Culture

Small suppliers who believe they are fairly treated by big supermarkets will put more resources into their relationship with buyers and perform better, according to academics at the University of East Anglia (UEA).

The research explored the concept of relational justice, specifically how small-scale food and drink producers perceive their treatment by 'key customers' - in this case supermarkets - and the impact this has on their allocation of resources and business performance.

Published in Supply Chain Management: an International Journal, the findings show that the way supermarket buyers treat their suppliers matters more for their suppliers' performance than their status as key customers.

The study also suggests that the length of time a small producer has been supplying a supermarket makes no difference to how they perceive their treatment. Rather, suppliers form their perceptions of fairness relatively quickly, so buyers should establish good relationships from the outset when taking on new producers, particularly when they are small business with limited resources.

Researchers Dr Ricardo Santana and Prof Andrew Fearne, of UEA's Norwich Business School, say the findings are highly relevant given the increasing scrutiny of supermarket buyer behaviour and its impact on suppliers.

"Positive and negative exchanges can have unexpected consequences that ultimately determine the health of a relationship and resulting performance outcomes," said Dr Santana. "Managing buyer-supplier relationships is, therefore, a challenging social task that involves tackling behavioural issues and power dynamics between the buyer and the supplier.

"Larger retailers should design strategies to enhance necessary elements of relational justice and should empower and encourage buyers and category managers to foster social elements, for example by offering the supplier the opportunity to provide input on decisions that affect the relationship, and fairly rewarding the suppliers who invest in the relationship by meeting standards and deadlines.

"Such strategies can help weaker suppliers feel that their voices are heard, concerns are addressed in the relationships, and their account managers are treated with dignity, courtesy, and respect."

Dr Santana added: "This study finds that such perceptions help suppliers perform better in their relationships with key customers, which eventually could be beneficial to the whole relationship and be in the holistic, long-term, interest of the supply chain."

Larger customers can establish commitment from suppliers at an early stage in their relationships, by respecting the principles of relational justice in their dealings with suppliers.

The authors say such principles can be easily incorporated into personal development plans of retail buyers, and their adherence easily measured through supplier assessments.

Prof Fearne said the conduct of suppliers was also important:
"In the highly competitive environment of fast-moving consumer goods, it is not purely down to the behaviour of the buyers. It's also about the way you as the supplier behave.

"All suppliers, whether old or new, need to stand out from the crowd. This is particularly important as retailers are having to rationalise their ranges so they can do better deals and make it easier for customers to shop. Market power has diminished as customers are talking with their pockets."

Prof Fearne added: "There are suppliers who invest significant resources in their key customers, such as a big supermarket, and in return they get treated fairly by the buyers, so they can perform better than those who don't recognise the importance of good customer service.

"We need smaller businesses to behave like big companies and we have found evidence of suppliers doing better when they are pro-active in managing their customer relationships. If you provide good customer support, buyers will support you in return and will listen when you've got problems."

Most of the birds you've ever seen--sparrows, finches, robins, crows--have one crucial thing in common: they're all what scientists refer to as perching birds, or "passerines." The passerines make up about 6,500 of the 10,000 bird species alive today. But while they're everywhere now, they were once rare, and scientists are still learning about their origins. In a new paper in Current Biology, researchers have announced the discovery of one of the earliest known passerine birds, from 52 million years ago.

"This is one of the earliest known perching birds. It's fascinating because passerines today make up most of all bird species, but they were extremely rare back then. This particular piece is just exquisite," says Field Museum Neguanee Distinguished Service Curator Lance Grande, an author of the paper. "It is a complete skeleton with the feathers still attached, which is extremely rare in the fossil record of birds."

The paper describes two new fossil bird species--one from Germany that lived 47 million years ago, and another that lived in what's now Wyoming 52 million years ago, a period known as the Early Eocene. The Wyoming bird, Eofringillirostrum boudreauxi, is the earliest example of a bird with a finch-like beak, similar to today's sparrows and finches. This legacy is reflected in its name; Eofringilllirostrum means "dawn finch beak." (Meanwhile, boudreauxi is a nod to Terry and Gail Boudreaux, longtime supporters of science at the Field Museum.)"

The fossil birds' finch-like, thick beaks hint at their diet. "These bills are particularly well-suited for consuming small, hard seeds," says Daniel Ksepka, the paper's lead author, curator at the Bruce Museum in Connecticut. Anyone with a birdfeeder knows that lots of birds are nuts for seeds, but seed-eating is a fairly recent biological phenomenon. "The earliest birds probably ate insects and fish, some may have been eating small lizards," says Grande. "Until this discovery, we did not know much about the ecology of early passerines. E. boudreauxi gives us an important look at this."

"We were able to show that a comparable diversity of bill types already developed in the Eocene in very early ancestors of passerines," says co-author Gerald Mayr of the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt. "The great distance between the two fossil sites implies that these birds were widespread during the Eocene, while the scarcity of known fossils suggests a rather low number of individuals," adds Ksepka.

While passerine birds were rare 52 million years ago, E. boudreauxi had the good luck to live and die near Fossil Lake, a site famous for perfect fossilization conditions.

"Fossil Lake is a really graphic picture of an entire community locked in stone--it has everything from fishes and crocs to insects, pollen, reptiles, birds, and early mammals," says Grande. "We have spent so much time excavating this locality, that we have a record of even the very rare things."

Grande notes that Fossil Lake provides a unique look at the ancient world--one of the most detailed pictures of life on Earth after the extinction of the dinosaurs (minus the birds) 65 million years ago. "Knowing what happened in the past gives us a better understanding of the present and may help us figure out where we are going for the future."

With that in mind, Grande plans to continue his exploration of the locale. "I've been going to Fossil Lake every year for the last 35 years, and finding this bird is one of the reasons I keep going back. It's so rich," says Grande. "We keep finding things that no one's ever seen before."

WASHINGTON, Feb. 7, 2019 -- Today, we're showing our love for white chocolate. Sure, it lacks the rich flavor of milk chocolate and the glossy brown color of dark chocolate. And many people even argue it's not really chocolate at all. But in this Reactions video, we show you all there is to love about this creamy pale confection: https://youtu.be/4qI8qbfTkys.

CRISPR is a technique that is revolutionizing biomedical research through high-precision genome editing. However, even though it allows the creation or correction of mutations consisting of a single or few nucleotides with relative ease, it still possesses limitations upon introducing larger fragments of DNA in the genome. For instance, the genomic insertion of a gene that produces a fluorescent protein such as the widely-used GFP suffers from poor efficiency and involves complicated cloning steps.

The group of Dr. Cerón at the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) used the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans to optimize the technique, leading to the development of the method called Nested CRISPR. This cloning-free method involves the insertion of long DNA fragments in two steps. In the first step, a small portion (less than 200 nucleotides) of the long fragment is inserted in the genome. During the second step, this small fragment then serves as a "nest" or "landing pad" for the efficient insertion of the longer fragment (of approximately one kilobase).

This recently published work in Genetics, a journal of the Genetics Society of America, is spawning unprecedented interest and has achieved the highest rating in terms of the journal's attention score. Model organisms with a short life cycle such as C. elegans enable researchers to explore both the possibilities and limitations of CRISPR. This work is part of the doctoral thesis of Jeremy Vicencio, awarded with the prestigious INPhINIT fellowship by La Caixa. Jeremy, together with predoctoral researchers Carmen Martínez and Xènia Serrat, have performed hundreds of microinjections in the C. elegans germline and thousands of genotypings to solidly and convincingly demonstrate the efficiency of the new technique, Nested CRISPR.

As DNA molecules for repair, Nested CRISPR utilizes commercial oligonucleotides for the first step and universal PCR products for the second. This facilitates large-scale experiments by making it possible to tag hundreds of genes with fluorescent proteins. Moreover, since Nested CRISPR is modular, additional peptides or proteins of interest can also be integrated in combination with these fluorescent proteins. For example, the group is currently working on the tagging of these fluorescent proteins with peptides that allow their degradation in a controlled manner.

Finally, the modeling diseases in C. elegans group directed by Dr. Cerón at IDIBELL intends to use Nested CRISPR to replace genes in C. elegans with their human counterparts. This would prompt the use of this small nematode as a multicellular model for studying the effect of human mutations that are associated with disease. This system would be of substantial interest in the field of personalized medicine since it could rapidly and efficiently provide a prognosis regarding the pathogenicity of a mutation or genomic variation (known as polymorphisms).

Glenview, Illinois - The American College of Chest Physicians® (CHEST) announced the publication of updates to the evidence-based guidelines on therapy for pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). PAH is a progressive disease that affects the small arteries in the lungs, which can lead to right-sided heart failure and death. There is no cure for PAH; there are several medications approved for the treatment of the disease. In the latest evidence-based guideline, Therapy for Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension in Adults: Update of the CHEST Guideline and Expert Panel Report, experts provide 78 evidence-based recommendations for appropriate use in treating patients with PAH.

"New recommendations and ungraded consensus-based statements were developed in this update based on new studies that were published since the 2014 guidelines. In addition, an evidence-based and consensus-driven treatment algorithm was created to guide the clinician through an organized approach to management," says CHEST Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension Guidelines Committee Co-Chair, Dr. Deborah Jo Levine.

As part of the guideline development process, the panel updated the systematic review on the same clinical questions and criteria. Based on the results of the systematic review, the panel developed two new recommendations about pharmacologic therapy for PAH:

* For treatment-naive patients with PAH who are World Health Organization (WHO) functional class II and III, we suggest initial combination therapy with ambrisentan and tadalafil to improve six-minute walk distance (6MWD).

* For stable or symptomatic patients with PAH on background therapy with ambrisentan, we suggest the addition of tadalafil to improve 6MWD.

The complete guideline article is free to view in the Online First section of the journal CHEST®.

A building's architectural plans map out what's needed to keep it from falling down. But design is not just functional: often, it's also beautiful, with lines and shapes that can amaze and inspire.

Beautifully crafted architecture isn't limited to human-made structures. Nature is rife with ornate structures, from the spiraling fractal patterns of seashells to the intricately woven array of neurons in the brain.

The microscopic world contains its fair share of intricate patterns and designs, such as the geometric patterns on individual grains of pollen. Scientists have been fascinated by these intricate structures, which are smaller than the width of a human hair, but have yet to determine how these patterns form and why they look the way they do.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Physics & Astronomy have developed a model that describes how these patterns form, and how pollen evolved into a diverse range of structures. Graduate student Asja Radja was the first author of the study, and worked with fellow graduate student Eric M. Horsley and former postdoc Maxim O. Lavrentovich, who is now working at the University of Tennessee. The study was led by associate professor Alison Sweeney.

Radja analyzed pollen from hundreds of flowering plant species in a microscopy database, including iris, pigweed, amaranth, and bougainvillea. She then developed an experimental method that involved removing the external layer of polysaccharide "snot" from the pollen grains, and taking high-resolution microscopic images that revealed the ornate details of the pollen as they formed at a micrometer scale.

Sweeney and Radja's original hypothesis was that the pollen spheres are formed by a buckling mechanism. Buckling occurs when materials are strong on the outside but pliable on the inside, causing the structure to shrink inwards and form divots, or "buckles," on the surface. But the data they collected didn't align with their initial idea.

"Alison taught me that with any biological system, you have to really stare at it in order to figure out exactly what's going on," Radja says about the hours she spent studying pollen images. One of the key challenges with studying pollen was looking at the problem with a fresh perspective in order to think about what underlying physics could explain the structures.

The solution, published in Cell, represents the first theoretical physics-based framework for how pollen patterns form. The model states that pollen patterns occur by a process known as phase separation, which physicists have found can also generate geometric patterns in other systems. An everyday example of phase separation is the separation of cream from milk; when milk sits at room temperature, cream rises to the top naturally without any additional energy, like mixing or shaking.

Radja was able to show that the "default" tendency of developing pollen spores is to undergo a phase separation that then results in detailed and concave patterns. "These intricate patterns might actually just be a happy consequence of not putting any energy into the system," says Radja.

However, if plants pause this natural pattern-formation process by secreting a stiff polymer that prevents phase separation, for example, they can control the shapes that form. These plants tend to have pollen spores that are smoother and more spherical. Surprisingly, the smooth pollen grains, which require additional energy, occur more frequently than ornate grains, suggesting that smooth grains may provide an evolutionary advantage.

This biophysical framework will now enable researchers to study a much larger class of biological materials. Sweeney and her group will see if the same rules can explain much more intricate architectures in biology, like the bristles of insects or the cell walls of plants.

Sweeney's group is also working with materials engineer Shu Yang of Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science to develop pollen-inspired materials. "Materials that are like pollen often have super-hydrophobicity, so you can very intricately control how water will interact with the surface," says Sweeney. "What's cool about this mechanism is that it's passive; if you can mimic the way pollen forms, you can make polymers go where you want them to go on their own without having to do complicated engineering that's expensive and hard to replicate."

Facial recognition technology, being trialled by two major police forces in Britain, should be subjected to more rigorous testing and transparency, according to new research from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and Monash University.

Facial recognition technology (FRT) involves the identification of an individual based on an analysis of the geometric features of his or her face, and a comparison between the algorithm created from the captured image and one already stored, such as from a custody image or social media account. The technology was first tested in public gatherings in 2014, when Leicestershire Police trialled a 'Neoface' facial recognition system, later using the technology to identify 'known offenders' at a music festival with 90,000 concertgoers.

The Leicestershire Police and the other two forces trialling FRT - the Metropolitan Police Service and the South Wales Police - argue the technology is lawful and its use in surveillance operations is proportionate. But researchers from UEA and Monash University in Australia say the technology could violate human rights. They argue there has not been sufficient statistical information about the trials made publically available for scrutiny. The limited outcomes that have been shared, the researchers say, have shown high false-positive identification rates and a low number of positive matches with 'known offenders'.

Furthermore, the researchers say the trials are a costly use of public funds: £200,000 for the Met Police trials and £2.6 million for those run by the South Wales Police.

The research, led by Dr Joe Purshouse of the UEA School of Law, and Prof Liz Campbell of Monash University, will be published on February 8, 2019 in the journal Criminal Law Review.

Dr Purshouse, a lecturer in criminal law, said: "These FRT trials have been operating in a legal vacuum. There is currently no legal framework specifically regulating the police use of FRT.

"Parliament should set out rules governing the scope of the power of the police to deploy FRT surveillance in public spaces to ensure consistency across police forces. As it currently stands, police forces trialling FRT are left to come up with divergent, and sometimes troubling, policies and practices for the execution of their FRT operations."

A key concern of the researchers is around the 'watch list' databases of facial images assembled from lists of wanted suspects and missing persons, but also other 'persons of interest'. There is no legal prohibition of police forces taking images from the internet or social media accounts to populate the 'watch lists'.

Dr Purshouse and Prof Campbell say there is a risk that people with old or minor convictions could be targeted by FRT, as well as those with no convictions whose images are retained and used by police after an arrest that did not lead to a conviction.

The accuracy of the technology has been brought into question by the researchers, leading to concerns that some individuals might be disproportionately included on 'watch lists'. The limited independent testing and research into FRT technology indicates that numerous FRT systems misidentify ethnic minorities and women at higher rates than the rest of the population. A disproportionate number of custody images are of black and minority ethnic groups, and as these images are routinely used to populate FRT databases, there is a particular risk that members of the public from black or ethnic minority backgrounds will be mistakenly identified as 'persons of interest'.

Dr Purshouse said: "There appears to be a credible risk that FRT technology will undermine the legitimacy of the police in the eyes of already over-policed groups."

The police forces trialling FRT say the technology has been effective in preventing crime and ensuring public safety. The researchers say that currently there is no meaningful way of measuring success, but that the technology might be deterring those who could pose a threat to the public from attending gatherings where FRT surveillance is known to be in use.

The researchers say the use of FRT surveillance is on the rise without sufficient reflection on its aims and consequences. The ways in which it has the potential to interfere with citizens' privacy related rights are multifaceted and complex, and without a full understanding of this potential we cannot hope to adequately regulate this form of policing technology.

Dr Purshouse added: "Rather than gradually becoming a pervasive and chilling feature of public life, FRT surveillance should only be targeted against credible and serious threats to public safety."

Financial analysts whose surnames are perceived as favourable elicit stronger market reactions to their earnings forecasts, new research from Cass Business School has found.

The researchers found that following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, market reactions weakened for forecasts from analysts with Middle Eastern surnames. They also found that following the French and German governments' opposition to the US-led Iraq War, the US market reactions weakened for analysts with French or German surnames. This effect was stronger in firms with lower institutional ownership and for analysts with non-American first names.

The researchers measured surname favourability using the US historical immigration records to identify countries of origin associated with a particular surname and the Gallup survey data on Americans' favourability toward foreign countries.

Dr Jay Jung, assistant professor of accounting at Cass Business School, said surname favourability was not associated with forecast quality such as accuracy, bias, and timeliness but rather it suggested the investors made biased judgements based on their perception of analysts' surnames.

"Our finding is consistent with the prediction based on motivated reasoning that people have a natural desire to draw conclusions that they are motivated to reach. If investors have favourable views toward an analyst due to his or her surname, they are motivated to assess the analyst's forecasts as being more credible or of higher quality because it reduces the unpleasant inconsistency between their attitudes and judgments," said Dr Jung.

Dr Jung said surname favourability did have a complementary effect on analysts' career outcomes, helping analysts prosper in their profession.

"We found that, conditional on good forecasting performance, having a favourable surname made it more likely for an analyst to get elected as an All-Star analyst and survive in the profession when his or her brokerage house went out of business or went through a M&A (mergers and acquisition) process," he adds.

Dr Jung said surname favourability also had impact on price drifts in the stock market.

"The speed at which stock prices reacted to an analyst's forecasts was faster when the analyst had a favourable surname. We found significantly smaller delayed price responses."

Dr Jung said the research demonstrated that investors' perception of an analyst' surname not only influences their information processing in capital markets but also affects market efficiency and leads to different labour market consequences for finance professionals.

"It is quite interesting to see how the favorability of a surname, unrelated to the information content or quality of an analyst's forecast, influences investor reaction and price anomalies in the capital market."

For decades, scientists and doctors have known that bacteria in soil were capable of manufacturing streptozotocin, an antibiotic compound that is also an important treatment for certain types of pancreatic cancer.

What was less clear, however, was exactly how bacteria managed to do it.

Led by Emily Balskus, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, a team of researchers has untangled that process, showing for the first time that the compound is produced through an enzymatic pathway and revealing the novel chemistry that drives the process. The study is described in a February 7 paper published in Nature.

What makes the molecule such an effective anti-cancer agent, is a chemical structure known as a nitrosamine - what Balskus called the molecule's reactive "warhead."

Known to be highly reactive, nitrosamines have been shown to be toxic in a host of other compounds, and are most commonly known outside of cancer treatment as a carcinogens found in everything from tobacco to cured meats.

"This chemical motif has a great deal of biological relevance, and has been investigated thoroughly," Balskus said. "Until our work, the view of how this chemical motif was generated in biological systems involved non-enzymatic chemistry - it was just something that occurred under the right conditions."

Balskus and colleagues, however, suspected the story may be more complex, and set out to explore whether bacteria evolved a natural pathway to produce nitrosamine compounds.

"That's what we found in this paper," she explained. "We discovered the biosynthetic genes and the biosynthetic enzyme the bacteria use to build streptozotocin.

"And what that revealed was a big surprise in terms of how this functional group gets made," she continued. "Because it turns out it's made by an enzyme in a very different way than all other known routes to make nitrosamine. The reaction has very limited, if any, precedent in biological or synthetic chemistry."

What Balskus and colleagues found was an iron-dependent enzyme with two different domains, each of which catalyze different steps in the process.

"Both of these domains had been associated with other chemistry in enzymes, but in the context of this protein, both are doing things that are really new," Balskus said. "So overall, from a purely chemistry perspective, it's a very exciting enzyme."

It's equally exciting from a biological perspective, she added, because it shows for the first time that biology evolved a specific pathway for manufacturing nitrosamines.

"And when we search bacterial genomes for enzymes that look like this one, we see a lot of them, including some in gene clusters in human pathogens and in organisms that live in symbiosis with plants," Balskus said. "So it seems that we have underappreciated how nature might be using compounds like this. The discovery that there are dedicated enzymes for making this type of functional group, and the fact that it may be made by so many types of microbes suggest an important role for its biology."

Going forward, Balskus said, she is working with collaborators to understand how the enzyme works at the molecular level and to better understand the intermediate steps in the production of nitrosamine.

Balskus also hopes to investigate whether and how other bacteria - particularly human pathogens - rely on similar enzymes to produce compounds that are potentially toxic.

"The question we want to answer is whether this new type of enzyme is allowing human pathogens to do something that is damaging the host," she said. "Now that we've found these gene clusters, we can start to ask what these other N-nitrosamine containing compounds might be doing."

A new Journal of Applied Social Psychology study investigates the associations between workplace sexism, sense of belonging at work, mental health, and job satisfaction for women in male-dominated industries.

In the study of 190 women from a large Australian trade union that represented mainly male-dominated jobs, organizational sexism and interpersonal sexism were associated with a poorer sense of belonging in the industry, which was associated with poorer mental health. A poorer sense of belonging also explained the negative effect of organizational sexism on job satisfaction.

The results fit a theoretical model in which workplace sexism reduces sense of belonging because it represents a form of bullying, rejection, and ostracism by men against their female co-workers. This reduced sense of belonging then impacts negatively on women's mental health and job satisfaction due its association with feelings of loneliness and alienation.

"Strategies that integrate women more thoroughly into male-dominated industries and give them a better sense of belonging may help to increase their mental health and job satisfaction" said corresponding author Associated Professor Mark Rubin, of The University of Newcastle, Australia. "However, we also need better strategies to reduce sexism in the workplace if we are to tackle this problem at its root."

HONOLULU, Feb. 6, 2019 -- Intravenous (IV) insulin did not improve stroke outcomes compared to standard blood sugar (glucose) control using insulin shots - answering a worldwide debate about the best way to control glucose in stroke patients. These primary late-breaking findings were presented at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2019, a world premier meeting for researchers and clinicians dedicated to the science and treatment of cerebrovascular disease.

Hyperglycemia, or increased glucose, is common in patients with acute ischemic stroke and is associated with poor recovery. There is a worldwide debate about the best way to control glucose levels in these patients.

The Stroke Hyperglycemia Insulin Network Effort (SHINE) study assessed the efficacy and safety of up to 72 hours of glucose control using continuous intravenous insulin infusion versus standard subcutaneous insulin injections in a multicenter, randomized, controlled trial of 1,151 patients enrolled at 63 sites across the United States.

Primary findings showed:

Intense glucose therapy via IV insulin, which lowers glucose to a target of 80-130 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL), does not improve functional outcomes at 90 days compared to standard glucose control using insulin shots, which aims to lower glucose below 180 mg/dL.

In addition, intense glucose therapy increases the risk of very low blood glucose (hypoglycemia) and requires more resources such as increased supervision from nursing staff.

"This study provides clear evidence to guide the control of glucose levels in patients experiencing acute ischemic stroke and hyperglycemia, or increased glucose," said Karen C. Johnston, M.D., M.Sc., professor of neurology and associate vice president for Clinical & Translational Research at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Co-authors and disclosures are noted on the abstract.

The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) funded the study.

Note: Scientific presentation is 11:23 a.m. Hawaii Time/4:23 p.m. Eastern Time, Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2019.

When researchers say they have sequenced the human genome, there is a caveat to this statement: a lot of the human genome is sequenced and assembled, but there are regions that are full of repetitive elements, making them difficult to map. One piece that is notoriously difficult to sequence is the Y chromosome.

Now, researchers from the University of Rochester have found a way to sequence a large portion of the Y chromosome in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster--the most that the Y chromosome has been assembled in fruit flies. The research, published in the journal Genetics, provides new insights into the processes that shape the Y chromosome, "and adds to the evidence that, far from a genetic wasteland, Y chromosomes are highly dynamic and have mechanisms to acquire and maintain genes," says Amanda Larracuente, an assistant professor of biology at Rochester.

THE NOTORIOUS Y CHROMOSOME

Y chromosomes are sex chromosomes in males that are transmitted from father to son; they can be important for male fertility and sex determination in many species. Even though fruit fly and mammalian Y chromosomes have different evolutionary origins, they have parallel genome structures, says Larracuente, who co-authored the paper with her PhD student Ching-Ho Chang. "Drosophila melanogaster is a premier model organism for genetics and genomics, and has perhaps the best genome assembly of any animal. Despite these resources, we know very little about the organization of the Drosophila Y chromosome because most of it is missing from the genome assembly."

That's in part because most Y chromosomes do not undergo standard recombination. Typically, genes from the mother and father are shuffled--or, "cross over"--to produce a genetic combination unique to each offspring. But the Y chromosome does not undergo crossing over, and, as a result, its genes tend to degenerate, while repetitive DNA sequences accumulate.

SEQUENCING VS. ASSEMBLING

Each chromosome is made up of DNA. When mapping a genome, traditional sequencing methods chop up strands of DNA and read--or sequence--them, then try to infer the order of those sequences and assemble them back together.

But, "there is a difference between sequencing a genome and assembling a genome," Larracuente says. There are so many repetitive strands on the Y chromosome that the pieces tend to look the same. It is difficult, therefore, to figure out where they come from and how to reassemble the strands--like trying to put together a puzzle when all of the pieces are exactly the same color. "When we try to take those bits of DNA and assemble them to see what the chromosome looks like, we can't fill in some of those gaps. We might have the sequence, but we don't know where it goes."

A DIFFERENT TYPE OF RECOMBINATION

Using sequence data generated by new technology that reads long strands of individual DNA molecules, Chang and Larracuente developed a strategy to assemble a large part of the Y chromosome and other repeat-dense regions. By assembling a large portion of the Y chromosome, they discovered that the Y chromosome has a lot of duplicated sequences, where genes are present in multiple copies. They also discovered that although the Y chromosome does not experience crossing over, it undergoes a different type of recombination called gene conversion. While crossing over involves the shuffle and exchange of genes between two different chromosomes, gene conversion is not reciprocal, Larracuente says. "You don't have two chromosomes that exchange material, you have one chromosome that donates its sequence to the other part of the chromosome" and the sequences become identical.

The Y chromosome has therefore found a way to maintain its genes via a process different from crossing over, Larracuente says. "We usually think of the Y chromosome as a really harsh environment for a gene to survive in, yet these genes manage to get expressed and carry out their functions that are important for male fertility. This rampant gene conversion that we're seeing is one way that we think genes might be able to survive on Y chromosomes."

Taking time to think kind thoughts about yourself and loved ones has psychological and physical benefits, new research suggests.

A study by the Universities of Exeter and Oxford has found that taking part in self-compassion exercises calms the heart rate, switching off the body's threat response. Previous studies have shown that this threat response damages the immune system. Researchers believe the ability to switch off this response may lower the risk of disease.

In the study, published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, 135 healthy University of Exeter students were divided into five groups, and members of each group heard a different set of audio instructions. The team took physical measurements of heart rate and sweat response, and asked participants to report how they were feeling. Questions included how safe they felt, how likely they were to be kind to themselves and how connected they felt to others.

The two groups whose instructions encouraged them to be kind to themselves not only reported feeling more self-compassion and connection with others, but also showed a bodily response consistent with feelings of relaxation and safety. Their heart rates dropped and the variation in length of time between heartbeats - a healthy sign of a heart that can respond flexibly to situations. They also showed lower sweat response.

Meanwhile, instructions that induced a critical inner voice led to an increased heart rate and a higher sweat response - consistent with feelings of threat and distress.

First author Dr Hans Kirschner, who conducted the research at Exeter, said: "These findings suggest that being kind to oneself switches off the threat response and puts the body in a state of safety and relaxation that is important for regeneration and healing."

Lead researcher Dr Anke Karl, of the University of Exeter, said: "Previous research has found that self-compassion was related to higher levels of wellbeing and better mental health, but we didn't know why.

"Our study is helping us understand the mechanism of how being kind to yourself when things go wrong could be beneficial in psychological treatments. By switching off our threat response, we boost our immune systems and give ourselves the best chance of healing. We hope future research can use our method to investigate this in people with mental health problems such as recurrent depression."

The recordings that encouraged self-compassion were a "compassionate body scan" in which people were guided to attend to bodily sensations with an attitude of interest and calmness; and a "self-focused loving kindness exercise" in which they directed kindness and soothing thoughts to a loved one and themselves.

The three other groups listened to recordings designed to induce a critical inner voice, put them into a "positive but competitive and self-enhancing mode", or an emotionally neutral shopping scenario.

All the audio recordings were 11 minutes long.

While people in both the self-compassion and positive but competitive groups reported greater self-compassion and decreased self-criticism, only the self-compassion groups showed the positive bodily response.

The signs of this were reduced sweat response and heart rate slowed by two to three beats per minute on average, compared to the groups listening to critical voice recordings. The self-kindness groups also showed increased hear rate variability - a sign of a healthy heart that is able to adapt to a range of situations.

Co-author Willem Kuyken, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Oxford, said: "These findings help us to further understand some of our clinical trials research findings, where we show that individuals with recurrent depression benefit particularly from mindfulness-based cognitive therapy when they learn to become more self-compassionate.

"My sense is that for people prone to depression, meeting their negative thoughts and feelings with compassion is a radically different way - that these thoughts are not facts.

"It introduces a different way of being and knowing that is quite transformative for many people."

The researchers now plan to extend their research by studying the physiological responses in individuals with recurrent depression.

The researchers stress that the study was conducted in healthy people, so their findings do not mean that people with depression would experience the same improvements from one-off exercises. They did not investigate another important feature of self-compassion, the ability to directly repair mood or distress. Further research is necessary to address these two open points.

Asking young girls to "do science" leads them to show greater persistence in science activities than does asking them to "be scientists," finds a new psychology study by researchers at New York University and Princeton University.

"Describing science as actions, by saying 'let's do science,' leads to more science engagement than does describing science in terms of identities, by asking them to 'be scientists'" explains Marjorie Rhodes, an associate professor in NYU's Department of Psychology and the senior author of the study, which appears in the journal Psychological Science.

"These effects particularly hold for children who are the target of stereotypes suggesting that they might not be the kind of person who succeeds in science--in this case, girls," she adds.

These findings suggest that efforts encouraging girls to enter science--a field in which they are underrepresented--might benefit from focusing on describing the activity of doing science rather than on encouraging children to adopt scientist identities, at least in early childhood.

"The roots of gender disparities in science achievement take hold in early childhood," Rhodes observes. "This research identifies an element of children's environments that could be targeted to reduce early gender differences in science behavior among young children."

Rhodes and her co-authors, who include Princeton's Sarah-Jane Leslie, note that the messaging children often receive through television shows centers on identity rather than action when it comes to science.

For instance, in a 2017 analysis of children's television shows, Rhodes and Leslie found that popular programs refer to scientists as a kind of person more often than they refer to science as an activity that people do. In other words, these television shows are missing an opportunity to use language that is more effective in encouraging girls in science, they conclude.

In the newly published Psychological Science work, the researchers conducted four studies with children aged four to nine years old. Here, the children received an introduction to science that described science as an identity ("Let's be scientists! Scientists explore the world and discover new things!") or as action ("Let's do science! Doing science means exploring the world and discovering new things!").

Children were then asked to complete a new science game designed to illustrate the scientific method. Persistence was measured by how long they continued to play this game.

Notably, girls who were initially asked to "do science" showed more persistence on the subsequent science game than did girls who had been asked to "be scientists."

By contrast, the effects of language for boys were more variable. For instance, one of their studies found that boys younger than five years old showed greater persistence when language was action-oriented while those older than five revealed higher levels of persistence when language was identity-oriented.

Overall, these findings suggest that identity-focused language can undermine persistence in some children as they acquire new skills, particularly when cultural stereotypes lead children to question if they hold the relevant identity.

The results are consistent with another study by Rhodes and her colleagues. This work, published in the journal Child Development last year, found that using verbs to talk about pro-social actions with children, such as asking them "to help" instead of to "be helpers," led to more pro-social helping behavior after children experienced setbacks.

HONOLULU, Feb. 6, 2019 -- Stroke survivors taking a combination of the blood thinner cilostazol with aspirin or clopidogrel had a lower risk of ischemic stroke recurrence than those who received aspirin or clopidogrel alone, according to late breaking science presented at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2019, a world premier meeting for researchers and clinicians dedicated to the science and treatment of cerebrovascular disease.

Although aspirin and clopidogrel have been shown to reduce early recurrence of ischemic stroke, the benefits seem to be short and was offset by a risk of major bleeding in long-term usage, said lead author Kazunori Toyoda, M.D., Ph.D., Deputy Director General of the Hospital, National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center in Suita, Osaka, Japan.

Since cilostazol has been shown to prevent stroke recurrence without increasing serious bleeding as compared to aspirin, researchers studied if dual antiplatelet therapy involving cilostazol would be safe and fit for long-term usage.

In a multicenter open-label, parallel-group trial, called The Cilostazol Stroke Prevention Study for Antiplatelet Combination (CSPS.com), high-risk patients were randomly assigned to receive aspirin or clopidogrel alone, or a combination of cilostazol with aspirin or clopidogrel at 292 sites in Japan over about four years. The study included 1,839 patients, including 756 taking aspirin and 1,083 taking clopidogrel. They had suffered an ischemic stroke up to six months earlier.

Researchers found:

The risk of a recurrence of ischemic stroke in high-risk patients was less common with long-term dual medication with cilostazol plus aspirin or clopidogrel compared to long-term therapy with aspirin or clopidogrel alone.

Both approaches had a similar risk of major bleeding.

The study was funded by Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd.

Note: Scientific presentation is 11:47 a.m. Hawaii Time/4:47 p.m. Eastern Time, Wednesday, Feb. 6, 2019.