Culture

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Young people with diverse gender identities may be bullied and victimized up to three times more often than peers who identify as male or female, a new study of more than 4,464 adolescents in Illinois found.

The students were part of a statewide survey of eighth- through 12th-grade youths in Illinois schools.

"Transgender youths reported the highest rates of all forms of peer victimization, which were double to nearly triple those of males and up to 2.6 times higher than those of females," said social work professor Rachel Garthe of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who led the research.

"Slightly more than half of transgender youths reported verbal abuse such as peers calling them names or spreading rumors about them. About one in three of these youths reported cyber victimization, and slightly fewer reported psychological dating violence," such as a romantic partner denigrating or trying to control them, Garthe said.

Gender-expansive youths - students who don't identify as male, female or transgender - experienced disproportionately higher rates of all forms of bullying and dating violence.

Among these students, 41% experienced verbal abuse, nearly 32% were cyberbullied and 19% experienced physical violence, according to the study.

Garthe said the findings, published in the journal Pediatrics, are very concerning and underscore the need for supportive policies and practices for students with diverse gender identities who may need help coping with psychological and physical violence from peers and romantic partners.

Additionally, she said more programs are needed in schools that prevent these types of violence from being perpetrated.

Equal numbers of male, female, transgender and gender-expansive students were included in the research. The study was novel in that it included a large sample of transgender individuals and the experiences of gender-expansive individuals were explored as a distinct group, Garthe said.

The students in the current study were a subset of the participants in the 2018 Illinois Youth Survey, a biennial survey that gathers data on a variety of social, behavioral and health indicators from youths in schools throughout Illinois. The Center for Prevention Research and Development, a unit within the U. of I. School of Social Work, conducts the survey.

Despite growing numbers of schools implementing anti-bullying policies that include protections based on sexual or gender identity, rates of victimization remain high among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youths, research has shown.

However, LGBTQ students report feeling safer and more connected at school and experience fewer gender-related negative remarks from peers when resources such as LGBTQ-inclusive curricula are taught, according to the study.

When anti-bullying policies with LGBTQ protections are implemented, students are less likely to be forced to use bathrooms that match their assigned sex or wear clothing incongruent with their gender identity or expression, Garthe said.

"To enhance the effectiveness of these policies and further support these students, anti-transphobic education for teachers, administrators and students is needed, along with the use of pronouns that reflect individuals' gender identity," Garthe said.

Can a protein found in a mosquito lead to a better understanding of the workings of our own brains? Prof. Ofer Yizhar and his team in the Weizmann Institute of Science's Neurobiology Department took a light-sensitive protein derived from mosquitos and used it to devise an improved method for investigating the messages that are passed from neuron to neuron in the brains of mice. This method, reported today in Neuron, could potentially help scientists solve age-old cerebral mysteries that could pave the way for new and improved therapies to treat neurological and psychiatric conditions.

Yizhar and his lab team develop so-called optogenetic methods - research techniques that allow them to "reverse engineer" the activity of specific brain circuits in order to better understand their function. Optogenetics uses proteins known as rhodopsins to control the activity of neurons in the mouse brain. Rhodopsins are light-sensing proteins - they are most known for their role in organs like the retina rather than in the dark inner reaches of the body. But the rhodopsins in the brains of Yizhar's mice enable him to control the activity of specific neurons when he and his team shine a minuscule beam of light into the mouse's brain. He is especially interested in communication between neurons: What signals are getting passed through the synapses, those gaps over which the brain's signals move? "We can detect the presence of the various neurotransmitters, but different neurons 'read' those neurotransmitters differently," he says. "Optogenetics enables us to not only see the 'ink,' but really to decipher the 'message'."

While optogenetic methods have produced a number of breakthrough results in labs around the world in recent years, they can be a bit finicky. In particular, the rhodopsins used for optogenetic studies tend to be imperfect when it comes to controlling the activity of synapses, the tiny junctions between neurons.

Yizhar and a large team of his trainees, including Dr. Mathias Mahn, Dr. Inbar Saraf Sinik and Pritish Patil, believed they could create a better version of the rhodopsins than those currently available. "We decided to look around and see what natural solutions exist out there," says Yizhar. And nature, it turns out, contains a multitude of variations on the rhodopsin molecule - not only in animal eyes but also fish, insects, and even mammals carry them in various body parts; some possibly for regulating their circadian cycles, others for purposes as yet unknown. Thus, the team started out with a long list of potential rhodopsin proteins, and their first job involved assessing which ones were most likely to fill their experimental requirements, which primarily included light-gated proteins that are able to modulate synaptic activity. Eventually the researchers winnowed their list down to two - one taken from a pufferfish and one from a mosquito.

It was the mosquito rhodopsin that turned out to be the most suitable. To evaluate the efficacy of the new mosquito-derived tool, the researchers tested their method against a drug that is known to reduce the strength of the communication between neurons in the brain. They found that the interference was just as effective, and much more stable with the mosquito rhodopsin.

More than that: Unlike a conventional drug that affects numerous parts of the brain and is hard to control, the researchers found that since only neurons that produce the mosquito sensor are affected by the light, the modulatory effect on the brain's synapses can be precisely controlled in both space and time - just by switching the light on or off in specific brain regions. They then validated the utility of the new tool by using it to block the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine on one side of the brain only: Illuminating the hemisphere expressing the mosquito rhodopsin with green light led to a one-sided bias in the behavior of these mice. In other words, they had created a tool that was precise, selective, and controllable.

"One of the major advantages of the mosquito rhodopsin is that it's bistable - that is, it does not need refreshing - and it is potentially very specific, so that we can control just the precise synapses in which we are interested," says Yizhar. "This is a very exciting technology, since it will allow us to discover the roles of specific pathways in the brain in a way that was not possible before. We think this mosquito protein could open the way to developing a whole family of new optogenetic tools for use in neuroscience research." These scientific endeavors will receive a great boost within the framework of the new Institute for Brain and Neural Sciences - Weizmann Institute's flagship project that is expected to bring together leading research groups from various fields, which will join efforts to unfold the mysteries of the brain.

EAST LANSING, Mich. - As climate change threatens global food security, researchers at Michigan State University are building better beans crucial to human nutrition by tapping into the genetics of the more heat-resistant tepary bean.

The tepary bean (Phaseolus acutifolius A. Gray) is a sister of the common bean which includes kidney, pinto and navy beans. "The common bean is the number one source of protein and nutrients for many people living in Central America and Africa," said Robin Buell, a professor of plant biology in MSU's College of Natural Science and former director of the Plant Resilience Institute.

Her research on bean genetics was published May 11 in Nature Communications.

"Mother nature has already made plants that are adapted to different climates," said Buell, who is also a faculty member with MSU's AgBioResearch. We can use that knowledge to adapt our modern agriculture; we don't need to reinvent it. "As climate change heats up the air and land, making them hotter and dryer, warmer nighttime temperatures make it more difficult to grow beans. To identify the genes that support bean growth in the desert, Buell and her team sequenced the genome of the tepary bean.

"The tepary bean has evolved over time to grow in the Sonoran Desert," Buell said. "We could lay the genomes for both types of beans next to each other and compare them. If we know this gene on the tepary genome protects it from heat, then, we can add the gene to the common bean."

There are genes from the common bean that are being introduced into the tepary bean to make it easier to grow and there are genes from the tepary bean that are being introduced into the common bean to make it more heat and pest resistant.

"The goal is to grow a bean that gives a good yield, grows in dry, hot climates and is nutritious." Buell said. "We want to create an accelerated path to breed better tepary and common beans."

Michigan is the number two bean producer in the nation. For over 40 years, MSU has been a leader in bean breeding and with help from MSU's expertise in plant resilience, a research partnership was formed over the tepary bean.

Severe symptoms of COVID-19, leading often to death, are thought to result from the patient's own acute immune response rather than from damage inflicted directly by the virus. Immense research efforts are therefore invested in figuring out how the virus manages to mount an effective invasion while throwing the immune system off course. A new study, published today in Nature, reveals a multipronged strategy that the virus employs to ensure its quick and efficient replication, while avoiding detection by the immune system. The joint labor of the research groups of Dr. Noam Stern-Ginossar at the Weizmann Institute of Science and Dr. Nir Paran and Dr. Tomer Israely of the Israel Institute for Biological, Chemical and Environmental Sciences, this study focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms at work during infection by SARS-CoV-2 at the cellular level.

During an infection, our cells are normally able to recognize that they're being invaded and quickly dispatch signaling molecules, which alert the immune system of the attack. With SARS-CoV-2 it was apparent early on that something was not working quite right - not only is the immune response delayed, enabling the virus to quickly replicate, unhindered, but once this response does occur it's often so severe that instead of fighting the virus it causes damage to its human host.

"Most of the research that has addressed this issue so far concentrated on specific viral proteins and characterized their functions. Yet not enough is known today about what is actually going on in the infected cells themselves," says Stern-Ginossar, of the Molecular Genetics Department. "So we infected cells with the virus and proceeded to assess how infection affects important biochemical processes in the cell, such as gene expression and protein synthesis."

When cells are infected by viruses, they start expressing a series of specific anti-viral genes - some act as first-line defenders and meet the virus head on in the cell itself, while others are secreted to the cell's environment, alerting neighboring cells and recruiting the immune system to combat the invader. At this point, both the cell and the virus race to the ribosomes, the cell's protein synthesis factories, which the virus itself lacks. What ensues is a battle between the two over this precious resource.

The new study has elucidated how SARS-CoV-2 gains the upper hand in this battle: It is able to quickly, in a matter of hours, take over the cell's protein-making machinery and at the same time to neutralize the cell's anti-viral signaling, both internal and external, delaying and muddling the immune response.

The researchers showed that the virus is able to hack the cell's hardware, taking over its protein-synthesis machinery, by relying on three separate, yet complementary, tactics. The first tactic the virus uses is to reduce the cell's capacity for translating genes into proteins, meaning that less proteins are synthesized overall. The second tactic is that it actively degrades the cell's messenger RNAs (mRNA) - the molecules that carry instructions for making proteins from the DNA to the ribosomes - while its own mRNA transcripts remain protected. Finally, the study revealed that the virus is also able to prevent the export of mRNAs from the cell's nucleus, where they are synthesized, to the cell's main chamber, where they normally serve as the template for protein synthesis.

"By employing this three-way strategy, which appears to be unique to SARS-CoV-2, the virus is able to efficiently execute what we call 'host shutoff' - where the virus takes over the cell's protein-synthesis capacity," Stern-Ginossar explains. "In this way, messages from important anti-viral genes, which the cell rushes to produce upon infection, do not make it to the factory floor to be translated into active proteins, resulting in the delayed immune response we are seeing in the clinic." The good news is that this study was also successful in identifying the viral proteins involved in the process of host shutoff by SARS-CoV-2, which could spell new opportunities for developing effective COVID-19 treatments.

New science about the fate of freshwater ecosystems released today by the journal Sustainability finds that only 17 percent of rivers globally are both free-flowing and within protected areas, leaving many of these highly-threatened systems¬--and the species that rely on them --at risk.

"Populations of freshwater species have already declined by 84 percent on average since 1970, with degradation of rivers a leading cause of this decline. As a critical food source for hundreds of millions of people, we need to reverse this trend," said Ian Harrison, freshwater specialist at Conservation International, adjunct professor at Northern Arizona University and co-editor of the journal issue.

As the world looks to establish new conservation targets at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity meeting later this year, scientists are calling on policymakers to prioritize increasing protection of freshwater ecosystems and species and to better integrate land and water conservation.

Free-flowing rivers and other naturally functioning freshwater ecosystems sustain biodiversity and the food supply chain, drinking water, economies and cultures for billions of people worldwide. Therefore, their protection is critical to sustain these values," said Jonathan Higgins, senior freshwater science advisor at The Nature Conservancy

A newly formed coalition of water resource experts--including representatives from academia as well as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy, among other entities-- coordinated this first-of-its-kind collection of papers focused exclusively on durable protections for free-flowing rivers, with the aim of offering a blueprint to policymakers so they can integrate the best available science into environmental action plans. There is no global framework focused specifically on river protection, and freshwater protection receives less attention and funding than comparable efforts for marine and terrestrial systems.

The collection of 15 studies with authors from throughout the world offers examples of free-flowing river protections through the application of scientific research, law, policy and on-the-ground implementation of restoration and management strategies.

It is co-edited by Denielle Perry, a water resource geographer who leads the Free-flowing Rivers Lab in the School of Earth and Sustainability at NAU, and Harrison, who also is co-chair of the Freshwater Conservation Committee of IUCN's Species Survival Commission. Both are founding members of the Durable River Protection Coalition, which is working to enable scientific research and policy proposals to help local communities, national governments, international institutions and private and public investors better protect these valuable but vulnerable resources.

"These ecosystems are among the most understudied and under-protected in the world, and they are at risk from further severe alteration and degradation by a range of threats, including poorly sited dam construction, overfishing, excessive water extraction and pollution," Perry said. "This first-of-its-kind collection addresses growing calls to protect rivers as corridors in a changing climate and for the important role they play in providing ecosystem services and livelihoods around the world. We are at a moment when climate change and policy will shape the path of development, and the management of our riverine resources. We must act to protect rivers now because failing to do so will have lasting consequences for decades to come."

The article topics range from global assessments to local case studies, including discussion of a framework that defines durable river protection, safeguarding free-flowing rivers through various policy mechanisms, adaptive management of the Malkumba-Coongie Lakes Ramsar site in Australia, the biological and cultural importance of sustainable floodplains in North Africa and more. The issue also features rivers in India, Mongolia, Mexico, China and the United States. Several articles take an in-depth look at a specific freshwater ecosystems and offer insights that can be applied elsewhere.

"The recommendations made in this special issue for more forward-thinking protections and wise use of our inland aquatic resources are timely. Wetlands are a powerful nature-based solution to the many challenges the world is facing. Taking action now for wetlands is foundational for creating the future we want," said Martha Rojas Urrego, Secretary General of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands.

As policymakers gather virtually this month to develop new global conservation goals, experts are calling for improved global targets for river protection. There is clear scientific evidence for the value of free-flowing rivers, including their ability to sustain migratory fish and to deliver the sediment needed to maintain river deltas--home to 500 million people and some of the most productive agricultural land on the planet--and prevent them from sinking and shrinking. Due to these values, researchers are calling for increased protections for free-flowing rivers as part of river basin management strategies.

"While 17 percent of all free-flowing rivers are within protected areas, in most countries the level of protection for large rivers is far lower," said Jeff Opperman, WWF's global lead freshwater scientist. "It's these large rivers that are most crucial for supporting fisheries that support rural communities."

Quick: Pick your three favorite fast-food restaurants.

If you're like many people, McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger King may come to mind--even if you much prefer In-N-Out or Chick-fil-A.

A new study from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and UC San Francisco's Department of Neurology found that when it comes to making choices, we surprisingly often forget about the things we like best and are swayed by what we remember. The paper, publishing this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, combines insights from economics and psychology with decision-making experiments and fMRI brain scans to examine how our imperfect memories affect our decision making.

"Life is not a multiple-choice test," says Berkeley Haas Assoc. Prof. Ming Hsu, director of UC Berkeley's Neuroeconomics Laboratory, who co-wrote the paper with Dr. Andrew Kayser, associate professor of neurology at UCSF, and lead author Zhihao Zhang, a Haas postdoctoral scholar. "Yet researchers traditionally give people a menu of options and ask them to choose."

The findings break away from traditional economic models that assume people make rational decisions from all available options. In most situations, rather than choosing from a ready-made list, we conjure choices from our memory.

"While everyone knows that human memory is limited--and there's a thriving market for reminder apps and Post-it Notes--scientists know surprisingly little about how this limit impacts our decisions," says Zhang. Answering this question could hold implications for everything from conducting consumer research and crafting public policy to managing neurodegenerative diseases.

To measure the influence of memory on decisions, the researchers examined people's choices for different types of consumer goods, such as fast food, fruit, sneakers, and salad dressing. For each, they asked one group of participants to name as many favorite brands or items in the category as they could. They asked a second group to choose their preferences from a menu of options. Based on those results, they created a mathematical method to predict which items people would choose in an open-ended situation.

The most surprising takeaway was just how often people seemed to forget to mention items they liked best, choosing less-preferred, but more easily remembered items. "A lot of people name McDonald's as their favorite, but many of those people don't actually like McDonald's as much as other brands," says Kayser. In an open-ended situation, 30% of people said McDonald's is their preferred fast food; yet for those given a list of restaurants, only half that many (15%) chose the Golden Arches, with the other half instead choosing restaurants such as In-N-Out or Chick-fil-A.

The researchers found similarly large differences between people's preferences in open ended versus list-based choices in all the other types of consumer goods tested, both branded and non-branded items, such as fruit. "The magnitude of these changes was very surprising," says Hsu. "The fact that so many people don't mention their favorites really argues against the notion that we usually act in our own best interest, as standard economic models might have us believe."

To gain a deeper scientific understanding of how memory impacts decisions, the researchers next constructed a new mathematical model that combines economic models of decision-making with psychological models of memory recall. "Very little attention has been paid to connecting these two areas," says Zhang. "By taking the best features of each, we found that we could make amazingly accurate predictions of how often people fail to choose their more preferred options due to their imperfect memories."

In fact, the predictions were so accurate that the researchers thought they had made a mistake. "We only came to trust the findings after checking and repeating the experiments multiple times," he said.

Understanding the role memory plays in decision making has implications for millions of people managing neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, says Kayser, who researches behavioral neurology.

"We know that memory declines as Alzheimer's disease progresses. We also see that decision-making capacity diminishes in areas such as financial management. But we don't yet have good models of how they might be linked, or even good ways to measure changes in decision-making capacity," he says. "For neurologists, these are urgent questions."

To nail down the role of memory retrieval in decision making, the researchers scanned the brains of a group of participants using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). Past neuroscientific research has shown that decision-making--which involves valuation--and memory are served by different brain systems.

"When people made open-ended choices in our experiments, we saw increased activity in memory retrieval regions of the brain and enhanced communication with valuation regions," says Zhang. That didn't happen when participants simply picked choices from a list: The valuation part lit up, but memory systems showed much less activity.

This provides neural evidence for the direct involvement of memory systems in open-ended decisions, and sheds light on the nature of suboptimal decisions in these situations.

"Based on these findings, it's possible that Alzheimer's patients are particularly vulnerable when decisions are open-ended," says Kayser, "If so, this could motivate development of decision support systems that can alleviate these vulnerabilities."

The research could also provide a more targeted way of designing "nudges" that help people expand their options without mandating specific choices. For example, "If we want consumers to switch to more sustainable species of fish, it might help to find a way to get people to consider other types of seafood they may have overlooked otherwise," says Hsu.

Autoimmune diseases have something in common with horses, bachelor's degrees and daily flossing habits: women are more likely to have them.

One reason for autoimmune diseases' prevalence in women may be sex-based differences in inflammation. In a new study, West Virginia University researcher Jonathan Busada investigated how sex hormones affect stomach inflammation in males and females. He found that androgens--or male sex hormones--may help to keep stomach inflammation in check.

"Stomach cancer is primarily caused by rampant inflammation," said Busada, an assistant professor in the School of Medicine and researcher with the Cancer Institute. "The overarching theme of my lab is to understand what's controlling the balance between a protective immune response, which is just targeting the infection, and a pathogenic immune response, which is like a toddler throwing a temper tantrum and damaging everything. It looks like androgens may be really important in tipping that balance toward a protective response."

His findings appear in Gastroenterology.

Busada's study focused on testosterone, the primary male sex hormone.

The study also considered glucocorticoids--steroid hormones that the adrenal glands secrete. Unlike testosterone, glucocorticoids are not sex hormones. Their production doesn't differ substantially between women and men.

Glucocorticoids are "the chief anti-inflammatory hormones that your body produces," Busada said. "You can think of them as the brake pedal to the immune system."

In researching mice without either glucocorticoids or testosterone, Busada, his research partner John Cidlowski--a senior investigator with the National Institutes of Health--and their colleagues observed that males' stomach inflammation increased as much as the females' did.

What's more, when he and his team gave testosterone to the female mice, their inflammation vanished.

"We were able to completely rescue them from their stomach inflammation," Busada said. "We proved that androgens were the hormones giving male mice that double layer of protection from inflammation. In the females, the only anti-inflammatory hormone was glucocorticoids. In males, it could be either glucocorticoids or androgens. This study potentially explains why women have a much higher incidence of autoimmune and chronic inflammatory diseases."

For instance, celiac disease is two to three times as common in women as in men. Multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis are three times as common. Thyroid problems? Five to eight times.

"Actually, eight out of 10 individuals with autoimmune disease are women," Busada said.

Based on these research findings, clinicians may consider if disruptive glucocorticoid or androgen signaling is contributing to their patients' stomach-inflammatory diseases.

"If someone presents with stomach inflammation, it might be worth it for clinicians to investigate what's going on with their endocrine system," Busada said.

And that's not only the case if the patient is a woman. Even though women are more susceptible to chronic stomach-inflammatory diseases, men are more susceptible to stomach cancer, of which inflammation is the biggest cause.

Worldwide, stomach cancer is the fifth most common form of cancer and the third leading cause of cancer deaths.

"Persistent, smoldering inflammation over the course of many, many years is the fertile ground for stomach cancer to grow." Busada said. "It's an important, and understudied, human health issue."

"These findings may help us understand how inflammation promotes cancer development, but we can't make any direct inferences about stomach cancer from this body of work," he said. "That's the direction we're moving in, though. We're currently studying how sex affects carcinogenesis using an actual cancer model."

Brown bears that are more inclined to grate and rub against trees have more offspring and more mates, according to a University of Alberta study. The results suggest there might be a fitness component to the poorly understood behaviour.

"As far as we know, all bears do this dance, rubbing their back up against the trees, stomping the feet and leaving behind odours of who they are, what they are, what position they're in, and possibly whether they are related," said Mark Boyce, an ecologist in the Department of Biological Sciences.

"What we were able to show is that both males and females have more offspring if they rub, more surviving offspring if they rub and they have more mates if they rub."

The research team led by Boyce and post-doctoral fellow Andrea Morehouse identified and collected bear hair samples from 899 bear rub spots, which included trees, fence posts and power poles, in the Alberta Rocky Mountains south of Highway 3 for a period of four years starting in 2011.

The team genotyped 213 individual brown bears (118 males, 95 females). Building on the work of Curtis Strobeck, who realized a decade earlier that emerging DNA methods could be used to identify individual bears, the team used previously collected data for more 2,043 individual brown bears in the area to create a family tree.

What the results showed was that bears that rub more frequently and at more sites do better.

For every rub object at which a male bear was detected, the predicted number of mates increased by 1.38 times. As well, for each additional occasion during which a male bear was detected, the predicted number of offspring is multiplied by 1.37.

The researchers also observed the same relationships for female brown bears. Females with more mates were detected at more rub objects and on more occasions than females with fewer mates. For each additional rub object and occasion during which a female was detected, the predicted number of offspring increased by 1.42 and 1.55 times respectively.

"It seems bears that are in good condition are more vigorous and they rub more, and that could be correlated with reproductive success," he said.

This study also showed that this rubbing behaviour helps females with cubs avoid territories of big males, by often choosing marginal habitat near ranch buildings or closer to roads.

"This is done by scent and the reason they do is that big males are notorious for killing cubs," said Boyce. "Big males won't go anywhere near a building, but for females with cubs, that's an acceptable risk."

He added further studies may also shed light on sexual selection in bears. While brown bears will fight tooth and nail to protect their territories, which will often include the territories of up to four females, females have a say.

In fact, previous research showed upwards of 17 per cent of all brown bear litters are sired by multiple males.

"Female choice is a big deal," said Boyce. "In this study, we proposed an alternative hypothesis that female brown bears use the information obtained from olfactory cues of rubbing males throughout the season to choose offspring paternity."

The study, "The smell of success: Reproductive success related to rub behaviour in brown bears," was published in PLOS ONE.

The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) has helped Gaia achieve millimagnitude (mmag) precision in photometry, according to a study led by researchers from National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) and Beijing Normal University (BNU).

Their study was published in The Astrophysical Journal.

If you look at the sky on a clear, starry night, you may notice that Aldebran is relatively red and Rigel is blue. Why? The answer stems from their intrinsic physical properties. Precisely measuring magnitudes and colors helps to explain such phenomena.

The ESA Gaia satellite is well known for its remarkable capacity for astrometric observation. It delivers the most precise photometric data ever, with much higher quality than ground-based telescopes.

However, in order for Gaia to cover a wide magnitude range from 6 to 22 magnitude (mag), different observation modes have been adopted for stars of different brightness. In addition, photometric data in the G, BP, and RP bands come from different instruments and CCDs. Therefore, magnitude and color-dependent systematic errors exist.

The researchers combined two datasets, Gaia Data Release 2 (DR2) and LAMOST Data Release 5 (DR5), then selected samples of high data quality and low extinction.

The samples comprised 779,691 main-sequence stars and 71,952 red giant branch stars. Stars from 13.3 to 13.7 mag in the G band were selected as the control sample in order to establish the empirical relationship between intrinsic colors and physical parameters deduced from LAMOST.

"Applying the relationship to the whole sample, the differences between the observed colors and model-determining colors at different G magnitudes represent the color correction terms," said Prof. LIU Jifeng from NAOC.

With the help of LAMOST's massive stellar spectrum, the researchers used a spectroscopy-based stellar color regression method to correct systematic errors that are magnitude- and color-dependent. The relationship between the intrinsic colors and physical parameters of stars represents the key focus of this method.

By using a sample of about 500,000 stars from LAMOST and Gaia, color correction curves for the F/G/K stars are derived. "With an unprecedented precision of about 1 mmag, systematic trends in the G magnitude are revealed for both G-RP and BP-RP colors in detail," said Prof. YUAN Haibo from BNU, the corresponding author of the study.

"Our work could be beneficial to studies where a high-precision color-color diagram is required, including the estimation of Gaia photometric metallicities, detection of peculiar objects, discrimination between binaries and single stars, and so on," said NIU Zexi, Ph.D. candidate from NAOC and lead author of the study.

In addition, another study by the same team on color corrections for Gaia Data Early Release 3 (EDR3) was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The polar vortex is a large area of upper-atmosphere cyclonic air circulation surrounding both poles. It is bounded by the polar jet stream and its associated cold air is usually confined to the polar regions. Within the Antarctic circle, and southern polar vortex, ozone quantities are the lowest, globally. A research published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, led by Dr. LUO Yuhan, corresponding author and Associate Professor at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS), suggests that the polar vortex plays a key role in Antarctic stratospheric ozone depletion.

"The atmosphere over Antarctica is controlled by a strong polar vortex in winter, making it difficult to exchange with the mid-latitude atmosphere." said Dr. LUO. "The extremely low air temperatures (

Dr. LUO further explained that PSCs are primarily composed of nitrate trihydrate and water ice, along with smaller concentrations of other volatile compounds. These aerosols provide surfaces for heterogeneous reactions that convert halogen reservoirs to active halogens which cause severe ozone depletion.

The team used Zenith Scattered Light Differential Optical Absorption Spectroscopy (ZSL-DOAS) techniques to measure ozone depletion near the edge of the polar vortex at the Fildes Peninsula on King George Island (62.22S, 58.96W). ZSL-DOAS can accurately quantify the column density of ozone. The ozone columns were compared with the stratospheric ozone profiles from NASA's MERRA2 ozone database and PV profiles from the ECMWF dataset, which helped better understand the causes of ozone depletion.

"PV is used to characterize the polar vortex and determine the edge of polar vortex by Nash's criterion." said QIAN Yuanyan, a PhD candidate working with Dr. Luo, and the first author of this paper. Nash's criterion suggests that the vortex typically lies at or south of 65° equivalent latitude, based on PV values.

Results show that PV is positively correlated with total ozone columns, and both variables trend up and down at the same pace.

"The observations conducted in this study contribute to a base for further analysis to improve the prediction of the inter-annual variations of stratospheric ozone." said Dr. LUO. "This will provide a better understanding of ozone recovery and stratosphere-troposphere exchange over the polar vortex edge area."

Ishikawa, Japan - History tells us that games are an inseparable facet of humanity, and mainly for good reasons. Advocates of video games laud their pros: they help develop problem-solving skills, socialize, relieve stress, and exercise the mind and body--all at the same time! However, games also have a dark side: the potential for addiction. The explosive growth of the video game industry has spawned all sorts of games targeting different groups of people. This includes digital adaptations of popular board games like chess, but also extends to gambling-type games like online casinos and betting on horse races. While virtually all engaging forms of entertainment lend themselves to addictive behavior under specific circumstances, some video games are more commonly associated with addiction than others. But what exactly makes these games so potentially addictive?

This is a difficult question to answer because it deals directly with aspects of the human mind, and the inner workings of the mind are mostly a mystery. However, there may be a way to answer it by leveraging what we do know about the physical world and its laws. At the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), Japan, Professor Hiroyuki Iida and colleagues have been pioneering a methodology called "motion in mind" that could help us understand what draws us towards games and makes us want to keep reaching for the console.

Their approach is centered around modelling the underlying mechanisms that operate in the mind when playing games through an analogy with actual physical models of motion. For example, the concepts of potential energy, forces, and momentum from classical mechanics are considered to be analogous to objective and/or subjective game-related aspects, including pacing of the game, randomness, and fairness. In their latest study published in IEEE Access, Professor Iida and Assistant Professor Mohd Nor Akmal Khalid, also from JAIST, linked their "motion in mind" model with the concepts of engagement and addiction in various types of games from the perceived experience of the player and their behaviors.

The researchers employed an analogy of the law of conservation of energy, mass, and momentum to mathematically determine aspects of the game-playing experience in terms of gambling psychology and the subjective/objective perception of the game. Their conjectures and results were supported by a "unified conceptual model of engagement and addiction," previously derived from ethnographic and social science studies, which suggests that engagement and addiction are two sides of the same coin. By comparing and analyzing a variety of games, such as chess, Go, basketball, soccer, online casinos, and pachinko, among others, the researchers showed that their law of conservation model expanded upon this preconception, revealing new measures for engagement while also unveiling some of the mechanisms that underlie addiction.

Their approach also provides a clearer view of how the perceived (subjective) difficulty of solving uncertainties during a given game can differ from and even outweigh the real (objective) one, and how this affects our behavior and reactions. "Our findings are valuable for understanding the dynamics of information in different game mechanics that have an impact on the player's state of mind. In other words, this helps us establish the relationship between the game-playing process and the associated psychological feeling," explains Professor Iida . Such insight will help developers make game content more engaging, healthy, and personalized both in the short and long term.

Further studies shall make the tailoring of game experiences much easier, as Professor Iida remarks: "Our work is a stepping-stone for linking behavioral psychology and game-playing experiences, and soon we will be able to mechanistically manipulate and adapt the notions of engagement and addiction towards specific needs and use-cases ." Let's hope these findings can take us one step towards deaddiction to games, while keeping the fun intact!

New research at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden suggests a link between psychosis and a genetic change that affects the brain's immune system. The study published in Molecular Psychiatry may impact the development of modern medicines for bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.

Psychosis affects approximately 2-3 per cent of the population and is characterized by a change in the perception of reality, often with elements of hallucinations and paranoid reactions.

Most of the people affected are patients with schizophrenia, but people with bipolar disorder may also experience psychotic symptoms.

The antipsychotics available today often have insufficient efficacy, and for patients, their life situation can be difficult.

The average life expectancy of people with schizophrenia is approximately 15 years shorter than that of the general population, according to Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare.

"It is not entirely known what biological mechanisms cause psychosis, but recent research suggests that immune activation in the brain's glial cells may be the cause. People with psychosis have elevated levels of kynurenic acid in the brain, a messenger that transmits information from the brain's immune system to the neurons," says Goran Engberg, Professor at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Karolinska Institutet, and the study's corresponding author.

Previous genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have shown that the protein GRK3 expresses itself via genetic changes in the immune system in patients with psychosis.

Now researchers at Karolinska Institutet, the University of California, San Diego, USA, and the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, USA, have studied more specifically which parts of the immune system impact psychotic disorders.

The study is based on extensive data from mice that lack the GRK3 protein in the brain, as well as an analysis of the genome from 70 people with bipolar disorder and 48 healthy control subjects.

Results show that the loss of the GRK3 protein appears to increase the sensitivity of the immune system and triggers a cascade of effects in the brain, involving an increased release of the cytokine IL-1beta and kynurenic acid.

"Our experimental data are confirmed through genetic studies where we see a link between psychosis in patients with bipolar disorder and decreased expression of GRK3, which leads to an increased amount of kynurenic acid in the brain," says Carl Sellgren. He is a senior lecturer at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Karolinska Institutet, and the study's first author together with Sophie Imbeault, senior researcher at the same department.

The data in the study provide a connection between immune activation and psychosis and thus presents a starting point for further study of novel antipsychotic drugs possessing immune modulatory functions.

The drugs currently used in psychosis treatment were developed in the 1960s.

"To develop effective, modern drugs, more knowledge is needed about the mechanisms in the brain that can trigger psychosis," says Sophie Erhardt, professor at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Karolinska Institutet, and the study's last author.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in children and adolescents is associated with impaired education and worse general health later in life. Access to specialist treatment is often limited. According to a study from Centre for Psychiatry Research at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Region Stockholm, internet-delivered cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can be as effective as conventional CBT. The study, published in the prestigious journal JAMA, can help make treatment for OCD more widely accessible.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a potentially serious mental disorder that normally debuts in childhood.

Symptoms include intrusive thoughts that trigger anxiety (obsessions), and associated repetitive behaviours (compulsions), which are distressing and time consuming.

Early diagnosis and treatment are essential to minimise the long-term medical and socioeconomic consequences of the disorder, including suicide risk.

The psychological treatment of OCD requires highly trained therapists and access to this kind of competence is currently limited to a handful of specialist centres across Sweden.

Earlier research has shown that while CBT helps a majority of young people who receive it, several years can pass between the onset of symptoms and receipt of treatment.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have spent three years evaluating whether low-intensity internet-delivered CBT for children and adolescents with OCD can be used in a stepped care model in order to improve access to treatment without compromising its efficacy.

The two-centre study was conducted in collaboration with Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in the Stockholm and Vastra Gotaland regions and comprised 152 participants between the ages of eight and 17.

The participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups. One group first received therapist-guided digital CBT, and the other (control) received standard CBT through weekly in-person sessions with a therapist.

Each group received treatment for a period of 16 weeks, supported by their therapists and parents.

The researchers then followed up the participants three months after treatment in order to evaluate the therapeutic effect on OCD symptoms, daily function and depressive symptoms.

After the 3-month follow-up, the participants in both groups deemed in need of additional support received up to 12 extra sessions of conventional CBT up until the 6-month follow-up.

The results showed that stepped digital CBT reduced the participants' OCD symptoms as much as conventional CBT. Approximately 70 per cent of participants in both groups were treatment responders at the 6-month follow-up.

"The advantage of the stepped care approach is that it makes it easier for us to reach out to more children and adolescents with OCD in need of help," says the study's first author Kristina Aspvall, psychologist and researcher at the Centre for Psychiatry Research, part of Karolinska Institutet's Department of Clinical Neuroscience.

Crucially, the stepped care group required fewer resources: therapists spent an average of 9 hours per participant in the stepped treatment group and 14 hours per participant in the control group.

"The study demonstrates the potential of technology when it comes to increasing access to evidence-based therapy for young people with OCD," says principal investigator Eva Serlachius, adjunct professor at Karolinska Institutet's Centre for Psychiatry Research. "By offering low-intensity digital intervention as the first step of treatment, clinics can save precious resources and devote their limited time to treating more patients or focusing on more complex cases."

Internet CBT for OCD is currently being implemented in regular care through Region Stockholm's Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (BUP Internetbehandling), which also collaborates with other health authorities across Sweden. The treatment was developed by researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Region Stockholm.

This rare fossil find comes from the Kimmeridge Clay Formation in England, a series of sedimentary rocks that was formed in a shallow, tropical-subtropical sea during the Upper Jurassic, about 150 million years ago. The fossil shark skeleton was found more than 20 years ago on the southern coast of England and is now held in the Etches Collection. Additional fossil shark specimens from it will be investigated in the years to come.

Due to their life-long tooth replacement shark teeth are among the most common vertebrate finds encountered in the fossil record. The low preservation potential of their poorly mineralized cartilaginous skeletons, on the other hand, prevents fossilization of completely preserved specimens in most cases.

The new study published in the journal PeerJ and led by Sebastian Stumpf from the University of Vienna now presents the fossil skeleton of a new ancient shark from the Kimmeridge Clay Formation of England, a fossiliferous rock sequence that was formed during the Late Jurassic in a shallow, tropical-subtropical sea.

The new shark fossil, which is about 150 million years old, is assigned to a previously unknown genus and species of hybodontiform sharks named Durnonovariaodus maiseyi. This extremely rare fossil find was made almost 20 years ago on the southern coast of England and is now held and curated in the Etches Collection, which houses one of the most scientifically significant fossil collections in England.

Hybodontiform sharks are one of the most species-rich groups of extinct sharks and represent the closest relatives to modern sharks. They first appeared during the latest Devonian, about 361 million years ago, and went extinct together with dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous, about 66 million years ago. The new genus and species Durnonovariaodus maiseyi differs from all other previously described hybodontiform sharks, including those that are characterized by having similarly shaped teeth. "Durnonovariaodus maiseyi represents an important source of information for better understanding the diversity of sharks in the past as well as for new interpretations of the evolution of hybodontiform sharks, whose relationships are still poorly understood, even after more than 150 years of research," says Stumpf.

The scientific importance of the Kimmeridge Clay Formation is underlined by additional, but still undescribed hybodontiform shark skeletons, which are also held in the Etches Collection. The research of fossil sharks from the Kimmeridge Clay Formation of England, which will be continued in the years to come, will certainly contain further surprises to be yet discovered.

Wastewater testing is an effective way to identify new cases of COVID-19 in nursing homes and other congregate living settings, and it may be particularly useful for preventing outbreaks in college dormitories, a new University of Virginia study finds.

The research, a collaboration of UVA's School of Medicine and School of Engineering, was led by UVA Health's Amy Mathers, MD. It offers some of the first clear guidance on the most effective methods to perform testing to detect COVID-19 in wastewater.

The researchers evaluated and compared sampling and analysis techniques by testing them within buildings with known numbers of positive cases. They were then able to determine wastewater testing's strengths and limitations as a tool for monitoring COVID-19 in a building population. For example, the technique proved better at detecting initial infections than determining the number of occupants infected or how long they had been infected.

One important answer revealed by the research: Wastewater testing can detect even small numbers of asymptomatic cases, something not previously documented.

"This work could be applied to surveillance in buildings where people live in groups, where transmission may be hard to control but the risk of spread could be high," said Mathers, an infectious disease expert in the School of Medicine's Department of Pathology. "Since we can identify new infections with high sensitivity, it provides an early warning signal of when to test everyone in the building to find and isolate the newly infected persons before an outbreak becomes large."

Wastewater Testing for COVID-19

To evaluate the effectiveness of wastewater testing for detecting COVID-19, Mathers collaborated with Lisa Colosi-Peterson, PhD, an associate professor in UVA Engineering's Department of Engineering Systems and Environment, who connected with Mathers through UVA's Center for Engineering in Medicine. They and their colleagues monitored wastewater from two student dormitory complexes for eight weeks. The researchers found that the wastewater testing caught more than 96% of cases.

One limitation of wastewater testing: It could not distinguish between new infections and virus found in stool from those who had recovered and were no longer contagious. That means the wastewater testing detected both active and former cases. "The inability to distinguish recently infected but no longer contagious persons from new contagious infections within a building is an important finding, as it means that wastewater testing would be best for identifying new cases and isolating individuals in groups without recent infections," Mathers said.

UVA's new research also establishes useful protocols for wastewater testing. In a scientific paper outlining their findings, the researchers describe how they collected and tested the samples, noting that refrigerating the samples on ice adequately preserved them for testing that same day. Institutions that plan to send their samples elsewhere for testing, however, may need to take additional steps to preserve the samples for longer, the researchers note. Cleansers and disinfectants used in the facilities could also degrade the viral RNA over time, they caution.

While the researchers are urging further study, they conclude that wastewater testing holds great promise for detecting and controlling COVID-19 in places where people live in close quarters. "Passive pooled surveillance of wastewater is now serving as an early warning system in many dormitories, barracks and prisons to identify new cases in situations where transmission risk is high," Mathers said. "Applications for wastewater surveillance to inform and control infectious disease transmission will continue to evolve, but it is hard to believe how far and how fast we have come in the last year."