Culture

A wave energy technology is being developed that could help generate low-cost electricity for thousands of houses.

The device costs less than conventional designs, has fewer moving parts, and is made of durable materials. It is designed to be incorporated into existing ocean energy systems and can convert wave power into electricity.

Small scale experiments in an ocean simulator show that one full-size device could generate the equivalent of 500kW, enough electricity for about 100 homes. Engineers say that their design could be used in fleets of low-cost, easily maintained structures at sea within decades, to take advantage of powerful waves in Scottish waters.

Engineers from the University of Edinburgh and from Italy developed their device - known as a Dielectric Elastomer Generator (DEG) - using flexible rubber membranes. It is designed to fit on top of a vertical tube which, when placed in the sea, partially fills with water that rises and falls with wave motion.

As waves pass the tube, the water inside pushes trapped air above to inflate and deflate the generator on top of the device. As the membrane inflates, a voltage is generated. This increases as the membrane deflates, and electricity is produced. In a commercial device, this electricity would be transported to shore via underwater cables.

A scaled-down version of the system was tested in the FloWave facility at the University of Edinburgh, a 25m diameter circular tank that can reproduce any combination of ocean waves and currents.

The system could replace conventional designs, involving complex air turbines and expensive moving parts.

The study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, was carried out in collaboration with the Universities of Trento, Bologna and Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna Pisa in Italy. It was supported by the European Union Horizon 2020 programme and Wave Energy Scotland.

Professor David Ingram, of the University of Edinburgh's School of Engineering, who took part in the study, said: "Wave energy is a potentially valuable resource around Scotland's coastline, and developing systems that harness this could play a valuable role in producing clean energy for future generations."

Chickadees with better learning and memory skills, needed to find numerous food caches, are more likely to survive their first winter, a long-term study of mountain chickadees has found.

Enhanced spatial cognition and brain power evolves via natural selection, an elaborate study of hundreds of mountain chickadees in the Sierra Nevada has found. Using passive integrative transponder (PIT) tags in combination with radio frequency identification-equipped feeders, scientists at the University of Nevada, Reno have tracked feeding behaviors and measured learning and memory of these non-migratory birds that live year-round in the high-elevation forest northwest of Truckee, California.

"This is a unique program, set in the wilderness, so we get unique results," Vladimir Pravosudov, lead researcher and biology professor at the University's College of Science, said. "Over the years, we've banded and tagged thousands of chickadees and observed their spatial cognition using custom-designed and built feeders that allow us to track how individuals learn and remember. And now we have tested whether individuals with better learning and memory performance are more likely to survive the winter."

Ben Sonnenberg, a doctoral student in the laboratory of Pravosudov (as a part of the Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology Graduate program) is the lead author, and Pravosudov is a corresponding author, on a scientific paper, based on the research, published Feb. 7 in the journal Current Biology.

'We're looking at how natural selection can generate differences in the birds living in different environments, and we now have direct evidence that selection is acting on chickadees' spatial cognition, which is needed to find tens of thousands of previously made food caches required to survive the winter," Pravosudov said. "Our new evidence fully support our previous comparative studies showing that chickadees living in harsh winter conditions at high elevations have better memory and larger hippocampus, a brain structure associated with memory. Our new data show that better learning and memory in these birds at high elevations are due to strong natural selection."

Pravosudov and his team of three graduate students visit their field sites near the University of California, Berkeley Sagehen Creek Field Station north of Truckee, California multiple times a week, year-round, including in some of the harshest Sierra Nevada winter weather. The field sites are about 40 miles from campus, so traveling during snowstorms is slow, and then they must use over-snow vehicles to go the last 10 miles to the high elevation site near Carpenter's ridge, at about 8,300 feet in elevation, often blazing a trail through four feet of new snow.

"Results like these (about natural selection) make the long days of digging out snowmobiles, shoveling snow and programming our chickadee feeders from underneath a tarp in sleeting weather worth the effort twice over," graduate student Sonnenberg said.

Four over-snow vehicles are used to transport the researchers and gear to their sites, and sometimes they have to ski to get there because their vehicles can't get through the deep snow.

Their destination at high elevation is the centerpiece for this study, with two identical metal frameworks - arrays - that hold eight feeders each. Access to the feeders is regulated by RFID activated doors and the feeder arrays can be raised and lowered depending on the snow depth. The frameworks hang by cables between trees in the forest that reaches 8,300 feet above sea level. Two similar arrays are set up at their lower elevation study area about four miles away and a few thousand feet lower in elevation.

Each bird has its own PIT tag ID and the feeder doors can be programmed to let in whichever birds Pravosudov and his team decide. The data, such as number of visits by an individual bird to each feeder, the time of day they feed and what other chickadees they share the feeder with, are automatically recorded by RFID boards and stored on memory cards which need to be regularly retrieved to download the data.

By assigning each bird only one rewarding feeder, researchers are able to measure learning and memory by recording how many non-rewarding, or 'wrong,' feeders birds visit before they find their rewarding feeder. As birds learn, they are expected to stop visiting all but the rewarding feeder.

"It's a simple system, we built it all in-house, with many design and build versions as we adapted them to the environment," Pravosudov said. "We collaborate with Dr. Eli Bridge from University of Oklahoma on RFID designs. Our feeders are field tested, needing to survive the elements and other animals - squirrels when the snow is deep, and bears all the time - who are looking to steal the bird seed from the experiment feeders. Bears have destroyed many feeders before we figured out how to avoid them."

"We follow chickadees their entire lives; we get the whole big picture," he said. "Mountain chickadees have an average lifespan of one and a half years, but our oldest is seven years old. The highest mortality occurs in juvenile birds during their first winter. Survivability is higher in adults once they survived their first winter because they are the ones who have better learning and memory abilities, allowing them to find where their food is cached. As much as 50 percent of the population dies off each year in the mountain environment; if they can't remember well where their food is cached, they are not likely to survive."

When comparing the juveniles who survived the first year to those who did not, learning and memory performance was better in those who survived. The research team also found that cognitive abilities remained stable as the birds aged.

The wild food-caching mountain chickadees don't migrate, they stay mostly at the same sites they settled on after they dispersed from where they hatched. At the Sagehen forest, there are no birds that permanently moved between the researchers' low and high elevation sites, which are six miles apart.

"We have banded several thousand chickadees over the years and we have never seen any birds permanently moving between elevations," Pravosudov, who teaches animal behavior and behavioral ecology, said. "These birds are easier to study because they are in one spot their entire life, dependent on food caches to make it through the harsh winters."

"The ability to track individual mountain chickadees throughout their lifetime in the Sierra Nevada mountains has been extremely exciting and rewarding," Sonnenberg said. "I was drawn to UNR and Vladimir's lab because there is no other system like it."

Vladimir has suspected for years that spatial memory is being shaped by natural selection and being able to take part in such a major step in confirming these ideas is extremely special, he said.

"Our results provide the first direct evidence for natural selection on spatial cognition in wild food-caching mountain chickadees," he said. "Taken together, our results suggest that natural selection associated with environmental differences, like those in winter conditions between high and low elevations in the mountains, might be generating intraspecific differences in cognitive abilities. Our evidence suggests that natural selection, rather than some other potential variables that critics have said could be responsible for the results of earlier comparative studies inconclusive, is the main driver of such differences."

The strongest supporting evidence comes from spatial learning and memory performance, as results from all three comparisons in the study are consistent with natural selection:

Adults showed better spatial learning and memory performance than first-year juveniles;

There was no significant difference in performance of the same cohort of chickadees that was first tested as first-year birds and then as adults, in other words they did not improve cognitive performance with experience; and

Spatial cognitive performance was a significant predictor of survival in first-year juvenile chickadees; birds that survived their first winter season showed significantly better performance in the spatial learning and memory tasks compared to birds that died.

Pravosudov received a National Science Foundation grant in 2014 to conduct this study. Two other NSF grants, one awarded to collaborator Eli Bridge and one awarded to Carrie Branch, were part of the funding for this project.

Co-authors on the scientific paper in Current Biology are Benjamin Sonnenberg, University of Nevada, Reno; Carrie Branch, former doctoral student at the University of Nevada, Reno and now a postdoc at Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Angela Pitera, University of Nevada, Reno; and Eli Bridge, University of Oklahoma, Oklahoma Biological Survey.

Pravosudov's is currently the only lab in the world that carries systematic study of spatial learning and memory in wild food-caching birds in extreme environmental conditions.

He's been studying mountain chickadees in the Sierra since 1999 starting as a post-doc at the University of California, Davis. Before that, he studied European food-caching tits (related to North American chickadees) above the Arctic Circle in northern Russia and then in North Eastern Siberia. Pravosudov's lab has published 21 papers about chickadees since 2015, with more in the pipeline. His curiosity and drive to learn more continues today.

"We now have DNA of all the birds we've banded, so next we are collaborating on genomics projects to investigate genomic bases of variation in learning and memory; maybe this summer we'll have a paper on our findings using full genomes of numerous chickadees with known learning and memory performance," he said.

He is a fellow of the American Ornithological Society, recognizing his "exceptional and sustained contributions to ornithology" and an elected fellow of the Animal Behavior Society.

MANHASSET, NY - A group of more than 60 leading international neuroscientists, including Mark Herceg, PhD, a neuropsychologist at Northwell Health's Phelps Hospital in Sleepy Hollow, NY, and a member of The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, published a correspondence today in The Lancet Neurology, asking for balance when reporting on sports-related injury chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). CTE is a type of dementia associated with exposure to repeated concussions, and has been linked with a variety of contact sports such as boxing, football, American football and rugby.

Although CTE is commonly featured in the news media and discussed among peers, the medical community is just beginning to understand how to recognize the disease, guidelines for how to assess its severity have yet to be established.

"We don't currently have a clear understanding of the link between CTE pathology and any specific symptoms," noted Dr. Herceg. "It's important to note to the public at large that CTE is at an early stage of scientific and medical understanding, with many important aspects of the disease yet to be established."

"Dr. Herceg and his colleague's CTE research is timely and impactful as a major step forward to more clearly defining the risk and prevalence of this important syndrome," said Kevin J. Tracey, MD, president and CEO of the Feinstein Institute.

A study provides new insight into how the stiffening of breast tissue plays a role in breast cancer development. By examining how mammary cells respond in a stiffness-changing hydrogel, bioengineers at the University of California San Diego discovered that several pathways work together to promote the transformation of breast cells into cancer cells. The work could inspire new approaches to treating patients and inhibiting tumor growth.

The team reported their findings in a paper published online on Feb. 12 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"By dynamically modulating the stiffness of the microenvironment, we can better mimic what happens during the transformation of breast cells to a malignant state in a dish," said senior author Adam Engler, a professor of bioengineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

The study is part of a growing body of research showing that mechanical forces--not just genetic and biochemical signals--play a key role in the development and spread of cancer. In the past, researchers have found that modeling stiff tissue environments in vitro promoted tumor growth.

But these models often do not fully recreate what's happening in the body because they are static, Engler noted. "Tissue stiffening is a dynamic process. Mammary tissue doesn't just start out stiff, this is something that develops over time," said Engler.

So Engler's approach was to use a material system in which the stiffness could be tuned dynamically while cells are inside, and then see how the cells respond to that change in stiffness.

"We're trying to mimic the process of fibrosis during the progression of tumor development," said Jesse Placone, a postdoctoral fellow in Engler's lab and a co-first author of the study. "As a tumor site forms, the local stiffness of the tissue increases. And by modeling this dynamic stiffness, our system is significantly more representative of what happens in vivo."

The team used a hydrogel called methacrylated hyaluronic acid, a soft material that can be stiffened to varying degrees with exposure to free radicals and UV light. They first stiffened the hydrogel enough to mimic the stiffness of normal breast tissue. Then, they cultured mammary epithelial cells in the gel. After the cells matured, the gel's stiffness was increased to that of a breast tumor. The amount of UV exposure required in this step was not enough to harm the cells, the team noted.

They discovered that stiffening triggers multiple pathways that together signal mammary cells to become cancerous. Key players of these pathways include the proteins TWIST1, TGF-beta, SMAD and YAP.

"In a dynamic environment, we found that these different pathways act cooperatively. It's not enough to inhibit just one of those pathways as was previously shown in studies modeling static, stiff environments," said Engler. "From a clinical perspective, this suggests that a single drug approach may not work for all patients with breast cancer tumors."

The team also discovered that a subpopulation of mammary cells do not respond to stiffening. Engler says this is good news for women as fewer cells than previously thought may turn into cancer as a result of the environment alone. Such a result, if it translates to patients, could mean fewer or smaller primary tumors.

The team next plans to explore drug candidates to inhibit the pathways and study their effects on tumor progression. This research was done primarily on genetically controlled cell lines, so the team will follow up with studies on patient-derived cell lines.

Although moderately mobile, marine cone snails have perfected several strategies to capture prey. Some fish-hunting species release venom into the surrounding water. Within the plume of toxic venom, the fish succumbs to fast-acting insulin that renders it immobile. As the fish flounders, the snail emerges from its shell to swallow the pacified victim whole.

Researchers at University of Utah Health detailed the function of cone snail insulins, bringing them one step closer to developing a faster-acting insulin to treat diabetes. The results of the study are available in the February 12 issue of the journal eLife.

"These snails have developed a strategy to hit and subdue their prey with up to 200 different compounds, one of which is insulin," said Helena Safavi-Hemami, Ph.D., assistant professor of Biochemistry at U of U Health and senior author on the paper. "Every now and then, we learn something unique from nature and millions of years of evolution."

Insulin, a hormone produced by the pancreas to regulate blood sugar, consists of two segments called A and B chains. The B cluster forms dimers and hexamers that allow the pancreas to store the hormone for later use. This segment is also necessary to activate the insulin receptors that signal the body to take up sugar from the blood. Insulin must undergo several conversions to decluster before it can lower blood sugar.

A person with type 1 diabetes is unable to produce insulin and requires daily injections to manage their blood sugar. Despite decades of research, the manufactured insulin continues to contain the B chain in order to activate the receptor to lower blood sugar, delaying the drug's effect by 30-90 minutes.

Safavi-Hemami and her team examined the function of seven insulin sequences found in the venom from three species of cone snailConus geographus, C. tulipa and C. kinoshitai. Unexpectedly, each species produces insulin with slightly different structures. Despite these differences, each insulin is fast-acting because it lacks the sticky part of the B chain found in human insulin.

"Evolution may be the driving force to increase the molecular diversity of the toxin molecules that the cone snail species use for hunting prey," said Danny Hung-Chieh Chou, Ph.D., assistant professor of Biochemistry at U of U Health and a co-author on the paper.

The team tested how each of the insulin sequences lowered blood sugar in zebrafish and mice. The model animals were treated with streptozotocin to induce symptoms of type 1 diabetes before the animals were dosed with the different synthesized insulins.

Safavi-Hemami found three of the venom-generated insulin sequences (Con-Ins T1A from C. tulipa, Con-Ins G1 from C. geographus and Con-Ins K1 from C. kinoshitai) lowered blood sugar effectively. Using cell lines, they found the cone snail insulin sequences were able to bind to and activate the human insulin receptor, despite missing the part of the B chain found in human insulin. These sequences, however, are 10 to 20 times less potent than human insulin.

According to Safavi-Hemami, each unique configuration provides the research team a slightly different template to consider when designing new drugs that act quickly and effectively.

"We are beginning to uncover the secrets of cone snails," said Safavi-Hemami. "We hope to use what we learn to find new approaches to treat diabetes."

New research from King's College London, published today in The BMJ, shows that electronically-delivered prescribing feedback and online decision support for GPs reduces unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions for respiratory illness.

NHS prescribing data show that UK GPs prescribe approximately 1.8 million courses of antibiotics every month to treat respiratory infections such as coughs, colds, bronchitis, otitis media, sinusitis and sore throat, at a cost of about £9 million[1]. Antimicrobial resistant infections currently claim at least 50,000 lives each year across Europe and the US alone and 700,000 globally[1][1]. These figures are set to rise to an estimated 10 million deaths per year by 2050 which would represent a greater death toll than cancer and diabetes combined.

The team from King's College London's School of Population Health & Environmental Sciences conducted a year-long trial including 79 general practices across the UK. GPs in the intervention trial arm received a short training webinar, monthly feedback reports of their antibiotic prescribing for respiratory illness and online access to decision support materials. The trial analysed the anonymised electronic health records of more than 500,000 patients.

Results showed that antibiotic prescribing was reduced by 12% overall with one antibiotic prescription avoided for every 62 patients aged 15 to 85 years. There was no evidence that serious bacterial complications, including pneumonia or scarlet fever, were increased. GPs did not reduce antibiotic prescribing to children (under 15 years) or to older adults (85 years and older). The authors note that antibiotic prescribing in these groups requires further evaluation.

Decision support tools included information leaflets for patients and carers on the expected duration of symptoms, recommendations for self-care and guidance on when to seek help again if needed. They also reminded GPs when antibiotics should and should not be prescribed.

Lead author Professor Martin Gulliford, Professor of Public Health at King's College London said: "Misuse of antibiotics is putting us all at risk. Taking antibiotics when they are not needed is leading to the emergence of resistant infections that can be very difficult to treat.

"This trial showed that providing GPs with information about their use of antibiotics for respiratory illnesses led to a reduction in antibiotic use. If this approach is scaled up nationally, it could contribute to reducing the emergence of antibiotic resistance."

A new virtual tool could help planners choose the best places to install bikes lanes in cities.

The data-based tool builds on previous research at the University of Waterloo that validated the safety benefits of bike lanes for cyclists and motorists.

Collected using sensors and a handlebar camera as researchers cycled hundreds of kilometres in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, the data showed bike lanes virtually eliminate vehicles getting too close to cyclists when they pass them.

"Drivers aren't trying to scare cyclists or be inconsiderate," said Bruce Hellinga, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Waterloo. "In many cases, they just don't feel they can leave more space because of the geometry of the road and the proximity of other vehicles."

On two-lane roads without bike lanes, passing motorists got within a metre of cyclists 12 per cent of the time. With bike lanes, that number dropped to just .2 per cent.

On four-lane roads, unsafe passing dropped from almost six per cent with no bike lanes to .5 per cent with bikes lanes.

One metre of separation was used to distinguish safe passing from unsafe passing in the study because it is a legal requirement in some jurisdictions in North America.

The data is now being used to develop a transferrable software tool that predicts the number of unsafe passes on roads based on factors including traffic volume and flow.

That would help urban planners determine where bike lanes and other cycling infrastructure would be most beneficial.

"It's not about giving something to cyclists and taking something away from motorists," Hellinga said. "It's about putting in infrastructure to reduce stress levels and improve safety for both."

The research was motivated by Hellinga's own experiences cycling to work.

"I got frustrated by what I perceived as vehicles getting too close to me," Hellinga said. "You feel very vulnerable when a vehicle comes within what feels like mere centimetres."

In addition to improving safety, he said bike lanes make cyclists more comfortable and therefore more likely to cycle.

Hellinga collaborated with graduate student Kushal Mehta and former postdoctoral fellow Babak Mehran.

Their paper on a predictive model, A methodology to estimate the number of unsafe vehicle-cyclist passing events on urban arterials, appears in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention.

Identity formation is a major developmental task in adolescence but continues throughout adulthood. Significant individual differences, however, emerge. The long-term role of personal styles for predicting identity stability and change during midlife at ages 36, 42 and 50 was assessed in a longitudinal study of Finnish women and men.

Personality styles identified at age 27 were defined as an organized whole of an individual's personality characteristics, life attitudes, and everyday activities. Identity differences emerged between the personal style clusters across ages for both women and men.

In women, the Individuated group with high intellectual interests and extensive education had consistently high identity achievement scores, while the more conventional, family-oriented female group, called Traditionals, was characterized by identity foreclosure in young adulthood. These differences leveled off by age 50. Identity achievement remained low throughout adulthood in the conflicted female group called the Brittles.

In men, ego resilience combined with high reflectiveness and positive life attitudes was associated with high identity achievement. Against expectations, at the opposite pole identity stagnation emerged in Overcontrolled men, defined as adaptive and socially well integrated at age 27.

"Their high introversion and low reflectiveness seemed to be detrimental to optimal identity development," explains Dr. Päivi Fadjukoff from University of Jyväskylä.

The most ambiguous identity patterns emerged in the conflicted, the Undercontrolled male group, characterized at age 27 by externalizing problems, high exploration, and low conscientiousness. Their positive trend of rapid identity achievement increase up to age 42 was abruptly replaced by a sudden reverse trend toward higher diffusion by age 50.

"Future research is needed to elaborate and substantiate this finding. The undercontrolled men may be specifically vulnerable to environmental changes such as economic circumstances," Dr. Fadjukoff ponders. "Thus, our research highlights distinctive challenges in both the undercontrolled and overcontrolled groups. A strong sense of identity is an important element of wellbeing and should also be supported in adulthood."

The detection of physical forces is one of the most complex challenges facing science. Although Newton's apple has long solved the problem of gravity, imaging the physical forces that act in living cells remains one of the main mysteries of current biology. Considered to play a decisive role in many biological processes, the chemical tools to visualize the physical forces in action do not exist. But today, researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) in Chemical Biology, Switzerland, have developed probes inspired by lobster cooking, they enable to enter into cells. For the first time, physical forces can be imaged live inside the cells. These results, a turning point in the study of life sciences, can be found in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Since its creation in 2010, one of the central objectives of the NCCR Chemical Biology has been to solve the problem of detecting cellular physical forces. "Our approach to creating tension probes was inspired by the color change of shrimp, crabs or lobsters during cooking," says Stefan Matile, Professor in the Department of Organic Chemistry at the Faculty of Science of the UNIGE and member of the NCCR. In live shrimp, the physical forces of the surrounding proteins flatten and polarize the carotenoid pigment, called astaxanthin, until it turns blue. "During cooking, these proteins are unfolded and the lobster pigment can regain its natural dark orange color," continues the Geneva chemist. Intrigued by these crustaceans, the development of fluorescent probes operating on the same principle of planarization and polarization required about eight years of research.

External force probes have proven their worth

Last year, the NCCR teams finally produced the first fluorescent probe capable of imaging the forces acting on the outer membrane, called the plasma membrane, of living cells. Requests for samples from more than 50 laboratories around the world came in immediate response to the release of these results, demonstrating the importance of this breakthrough for life sciences. To meet this demand, UNIGE's force probes were launched under the Flipper-TR® brand at the end of last year.

What about the internal forces of the cells?

The study of forces that apply outside the cells is not limited to chemical tools for fluorescence imaging. Cellular surfaces are accessible to physical tools like micropipettes, optical clamps, cantilevers of atomic force microscopes, etc. "But these physical tools are obviously not applicable to the study of forces within cells," says Aurélien Roux, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the Faculty of Science of the UNIGE and a member of the NCCR. "Organelles such as mitochondria, responsible for energy production; endoplasmic reticulum, responsible for protein synthesis; endosomes, responsible for trafficking material to and within cells; or the nucleus, which stores genetic information, are simply beyond the reach of physical tools from outside." Until today visualization of the forces that operate and control these organelles inside the cells was still impossible, although essential to understand their function!

This fundamental challenge in the life sciences is now being met. The NCCR team, led by Stefan Matile, Aurélien Roux and Suliana Manley, professor at the EPFL Institute of Physics, also member of the NCCR, succeeded in getting their force probes into the cells and selectively marking the various organelles. They are now able to show, for example, how tension rises in the mitochondria that are beginning to divide. "For the very first time, physical forces can be imaged live inside the cells," enthuses Aurélien Roux. This new chemistry tool finally allows scientists to achieve what they have wanted to do for a very long time. "These new probes now offer us the opportunity to tackle mechanobiology and revolutionize the study of life sciences," concludes Stefan Matile.

Empty homes tax has the potential to generate income for local governments, reduce demand from foreign investors and increase housing affordability, a study suggests.

Housing affordability has decreased substantially in the UK between 1997 and 2016, due to a rapid increase in prices relative to earnings. This may be due in part to ownership of properties by foreign investors in cities such as London, or second home ownership by British citizens in rural areas, reducing the availability of affordable housing for local residents.

Researcher Jonathan Bourne at University College London investigated the relationship between the percentage of properties which do not have a permanent resident (low-use properties), and housing affordability in different parts of England and Wales. His findings are published in the journal Palgrave Communications, which is part of the Springer Nature portfolio.

"One of the goals of this research was to get an idea of the fraction of the population of England and Wales living in areas where low-use properties are more expensive than homes occupied by full time residents, which suggests that the most desirable properties are being bought for purposes other than use as a home, for example as investment opportunities or holiday homes," Bourne explained.

"Some of the most surprising findings were the sheer value and quantity of low-use properties in some areas, amounting to £21 billion in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea alone, and £123 billion in the entire dataset. We estimate that in England and Wales, 39-47% of the population lives in areas where low-use properties are more expensive than permanently-occupied homes."

The researcher collected data from 112 local authorities, representing 32% of total local authorities in England and Wales, and covering 40% of the population of England and Wales (23.2 million people). This dataset included 340,000 low-use properties. Analysis revealed that low-use properties were worth £363,000 on average, which is 18.5% more expensive than the average home (£306,000). This was the case for the majority of properties included in
the dataset.

Bourne also aimed to identify areas that could be responsive to one of two ways of reducing house prices; increasing the supply of housing, or decreasing property demand, for example by introducing an empty homes tax.

The author said: "The data shows that low-use properties are very concentrated in small numbers of desirable areas. In such cases simply building more homes is not going to solve the problem, as the issue is intense competition for property, not a lack of places to live. An empty homes tax may be more effective, with the potential to generate a not inconsiderable income for local authorities, whilst taxing people who are typically not eligible to vote in local elections, or encouraging them to rent out their properties."

Based on these findings and the current council tax base, the author suggests that an empty homes tax of 1% would raise an additional £1.2 billion in taxes, which is equivalent to 11% of the council tax currently collected in the areas included in the dataset. An empty homes tax has been applied to domestic properties with no regular occupant by the city of Vancouver since 2018.

The author cautions that the empty homes tax would not be evenly distributed: "There are substantial differences in how much income individual areas would gain from an empty homes tax. For example, for individual boroughs in London, while the City of London would gain an additional £2100 per resident - the equivalent to 260% of current council tax - the boroughs of Kensington and Chelsea, and Barking and Dagenham would raise an additional £2000 per resident (201% of current council tax), and £3.60 per resident (1% of the current council tax), respectively."

The study shows that it is possible to provide a detailed analysis of housing at a local and national level using publicly available data. The method developed here could be implemented for the UK and other countries to help inform housing policy, according to the author.

Many men with low-risk prostate cancer who most likely previously would have undergone immediate surgery or radiation are now adopting a more conservative "active surveillance" strategy, according to an analysis of a new federal database by scientists from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

The use of active surveillance increased from 14.5 percent to 42.1 percent of men with low-risk prostate cancer between 2010 and 2015, said the researchers, led by Brandon Mahal, MD, from the department of radiation oncology at Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center who led the study published by JAMA.

During that same period, the percentage of men undergoing radical prostatectomy (removal of the prostate gland) declined from 47.4 percent to 31.3 percent. The use of radiotherapy for low-risk disease dropped from 38.0 percent to 26.6 percent.

"What we know from high level evidence is that conservative management of low-risk prostate cancer is associated with a very favorable prognosis," said Mahal. "Many men with low-risk disease are able to be spared the toxicity of treatment so it's an important discussion to have between clinicians and patients."

National guidelines advocating conservative management rather than immediate "definitive treatment" with surgery or radiotherapy were established in 2010 for men with low-risk prostate cancer. Low-risk disease is defined as a small tumor confined to the prostate gland that is assigned a grade of 6 on the Gleason scale following a biopsy; an early pathological stage, and a low PSA (prostate-specific antigen) blood level.

"This encouraging finding suggests that clinicians are better adhering to current recommendations and guidelines for men with low-risk prostate cancer, as the use of active surveillance in appropriately selected men will reduce rates of overtreatment," said Howard Soule, PhD, executive vice president and chief science officer of the Prostate Cancer Foundation.

Mahal said men with low-risk tumors have a "very, very low risk of dying" from prostate cancer, and that invasive treatments don't necessarily improve survival odds. In the current study, Mahal and his colleagues, including senior author Paul Nguyen, MD, a Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center radiation oncologist, made use of a federal database that for the first time specified whether patients made use of watchful waiting or active surveillance. (Patients adopting a watchful waiting approach are told to report symptoms such as changes in urinary habits, pain, or irritation, or bone pain that could reflect metastatic progression. Active surveillance involves periodic follow-up tests for PSA levels, repeat biopsies, and exams by a doctor every six to 12 months).

The study also revealed changes in treatment for high-risk prostate cancer from 2010 to 2015 - though the researchers were somewhat surprised by the findings. The use of radical prostatectomy increased from 38 percent to 42.8 percent during that period, while radiotherapy decreased from 60.1 percent to 55 percent.

"This shift in management patterns away from radiation therapy and toward more radical prostatectomy is not supported by any recent high-level studies," said Mahal. "This finding is provocative and may be a focal point of debate."

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), gestational diabetes affects an estimated 2 - 10% of pregnancies in the United States. If left untreated, gestational diabetes (GDM) can lead to pregnancy complications, including preterm birth, caesarean delivery and more.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommends that all pregnant women be screened for GDM. According to ACOG, routine screening for GDM should take place at 24 to 28 weeks gestation with earlier screening (at the initial prenatal visit) in women with certain risk factors, including obesity. To date, however, there have been no randomized control trials (RTC) that demonstrate early screening in obese women results in improved birth outcomes.

In a study to be presented on February 14, 2019, at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine's (SMFM) annual meeting, The Pregnancy Meeting™, researchers will unveil findings that suggest early screening for gestational diabetes in obese women does not lead to better birth outcomes as compared to screening done at the routine period. The research was funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shiver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

In the study, 959 obese pregnant women were randomized to two groups. The first group was screened between 14 - 20 weeks. The second group was screened at 24 - 28 weeks. A variety of birth outcomes were examined, including the rate of cesarean delivery, shoulder dystocia, hypertension, macrosomia, neonatal hypoglycemia, neonatal hyperbilirubinemia and more.

"The only notable difference between women in the early screening group and those in the routine screening group was an increase in the use of insulin in the early screening group," said Lorie M. Harper, MD, MSCI, lead author of the abstract and associate professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. While there are no significant harms associated with insulin use in pregnancy, it can be painful to inject and costly.

"Our study results suggest that early screening in obese women is not beneficial," said Harper. "Since this the was the first of its kind, additional studies are needed to assess early screening in a large, diverse population and the best screening thresholds to use early in pregnancy."

Every county in the United States tracks HIV cases, sequencing the virus' genome to see if it is resistant to current medications and looking for trends. More recently, local health departments and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have begun using those HIV genetic sequences to trace the virus' transmission history.

They can do that because the virus evolves quickly, with genetic variations arising frequently. This information allows researchers and public health officials to build transmission networks, clusters of people with genetically similar HIV. Transmission networks help determine which groups might be at increased risk for transmitting HIV, but they do not reveal who contracted the infection from whom.

Working with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine recently used this data to look for HIV infection trends in the region. They expected to find many transmission clusters with men who have sex with men, a group that makes up 62 percent of new HIV cases each year in the U.S., but they were surprised to find more transgender women (people assigned male at birth, but who identify as female) and heterosexual cisgender men (people who were assigned male at birth and identify as male) in these clusters than they had anticipated.

The findings, published February 11, 2019 in Lancet HIV, suggest transgender women are at higher risk of being in an HIV transmission network than men who have sex with men. In addition, cisgender men in these clusters should be considered at higher risk for HIV than previously thought.

"This is a pattern of HIV transmission that we didn't know about before, and the information could help us slow the spread of the virus," said senior author Joel Wertheim, PhD, assistant professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at UC San Diego School of Medicine. "For example, this type of information could help public health officials tailor their efforts within the transgender community, hopefully allowing them to diagnose people living with HIV, connect more diagnosed people with the care they need, and help people at high risk get access to preventative medications."

Wertheim led the study with first author Manon Ragonnet-Cronin, PhD, who was a postdoctoral researcher in his group at the time of the study.

The proportion of transgender women with HIV is 27.7 percent in the U.S. and, in addition, transgender women are known to have high rates of undiagnosed infections. Yet, according to the Wertheim and Ragonnet-Cronin, HIV transmission networks for transgender women have never before been studied.

The researchers found that transgender women in Los Angeles County were distributed across 126 HIV transmission clusters. These women were very likely to cluster with each other (i.e., be linked to at least one other transgender woman), indicating shared risk activities, such as sex with each other or with shared partners. Transgender women were also linked to more cisgender men than expected.

This approach allowed the researchers to characterize the partners of transgender women across the entire county.

"This is about prioritizing limited resources," Wertheim said. "If your goal is to improve public health, especially among the underserved and high-risk populations, these results provide a guide for a better way to do that."

Now Wertheim is working with the CDC and public health departments in Chicago, New York City and Houston to employ this same molecular epidemiology approach to identify local groups at highest risk for HIV, and greatest need for intervention and support.

Study co-authors include: Sheldon R. Morris, UC San Diego; Yunyin W. Hu, Zhijuan Sheng and Kathleen Poortinga, Department of Public Health, Los Angeles County.

Love can make us do crazy things. It often prompts us to behave in counterintuitive ways, like, for example, placing the wellbeing of our loved ones above our own.

But why?

Such altruism has perplexed and intrigued scientists for centuries. A new study out of UC Santa Barbara explores how an individual's genetics and brain activity correlate with altruistic behaviors directed toward romantic partners. The team found that pathways related to bonding in other animals showed up in humans, and may be involved in altruism more generally. The results appear in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience.

Scientists currently think that altruism evolved in social species as a strategy for ensuring the survival of relatives. The idea is that genes that promote altruism will persist, perhaps not through an individual's children but through those of their kin, who carry similar genetics. In this way, providing for your relatives ensures some of your own genes are passed down.

For humans, with our complex social systems, this basic premise takes on new dimensions. "It would make sense that people would be particularly invested in the wellbeing of their partners because they want to live long, happy, healthy lives together," said Bianca Acevedo, a research scientist at UC Santa Barbara's Neuroscience Research Institute, and the paper's lead author. "And in the case of newlyweds, some of them will want to have children. So being selfless towards their partner is an investment in their offspring."

Altruism is an important aspect of pair bonding, but according to Acevedo, it hasn't been examined much -- especially when compared to the bond between parents and their children, where altruism is critical. "Responding to a child in a selfless way is such an important piece of care-giving," said Acevedo.

Phenomena as nuanced as love and altruism involve a lot of chemistry. Oxytocin is a neurotransmitter that has taken hold in popular consciousness as the "cuddle hormone." And while it's involved in a variety of processes, it's role in trust, empathy and bonding is well established. Less well known is the hormone vasopressin, which scientists have also connected with pair bond behaviors.

Acevedo's team recruited newlywed couples to investigate how a person's genetics and brain activity correlate with the empathy they show toward their romantic partner. The team tested each participant for two genetic variants, one involved in oxytocin sensitivity and another connected to vasopressin sensitivity. The researchers then had them respond to a standardized questionnaire asking about their feelings toward their partner and other individuals. This gave them a measurement of each person's general levels of empathy and altruism toward their partner.

Then the participants entered a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. Though similar to the standard MRI machines doctors use to image soft tissue, fMRIs can track changes associated with blood flow. This allows researchers to see how different parts of the brain activate in response to different types of stimuli. In this case, participants were shown pictures of their romantic partners, friends and strangers with different facial expressions. The researchers explained what the person in the picture was feeling and why, in order to elicit an emotional response.

When participants felt a strong sense of empathy with the person in the picture, regions of the brain associated with emotion and emotional memory lit up. "It's almost like the brain is responding in a way that signals, 'this is important, pay attention,'" said Acevedo.

These areas of the brain -- like the amygdala and ventral pallidum -- have a particularly dense concentration of receptors for oxytocin and vasopressin, further implicating these neurotransmitters in empathy and altruism. What's more, individuals with genetic variations that made them more sensitive to these hormones exhibited stronger emotional responses across the board.

The researchers also found that brain regions that activated specifically in response to a partner's face were the same regions that are critical in other animals during studies of pair bonding and attachment. This suggests that our brains have pathways devoted specifically to attachment-related behaviors, pathways which may be quite old. However, some of these attachment pathways showed activity even when participants saw strangers' faces, providing evidence of the intricate notions of empathy and altruism at play in humans.

Acevedo is continuing to investigate empathy, altruism and care-giving in different types of couples. She's currently exploring how mind-body activities like yoga influence how individuals respond to partners struggling with memory problems.

"It's important that we're thinking about these systems and these behaviors beyond romance," said Acevedo. "When people think about relationships, they tend to think of romantic love as being really important. But we've forgotten some of the other basic and important reasons that people are together, like to take care of each other.

"Beyond romantic love, we live long lives together. Many of us raise children together, or take care of each other into old age," continued Acevedo. "And altruism is deeply rooted in our evolutionary, neural and genetic framework."

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. - The quality of your marriage could be affected by your genes, according to new research conducted at Binghamton University, State University of New York.

A research team led by Binghamton University Associate Professor of Psychology Richard Mattson evaluated whether different genotypes (i.e., possible genetic combinations) of the Oxytocin Receptor gene (OXTR) influenced how spouses support one another, which is a key determinant of overall marital quality. OXTR was targeted because it is related to the regulation and release of oxytocin, which is a hormone associated with feeling love and attachment. Oxytocin also appears to be relevant to social cognition and a wide range of social behavior.

"Prior research has hinted that marital quality is, at least partially, impacted by genetic factors, and that oxytocin may be relevant to social support -- a critical aspect of intimate partnerships," said Mattson. "However, we are the first to provide evidence that variation on specific genes related to oxytocin functioning impact overall marital quality, in part, because they are relevant to how partners provide and receive support from each other."

The research team, which included Binghamton's Matthew D. Johnson and Nicole Cameron, recruited 79 couples. Each partner was asked individually to come up with an issue to discuss involving something they identify as their most salient personal problem that was not related to their partner or partner's family (e.g., problems at work). The selected topics were discussed for 10 minutes, recorded, and later coded for how support was provided and received by each partner. Couples were also asked to separately respond to several questionnaires, including the index of perceived quality of support during the prior interaction, and saliva samples for genotyping were taken at the end of the study session.

The team's findings highlight that particular genes may impact marital quality by influencing important relational processes, but that context shapes when particular genotypes are more or less beneficial to the marriage.

"We found that variation at two particular locations on OXTR impacted the observed behaviors of both husbands and wives, and that differences in behavior across couples had small but cumulative effects on overall evaluations of support, and thus marital quality in general," said Mattson. "However, what emerged as most relevant to overall marital quality for both partners was genotypic variation among husbands at a specific location on OXTR. Husbands with a particular genotype, which other researchers associated with signs of social deficits, were less satisfied with the support they were provided. Being less satisfied with the support they got from their wives was also associated with being less satisfied with their marriage.

The researchers hope their findings provide the foundation for replication and additional study of OXTR as an enduring determinant of marital functioning, as well as encourage research more broadly evaluating the role of genetic factors in interpersonal processes important to overall marital quality.

"Genes matter when it comes to the quality of marriage, because genes are relevant to who we are as individuals, and characteristics of the individual can impact the marriage," said Mattson. "Our findings were the first to describe a set of genetic and behavioral mechanisms for one possible route of the genetic influence on marriage. In addition, we added to the increasing awareness that the expression of genotypic variation differs greatly depending on context."