Culture

A new UC Riverside study finds geckos are fierce hunters whether or not their tails are attached to their bodies.

Geckos and other lizards can distract predators by quickly dropping their tails. The tail vertebrae are perforated, making it easier to disconnect them without any formation of scar tissue or loss of blood. Though this ability can keep lizards from being eaten, the maneuver is performed at a cost.

"Other studies have documented the negative effects of tail loss on lizards' ability to run, jump, mate, and reproduce," said UCR biologist Marina Vollin, lead author of the study. "However, few have examined their ability to capture food when they lose their tails, which is critical for regenerating the tail and for overall survival."

To help fill this gap in understanding, Vollin and Tim Higham, an associate professor in UCR's Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology, observed intact and newly tailless geckos on the hunt. Their work is published in a recent Integrative and Comparative Biology journal article.

The researchers found that geckos successfully captured crickets about 77% of the time both before and after losing tails -- a surprising retention of accuracy since tails appear to help stabilize gecko body positions during and after a strike.

"The geckos were much slower without tails, and their attack strikes much more awkward," Vollin said.

Western banded geckos, native to the southwestern U.S. and Mexico, are one of the few reptiles that help control scorpion populations.

In this study, the geckos were observed hunting crickets in artificial enclosures. Vollin and Higham are planning future studies in which they hope to observe geckos hunting in the wild and feeding on other small insects.

"It is very possible that geckos suffer a loss in feeding performance and success following autotomy in nature given the complexity of the habitat and more room for the prey to escape," Higham said.

They'll also study whether geckos are able to fully regain their agility once their tails have regenerated, which can take up to a month.

"It's important to get a sense of how they operate in nature, where additional elements could affect whether they have more difficulty capturing prey," Vollin said.

Understanding how lizards like the Western banded gecko are able to survive carries a significance beyond the lizards themselves. Though they eat a variety of small insects, they also serve as a key food source for birds, snakes, and other predatory mammals.

"I've heard them referred to as 'nature's popcorn,' because other animals can eat a bunch of them at once, they're abundant, and easy to acquire," Vollin said. "They're a big part of the base of the food chain."

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Americans consistently believe that poor African Americans are more likely to move up the economic ladder than they actually are, a new study shows.

People also overestimate how likely poor white people are to get ahead economically, but to a much lesser extent than they do for Black people.

"It's no surprise that most people in our society believe in the American Dream of working hard and succeeding economically," said Jesse Walker, co-author of the study and assistant professor of marketing at The Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business.

"But many people don't know how much harder it is for African Americans to achieve that dream than it is for white people."

The good news in the study was that making people aware of economic racial disparities, or merely having them reflect on the unique challenges that Black Americans face in the United States, helped people calibrate their beliefs about economic mobility.

Walker conducted the study with Shai Davidai, assistant professor of management at Columbia Business School at Columbia University. Their findings were published this week in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

The researchers conducted six studies with a total of 1,761 U.S. adults, who participated online.

In one study, they asked participants to estimate the chances that a randomly selected child born to a family in the lowest income quintile (0 to 20%) would rise to one of the four higher income quintiles. They made two predictions, one for a white child and one for a Black child.

Results showed that participants overestimated upward mobility for the white child by about 5%, but overestimated mobility for the Black child by about 16%. white Americans' actual likelihood of moving up from the bottom quintile is 69%, compared to 52% for Black Americans.

The researchers also measured how likely the participants thought the randomly selected poor child would be able to rise to the top of the economic heap - one of the two highest income quintiles (those in the top 40% in terms of income). Here participants again overestimated the odds of the Black child reaching those heights, but actually underestimated the chances of the white child doing so.

It wasn't just white Americans who held these misperceptions. A separate study found that Black participants were similarly inaccurate in their estimation of a Black child's probability of moving out of poverty.

While the results cannot say why this happened, Davidai said it may be that Black Americans - particularly those in the lower economic groups themselves - want to believe in their chance at economic success.

"No one wants to believe there is no American Dream out there for them," Davidai said.

Results from other studies in the series suggested that people can more accurately assess the chances of poor Black people moving up if they are reminded of economic racial disparities or even just think about the problems Black people face in the United States.

In one study, participants were shown one of two graphs before they estimated the probability of poor white or Black Americans moving up economically. One showed the distribution of wealth by income quintiles, revealing that the richest 20% of Americans own 81% of private wealth.

The remaining participants were shown a graph of the distribution of wealth in the United States by ethnicity, revealing that white people own 89% of private wealth, compared to Black people, who own 1.3%.

In this study, those who were shown the graph highlighting general economic inequality overestimated a poor Black person's chances of moving up the economic ladder by about 20%. But those who were shown the graph revealing racial economic inequality were quite accurate in their beliefs about economic mobility.

"Making people think about the racial economic disparities in this country made them much better able to estimate the real chances of Black Americans getting ahead economically," Davidai said.

Another study showed that considering the general social challenges that Black Americans face in the United States - without any reference to economics - made people more accurate in their mobility estimates.

But it wasn't just information about the current situation of African Americans that influenced how participants viewed the possibility that a Black child could get ahead economically.

In one study, participants read one of two short articles: one discussing the amount of progress Black people have made in the United States in the past century, or one about how much progress still needs to be made toward racial equality. Both focused on social rather than economic progress.

People who read the positive story about racial progress believed that a Black child born to a family in the poorest 20% of Americans was more than twice as likely to move up the economic ladder than those who read about the lack of progress.

Still, people who read either article overestimated the chances of the Black child from a poor family achieving more economic success. Reading either article didn't change what people thought about the white child's chance of moving up.

"Because people think Black people have made progress toward social equality, they assume that there must have been positive changes in economic mobility, too," Davidai said.

In this study, participants who were Black showed the same tendencies to overestimate the Black child's chances of success as did white participants, no matter which article they read - but they were much more accurate than the white people.

Overall, the results of the six studies have important implications, Walker said.

"If you think someone is more likely to move up the economic ladder than they actually are, it is a lot easier to blame them for not being successful," he said.

"These misperceptions may make people less likely to support policies that may actually help African Americans move up and address the large racial wealth gap that exists in America."

A research team led by Professor Jang-Sik Lee of Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) has successfully developed the halide perovskite-based memory with ultra-fast switching speed. The findings from this study were published in Nature Communications on June 10, 2021.

Resistive switching memory is a promising contender for next-generation memory device due to its advantages of simple structure and low power consumption. Various materials have been previously studied for resistive switching memory. Among them, halide perovskites are receiving much attention for use in the memory because of low operation voltage and high on/off ratio. However, halide perovskite-based memory devices have limitations of slow switching speed which hinder their practical application in memory devices.

To this, the researchers at POSTECH (Prof. Jang-Sik Lee, Prof. Donghwa Lee, Youngjun Park, and Seong Hun Kim) have successfully developed ultra-fast switching memory devices using halide perovskites by using a combined method of first-principles calculations and experimental verification. From a total of 696 compounds of halide perovskites candidates, Cs3Sb2I9 with a dimer structure was selected as the best candidate for memory application. To verify the calculation results, memory devices using the dimer-structured Cs3Sb2I9 were fabricated. They were then operated with an ultra-fast switching speed of 20 ns, which was more than 100 times faster than the memory devices that used the layer-structured Cs3Sb2I9. In addition, many of the perovskites contain lead (Pb) in the materials which has been raised as an issue. In this work, however, the use of lead-free perovskite eliminates such environmental problems.

"This study provides an important step toward the development of resistive switching memory that can be operated at an ultra-fast switching speed," remarked Professor Lee on the significance of the research. He added, "this work offers an opportunity to design new materials for memory devices based on calculations and experimental verification."

People who have contact with other social groups are more likely to be committed to social justice. However, an international study led by the University of Zurich has shown that for this to be the case, power relations and discrimination must be actively addressed and group-specific needs must be met. It is important that disadvantaged group members, such as racial minorities and LGBTIQ+ individuals, are given a voice, and that those who belong to advantaged groups do not feel labeled as biased.

People who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against because they belong to a particular group often join forces with other disadvantaged people to fight together for better rights. Prominent examples of such political engagement are the women's rights movement, Black Lives Matter, or LGBTIQ+ activism. In a newly published study, Tabea Hässler and Johannes Ullrich of the University of Zurich, together with 41 other researchers from 23 countries, conducted a survey with more than 11,000 individuals to better understand the relations between intergroup contact and advantaged and disadvantaged group members' support for social change.

Chatting about the weather is not enough

The results show that people are more committed to tackling inequality when they are in contact with each other across group boundaries. However, it matters how the interactions are experienced and how the injustices are perceived: If members of socially disadvantaged groups simply have pleasant, positive exchanges with people who are not themselves discriminated against, they tend to be even less committed to fighting for social justice and improving their own situation. "They get the deceptive impression that their own group no longer suffers so much discrimination," says study first author Tabea Hässler, explaining the phenomenon. "It is therefore important that social inequalities and discrimination between different social groups are actively addressed and named."

Empowerment thanks to active listening

This was confirmed in the study: If disadvantaged minorities felt they were given a voice by the advantaged majority, they were more likely to advocate for social justice. "In our research field we call this empowerment," says Johannes Ullrich, professor of social psychology at UZH. "By that, we mean that disadvantaged people are actually actively listened to when they talk about discrimination and disadvantage."

At the same time, the study showed that majority group members were more committed to social justice when, during intergroup contact, they felt accepted by minorities and were not assumed to be biased.

Diverse group constellations examined

In their study, the researchers surveyed more than 11,000 respondents and examined a variety of group constellations, including, for example, heterosexual individuals and members of sexual or gender minorities, migrants and their respective host societies, as well as indigenous groups and religious minorities. In all cases, empowerment of the members of minority groups was positively related to their willingness to advocate for their own group.

"Overall, our findings suggest that contact across group boundaries fosters social change when it meets the targeted needs of disadvantaged and advantaged groups," Ulrich says.

Rather than levelling inequality, as the Great Depression did, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated inequalities around the world allowing some wealthy investors to benefit from the crisis and make a fortune on the misfortune of others.

During March to December last year, U.S. billionaires increased their wealth by over one-third, to one trillion dollars, while millions of Americans faced deep financial hardship.

New research from Copenhagen Business School has examined how American "shadow banks"- which are less regulated and include private credit intermediaries such as private equity, venture capital, and hedge fund firms - have invested in ways that extract profit from the misfortunes of frontline workers, struggling companies, and distressed sectors.

The research focused on industry reports and news media coverage of the industry to track investments made by shadow banks during the crisis as well as their investments leading up to the crisis that affected the safety and security of frontline workers when the coronavirus hit.

"We found that while the most economically vulnerable have suffered the brunt of the pandemic's hardship, those with financial capital have profited from struggling and booming sectors alike. The work of shadow banks has contributed to growing economic and social inequality during the crisis," says lead author Megan Tobias Neely, and assistant professor in the Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School.

The research is published in the American Behavioral Scientist journal.

Influence of shadow banks

While the general public is mostly unaware of shadow banking, this sector has been one of the fastest growing areas of finance since deregulation in the early 1980s. The research states that shadow banks have since played a central role in shaping how executives manage companies, often placing pressure on companies to downsize their workforces and cut wages and benefits for the sake of the shareholders.

"Private equity invests in private companies and often proactively influences how executives run the company," says co-author Donna Carmichael, PhD Researcher in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. "Venture capital, a type of private equity, invests in start up companies and provides guidance to entrepreneurs. Hedge funds invest in both public stock markets and private companies."

Healthcare, grocery, and distribution drivers have been some of the industries hardest hit even before this crisis. The authors cite Eileen Applebaum and Rosemary Batt's pivotal research to show how private equity has helped to create the conditions that made frontline workers vulnerable in the first place. These investors have targeted the U.S. healthcare industry with negative impact on hospitals, urgent care, and ambulances.

"Private equity firms often try to quickly turnover companies and invest less, or not at all, in new technology, workers' skills, quality improvements, and emergency equipment stockpiles like personal protective equipment. This has had the effect of increasing healthcare costs and overburdening underpaid healthcare staff," says Donna Carmichael.

"Women, especially women of colour, are disproportionately the workers who have been put at greatest risk during the pandemic. One-third of jobs held by women are 'essential,' and women compose 52% of frontline workers, including nine out of ten nurses and two-thirds of grocery store and pharmacy clerks. And so, the pandemic has made women 'essential and expendable' at the same time," adds Megan Tobias Neely.

COVID-19 crisis

The research underlines how, during the pandemic, shadow banks profited by investing in both booming sectors (such as health technologies and delivery services) and those that have struggled (including the airline, energy, and hospitality sectors). "Many companies in the latter sectors have seen their share prices sharply drop as their revenue plummets and investors sell off shares," says Donna Carmichael.

Short-selling occurs when an investor borrows a security and then sells it on the open market. If the price drops, they can then buy back the stock at the lower price and make a profit on the difference.

This is where shadow banks come in, to invest in turning those companies around or to short-sell (that is, bet against) the stock. "This is what hedge funds did that sparked the recent 'GameStop Rebellion. An example of short-selling during the crisis is how one hedge fund manager made a $1.3 billion profit by shorting shopping mall stocks, knowing they'd be hit hard by covid shutdowns," says Megan Tobias Neely.

"It can be seen as a riskier investment, and you can also lose money, but it is less regulated than other investment firms because the US Securities and Exchange Commission views these wealthy and institutional investors as less in need of protection. The climate of laissez-fair economics, the notion that markets will self-regulate and should be deregulated, has allowed shadow banks to thrive," adds Neely.

Moving forward

The research hopes to raise awareness of how the everyday work being done in financial services can have adverse consequences for working conditions and inequality. The ramifications are often unintentional.

"The people working in these industries understand their work as making companies more efficient and providing savings for people to retire and for institutions like university endowments and sovereign wealth funds (the investments of governments)," adds Megan Tobias Neely.

This research has important takeaways for public policy to address hardship and inequality among average workers during and after the crisis. Tax and regulatory reforms are a possible avenue for change to address these pressing social issues.

"Another way forward is democratising corporate decision-making among workers and improving representation of workers, consumers, and communities on corporate boards. Even though many have called to ´Build Back Better´, the prospects for a more equal and equitable future is still far away,"concludes Donna Carmichael.

Skoltech researchers and their colleagues from Russia and Serbia have reviewed almost a thousand patents held by some two hundred organizations involved in the New Space economy. The analysis helped draw a comprehensive picture of technology trends in the field. The paper was published in the journal Progress in Aerospace Sciences.

"New Space" is a loosely defined term that encompasses the recent flurry of space-related activities coming from smaller actors rather than a handful of space-faring nations. Put somewhat simply, while the Apollo missions were more traditional, SpaceX, Rocket Lab (launching small satellites from New Zealand) or LeoLabs (a space junk tracking company) are undeniably parts of a new and different space economy. In a 2020 paper, Skoltech Associate Professor Alessandro Golkar and Alejandro Salado of Virginia Tech found three distinguishing traits of New Space companies: explicit customer focus, new product development approaches, and new business models.

"In a nutshell, the main difference relates to how New Space organizations develop their products and how they approach the business. New Space organizations tend to embrace innovative development processes such as agile, have a risk-taker attitude, and focus on profit. This new attitude allows New Space companies to reduce time-to-market and lower the cost of entry to the space business," Skoltech PhD student Nicola Garzaniti says.

Golkar, Garzaniti and their colleagues decided to map New Space to analyze this paradigm shift in the industry. They used the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a topic modeling algorithm, to analyze patents' data and the global intellectual property landscape, identifying the most prominent technological trends.

"For this project, we employed a data-based approach to analyze the New Space ecosystem. To do so, we employed a topic modeling technique known as Latent Dirichlet Allocation, or LDA. LDA is a generative statistical model used in the natural language processing domain. Put simply, the model "reads" the patents and identifies patterns of words in the collection of patents, allowing to connect documents that exhibit similar patterns," Garzaniti explains.

He notes that startup companies and large system integrators as key stakeholders of New Space do not typically publish academic papers but rather prefer filing for patents to protect their intellectual property.

Having looked at 122 organizations that own 933 active patents and patent applications, the team identified ten topics, from remote sensing and image acquisition and launch systems to antenna systems and space platforms. 62% of the portfolio had to do with data related products and services, making data "the most valuable asset of the New Space ecosystem," the authors note.

"Our society is increasingly hungry for data, and for useful insights deriving from data. New Space ventures are contributing to this need by exploiting space infrastructure to generate, process and distribute a huge amount of data, and making available to end users a set of information possible to get only through space systems," Garzaniti notes.

An analysis of trends over time revealed sharp exponential growth from 2007 onward, making that year a tentative cutoff line for the start of the New Space era. The paper also describes the ecosystem of New Space companies, providing a useful overview of the markets and major players based on the existing academic literature.

"As a direct consequence of this work, we identified key topics in space systems development that represent significant opportunities for research and innovation in the short- and mid-term. For instance, we are now actively looking into the topic of active constellation management, and new paradigms for designing and operating satellite systems. From an innovation perspective, we are increasingly interested in looking at the implications and opportunities that arise from the increasing rate of consolidation of the space value chain through vertical integration," Nicola Garzaniti concludes.

In 2020, as many states of emergency were declared around the world during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic as there were in the entire previous decade. The influence of neighbouring countries on each other, weak democracies and poor pandemic preparedness are some of the explanations, according to research from the University of Gothenburg and Stockholm University.

A state of emergency is a situation in which a country's ordinary laws and rights are suspended and authorities are given increased powers. A state of emergency is declared by the government of a country, often as a result of war, civil unrest or natural disasters. The introduction of a curfew is a common measure in a state of emergency.

Previous research has explained why countries declare a state of emergency. However, for the first time, researchers have now focused on the states of emergency declared in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic that swept the world in the spring and summer of 2020.

Approximately half of the world's countries declared some form of state of emergency for brief or extended periods.

"The total number of states of emergency in the first half of 2020 is comparable to the total number of states of emergency declared between 2010 and 2019, so it is a big number. The areas that stand out are Latin America, Southern Europe and parts of Africa, which had a particularly large share of these states of emergency," says Magnus Lundgren, senior lecturer in political science.

Together with his research colleagues at Stockholm University, he has studied which factors made it more or less likely for a country to declare a state of emergency during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results are based on a statistical survey of 180 countries in the period from January to June 2020.

"We identified three main patterns relating to the influence of neighbouring countries, the degree of democracy and pandemic preparedness."

Firstly, it was more likely for countries to declare a state of emergency if other countries in the same region had already done so. Secondly, states of emergency were more common among countries with weak democratic systems, compared with countries with strong democratic systems and countries with non-democratic systems. Finally, countries with stronger pandemic preparedness were less prone to declaring a state of emergency.

The pandemic has put considerable pressure on society and governments have opted for various measures. A state of emergency can provide governments with greater opportunities to fight a pandemic, however, they often lead to significant curtailment of civil liberties.

"Our research can help us to understand how different countries have tried to stop the pandemic. Although not the subject of direct analysis in our study, the results can potentially help us understand whether and to what extent a state of emergency has been abused by governments to promote political goals that have nothing to do with the pandemic," says Mark Klamberg, professor of international law at Stockholm University.

Imagine flexible surgical instruments that can twist and turn in all directions like miniature octopus arms, or how about large and powerful robot tentacles that can work closely and safely with human workers on production lines. A new generation of robotic tools are beginning to be realized thanks to a combination of strong 'muscles' and sensitive 'nerves' created from smart polymeric materials. A research team led by the smart materials experts Professor Stefan Seelecke and Junior Professor Gianluca Rizzello at Saarland University is exploring fundamental aspects of this exciting field of soft robotics.

In the factory of the future, man and machine will work side-by-side - in harmony, as a team, joining forces whenever necessary - just as if the robot co-worker was made from flesh and blood. While collaborative robots ('cobots') are already being deployed in industrial production lines, real hand-in-hand teamwork involving robots and their human counterparts is still some way off. The problem lies in the physical proximity of human co-workers, whose actions - unlike those of a robot - do not follow predictable algorithms. A human worker can become tired or distracted and may act suddenly or even illogically as a result. This has clear implications for safety and explains why the robot arms currently used on production lines are often housed in cages. For anyone who gets too close, things can get dangerous. Typically, industrial robots are large, heavy machines. But they are also powerful, fast and agile and are used for a wide range of operations, like welding, assembling, painting, stacking and lifting. However, the motions that they execute are dictated wholly by the programs that control them. And if someone gets in their way or too close, the consequences can be serious.

The team led by Professor Stefan Seelecke and Junior Professor Gianluca Rizzello of Saarland University and the Center for Mechatronics and Automation Technology (ZeMA) in Saarbrücken are working on new, smart types of robot arms. 'Our technology is based on smart polymer systems and enables us to create novel soft robotic tools that are lighter, more manoeuvrable and more flexible than the rigid components in use today,' explains Stefan Seelecke. An accidental shove from one of these robotic arms of the future would be more like being pushed by a human co-worker (and less likely to land you in hospital).

The material used for these new soft robot arms is a special kind of polymer known as a 'dielectric elastomer'. The Saarbrücken researchers are using this composite material to create artificial muscles and nerves. The special properties of dielectric elastomers make it possible to develop systems inspired by the ingenious designs found in nature. These elastomers can be compressed, but can then be stretched to regain their original shape. 'We print electrodes onto both sides of the elastomer material. When we apply a voltage, the two electrodes attract each other, compressing the polymer and causing it to expand out sideways,' says Dr. Gianluca Rizzello, Junior Professor for Adaptive Polymer-Based Systems. The Italian research scientist has been working in Seelecke's team since 2016. The elastomer can thus be made to contract and relax, just like muscle tissue. 'We exploit this property when designing our actuators,' explains Rizzello. By precisely varying the electric field, the engineers can make the elastomer execute high-frequency vibrations or continuously variable flexing motions or even remain still in a particular desired intermediate position.

The researchers then combine a large number of these small 'muscles' to create a flexible robot arm. When combined in this way to form a robot tentacle, the interplay between the muscles produces motions that mimic those of an octopus arm that can twist and turn in all directions. Unlike the heavy, rigid robotic limbs currently in use, which, like humans, can only execute motions in certain directions, these new robot tentacles are free to move in almost any direction. Gianluca Rizzello together with his doctoral student Johannes Prechtl recently won the Best Paper Award at the RoboSoft 2021 conference for their work on developing a prototype dielectric-elastomer-based tentacle - just one of the numerous accolades earned by Professor Seelecke's research team. The team hopes to have the tentacle prototype fully developed in about a year's time.

When it comes to imparting intelligence into polymeric materials, Gianluca Rizzello is something of an expert. He provides the control unit (i.e. the robot's 'brain') with the input needed to move the arm in an intelligent manner - a highly complex and ambitious task. 'These systems are significantly more complex than the robot arms in use today. Using artificial intelligence to control polymer-based components is substantially more challenging than controlling conventional mechatronic systems,' explains Rizzello. As the elastomer muscles also have sensor properties, they can act as the system's nerves, which means that the robot arm does not need to be equipped with additional sensors. 'Every distortion of the elastomer, every change in its geometry causes a change in the material's capacitance, which enables the team to assign a precise electrical capacitance value to any specific deformation of the elastomer. By measuring the capacitance, we know exactly what shape the elastomer has adopted, which allows us to extract sensor data,' explains Rizzello.

This quantitative data can then be used to precisely model and program the motion of the elastomer arm. The focus of Rizzello's research work is on developing intelligent algorithms that can train these novel robot tentacles to move and respond in the required manner. 'We are attempting to uncover which physical properties are responsible for the behaviour of these polymers. The more we know, the more precisely we can design the algorithms to control the elastomer muscles,' says Dr. Rizzello.

The technology being developed in Saarland will be scalable. It can be used to create miniature tentacles for medical instruments or to make large robot arms for industrial applications. But unlike the heavy robot arms in use today, the robot limbs built from smart elastomers will be far lighter. 'Our robot arms don't need to be driven by motors or by hydraulic or pneumatic systems - they can be powered simply by the application of an electric current. The elastomer muscles can also be produced in shapes that meet the requirements of a particular application. And they consume very little electric power. Depending on the capacitance, the electric currents that flow are in the microampere range. This type of soft robot technology has huge promise for the future as it is both energy efficient and cost-effective to manufacture,' says Stefan Seelecke in summary.

Augmented reality (AR) is poised to revolutionise the way people complete essential everyday tasks, yet older adults - who have much to gain from the technology - will be excluded from using it unless more thought goes into designing software that makes sense to them.

The danger of older adults falling through the gaps has been highlighted by research carried out by scientists at the University of Bath in the UK in collaboration with designers from the Bath-based charity Designability. A paper describing their work has received an honourable mention at this year's Human Computer Interaction Conference (CHI2021) - the world's largest conference of its kind.

The study concludes that adults aged 50+ are more likely to be successful at completing AR-prompted tasks (such as 'pick up the cube' followed by 'move the cube to the blue area') when the steps are shown by a 'ghosthand' demonstrating the action rather than the more commonly used arrow or some other visual aid.

According to the research team, many manufacturers of AR software are failing to factor the needs and preferences of older people into their application designs.

"We can't expect people to benefit from AR technology if they can't follow the prompts shown to them," said Dr Christof Lutteroth from the University's Department of Computer Science.

Thomas Williams, the Doctor of Engineering student (funded by the EPSRC) who conducted the research from the university's Centre for Digital Entertainment, said: "A lot more thought needs to go into understanding what older adults need from augmented reality, so users in this group understand the prompts they're given straight away."

He added: "AR technology has great potential for improving the lives of older adults but most AR designers give little or no thought to the kind of augmentations they use for this population."

Supervising the project were Dr Lutteroth and Dr Simon Jones, also from Bath's Department of Computer Science, Dr Elies Dekoninck from the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Dr Hazel Boyd from Designability.

For the study, participants were asked to lift, move, lower, open and close 3D shapes on a foam board in response to four different types of visual instruction displayed on a laptop that was running the AR application. Overall, participants preferred the ghosthand over other AR prompts, and were both faster at completing tasks and more confident in their actions. Assisted by the hand, they responded up to twice as fast and twice as accurately as they did when using another, more commonly used prompt. Participants commented that they could relate to the hand and it was clearer to them than the other visual prompts.

Demonstrations delivered by three other 'augmentations' - an arrow, a transparent ghost of the object and a pulsating transparent ghost - often resulted in participants hesitating before taking action and needing to see the visual instructions more often to get the task completed. It also led to participants being less sure that they'd done the job right.

"Though AR technology has great potential for improving the lives of older adults, this user group is rarely considered the target for AR development," said Dr Lutteroth. "I think this is the first study to investigate the accessibility of AR technology to older users."

HOW AR CAN HELP WITH DEMENTIA AND MEMORY PROBLEMS

Researchers envision AR technology soon being adopted to help others:

Understand what it might be like living with a cognitive impairment such as dementia

Make better assessments of fall-prevention modifications to older adults' homes

Reduce navigation- and distraction-related errors with in-car navigation systems

Provide training for improving spatial direction.

The research teams sees huge potential for AR technology being used to help people with dementia and other memory difficulties. Using AR, a task such as preparing food, hand washing or making a cup of tea can be broken down into individual steps, each step represented simply and clearly on a screen or AR glasses, making it far easier for the job to be completed successfully. AR is also being explored as a diagnostic tool to detect early signs of cognitive decline and provide people with an earlier diagnosis of dementia.

"Activities of daily living that we take for granted can be more difficult for people with dementia, and AR prompting could make a big difference for them if designed appropriately," said Dr Boyd.

INCLUSIVITY

So why are older adults being left out of AR research? "Designers often find it difficult to know how non-designers and older people think if they're not big users of tech." explained Dr Jones.

"Another common problem is that designers often prioritise in a way that's not inclusive - they worry about the aesthetics of an application more than the ease of use for everyone. This is fine if you're a regular user of an application but it violates an essential principle of usability: you shouldn't have to read a manual to achieve what you're trying to achieve."

AR is gaining popularity in medicine, cultural heritage tourism, industrial assembly, and more recently, in the home. It allows people to use their smartphones or special glasses to immerse themselves in a real-world environment where the objects in their immediate vicinity are enhanced by digital content (such as a ghosthand). Over the next decade, computer scientists expect this technology to become increasingly integrated into all our daily lives.

"We'll be using AR for everything from fixing our own washing machines to deciding whether we're better off catching the bus from bus stop 1 or 2 as we're walking down the street," said Dr Dekoninck.

According to a recent study, open learning spaces are not directly associated with the physical activity of students in grades 3 and 5, even though more breaks from sedentary time were observed in open learning spaces compared to conventional classrooms.

The findings are based on the CHIPASE study, carried out at the Faculty of Sport and Health Science of the University of Jyväskylä. The results were published in Frontiers of Sports and Active Life.

After the reform of the national core curriculum for basic education in Finland, issued in 2016, most of the new or renovated comprehensive schools in Finland began to incorporate open and flexible classroom designs and principles. Combined with student-centred pedagogies, these open learning spaces may increase children's physical activity during lessons. Classroom-based physical activity may also have a positive impact on academic-related outcomes.

"Surprisingly, students were physically less active in open learning spaces than in conventional classrooms," Says Doctoral Researcher Jani Hartikainen from Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Jyväskylä. "In turn, open learning spaces seem to enable more breaks from sedentary time, which may decrease the potential adverse effects of prolonged sitting on the health of children."

The main result of the study was that, on their own, open learning spaces do not increase children's' physical activity during lessons. Future studies should seek to investigate and develop teacher practices to capitalise on the potential of open learning spaces to promote classroom-based physical activity.

"In this study, we did not observe teachers' instructions about students' movement, but prior studies have reported difficulties in how teachers adapt to open learning spaces," Hartikainen says. "Especially large student groups may cause teachers to need to restrict students' movement during lessons."

The relationship between personality, genes and chronotype (sleep patterns) has been studied by researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Tartu, Estonia

People high in Conscientiousness and low in Openness are rather morning people; lower-level personality traits such as self-discipline, excitement-seeking, and straightforwardness have also been linked to chronotype

It is partly due to genetic factors, but there is scope to change your sleep patterns if you wanted to become a morning person but are currently an evening person for example

The link between the different hierarchies of personality, sleep patterns and even genetics has been discovered by researchers from the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick.

A typical example of a morning person is thought to be someone who wakes up naturally at 6am, goes for a jog, showers, has breakfast and is ready for a productive day at work by 9am. Whereas an evening person struggles to get up in the morning and feels more productive in the evening.

Researchers from the University of Warwick with colleagues from the University of Tartu have recently had the paper, 'Personality Traits Relate to Chronotype at Both the Phenotypic and Genetic Level' published in the Journal of Personality, in which they have analysed the relationship between sleep timing (chronotype), preference to the morning/evening, and personality traits at a phenotypic and genetic level.

Ultimately the researchers have found that the relationship between personality and morningness-eveningness is partly due to genetic factors.

Using a large-scale sample of participants form the Estonian Biobank researchers asked them to answer questionnaires about their sleep timings and personality, personality was also assessed by someone who knew the participant well. Once answered researchers were able to identify the phenotypic relationships between the sleep and personality.

However they were also able to calculate the genetic correlations through summary statistics of large genome-wide association studies of personality and sleep preferences.

Personalities can be divided into three hierarchies: personality domains, facets and items, researchers analysed all three, but in particular they found on a domain level that people high in Conscientiousness and low in Openness were associated with being earlier chronotypes (i.e., they went to bed and got out of bed earlier).

On a facet level, researchers found that less straightforward (a facet of Agreeableness) and excitement-seeking (a facet of Extraversion), yet more self-disciplined (a facet of Conscientiousness) people were more likely to have earlier chronotypes. Higher Conscientiousness and lower Openness were also genetically related to preference for morningness.

Postgraduate researcher Dr Anita Lenneis, from the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick comments:

"Our findings have helped us to come up with two possible pathways of how personality might influence chronotype. Personality traits such as Conscientiousness and C5: Self-discipline in particular may influence chronotype through shaping people's preferences for various social activities and behaviours which in turn, may influence what time people go to and get out of bed, or personality may influence chronotype is through active decisions people make regarding their sleep.

"However, it could also be that chronotype influences personality or that chronotype and personality mutually influence each other. The findings of the genetic correlations support this view but further studies will be necessary to better understand the shared genetic mechanisms between the two constructs as well as the causality of their relationships."

Professor Anu Realo, from the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick adds:

"Not only have we shown there is a relationship between chronotype, personality and partially your genes, our findings also suggest that it might be possible to change your chronotype or at least train yourself into a different more socially convenient sleep pattern by increasing your self-control. Ideally work hours would be adapted to your chronotype, but if not, evening people who typically experience worse health could learn to go to bed at earlier hours which might also accelerate the release of melatonin. Melatonin is also influenced by artificial light, so regularly turning off the lights at earlier hours might also lead to falling asleep at earlier hours of the evening. However, future studies will need to investigate whether such interventions to enhance self-control would result in a permanent change or would indeed promote better health in later chronotypes."

Most of us have genetic variations that increase the risk of medicinal products not being effective. In order to provide a more effective treatment with fewer side effects, we need to analyse more of these genetic variations. This will provide us with more precise knowledge about how the individual patient reacts to medicinal products. A new research result from Aarhus University shows that.

Personalised medicine has been a hot topic in recent years, using information about the genes to adapt the treatment to the individual patient. Personalised medicine potentially provides better treatment and fewer side effects for the patient. At least in an ideal world.

How the body converts medicinal products - the scientific term is metabolises - is also affected - among other factors - by our genes, among other factors. Research from Aarhus University now shows that more than eighty per cent of the participants in a study based on data from the National Psychiatry Project iPSYCH, have more than three genetic variants, which increase the potential risk of the medicinal products not having the effect they should.

"Pharmacogenetic variation can impact how we metabolise or react to drugs compared with the average patients. Rapid metabolism can increase the risk of a reduced effect of medicine, and slow metabolism can increase the risk of an 'overdose' that can be experienced as side effects," explains Christiane Gasse from Aarhus University, who is leading the study.

Not only applicable to medicine for mental disorders

The researchers have analysed the frequency of genetic variants in clinically relevant drug metabolism or drug targets of 51,464 people with a diagnosed mental disorder and 26,220 without - a total of 77,684 people.

"The study has primarily analysed pharmacogenetic variants with documented recommendations of dose adjustment having great importance for the effect of the affected drugs. Many of these drugs are psychotropic medications - i.e. medicine for people with a mental disorder, but include also drugs for cardiovascular disorders. We found that more than 80% of the analysed population had more than three pharmacogenetic variants that potentially affect the metabolism of these drugs," she says.

Criteria for how the medication and dose work most effectively on the majority of the population defines the dosage of a medicine. However, the desired effect is not achived in some cases, or or patients experience side effects. Individualized treatment with medicinal products may include a pharmacogenetic test, in which the patient's genes are analysed. Based on the patient's genetic profile, it is possible to determine how effectively the actual medicine is metabolised in the individual patient.

"Most often there are several genes and genetic variants that influence the effect of the medicine. Within all medicinal products, we know of 42 variants where international pharmacogenetic consortia have described recommendations about pharmacogenetic guided dosing. They are therefore relevant for adjustments, and are therefore relevant for clinical practice," explains Christiane Gasse.

Now, genetic tests often analyse a single genetic variation, which is known to have an effect on the metabolism of the drug in question. However, the researchers believe that it would be possible to obtain far more accurate information about the patient's disposition to metabolise medicines, if more genetic variants were analysed.

The solution is a wide-ranging panel test that can analyse several pharmacogenetic variations at the same time and in this way provide the opportunity to plan more optimal treatment.

"The study demonstrates the need to use a pharmacogenetic test that analyses a wide range of genes and genetic variants. This can provide information about the choice of the right medicinal product or the right dose for the individual patient", says Christiane Gasse.

She adds that a pharmacogenetic test can either be performed prior to the first treatment with a relevant drug, and can be used as guidance for the planned and future treatments, or it can be done during the course of treatment with aim to adjust the dose and if needed the medicine.

The spinal cord is an important component of our central nervous system: it connects the brain with the rest of the body and plays a crucial part in coordinating our sensations with our actions. Falls, violence, disease - various forms of trauma can cause irreversible damage to the spinal cord, leading to paralysis, sometimes even death.

Although many vertebrates, including humans, are unable to recover from a spinal cord injury, some animals stand out. For instance, the axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum), a salamander from Mexico, has the remarkable ability to regenerate its spinal cord after an injury. When an axolotl's tail is amputated, neural stem cells residing in the spinal cord are recruited to the injury to rebuild the tail. So far, scientists could only detect this activity a few days after the process had started.

"Four days after amputation, stem cells within about one millimetre of the injury divide three times as fast as the normal rate to regenerate the spinal cord and replace lost neurons," explains Emanuel Cura Costa, co-first author of the study. "What the stem cells are doing in the first four days after injury was the real mystery."

To understand what happens in the first moments of spinal cord regeneration, researchers at CONICET, IMP, and TU Dresden teamed up to recreate the process in a mathematical model and test its predictions in axolotl tissue with the latest imaging technologies. Their findings, published in eLife, show that neural stem cells accelerate their cell cycles in a highly synchronised manner, with the activation spreading along the spinal cord.

Regenerating in sync: cells follow the tempo

In the uninjured spinal cord, cells multiply asynchronously: some are actively replicating their DNA before splitting into two cells to sustain growth, while some are simply resting.

The scientists' model predicted that this could change dramatically upon injury: most cells in the vicinity of the injury would jump to a specific stage of the cell cycle to synchronise and proliferate in unison.

"We developed a tool to track individual cells in the growing spinal cord of axolotls. Different colours label resting and active cells, which allow us to see how far and how fast cell proliferation happens with a microscope," says Leo Otsuki, postdoc in the lab of Elly Tanaka at the IMP and co-first author of this study. "We were very excited to see the match between the theoretical predictions and the experimental results."

The way cells multiply in chorus in the regenerating spinal cord is exceptional in animals. How can cells coordinate their efforts over almost one millimetre - 50 times the size of a single cell?

A mystery signal orchestrating regeneration

"Our model made us realise there had to be one or more signals that spread through the tissue from the injury, like a wave, for the area of proliferating cells to expand," explains Osvaldo Chara, career researcher at CONICET, group leader of SysBio at the Institute of Physics of Liquids and Biological Systems (IFLySIB) and guest professor at Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing (ZIH), Technische Universität Dresden. "This signal might act like a messenger and instruct stem cells to proliferate."

The researchers suspect that this mystery messenger helps reprogram stem cells to divide rapidly and regrow amputated tissue. Their work pinpoints this signal in space and time, and paves the way to characterise it further.

"Combining mathematical models with our expertise in tissue imaging was key to understanding how the spinal cord starts regenerating," says Elly Tanaka, senior scientist at the IMP. "The next step is to identify the molecules that promote regeneration of the spinal cord - that could have tremendous therapeutic potential for patients with spinal injuries."

Researchers have identified a combination of biological markers in patients with dengue that could predict whether they go on to develop moderate to severe disease, according to a study published today in eLife.

Biomarkers are used to identify the state or risk of a disease in patients. Examples of biomarkers can include naturally occurring molecules or genes in the vascular, inflammatory or other biological pathways. The new findings could aid the development of biomarker panels for clinical use and help improve triage and risk prediction in patients with dengue.

Dengue is the most common mosquito-borne viral disease to affect humans globally. In 2019, the World Health Organization identified dengue as one of the top 10 threats to global health, with transmission occurring in 129 countries and an estimated 3.9 billion people being at risk.

"While most symptomatic dengue infections are self-limiting, a small number of patients develop complications that usually occur at around four to six days from symptom onset," explains first author Vuong Nguyen Lam, Researcher and PHD Student at Oxford University Clinical Research Unit (OUCRU), Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. "Large numbers of patients therefore need regular assessments to identify these complications. The accurate and early identification of such patients, particularly within the first three days of illness, should allow for the appropriate care to be provided."

The role of blood biomarkers in predicting severe outcomes has been investigated in other studies, but mostly later in the disease progression or at hospital admission. Many of these biomarkers either peak too late in the disease course or have too short a half-life to be clinically useful.

To address this, Vuong and colleagues selected 10 candidate biomarkers from vascular, immunological and inflammatory pathways that are associated with dengue disease pathogenesis. These biomarkers were: VCAM-1, SDC-1, Ang-2, IL-8, IP-10, IL-1RA, sCD163, sTREM-1, ferritin, and CRP. They were chosen based on their likelihood to be increased during the early stages of disease.

The team then conducted a study using samples and clinical information from a large multi-country observational study called 'Clinical evaluation of dengue and identification of risk factors for severe disease' (IDAMS study). Of the 2,694 laboratory-confirmed dengue cases included in the IDAMS study, 38 and 266 cases were classified as severe and moderate dengue, respectively.

For the current study, the researchers selected 281 cases in four countries - Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia and El Salvador - as the blood samples from these participants were stored at the OUCRU laboratory. For comparison, the team also selected 556 patients with uncomplicated dengue who shared similar geographies and demographic characteristics.

They measured the participants' blood biomarkers at two different time points - one during the first three days of illness, and the second following recovery (10-31 days after symptom onset). They found that, during the first three days of illness, higher levels of any of the 10 biomarkers increased a patient's risk of developing moderate to severe dengue.

They also identified a combination of six biomarkers that was best associated with severe disease in children, and a combination of seven biomarkers that was best associated with severe disease in adults. "This highlights how relationships between biomarkers and clinical outcome can differ between age groups," Vuong says.

"Together, our findings should assist the development of biomarker panels to help improve future triage and early assessment of dengue patients," concludes senior author Sophie Yacoub, Dengue Research Group Head at OUCRU. "This would help improve individual patient management and healthcare allocation, which would be of major public health benefit especially in outbreak settings."

HOUSTON - (June 22, 2021) - How do you kill tumor cells that can't be targeted? Get their more susceptible neighbors to help.

The Rice University lab of synthetic chemist K.C. Nicolaou, in collaboration with AbbVie Inc., has created unique antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) that link a synthetic uncialamycin analogue to antibodies that target cancer cells.

Once they enter the targeted tumor cells, these ADCs exhibit a "significant bystander effect," according to the study. In other words, cancerous neighbor cells that aren't directly attacked by the drugs are also affected.

The study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences presents "an intriguing opportunity in the tumor-targeting therapeutics development area," according to the researchers.

"The bystander effect is expected to improve the efficacy of the ADC drug by killing, in addition to the targeted cancer cells, a significant number of nearby, nontargeted cancer cells usually found within or in close proximity to malignant tumors," Nicolaou said.

Nicolaou's lab, which specializes in the synthesis of molecules found in nature that have medicinal properties, first reported in 2016 its development of a method to simplify its synthesis of uncialamycin, an enediyne compound isolated from a strain of marine bacteria. Once inside the nucleus of a cell, it produces radicals that cut both strands of the target's DNA.

The earlier study produced 13 analogues of uncialamycin and tested them on lung, gastric, ovarian and multidrug-resistant cancer cell lines with "remarkably high potency," the researchers reported at the time, suggested they showed promise as ADC payloads and chose one for further development.

That promise is now paying off. In tests on solid tumors, the best of a variety of ADCs killed not only the cell that expressed the target protein but also "neighbor" cancer cells that didn't.

"That is unique within the enediyne payload-carrying ADCs, and in contrast to the currently employed ADCs containing N-acetyl calicheamicin payloads, which do not exhibit this killing effect," Nicolaou said.

Importantly, he said, the majority of clinically approved ADCs demonstrate bystander killing effect.

The study found ADCs made with cleavable linkers that are stable in the bloodstream but release their payloads in the tumor microenvironment were most effective at decreasing the size of small-cell lung cancer tumors in PDX mouse models.