave. And very few Americans wanted government funding leave by itself, Knoester said. Most wanted the government and private employers to share the costs.

"This may be a major reason why we don't have more widespread and generous leave offered in the United States, even though most people support it," he said.

"If we don't have leave provided through the federal government, we get what we have now, which is a patchwork of states and employers offering different leave policies."

Americans also didn't want as much paid leave as did those from other countries in the survey. People in the United States wanted about four months of leave allocated to new parents. Worldwide, people supported close to 13 months.

Support for paid leave for fathers is lower than for maternity leave, both in the United States and in the rest of the countries surveyed.

Overall, about 60% of people surveyed wanted paid paternity leave, compared to just over half of Americans.

While a lack of support for government funding may be one reason why the U.S. is the only major country without paid maternity leave, there are other reasons, the researchers said.

In another new study by the researchers, forthcoming in Sociological Focus, findings showed that older white people with more conservative political views in the United States were least supportive of paid parental leave.

"These tend to be the people in the elite positions in our society who make those policy decisions about paid leave," Li said. "That makes it difficult to enact leave policies."

Petts noted another reason why political elites in the United States may be less supportive of government-supported leave.

"These are the people who already largely have access to paid leave through their employers. They would not directly benefit from it, because they already have it," Petts said.

"It is a story of the haves and the have-nots."

The international study also showed other factors that affect people's support of paid leave.

As expected, women were generally more likely to support paid leave and wanted longer time off.

Also, people who were strong supporters of traditional gender roles, in which men focus on paid work and women focus on the home and family, were less supportive of paid leave than people who advocated more egalitarian gender roles.

"Relatedly, when people endorse both members of a couple working, they are more supportive of paid leave and this shows up particularly for support of paid leave for fathers in the U.S.," Knoester said.

In addition, individuals who felt more conflict between their home and job responsibilities were more likely to endorse paid leave.

While the survey that this study was based on was done 10 years ago, the researchers said more recent surveys suggest people's views have not changed much. If anything, people may have become slightly more supportive of paid leave, particularly in the United States.

"We are still seeing very high support of paid maternity leave, and there are some indications that support for paternity leave has increased since 2012," Knoester said.

In addition, signs point toward more Americans being in favor of government support of parental leave. Nine states and Washington, D.C., have enacted paid parental leave programs. Last November, Colorado voters passed a ballot measure that allows for up to 12 weeks of leave.

"I would never have guessed that the kind of measure enacted in Colorado would pass in the U.S. It suggests Americans are becoming more open to government support," Petts said.

Singularities such as those at the centre of black holes, where density becomes infinite, are often said to be places where physics 'breaks down'. However, this doesn't mean that 'anything' could happen, and physicists are interested in which laws could break down, and how.

Now, a research team from Imperial College London and the Cockcroft Institute and Lancaster University have proposed a way that singularities could violate the law of conservation of charge. Their theory is published in Annalen der Physik.

Co-author Professor Martin McCall, from the Department of Physics at Imperial, said: "'Physics breaks down at a singularity' is one of the most famous statements in pop-physics. But by showing how this might actually happen, we take aim at one of the most cherished laws of physics: the conservation of charge."

The conservation of charge says that the total electric charge of any isolated system - including the Universe as a whole - never changes. This means that if negatively or positively charged particles move into one area, the same amount of respectively charged particles must move out.

This has been shown at the very smallest scales: when different particles are created or eliminated in experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider, the same amount of negatively and positively charged particles are always produced or destroyed, respectively.

Now, by modifying classic physics equations to include axions, a candidate for dark matter, the team have been able to show that temporary singularities - such as black holes that appear and then later evaporate - could destroy charge when they come to the end of their life.

Axions are hypothetical particles that may explain dark matter - the 'missing' 85 percent of the matter of the Universe. Their predicted properties could form a field that would interact with the kind of fields physicists have known about for centuries - electromagnetic fields, which are described by a set of equations called Maxwell's equations.

Using a branch of mathematics called differential geometry, the team found out how to create or destroy charge, violating the charge conservation of the Universe.

Co-author Jonathan Gratus said: "You can imagine creating an 'axion bomb' that holds charge by combining coupled axion and magnetic fields; and then dropping it into an evaporating black hole. As the construction shrinks and disappears into the singularity, it takes electrical charge with it. It is the combination of a temporary singularity and a newly proposed type of axion field that is crucial to its success."

Co-author Dr Paul Kinsler, from the Department of Physics at Imperial, said: "There are also philosophical implications. Although people often like to say that physics 'breaks down', here we show that although exotic phenomena might occur, what actually happens is nevertheless constrained by the still-working laws of physics around the singularity."

The team say the axion phenomenon would only occur under extreme conditions that currently cannot be created in a lab, but that future advances in intense laser fields might allow the theory to be tested in a terrestrial environment.