Culture

The wonder-material graphene could hold the key to unlocking the next generation of advanced, early stage lung cancer diagnosis.

A team of scientists from the University of Exeter has developed a new technique that could create a highly sensitive graphene biosensor with the capability to detect molecules of the most common lung cancer biomarkers.

The new biosensor design could revolutionise existing electronic nose (e-nose) devices, that identify specific components of a specific vapour mixture - for example a person's breath - and analyses its chemical make-up to identify the cause.

The research team believe the newly developed device displays the potential to identify specific lung cancer markers at the earliest possible stage, in a convenient and reusable way - making it both cost-effective and highly beneficial for health service providers worldwide.

The research is published in the Royal Society of Chemistry's peer-reviewed journal Nanoscale.

Ben Hogan, a postgraduate researcher from the University of Exeter and co-author of the paper explained: "The new biosensors which we have developed show that graphene has significant potential for use as an electrode in e-nose devices. For the first time, we have shown that with suitable patterning graphene can be used as a specific, selective and sensitive detector for biomarkers.

"We believe that with further development of our devices, a cheap, reusable and accurate breath test for early-stage detection of lung cancer can become a reality.

The quest to discover viable new techniques to accurately detect early-stage lung cancer is one of the greatest global health care challenges.

Although it is one of the most common and aggressive cancers, killing around 1.4 million people worldwide each year, the lack of clinical symptoms in its early stages means many patients are not diagnosed until the latter stage, which makes it difficult to cure.

Due to the unrestrainable nature of the abnormal cancer cells, while they begin in one or both lungs, they are prone to spread to other parts of the body rapidly.

There are currently no cheap, simple, or widely available screening methods for early diagnosis of lung cancer. However, for the new research, the team from Exeter looked at whether graphene could form the basis for a new, enhanced biosensor device.

Using multi-layered graphene, the team suggest that current e-nose devices - which combine electronic sensors with mechanisms for pattern recognition, such as a neural network - could revolutionise breath diagnostic techniques.

Using patterned multi-layered graphene electrodes, the team were able to show greater sensing capabilities for three of the most common lung-cancer biomarkers - ethanol, isopropanol and acetone - across a range of different concentrations.

The team believe this could be the first step towards creating new, improved and cheaper e-nose devices that could give the earliest possible lung-cancer diagnosis.

Multi-layer graphene as a selective detector for future lung cancer biosensing platforms is published in the journal Nanoscale.

Trying to take someone else's perspective may make you less open to their opposing views, according to findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

"As political polarization in America has increased, there has been a lot of discussion about how to bring people with opposing views to the table, in order to have more productive dialogues," says lead researcher Rhia Catapano of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. "Our findings show that self-persuasion can be an effective way to move people from entrenched views, but that perspective taking can actually undermine its effectiveness."

Although policymakers and pundits often refer to perspective taking when they talk about addressing polarization, the scientific evidence for its effectiveness as a self-persuasion strategy is mixed. On the one hand, people might generate more persuasive arguments or relate more to alternative viewpoints after taking someone else's perspective. On the other hand, it's possible that trying to see things from the other side could make people more entrenched in their views, especially when they view alternative perspectives in a competitive light.

Catapano and colleagues hypothesized that taking the perspective of someone with an opposing opinion may backfire when that person is seen as having very different values.

For their first online experiment, the researchers recruited participants from Reddit with the aim of reaching a large sample of people interested in political issues. The 484 participants completed a survey, in which they reported demographic information and rated their support for universal health care (from 0, strongly against, to 100, strongly support).

The participants then received information about the person they would supposedly be interacting with in the next task: a 22-year-old White male from Ohio. Importantly, the partner's political ideology and attitude toward universal health care were always opposite those of each participant.

Half of the participants were instructed to reflect on their partner's intentions and interests and visualize his life and experiences. And all of the participants generated an argument that their partner might give in support of his attitude toward universal health care.

At the beginning of the experiment, the two groups of participants reported similar initial attitudes toward universal health care. However, those who engaged in the perspective taking exercise reported less receptiveness and showed less attitude change compared with the control group. As the researchers hypothesized, personal values helped to explain this effect - participants who engaged in perspective taking reported that their worldview and morals were less aligned with their partner's compared with those in the control group.

And the researchers replicated these findings with another online sample of 998 participants recruited from Amazon MTurk.

"When people try to take the perspective of those on the other side, they're actually quite good at it. They write arguments that people on that side might actually come up with, rather than dismissing the task or writing poor arguments on purpose," Catapano explains. "The problem is that the arguments appeal to the values of the person whose perspective they're taking, rather than their own values."

But what if people felt as though they were taking the perspective of someone who holds similar values despite having a different opinion?

Findings from a second online experiment suggest that perspective taking enhances participants' openness to an alternative viewpoint when their values are congruent with those of their partner.

Together, the findings shed light on the self-persuasion strategies that are most likely to help bridge ideological divides. Intriguingly, simply generating arguments for the other side - the control condition in each experiment - actually seemed to increase participants' receptiveness.

"Having people think of arguments for the opposing view but without engaging in perspective taking, was quite effective in opening people up to the opposing view," says Catapano. "We found that encouraging."

Muscle co-contraction is a strategy used commonly in elderly people to increase their stability. Co-contraction involves the simultaneous contraction of pairs of muscles from opposing groups to lock a joint and provide stability.

However, co-contraction can also lead to stiffness, which in turn reduces stability, which is why some authors have suggested the opposite approach by pointing to relaxation as a way to improve stability. However, many studies do not clarify whether tension or relaxation is the more effective strategy.

In turn, in our society relaxation is a misleading concept because it tends to be confused with rest when it is actually a mechanism that reduces energy expenditure and increases stability during stress. The inability to relax may be related to suboptimal neuro-motor control that can lead to increased tension.

A study carried out by Simone Tassani, first author of the paper, Miguel Ángel González Ballester, ICREA research professor and Jérôme Noailly, members of BCN MedTech of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) at UPF, with the participation of Josep M. Font-Llagunes, a researcher at the UPC, has shown that muscle tension significantly reduces subjects' stability. The article is published online in the journal Gait & Posture and will be included in volume 68 of February.

The goal of the study was to investigate the effect in humans of voluntary muscle contraction and relaxation on the stability of the standing posture to find out if muscle tension has an impact on stability and to estimate this impact using minimally invasive procedures. Therefore, the authors use force plates to measure the pressure centre in a standing position, in balance studies in 30 volunteers during states of tension and relaxation, and in two visual situations, eyes open and eyes closed.

The results showed that muscle tension significantly reduces the subjects' stability. Simone Tassani, first author of the article says: "Our results show that daily stress situations can lead to a decrease in stability. A loss of stability may increase the risk of chronic overload or falling".

In addition, the study shows that breathing has a direct effect on pain and stress management and Tassani adds: "the results presented here demonstrate the need to explicitly explore the worrying fact that a large part of the population might not be able to breathe properly". Indeed, one of the conclusions of the study is that for many young subjects, abdominal breathing seems to be a difficult task. Finally, the study also showed that in a standing position, vision has an interaction effect with relaxation.

The latest issue of the journal The Gerontologist from The Gerontological Society of America contains 21 articles highlighting the state-of-the-art research regarding aging and technology, and offering guidance for the future.

Among the findings are that older adults in certain demographic groups are less likely to use technology for health-related purposes; using the Internet to connect with family and friends can indirectly affect well-being by decreasing loneliness and increasing social engagement; and there exists a potential for social robots to promote the health of older people. The development of this special issue was led by past Editor-in-Chief Rachel Pruchno, PhD, FGSA.

"Technology has the potential to improve the lives of older people," Pruchno wrote in an opening editorial. "However, for technology to be useful, gerontologists must be engaged in every step of its development."

The articles fall under several categories: technology and the digital divide, strategies for bridging the digital divide, Internet use and well-being, robotics, technology in the community, and technology in nursing homes.

"Gerontologists understand the aging process and can facilitate the experiences of older users. Engineers and marketing managers usually do not have this expertise," Pruchno said, adding that when technology and marketing proceed without gerontologists, a great deal of money is invested in useless technology.

"On the other hand, gerontologists do not have the skills to develop or design new technologies. Success will depend on evolving partnerships that include gerontologists, engineers, marketing experts, and older people working together and listening to one another," she said.

GSA has been active in promoting research on technology and aging, most notable through the work of a member interest group and a dedicated track of sessions at the Society's Annual Scientific Meeting in November 2018.

Iridium - a rare metal on earth from the meteorite that wiped out dinosaurs - attached to albumin, a protein in our blood, can penetrate into the nucleus of cancer cells and destroy them when blasted with light, researchers at the University of Warwick have found

It can be applied locally and in smaller doses, the next step is pre-clinical trials

"It is amazing that this large protein can penetrate into cancer cells and deliver iridium which can kill them." says Professor Peter Sadler from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick

A new compound based on Iridium, a rare metal which landed in the Gulf of Mexico 66 M years ago, hooked onto albumin, a protein in blood, can attack the nucleus of cancerous cells when switched on by light, University of Warwick researchers have found.

The treatment of cancer using light, called Photodynamic therapy, is based on chemical compounds called photosensitizers, which can be switched on by light to produce oxidising species, able to kill cancer cells. Clinicians can activate these compounds selectively where the tumour is (using optical fibres) thus killing cancer cells and leaving healthy cells intact.

Thanks to the special chemical coating they used, the Warwick group was able to hook up Iridium to the blood protein Albumin, which then glowed very brightly so they could track its passage into cancer cells, where it converted the cells' own oxygen to a lethal form which killed them.

Not only is the newly formed molecule an excellent photosensitiser, but Albumin is able to deliver it into the nucleus inside cancer cells. The dormant compound can then be switched on by light irradiation and destroy the cancer cells from their very centre.

The bright luminescence of the iridium photosensitiser allowed its accumulation in the nucleus of tumour cells and its activation leading to the cancer cell death to be followed in real time using a microscope.

Professor Peter Sadler, from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick comments:

"It is amazing that this large protein can penetrate into cancer cells and deliver iridium which can kill them selectively on activation with visible light. If this technology can be translated into the clinic, it might be effective against resistant cancers and reduce the side effects of chemotherapy"

Dr Cinzia Imberti, from the University of Warwick comments:

"It is fascinating how albumin can deliver our photosensitiser so specifically to the nucleus. We are at a very early stage, but we are looking forward to see where the preclinical development of this new compound can lead."

"Our team is not only extremely multidisciplinary, including biologists, chemists and pharmacists, but also highly international, including young researchers from China, India and Italy supported by Royal Society Newton and Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowships."

The observed population crash in a colony of sooty terns, tropical seabirds in one of the UK Overseas Territories (UKOTs), is partly due to poor diet, research led by the University of Birmingham has found.

The findings provide fresh evidence of the fragility of marine ecosystems and lend weight to the scientific case for creating the Ascension Island Ocean Sanctuary (AIOS), set to be one of the largest fully protected reserves in the Atlantic Ocean.

The most numerous seabird of tropical waters, sooty terns breed on Ascension Island where the colony is the largest in the entire Atlantic Ocean. The Ascension population has declined in numbers from several million in the middle of the last century, to just a few hundred thousand today. A team based in the University's School of Biosciences believes the birds' plight is closely linked to changes in populations of predatory fish such as tuna. The terns follow these large fish across vast expanses of ocean to feed on the small fish driven to the surface as they hunt.

The terns had been expected to benefit from conservation work carried out on the island between 2002 and 2004 by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). This involved a feral cat eradication scheme in a bid to restore nesting populations of seabird species, including the Ascension frigatebird that is only found on Ascension Island.

However, while many seabird species subsequently began to thrive, the tern population did not recover as expected and the Birmingham team, together with researchers from the University of Exeter, the Ascension Island Government Conservation Department (AIGCD) and the Army Ornithological Society (AOS), set out to find out why.

"We believe that a number of factors might influence the size of the breeding population of sooty terns on the island but we wanted to understand such factors in greater detail, resulting in causal explanations of the tern population decline over the past 60 years," says Dr Jim Reynolds, lead author on the paper.

The team started to look at the birds' diet after noticing that some of the food naturally regurgitated by the terns contained lots of prey low in nutrients, such as squid, marine snails and even locusts.

To find out more, they started to search museum databases to find Ascension sooty tern specimens held in museum collections across the world. Feathers from these specimens can be analysed using mass spectrometry techniques to reveal clues about what the birds were eating.

Feathers from more than 180 specimens, dating from 1890 to the present day, were collected and analysed by collaborators at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. The results clearly showed that a change in the terns' diets from eating mainly fish to eating lower quality food was coincidental with their population decline.

"There are several factors that could have led to the terns eating less fish," explains Dr Reynolds. "Part of the answer will lie in the rapid growth of industrial fishing for species like tuna over past decades - but ecosystems are complex, and other forms of global change, such as the warming of the oceans may also play a significant part in this story. As oceans warm, the movements of top predators and the fish on which they forage are changing, possibly making it more difficult for the terns to follow them in search of food."

Dr Reynolds adds: "This is a complicated story that shows just how fragile and delicate the marine ecosystem is. Our findings strongly reinforce the need for a large marine reserve where it would be possible to police fishing more effectively and do much more to protect these vulnerable species."

Dr Sam Weber, a co-author from the University of Exeter, added "Seabirds are often regarded as sensitive indicators of the health of marine ecosystems - or 'sentinel species' - so the findings of this study could be seen as a bellwether for broader ecological challenges facing the tropical Atlantic. Marine protected areas such as that planned for Ascension Island may well help to alleviate pressure on species like sooty terns. However, restoring healthy marine food webs across the vast areas over which these birds roam will ultimately require a fundamental shift in the way we think about, and manage, the world's oceans, including in high seas areas beyond national jurisdictions."

In an ongoing study exploring walking for health across the adult lifespan, University of Massachusetts Amherst kinesiology researchers found that walking cadence is a reliable measure of exercise intensity and set simple steps-per-minute guidelines for moderate and vigorous intensity.

Catrine Tudor-Locke, professor of kinesiology, and postdoctoral researchers Elroy Aguiar and Scott Ducharme concluded that for adults, age 21-40, walking about 100 steps per minute constitutes moderate intensity, while vigorous walking begins at about 130 steps per minute.

The research, published this month in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, offers walkers a concrete way to track their activity level without relying on exercise devices or complicated calculations about oxygen consumption or heart rate. It represents the first set of outcomes from Tudor-Locke's ongoing, five-year CADENCE-Adults study, funded with a $2.2 million grant from the NIH's National Institute on Aging. The study seeks to establish the relationship between walking cadence (steps per minute) and intensity (metabolic rate) across the adult lifespan, from age 21 to 85.

Using the study's initial results for younger adults, walkers can simply count their steps to determine their approximate exercise intensity. Counting steps for 15 seconds and multiplying by four, for example, will determine steps per minute.

"This research establishes a very practical method to measure the intensity of walking, one that is very easy to communicate and also rigorously validated by the science," says Tudor-Locke, a well-known expert on the steps-per-day question.

To ensure sex and age balance, researchers recruited 10 men and 10 women for each five-year age group between 21 and 40, for a total of 80 healthy participants. They performed a series of five-minute walks on a treadmill, with two-minute rests, as their cadence was hand-tallied and intensity (METs) was measured using a portable indirect calorimeter. Sessions began at .5 mph and increased in .5 mph increments until participants either began to run, reached 75 percent of their predicted maximum heart rate or reported a perceived exertion of "somewhat hard."

Federal guidelines call for 150 minutes of "moderate" or 75 minutes of "vigorous" exercise each week. Moderate intensity is defined as activity that requires 3 METs (metabolic equivalents of task), or three times the amount of oxygen that's consumed while sitting still. In the study, moderate-intensity walking began at about 2.7 mph and was equal to 3 METs. Vigorous walking was associated with 6 METs.

Aguiar said that the natural walking pace of 90 percent of the study participants was above the moderate-pace threshold. "If you just tell people to walk at their normal speed, they probably are going to walk above 100 steps per minute. Asking people to walk for exercise is a low-cost, low-skill, feasible activity choice which has the potential to drastically improve people's health," he says.

The research suggests a simple but powerful public health message: Just walk, as much as possible. "Our society has engineered movement out of our life," Aguiar says. "We have TVs, we have cars, we have remotes. It's clear that you can achieve the public health guidelines for physical activity through walking."

Researchers used two distinct analytical methods to determine the approximate walking cadence thresholds. They also found that after moderate intensity walking of 100 steps per minute was reached, each 10 steps-per-minute increase was associated with an increase in intensity of one MET. So, 4 METs is roughly equivalent to 110 steps per minute and 5 METs with 120 steps per minute.

Although the findings confirm data from previous research, the CADENCE-Adults study is the first calibration study to use a sex-and-age-balanced sampling approach, Tudor-Locke said. Future reports from the study may establish age-appropriate walking thresholds.

Many mothers have to navigate a sea of advice from family and experts when it comes to feeding their babies. Nonetheless, nutrition educators typically focus only on the mother, even in Latino communities where grandmothers and other older female relatives often play major roles in caring for children.

A new study shows programs to reduce childhood obesity and other nutrition programs should incorporate all family members who regularly take care of children, not just their mothers.

Ann Cheney, an assistant professor in the Center for Healthy Communities at the UC Riverside School of Medicine, co-led the study with Tanya Nieri, an associate professor in the UCR Department of Sociology. The study focused on food and feeding in low-income Latino families and sought to generate ideas for the development of early childhood obesity prevention programs based on mothers' experiences.

"Mothers are busy. We can't assume that only the mother feeds her baby," Cheney said. "In many cultures, senior women in family and community help with childcare and instruct new mothers on how, when, and what to feed their baby."

The researchers talked about feeding babies with 19 women who had a child under 2 years old enrolled in Early Head Start programs in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. The participants were Latina, mostly of Mexican descent. Many lived in extended family households, which included in-laws or other members of their families of origin. A little over half spoke English as their dominant language, with the rest speaking predominantly Spanish.

Through Early Head Start nutritional education, the mothers knew a lot about healthy diets for babies but faced conflicting ideas from older female relatives. They knew, for example, that doctors do not recommend giving solid food to babies under six months old because it increases the risk of obesity. But many of them were told by their own mothers, mothers-in-law, or grandmothers to give their babies oatmeal, mashed rice and beans, or other soft foods to help their babies feel fuller and gain weight, even though the mothers did not think their babies were too thin.

The mothers also knew not to give their babies sugar but were often told by older female relatives to add sugar to milk or other foods so the baby would consume more of it. These relatives also often fed the children, making it harder for the mother to stick to the healthy feeding recommendations she learned through Early Head Start.

Some of the older relatives had experienced food insecurity growing up and did not want their grandchildren to experience it too. To the older generation, chubby babies with full stomachs were healthy babies. Although their advice came from love and concern for the baby's health, the mothers knew some of the grandparents' recommendations could to lead to obesity and other health problems.

The mothers used two strategies to balance their child's healthy diet against preserving family harmony. They could agree to the relative's instructions in face-to-face interactions, but later, feed the child as they wished. They could also use the opportunity to educate the family member by saying "no" and explain why. Most mothers used both strategies in different situations and with different family members.

"It is difficult at times to tell the family, 'no.' But we are thinking of the well-being of our children. Because our (family) roots are very strong," one study participant said. "But families have to learn new ways too."

The authors concluded that government sponsored nutrition education programs, like Early Head Start nutrition education, prioritize nuclear family dynamics and identify parents as primary caregivers. The researchers recommend that nutrition education programs should recognize the diversity of families and acknowledge other family arrangements including extended families, and programs should incorporate extended families in addition to the child's parents.

In one of the coldest, driest places on Earth, CU Boulder scientists have developed a possible answer to a longstanding mystery about the chemistry of streamflow, which may have broad implications for watersheds and water quality around the world.

The new study conducted in Antarctica's arid McMurdo Dry Valleys (MDV) region examined the nearly ubiquitous phenomenon that streams in all climates, regardless of their flow rate, tend to maintain a remarkably consistent concentration of dissolved minerals as they move through the landscape. In other words, moving water retains its chemical makeup regardless of whether it's going fast or slow.

Antarctica's dry, pristine conditions offer a streamlined--if far-flung--natural laboratory to test out why that's the case.

"The MDV region provides ideal hydrological study conditions," said Adam Wlostowski, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in CU Boulder's Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR). "Here, we only have one source of water--glacial melt--and no deep groundwater, with permafrost acting as a physical barrier for the stream. By limiting the number of variables, we can learn a great deal."

The research, detailed in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, examined seven different streams in the Taylor Valley, where meltwater flows to ice-covered lake basins in just hours or weeks, compared to months or years in the Rocky Mountain region. As such, Antarctic streams have precious little opportunity to stagnate in the landscape.

"We expected the water at the stream outlets to look like the water at the head of glacier due to limited interactions with minerals," Wlostowski said. "And we thought that as the flow went up, the concentration would decrease. That did not turn out to be true. There was little to no variation even with flow change."

The results suggest that high levels of chemical weathering--the process by which solid minerals dissolve, much like rock salt in a puddle of warm water--are the primary mechanism for this streamflow phenomenon.

"These Antarctic polar desert streams host some of the most rapid chemical weathering rates in the world because their beds are made up of fresh sediments that see water for only 6-10 weeks per year," said Michael Gooseff, a professor in CU Boulder's Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering. "This is another important lesson we have learned about this ecosystem that is transferrable to other parts of the world."

The study underscores the value of long-term data collection, Wlostowski said, which makes the study of hydrological phenomena possible. In this case, he and his colleagues drew on more than 20 years of streamflow observations collected by the National Science Foundation's McMurdo Dry Valleys Long?Term Ecological Research (LTER) Project, which has funded and supported CU Boulder students and faculty for over two decades.

The new study contributes to a high-level understanding of how streams behave geochemically and highlights the importance of stream corridors in shaping water quality before it reaches its end point.

"As climate and land use practices change throughout the world, we want to be able to predict how the quality and quantity of river water may change in response," said Wlostowski. "We can apply lessons from these relatively simplified hydrologic systems in Antarctica to temperate watersheds, where the human implications of environmental management may be much higher."

Around the world 4.2 million people die every year within 30 days after surgery - with half of these deaths occurring in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), a new study reveals.

There is also a significant unmet need for surgery in LMICs and researchers believe that if operations were provided for all patients who need them the number of global post-operative deaths would increase to 6.1 million.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham published their analysis on the numbers of people dying within 30 days of surgery in a research letter to The Lancet. They estimate that more people die each year within 30 days after surgery than from HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria combined (2.97 million).

The Lancet Commission on Global Surgery identified that 313 million surgical procedures are performed each year, but little is known about the quality of surgery globally, as robust postoperative death rates are available for only 29 countries.

Researchers at the University's NIHR Global Health Research Unit on Global Surgery analysed available information to estimate how many people around the world die after operations - based on surgical volume, case-mix and post-operative death rates adjusted for country income.

Dr Dmitri Nepogodiev, Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, commented: "Surgery has been the 'neglected stepchild' of global health and has received a fraction of the investment put in to treating infectious diseases such as malaria.

"Although not all postoperative deaths are avoidable, many can be prevented by increasing investment in research, staff training, equipment, and better hospital facilities. To avoid millions more people dying after surgery, planned expansion of access to surgery must be complemented by investment in to improving the quality of surgery around the world."

Professor Dion Morton, Barling Chair of Surgery at the University of Birmingham and Director of Clinical Research at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, commented: "Surgery saves lives and can transform patients' quality of life, but this study shows that a large number of patients die in the immediate postoperative period. As efforts continue to increase access to surgery around the world, there is also an urgent need for research to improve the quality and safety of surgery."

The researchers project that expanding surgical services to address unmet need would add another 1.9 million post-operative deaths in LMICs each year. Based on 4.2 million deaths, 7.7% of all deaths globally occur within 30 days of surgery. This figure is greater than that attributed to any other cause of death globally except ischaemic heart disease and stroke .

At present, around 4.8 billion people worldwide lack timely access to safe and affordable surgery and it is estimated that there is an annual unmet need for 143 million procedures in LMICs.

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to study some of the oldest and faintest stars in the globular cluster NGC 6752 have made an unexpected finding. They discovered a dwarf galaxy in our cosmic backyard, only 30 million light-years away. The finding is reported in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters.

An international team of astronomers recently used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to study white dwarf stars within the globular cluster NGC 6752. The aim of their observations was to use these stars to measure the age of the globular cluster, but in the process they made an unexpected discovery.

In the outer fringes of the area observed with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys a compact collection of stars was visible. After a careful analysis of their brightnesses and temperatures, the astronomers concluded that these stars did not belong to the cluster -- which is part of the Milky Way -- but rather they are millions of light-years more distant.

Our newly discovered cosmic neighbour, nicknamed Bedin 1 by the astronomers, is a modestly sized, elongated galaxy. It measures only around 3000 light-years at its greatest extent -- a fraction of the size of the Milky Way. Not only is it tiny, but it is also incredibly faint. These properties led astronomers to classify it as a dwarf spheroidal galaxy.

Dwarf spheroidal galaxies are defined by their small size, low-luminosity, lack of dust and old stellar populations [1]. 36 galaxies of this type are already known to exist in the Local Group of Galaxies, 22 of which are satellite galaxies of the Milky Way.

While dwarf spheroidal galaxies are not uncommon, Bedin 1 has some notable features. Not only is it one of just a few dwarf spheroidals that have a well established distance but it is also extremely isolated. It lies about 30 million light-years from the Milky Way and 2 million light-years from the nearest plausible large galaxy host, NGC 6744. This makes it possibly the most isolated small dwarf galaxy discovered to date.

From the properties of its stars, astronomers were able to infer that the galaxy is around 13 billion years old -- nearly as old as the Universe itself. Because of its isolation -- which resulted in hardly any interaction with other galaxies -- and its age, Bedin 1 is the astronomical equivalent of a living fossil from the early Universe.

The discovery of Bedin 1 was a truly serendipitous find. Very few Hubble images allow such faint objects to be seen, and they cover only a small area of the sky. Future telescopes with a large field of view, such as the WFIRST telescope, will have cameras covering a much larger area of the sky and may find many more of these galactic neighbours.

Following years of research that demonstrated feeding tubes can harm patients with dementia, the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society has published an OHSU opinion paper recommending patient preference for feeding tubes be excluded from Physician Order for Life-Sustaining Treatment, or POLST, forms.

The paper was published after Oregon became the first state to remove the feeding tube section from its POLST form Jan. 2, 2019. Oregon's POLST form had included a feeding tube section since it was first created in 1993, when the medical community believed artificial nutrition was widely beneficial.

Susan Tolle, M.D., and two OHSU colleagues wrote the paper. Tolle is director of the OHSU Center for Ethics in Health Care and professor of medicine (general internal medicine and geriatrics) in the OHSU School of Medicine.

Percutaneous endoscopic gastronomy, or PEG, feeding tubes are surgically inserted through the abdomen and are intended for long-term use. PEG tubes do not extend life for patients with dimentia; rather, they increase discomfort and agitation. This can lead to a need for restraints, which often cause bedsores.

While artificial nutrition can help patients in a coma or living with Lou Gehrig's Disease, research has shown it's harmful to those with dementia. The American Geriatrics Society does not recommend feeding tubes for older adults with advanced dementia.

The paper further asserts that POLST forms shouldn't include feeding tube preference because PEG tubes are only inserted after obtaining separate consent from patients or their families.

The POLST form was created after a group of ethics leaders convened by OHSU to ensure the end-of-life health care wishes of those with advanced illness or frailty would be followed. POLST-like programs have been adopted or are in development in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., and are associated with reducing unwanted hospitalizations near the end of life for patients whose forms call for comfort-focused care.

Separate from POLST, advanced directive forms share a patient's end-of-life philosophy and enable patients to appoint a surrogate, but they do not provide actionable medical orders for an emergency.

MINNEAPOLIS, MN- January 31, 2019 - There are more than 290,000 people estimated to be living in the United States with a spinal cord injury. Previously, it has been shown that it is possible to restore some function to young and healthy patients within a few years of injury. Now, researchers show spinal cord stimulation can immediately restore some voluntary movement and autonomic functions such as cardiovascular, bowel, and bladder years after a paralyzing injury without any significant rehabilitation.

"This was an opportunity to use epidural stimulation, combine my background in mathematics, collaborate with people from multiple disciplines including biomedical engineering and set up a truly innovative trial," said Dr. David Darrow, a neurosurgery resident at the University of Minnesota Medical School and a lead investigator for the E-STAND Clinical trial. He is also a senior neurosurgery resident at Hennepin Healthcare and University of Minnesota Medical Center. "We wanted to push the envelope for patients. Once we determined it worked, we moved on to knocking down other barriers to translation to patient care."

In a study recently published in the Journal of Neurotrauma, Darrow and his colleagues implanted the first series of female patients who both suffered devastating traumatic spinal cord injury. Both patients had no lower body function whatsoever and MRIs showing very little residual spinal cord at the level of injury. The two women were five and ten years from injury and in their 5th and 6th decade of life, which is much closer to the average patient with spinal cord injury compared to the work of other investigators.

"Enabling someone to move her legs more than 10 years after being paralyzed from spinal cord injury has been one of the greatest moments of my career," said Uzma Samadani, MD, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Neurosurgery University of Minnesota Medical School and Neurosurgeon with Hennepin Healthcare. "I am grateful to my colleagues for their mutual hard work during the 2 years it took to get from idea to the first operation."

In this study researchers expanded the inclusion guidelines of who could receive epidural stimulation.

"We believe that we are studying a population that is much closer to the general population of patients with spinal cord injury," said Darrow. "We have opened the doors to so many more patients with traumatic spinal cord injury."

"While we are excited for all this could mean for patients, there is still a lot of research to be done, both with this therapy and through other avenues, many of which we are studying at the University of Minnesota," said Ann M. Parr, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Minnesota Medical School. Dr. Parr has an active translational spinal cord injury research laboratory at the Stem Cell Institute.

The first moments of life unfold with incredible precision. Now, using mathematical tools and the help of fruit flies, researchers at Princeton have uncovered new findings about the mechanisms behind this precision.

In a new study published in the journal Cell, the team showed that cells determine exactly where they need to be and therefore what body parts they will become by optimizing the use of all information available from the genetic code. This optimization allows each cell to position itself within one cell's width of where it should be, rather than making errors that later are corrected.

The study also demonstrates that a complex biological system can operate according to a mathematically optimal process. The team was able to predict the placement of cells to within 1 percent of their actual locations along the length of the embryo, showing that biological behaviors can be computed and predicted from theoretical principles.

"The information required to specify precise cell locations -- and therefore what body parts they will become -- is present and utilized at the earliest stages of development in fruit flies," said Thomas Gregor, associate professor of physics and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. "This contrasts with the prevailing view that the position of the cells is refined slowly over time."

"The theoretical idea is very simple, which is that every cell is using all the information that it can squeeze out of the relevant genes," said William Bialek, the John Archibald Wheeler/Battelle Professor in Physics and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. "Something we've known for a while, but never stop being amazed by, is that the whole system is incredibly precise, and this fact is what spurred us to believe that the cells are using all the information that they can."

Cells take cues from genes, or more specifically, from the protein molecules that those genes produce. But do the cells use all of the information to get everything right the first time? Or is the system messy, with mistakes that are repaired before irreparable harm is done to the embryo?

The question was exactly the type of big-picture problem that the team of biologists and physicists, who have been working together since the early 2000s, likes to tackle.

Thanks to previous work by team member Eric Wieschaus, the Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology and professor of molecular biology and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, scientists know exactly which genes and molecules are involved in creating stripes across the embryo that mark the segments of the fly larva. If anything goes wrong, the stripes form in the wrong places or not at all.

"The experiment defines the first truly quantitative measure of how much information cells have available for crucial developmental decisions and how much of that information they actually use," said Wieschaus, who is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and earned the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work on the genetic control of early embryonic development.

"This gives us an amazing tool for understanding how decision-making in biology actually works, one that is useful at levels ranging from the way proteins bind to DNA to how new biological pathways arise and compete during evolution," he said.

Mariela Petkova, a co-first author on the study, was an undergraduate working in Gregor's laboratory when she took on the question of how the cells use genetic and molecular information to find their locations and fates.

"We take seriously the idea that in a developing embryo cells need to "know" their position in order to make the correct developmental decisions," said Petkova, Class of 2012. "One can imagine cells as GPS devices which, instead of satellite signals, collect molecular ones to figure out their locations. We are able to decode how such molecular signals specify positions along the length of the early fly embryo."

Scientists have long known that the stripes form as a result of a cascade of steps that starts with the fly mother, who tucks into each egg an instruction set built from three different kinds of signaling molecules.

These signaling molecules spread through the embryo's body, forming concentration gradients that activate four so-called "gap" genes. The expression of these genes produces protein molecules that act on DNA segments known as enhancers to drive "pair-rule" genes to produce the striped pattern.

Petkova made detailed measurements of gap gene expression and the exact amounts of molecules produced in the cells along the long body axis. She started the research as part of her senior thesis and then deferred going to graduate school for a year to continue working on the project. She finished the work while on breaks from her studies at the Harvard University Biophysics Graduate Program.

With these measurements in hand, the theoretical physics part of the team was able to model how the cells use information to find their place in the embryo. The team included co-first author Gašper Tkačik, who earned his Ph.D. in physics at Princeton in 2007 and is now a faculty member at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria.

There are many ways that the cells could use the information encoded in the molecules. But the researchers chose to assume that the embryo makes use of all the available information encoded in the molecules. They called this the "optimal decoding approach."

With that assumption, Tkačik and Bialek used a relatively straightforward mathematical approach to predict where the stripes would form. The team then compared the predictions to the actual measurements of gap molecules and found they had accurately anticipated the locations of the stripes.

The real proof came when Petkova studied the eggs laid by flies which have mutations in the genes coding for the maternal signaling molecules that are at the start of the cascade. The team precisely predicted how various gene mutations altered the stripe pattern -- for example by making some of the stripes disappear or form in the wrong place.

"We used genetic manipulations to shuffle the gap gene patterns and 'trick' the cells into 'thinking' they were somewhere else along the length of the embryo," Petkova said. "We put these shuffled patterns through our decoder and built decoding maps, which told us where the cells were versus where they thought they were. Using these maps we predicted where the embryos would make stripes. When we looked at these mutant embryos under a microscope we actually found the stripes at the predicted locations! It was very satisfying."

The study gets at the question of whether it is possible to make robust predictions about biological systems starting from theoretical principles, according to the authors.

"This finding gives us theorists hope that our job in biology will not be forever relegated to fitting models from data, but actually predicting and quantitatively understanding why evolution came up with certain solutions," Tkačik said. "This gives promise, for at least a few example cases, that there may be a 'predictive theory for biology' -- an excellent motivation for future work."

Added Bialek: "A hallmark of modern physics is that general theoretical principles can be connected to an experiment in exquisite quantitative detail," he said. "It has long been difficult to imagine this sort of theory -- experiment interaction in the physics of biological systems -- living things seemed too complex, too messy. This work is one of the strongest examples of theory-experiment comparison that I have seen. I had always hoped that we would get to this level, but I didn't know when it would happen."

Wieschaus added: "Most scientists tend to think that biological processes are inherently sloppy and that cells achieve precision by multiple corrective steps and complicated interactive networks. Such processes certainly exist. What is amazing to me, however, is how precise and reproducible information can be at a single step in development, and once that information is there, how evolution and natural selection can push the cells to make maximum efficient use of that information."

The fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) is frequently used to learn general principles of biology that may apply to more sophisticated organisms such as humans. Whether organisms other than the fruit fly adhere to this optimal use of information remains to be seen, said Gregor.

"This research gives us a look at how genetic networks encode information, how networks work together, and how they do the computations they can do," Gregor said. "There are genetic networks that do all sorts of things in biology, so this is certainly a rich area for further exploration."