Culture

MADISON -- Hundreds of meters deep in the dark of the ocean, a shark glides toward what seems like a meal. It's kind of ugly, eel-like and not particularly meaty, but still probably food. So the shark strikes.

This is where the interaction of biology and physics gets mysterious -- just as the shark finds its dinner interrupted by a cloud of protective slime that appeared out of nowhere around an otherwise placid hagfish.

Jean-Luc Thiffeault, a University of Wisconsin-Madison math professor, and collaborators Randy Ewoldt and Gaurav Chaudhary of the University of Illinois have modeled the hagfish's gag-inducing defense mechanism mathematically, publishing their work today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

The ocean-dwelling hagfish is unique for all the strangest reasons. It has a skull, but no spine or jaw. Its skin hangs loose on its

body, attached only along the back. Its teeth and fins are primitive, underdeveloped structures best described with qualifiers -- "tooth-like" and "fin-like."

But it has an amazing trick up that creepy, loose sleeve of skin: In the blink of an eye (or flash of attacking tail and teeth) the hagfish can produce many times its own body's volume in slime. The goop is so thick and fibrous, predators have little choice but to spit out the hagfish and try to clear their mouths.
"The mouth of the shark is immediately chock full of this gel," Thiffeault says. "In fact, it often kills them, because it clogs their gills."

The gel is a tangled network of microscopic, seawater-trapping threads unspooled from balls of the stuff ejected from glands along the hagfish's skin. These "skeins" are just 100 millionths of a meter in diameter (twice the width of a human hair), but so densely coiled that they can contain as much as 15 centimeters of thread.
Curious scientists have looked at the unraveling before, putting the skeins in salt water to see how long it took them to come apart.

"The hagfish does it in less than half a second, but it took hours of soaking for the threads to loosen up in experiments," says Thiffeault, whose research is focused on fluid dynamics and mixing. "Until they stirred the water, and it happened faster. The stirring was the thing."

The slime modelers set out to see if math could tell them whether the forces of the turbulent water of a bite-and-shake attack were enough to unspool the skeins and make the slime, or if another mechanism -- like a chemical reaction providing some pop to the skein -- was required.

Ewoldt, a mechanical engineering professor, and his graduate student Chaudhary began unraveling skeins under microscopes, watching the process as loose ends of thread stuck to the tip of a moving syringe and trailing lengths spun out from the ball.

"Our model hinges on an idea of a small piece that's initially dangling out, and then a piece that's being pulled away," says Thiffeault. "Think of it as a roll of tape. To start pulling tape from a new roll, you may have to hunt for the end and pick it loose with your fingernail. But if there's already a free end, it's easy to catch it with something and get going."

Unrolling requires a big enough difference between the drag on the free end and an opposing push on the skein -- a ratio larger than a tipping point the researchers refer to informally as the "peeling number" -- to free more thread.

"That's unlikely to happen if the whole thing is moving freely in water," says Thiffeault. "The main conclusion of our model is we think the mechanism relies on the threads getting caught on something else -- other threads, all the surfaces on the inside of a predator's mouth, pretty much anything -- and it's from there it can really be explosive."

It doesn't even have to be a single snag.

"Biology being the way it is, it doesn't have to be exact. Things get to be messy," says Thiffeault. "That leading bit of thread can get caught a little bit, then slip, then get caught again. As long as it's happening to enough skeins, it's pretty fast that you're in the slime."

The skeins may get a boost from mucins, proteins found in mucus that could speed the breakup of packed thread, "but those kinds of things would just help the hydrodynamics," says Thiffeault, who once calculated the extent to which swimming marine life mix entire oceans with their fins and flippers.

"It's just hard to imagine there's another process other than hydrodynamic flow that can lead to these timescales, that burst of slime," he says. "When the shark bites down, that does create turbulence. That creates faster flows, the sorts of things that provide the seed for these things to happen. Nothing is going to happen as nicely as in our model -- which is more of a good start for anyone who wants to take more measurements -- but our model shows the physical forces play the biggest role."

The hydrodynamics of hagfish slime is not just a curiosity. Understanding the formation and behavior of gels is a standing issue in many biological processes and similar industrial and medical applications."

One of the things we'd love to work on in the future is the network of threads. I love thinking about modeling materials as big random collections of threads," Thiffeault says. "A simple model of entangled threads may help us see how that network determines the macroscopic properties of a lot of different, interesting materials."

Hartford, Conn. - Restaurant, food, and beverage companies (food companies) target Hispanic and Black children and teens with ads almost exclusively for fast food, candy, sugary drinks, and unhealthy snacks, according to a new report from the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at the University of Connecticut, the Council on Black Health at Drexel University, and Salud America! at UT Health San Antonio.

The new report finds that fast food, candy, sugary drinks, and unhealthy snacks represented 86 percent of food ad spending on Black-targeted TV programming, where Black consumers comprise the majority of viewers, and 82 percent of ad spending on Spanish-language TV, in 2017. According to researchers, food companies spent almost $11 billion in total TV advertising in 2017, including $1.1 billion on advertising in Black-targeted and Spanish-language TV programming.

"Food companies have introduced healthier products and established corporate responsibility programs to support health and wellness among their customers, but this study shows that they continue to spend 8 of 10 TV advertising dollars on fast food, candy, sugary drinks, and unhealthy snacks, with even more advertising for these products targeted to Black and Hispanic youth," said Jennifer Harris, PhD, the report's lead author and the Rudd Center's director of Marketing Initiatives.

Researchers also found that food companies increased their Black-targeted TV ad spending by more than 50 percent from 2013 to 2017, even though their total advertising spending on all TV programming declined by 4 percent. Black teens saw more than twice as many ads for unhealthy products compared to White teens in 2017.

The report, "Increasing disparities in unhealthy food advertising targeted to Hispanic and Black youth," analyzed advertising by 32 major restaurant, food, and beverage companies that spent at least $100 million or more on food advertising to children (age 2-11) and teens (age 12-17) in 2017 and/or participated in the Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI). The CFBAI is a voluntary, self-regulatory program that sets standards for food advertising directed to children under age 12.

Researchers examined TV ad spending by food companies, as well as young people's exposure to this advertising, and identified brands targeting all children and teens and Hispanic and Black consumers on Spanish-language and Black-targeted TV programming. They compared these 2017 findings with data collected in 2013 from an earlier Rudd Center report on this topic. Researchers also examined companies' public statements about their targeted marketing.

Companies Rarely Advertise Healthy Products:

The report also finds that advertising for healthier product categories--including 100 percent juice, water, nuts, and fruit--totaled only $195 million on all TV programming in 2017, a figure that represented 3 percent of their overall ad spending. Companies were even less likely to advertise these products to Black consumers (representing just 1 percent of ad spending on Black-targeted TV), and they were not advertised at all on Spanish-language TV.

"At best, these advertising patterns imply that food companies view Black consumers as interested in candy, sugary drinks, fast food, and snacks with a lot of salt, fat, or sugar, but not in healthier foods," said Shiriki Kumanyika, PhD, MPH, study author and chair of the Council on Black Health at Drexel University, Dornsife School of Public Health. "Not only are these companies missing out on a marketing opportunity, but they are inadvertently contributing to poor health in Black communities by heavily promoting products linked to an increased risk of obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure," she said.

Study authors call on food manufacturers to stop disproportionately targeting Black and Hispanic youth with ads for unhealthy food, expand corporate health and wellness commitments to promote marketing of healthier products to communities of color, and strengthen CFBAI standards to address targeted marketing of unhealthy products to all children and teens, including Black and Hispanic youth.

"This report shows just how much the food and beverage industry values Hispanic consumers when it comes to encouraging them to buy unhealthy products. But if the industry really values these consumers, companies will take responsibility for advertising that encourages poor diet and related diseases. They can start by eliminating the marketing of unhealthy products to Hispanic youth and families," said Amelie G. Ramirez, DrPH, MPH, study author and director of Salud America!, a national program to promote health equity based at the Institute for Health Promotion Research at UT Health San Antonio.

Other findings in the report include:

Black children and teens each viewed an average of more than 16 food-related ads per day in 2017, compared to 8.8 ads-per-day for White children and 7.8 ads for White teens.

Disparities in how many food-related TV ads Black and White youth view are increasing. In 2013, Black children and teens viewed 70 percent more food-related ads than their White peers. In 2017, these disparities grew to 86 percent more ads viewed by Black children and 119 percent more for Black teens compared to White children and teens.

Candy brands, in particular, disproportionately advertised to Hispanic and Black youth. Candy represented almost 20 percent of food-related TV ads viewed by Hispanic children and teens on Spanish-language TV. Black children and teens saw approximately 2.5 times as many candy ads as White children and teens.

Companies with the most brands targeted to all youth and to Black and/or Hispanic consumers of all ages included Mars (candy and gum brands), PepsiCo (snack and sugary drink brands), and Coca-Cola (sugary drink, diet soda, and drink mix brands).

Fast food restaurants represented approximately one-half of all food-related TV advertising in 2017 (almost $4 billion), including advertising on Black-targeted and Spanish-language TV programming.

New research, led by the University of Bristol, has shed new light on the eating habits of Neolithic people living in southeastern Europe using food residues from pottery extracts dating back more than 8,000 years.

With the dawn of the Neolithic age, farming became established across Europe and people turned their back on aquatic resources, a food source more typical of the earlier Mesolithic period, instead preferring to eat meat and dairy products from domesticated animals.

The research, published today in the journal Royal Society Proceedings B, reveals that people living in the Iron Gates region of the Danube continued regular fish-processing, whereas pottery extracts previously examined from hundreds of sherds elsewhere in Europe show that meat and dairy was the main food source in pots.

This region is archaeologically very important because the sites document Late Mesolithic forager settlements and the first appearance of Neolithic culture, which is spreading up through Europe illustrated by the first appearances of pottery, domesticated plants and animals and different burial styles.

The Iron Gates is a unique landscape on the border between modern-day Romania and Serbia where the Danube cuts through the junction of the Balkan and Carpathian mountain chains. It provided a rich wild aquatic resource base for prehistoric hunter-fisher-foragers during the Late Glacial and early Holocene.

As farming spread from south west Asia into Europe, prehistoric diets ultimately transformed towards a diet based upon domesticated plants and animals. However, in this region, evidence has suggested that wild resources may have continued to be important well into the early Neolithic.

This research involved analysis of organic residues surviving in the fabric of 8,000-year-old Neolithic pottery excavated from sites on the banks of the Danube.

Chemical analyses allowed scientists to directly see what kinds of resources were being prepared in these newly-appearing pots and compare this with the way the same type of pottery was being used by farmers in the wider Balkans region.

Dr Lucy Cramp from the University of Bristol's Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, led the research. She said: "The findings revealed that the majority of Neolithic pots analysed here were being used for processing fish or other aquatic resources.

"This is a significant contrast with an earlier study showing the same type of pottery in the surrounding region was being used for cattle, sheep or goat meat and dairy products.

"It is also completely different to nearly all other assemblages of Neolithic farmer-type pottery previously analysed from across Europe (nearly 1,000 residues) which also show predominantly terrestrial- based resources being prepared in cooking pots (cattle/sheep/goat, possibly also deer), even from locations near major rivers or the coast."

The research team suggest that this unusual dietary/subsistence pattern may be for several reasons.

It is possible that farmers were attracted to this location by the impressive aquatic resources available including huge sturgeon which swam up the river from the Black Sea.

It may also be that Late Mesolithic dietary practices are continuing here, but now using new Neolithic pottery as a result of these early interactions between Mesolithic and Neolithic communities.

Researchers from the University of Southern California have discovered that a drug currently being developed to treat stroke patients could also prevent Alzheimer’s disease. The study, which will be published January 15 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, shows that the genetically engineered protein 3K3A-APC protects the brains of mice with Alzheimer’s-like symptoms, reducing the buildup of toxic peptides and preventing memory loss.

3K3A-APC is a genetically modified version of a human blood protein called activated protein C, which reduces inflammation and protects both neurons and the cells that line the walls of blood vessels from death and degeneration. 3K3A-APC has beneficial effects in various mouse models of disease, including traumatic brain injury and multiple sclerosis, and is currently being developed to treat stroke in humans, where it has been shown to be safe, well tolerated, and capable of reducing intracerebral bleeding.

“Because of its neuroprotective, vasculoprotective, and anti-inflammatory activities in multiple models of neurological disorders, we investigated whether 3K3A-APC can also protect the brain from the toxic effects of amyloid-β toxin in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease,” says Berislav V. Zlokovic, Director of the Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California.

Toxic amyloid-β peptides accumulate in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, leading to neurodegeneration and reduced blood flow within the brain. Zlokovic and colleagues found that 3K3A-APC significantly reduced the accumulation of amyloid-β in the brains of mice that usually produce large amounts of the toxic peptide. 3K3A-APC treatment prevented these mice from losing their memory and helped maintain normal cerebral blood flow. The drug also suppressed inflammation within the brain, another common feature of Alzheimer’s disease.

Zlokovic and colleagues found that 3K3A-APC protects the brain by preventing nerve cells from producing an enzyme called BACE1 that is required to produce amyloid-β. Several different inhibitors of BACE1 have been tested in clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease, but the new study suggests that using 3K3A-APC to block the production of BACE1 could be an alternative approach, particularly at early stages of the disease when amyloid-β has yet to accumulate to levels capable of permanently damaging the brain.

“Our present data support the idea that 3K3A-APC holds potential as an effective anti–amyloid-β therapy for early stage Alzheimer’s disease in humans,” Zlokovic says.

Sophia Antipolis, 15 January 2019: Patients with type 2 diabetes should be prescribed physical activity to control blood sugar and improve heart health. That is one of the recommendations in a position paper(1) of the European Association of Preventive Cardiology (EAPC), a branch of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC). The paper is published today in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, a journal of the ESC.

"Sedentary lifestyles and unhealthy diets are the most important drivers of the increasing number of patients with type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular problems such as heart attacks," said first author Dr Hareld Kemps, a cardiologist at Máxima Medical Centre, Veldhoven, the Netherlands. "Diabetes doubles the risk of mortality but the fitter patients become, the more that risk declines. Unfortunately, the majority of patients do not engage in exercise programmes."

One in 11 adults worldwide have diabetes, of which 90% is type 2 diabetes. Nearly all patients with type 2 diabetes develop cardiovascular complications, which are the leading causes of death in this group.

The paper provides practical recommendations for doctors on how to motivate patients to incorporate physical activity into their daily routine, set achievable and measurable goals, and design individualised exercise training programmes to meet those goals.

"Just advising patients to exercise, which is what doctors typically do, is not enough," said Dr Kemps. "Patients must be assessed for comorbidities, risks related to exercise, and personal preferences. This will be cost effective in the long run so we have to wake up policy makers and healthcare insurers to pay for it. That needs clinicians to take the lead and call for programmes to be reimbursed."

Patients should see their doctor for a personalised plan, and those with health insurance should ask if exercise programmes are covered, said Dr Kemps. "There are also steps patients can take without needing to see a doctor first, such as interrupting sitting time and doing moderate exercise like walking and cycling."

Long-term adherence can be improved by setting early achievable goals that are measurable, and adapting exercise plans to patients' preferences. Remote guidance also looks promising, with patients monitoring themselves with smartwatches then sending data to a health professional for feedback.

Practical and specific goals tend to be motivational, said Dr Kemps. "For an elderly person this could be climbing the stairs in their home or walking to the supermarket - achievements that will really improve their quality of life. Being able to use less medication because of better glycaemic control is also an incentive."

As for clinical targets, cardiorespiratory fitness and glycaemic control are the top two. Both improve with exercise training, the changes can be measured, and they are directly related to wellbeing, morbidity and mortality. Exercise also helps to lower blood pressure and harmful blood lipids.

Dr Kemps noted that weight loss might not be the best target for exercise training. "It's difficult to lose weight with exercise only and if that is the main target patients may become demotivated and stop exercising," he said. "Weight loss is important, but it needs to be part of a multidisciplinary intervention that includes nutrition."

As for the type and intensity of exercise, this needs to be personalised to each patient. High intensity interval training - for example alternating moderate and vigorous walking - is most effective at boosting fitness and controlling blood sugar, but may be unsafe for patients who develop arrhythmias (abnormal heart rhythm) during exercise or have ischaemia (restricted blood flow to the heart).

Dr Kemps said: "I can't stress enough how effective even small increases in activity can benefit patients with type 2 diabetes and heart problems. Interrupting sitting with brief bouts of walking improves glucose control, while two hours of brisk walking per week reduces the risk of further heart problems."

NEW YORK, NY (January 14, 2019)--A new study of around 8,000 middle-aged and older adults found that swapping a half-hour of sitting around with physical activity of any intensity or duration cut the risk of early death by as much as 35 percent. The findings highlight the importance of movement -- regardless of its intensity or amount of time spent moving -- for better health.

The study was published online in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

"Our findings underscore an important public health message that physical activity of any intensity provides health benefits," says Keith Diaz, PhD, assistant professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and lead author of the paper.

About one in four adults spends more than eight hours a day sitting, according to a recent study.

In a previous paper, Diaz and his team discovered that adults who sat for long stretches at a time -- an hour or more without interruption -- had a greater risk of early death than those who were sedentary for the same total amount of time but got up and moved around more often. They also found that people who sat for less than 30 minutes at a time had the lowest risk of early death, suggesting that taking movement breaks every half-hour could lower your risk of death.

But just how intense, and for how long, does the physical activity need to be to counter the ill effects of sitting?

The current study included 7,999 individuals, age 45 and older, who took part in a national investigation of racial and regional disparities in stroke between 2009 and 2013. The individuals wore activity monitors for at least four days to record the amount and intensity of physical activity they engaged in while awake. The researchers tabulated the death rate among participants through 2017. Using this data, they estimated how substituting time spent sitting with time being physically active would affect risk of early death.

The study found that replacing just 30 minutes of sitting with low-intensity physical activity would lower the risk of early death by 17 percent, a statistically significant decrease. Swapping the same amount of sitting for moderate to vigorous activity would be twice as effective, cutting the risk of early death by 35 percent. The researchers also found that short bursts of activity -- of just a minute or two -- provided a health benefit.

"If you have a job or lifestyle that involves a lot of sitting, you can lower your risk of early death by moving more often, for as long as you want and as your ability allows -- whether that means taking an hour-long high-intensity spin class or choosing lower-intensity activities, like walking," Diaz says.

While the study estimated the degree to which the risk of dying from any cause could be cut by swapping sitting for movement, it did not look at specific health-related outcomes.

"In our next study, we plan to look at the risk of specific cardiovascular outcomes, such as heart attack, heart failure, and cardiovascular-related deaths, associated with physical activity versus sedentary behavior," Diaz says.

If you're angry about the political feud that drove the federal government to partially shut down, or about a golden parachute for a CEO who ran a business into the ground, you aren't alone -- but you probably won't do much about it, according to new research by Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business.

The research, coauthored by Rosalind Chow, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory, and Jeffrey Galak, Associate Professor of Marketing, outlines how people respond to two types of injustices: when bad things happen to good people, and when good things happen to bad people.

In the first instance -- a bad thing happening to a good person, such as a hurricane devastating a town -- human beings are reliably motivated to help, but only in a nominal way, according to the research.

"Everybody wants to help. They just do it to a small degree," Galak explains. "When a hurricane happens, we want to help, but we give them 10 bucks. We don't try to build them a new house."

This response illustrates that even a small amount can help us feel that justice is restored, Chow explains: "You checked the box of doing something good, and the world seems right again."

But the converse is not necessarily true: When the universe rewards bad people despite their rotten behavior, people are usually reluctant to do anything about it, even when they're angry at the unfairness of the situation.

That's because people often feel that the forces at play in creating the unfair situation are beyond their control, or would at least be too personally costly to make the effort worthwhile, Galak says. So, we stay angry, but often we settle for the hope that karma will eventually catch up.

On the rare occasions when people do decide to take action against a bad person, the research says they go for broke, spending all their resources and energy -- not just a token amount -- in an effort to deprive that person of everything they shouldn't have gotten. The desire to completely wipe out a bad person's ill-gotten gains is driven by a sense that justice will not be served until the bad person will be effectively deterred from future bad behavior, which is unlikely to be the case if the punishment is a slap on the wrist. For example, for individuals who believe that President Trump was unjustly rewarded the presidency, indictment may be seen as insufficient to deter future bad behavior on his part. Only by completely removing his fortune - impeachment from the presidency, dissolution of his businesses--does justice seem to be adequately served. But given that those outcomes are unlikely, many Americans stew in anger and hope for the best.

So when ordinary people see bad things happening to good people, pitching in a few dollars feels good enough. Pitching in a few dollars to punish a bad person who has been unjustly rewarded, however, doesn't cut it; only when people feel that their actions are guaranteed to send an effective signal to the bad person will they feel compelled to act. Since that sort of guarantee is hard to come by, most people will just stand by and wait for karma to catch up.

The research, titled "Compensate a little, but punish a lot: Asymmetric routes to restoring justice," will be published on January 10, 2019 in PLOS ONE.

Philadelphia, January 15, 2019 -- The American College of Physicians (ACP) today released the seventh edition of its Ethics Manual, published as a supplement to the current issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, ACP's flagship journal, and available online at http://www.annals.org.

New or significantly expanded sections of the ACP Ethics Manual include precision medicine and genetic testing, research and protection of human subjects, telemedicine, electronic communications, social media and online professionalism, electronic health records, and physician volunteerism.

The manual also revisits issues that are still very pertinent and in which ACP has maintained long-standing positions, such as on end-of-life care and physician-assisted suicide, physician-industry relations, and complementary and integrative care.

"The intersection of medicine, the law, and social values can pose challenging ethical dilemmas for patients and their physicians," said ACP President Dr. Ana María López, who is also the former chair of ACP's Ethics, Professionalism, and Human Rights Committee. "We believe that the ACP Ethics Manual can help clinicians, educators, researchers, and policymakers to consider and resolve ethical issues, thereby also enhancing trust in the medical profession among patients and the public."

The manual is intended to facilitate the process of making ethical decisions in clinical practice, teaching, and medical research and to describe and explain underlying principles of ethics, as well as the physician's role in society and with colleagues.

"The focus of the manual continues to be patient-centered and based in the critical importance of fostering strong patient-physician relationships," said Lois Snyder Sulmasy, JD, director of ACP's Center for Ethics and Professionalism.

For example, in the guidance for telemedicine, the ACP Ethics Manual states:

.... The benefits of increased access to care through telemedicine must be balanced with risks from the loss of the in-person encounter, e.g., misdiagnosis potential; over-prescribing; absent in-person interactions including the therapeutic value of touch, body language; and continuity of care....

In an accompanying editorial, J.S. Blumenthal-Barby, PhD, MA, and Bernard Lo, MD, write: "The American College of Physicians and the authors of the Ethics Manual have provided helpful, specific guidance on many difficult ethical issues that internists face in everyday practice as well as providing an explanation of the ethical principles and professional obligations that justify these recommendations."

The ACP Ethics Manual is developed primarily for doctors but has been widely used by educators, policymakers, and patients, and is often cited in medical and ethical literature. The first ACP Ethics Manual was published in 1984. This seventh edition is an update of the 2012 sixth edition and was developed by ACP's Ethics, Professionalism, and Human Rights Committee. ACP's Board of Regents reviewed and approved the manual.

Back pain is among the most frequently reported health problems in the world. New research published in Arthritis Care & Research, an official journal of the American College of Rheumatology and the Association of Rheumatology Health Professionals, examines patterns in back pain over time and identifies the patient characteristics and the extent of healthcare and medication use (including opioids) associated with different patterns.

The study included a representative sample of the Canadian population that was followed from 1994 to 2011. A total of 12,782 participants were interviewed every two years and provided data on factors including comorbidities, pain, disability, opioid and other medication use, and healthcare visits.

During the 16 years of follow-up, almost half (45.6 percent) of participants reported back pain at least once. There were four trajectories of pain among these participants: persistent (18 percent), developing (28.1 percent), recovery (20.5 percent), and occasional (33.4 percent).

The persistent and developing groups tended to have more pain and disability, as well as more healthcare visits and medication use than those in the recovery and occasional trajectory groups. The recovery trajectory group increased the use of opioids and antidepressants over time.

"The good news is that one in five people with back pain recovered; however, they continued to use opioids and antidepressants, suggesting that people recovering from back pain need ongoing monitoring," said lead author Mayilee Canizares, PhD, of the University Health Network's Krembil Research Institute in Toronto, Canada. "The bad news was that one in five experienced persistent back pain, with an additional group--almost one in three--who developed back pain over time. These two groups were associated with greater pain limiting activity, disability, and depression, as well as increased healthcare and medication use."

Dr. Canizares noted that the findings suggest that people with back pain are a heterogeneous group that may benefit from different approaches to management rather than a traditional one size fits all approach. "The distinct groups identified in the study may represent opportunities for more individualized treatment and preventative strategies," she said.

A substantial proportion of young Britons are not ready for their first sexual activity- whatever their age-and lose their virginity "under circumstances that are incompatible with positive sexual health," reveals research published online in BMJ Sexual & Reproductive Health.

Rather than focusing on the age at which a young person starts having sex, a much more nuanced approach is needed to this key milestone, say the researchers, in recognition of the fact that "young age alone doesn't threaten sexual health any more than older age safeguards it."

The researchers base their findings on information gleaned from responses to the Third National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-3) for residents of Britain, and carried out in 2010-12.

The analysis was restricted to 2825 sexually experienced 17 to 24-year olds who were asked about their experience of losing their virginity.

The questions aimed to gauge their level of 'sexual competence,' defined as consent; autonomy; contraceptive use; and readiness.

So they were asked whether both partners had been equally willing to have sex; whether the decision had been autonomous, and not due to external factors, such as drunkenness or peer pressure; whether they had been ready to start having sex; and if a reliable method of contraception had been used.

Only respondents who answered yes to all four domains were deemed sexually competent.

Background information on deprivation; educational attainment; and contextual factors, such as the nature of the relationship, age of both partners, and the previous sexual experience of the other partner were also explored.

Analysis of the responses showed that nearly four out of 10 women (just under 40%) and around one in four men (26.5%) didn't feel that their first sexual experience had happened 'at the right time.'

And almost one in five women said that they and their partner had not been equally willing to have sex on the first encounter, with a similar proportion of women reporting that they had not been in charge of the decision to have sex for the first time.

While most young people used reliable contraception, around one in 10 didn't.

Over half of all the female respondents (just under 52%) and more than four out of 10 (43.5%) of all the male respondents weren't deemed sexually competent.

Although increasing age was associated with sexual competence, it didn't explain all of the variability as sexual competence didn't come close to zero or 100 per cent at any age. This suggests that "chronological age may be an overly simplistic indicator of the nature of first intercourse," explain the researchers.

In line with other published research, partnership stability was associated with a more positive 'first time,' while uncertainty about the virginity status of the partner was associated with a lack of sexual competence, possibly reflecting communication issues, say the researchers.

Those of black ethnicity (women) or living in deprived areas (men) were more likely to lack sexual competence, while young women who had discussed sex with their parents or who had received sex education at school were more likely to have been sexually competent when they lost their virginity.

But this wasn't the case for men, possibly because communication and negotiation skills are less important for men to feel good about their 'first time,' suggest the researchers. An alternative interpretation is that school relationships and sex education needs to be more relevant to the needs of young men, they add.

This is an observational study, and as such, can't establish cause, added to which the associations found may have been due to unmeasured or unknown factors.

But the researchers nevertheless conclude: "A substantial proportion of young people in Britain become sexually active under circumstances that are arguably incompatible with sexual health, defined in its broad sense, encompassing both physical and psychosocial wellbeing."

And inequalities in sexual health, such as unplanned pregnancies and higher rates of sexually transmitted infections, are evident across certain social/ethnic groups, they add.

"The current findings suggest that these inequalities are also reflected in the nature of first intercourse, indicating that greater efforts are required to reduce the disparities that exist from the very onset of sexual activity," they write.

REDWOOD CITY, CA -January 14, 2019 - Scientists at Numenta propose a major new theory about how the human brain works. While neuroscientists have amassed an enormous amount of detailed factual knowledge about the brain, there remains no unifying theory as to what intelligence is and how the brain produces it. In their paper, "A Framework for Intelligence and Cortical Function Based on Grid Cells in the Neocortex," Numenta researchers describe a broad framework for understanding what the neocortex does and how it works. The paper appears in the journal Frontiers in Neural Circuits.

In preprint, the paper ranked as one of the most downloaded on BioRxiv in 2018.

The key insight described in the paper relates to a type of neuron called grid cells. Grid cells exist in an older part of the brain that learns maps of environments. As you move, grid cells keep track of the location of your body relative to these maps. Numenta researchers deduced that grid cells also must exist throughout the neocortex. These "cortical grid cells" track the locations of your sensors as they move relative to the objects in the world. The authors propose that cortical grid cells allow the neocortex to learn models of objects similar to how the older part of the brain learns maps of environments. The paper proposes how we learn the structure and behavior of objects based on locations and location spaces defined by cortical grid cells.

Numenta co-founder and lead author of the paper Jeff Hawkins commented, "The neocortex is composed of a repeating circuit that creates our perceptions, language, and high-level thoughts. We have identified a key piece of this circuit that had been missed, which led to a cascade of discoveries including a new interpretation of how the neocortex works and a new framework for all forms of intelligent thought."

Among discoveries highlighted, the paper also predicts the presence of a new type of neuron called "displacement cells," which partner with cortical grid cells to represent the positions of objects relative to each other. Displacement cells allow the neocortex to learn new objects as compositions of previously learned objects, an important form of generalization.

Co-author Subutai Ahmad elaborated, "Our new theory suggests the brain works differently than commonly believed. Instead of learning one big model of the world, the neocortex learns thousands of models that operate in parallel. We call this the 'Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence'."

Scientists Comment on the New Paper

"Hawkins consistently concentrates on the big picture: the theoretical frameworks that might explain how the whole system functions. His secret power is to understand the data on the ground while adopting a 30,000 foot view -- and this is what allows the possibility of surmounting incrementalism to make real advances in neuroscience," said David Eagleman, Neuroscientist, adjunct professor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer at Neosensory, Inc.

"Numenta's previous research on learning temporal sequences provided new insights into the role of dendrites, neurons and prediction. Their latest paper offers a novel unifying framework for understanding how the entire brain works," said Weinan Sun, a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus. "It will impact the field of neuroscience as well as artificial intelligence."

Resources

Jeff Hawkins presented the new theory in a keynote address at the Human Brain Project Summit on October 15, 2018, in Maastricht, the Netherlands. Numenta also has written a companion piece designed to explain the framework in plain language, making it accessible to non-neuroscientists. Links to these and other resources can be found on Numenta's website https://numenta.com.

Implications for Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Numenta's new framework for how the brain creates intelligence could offer a roadmap for the future of AI. Many leading AI researchers have concluded that deep learning networks have severe limitations and that new approaches will be needed. Numenta's brain theory differs sharply from today's AI techniques. Numenta's belief is that the Thousand Brains Theory, which incorporates the ability to represent compositional structure, learn through movement, and integrate knowledge across sensory modalities, will prove to be the ultimate framework for artificial general intelligence and robotics.

Scientists have created a tool which can more accurately identify ancient Eurasian populations

The tool allows people to discover how similar they are to the Roman Britons, Vikings or ancient Israelites

Scientists at the University of Sheffield studying ancient DNA have created a tool allowing them to more accurately identify ancient Eurasian populations, which can be used to test an individual's similarity to ancient people who once roamed the earth.

Currently the study of ancient DNA requires a lot of information to classify a skeleton to a population or find its biogeographical origins.

Now scientists have defined a new concept called Ancient Ancestry Informative Markers (aAIMs) - a group of mutations that are sufficiently informative to identify and classify ancient populations.

The research, led by Dr Eran Elhaik, from the University of Sheffield's Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, saw the identification of a small group of aAIMs that can be used to classify skeletons to ancient populations.

Dr Elhaik said: "We developed a new method that finds aAIMs efficiently and have proved that it is accurate."

AIMs (Ancestry Informative Markers) have a long history in science and have been employed for the past decade by health and forensic experts.

But Dr Elhaik said that when his team applied traditional AIMs-finding tools to ancient DNA data, they were disappointed with their low accuracy.

"Ancient populations are much more diverse than modern ones," he said. "Their diversity was reduced over the years following events such as the Neolithic revolution and the Black Death.

"Although we have many more people today they are all far more similar to each other than ancient people. In addition, the ancient data themselves are problematic due to the large amount of degraded DNA."

To overcome these challenges, Dr Elhaik developed a specialised tool that identifies aAIMs by combining traditional methodology with a novel one that takes into account a mixture.

"Ancient genomes typically consist of hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of markers. We demonstrated that only 13,000 markers are needed to make accurate population classifications for ancient genomes and while the field of ancient forensics does not exist yet, these aAIMs can help us get much closer to ancient people."

He added: "Until now you couldn't test people for ancient DNA ancestry because commercial microarrays, such as the ones used for genetic genealogy, don't have a lot of markers relevant for paleogenomics - people could not study their primeval origins.

"This finding of aAIMs is like finding the fingerprints of ancient people. It allows testing of a small number of markers - that can be found in a commonly available array - and you can ask what part of your genome is from Roman Britons or Viking, or Chumash Indians, or ancient Israelites, etc.

"We can ask any question we want about these ancient people as long as someone sequenced these ancient markers. So this paper brings the field of paleogenomics to the public."

Researchers said to make the study's findings more accurate for identifying and classifying ancient people throughout the world, the framework and methods of the study should be applied again when more comprehensive ancient DNA databases are available.

Hershey, Pa -- People with cancer are more than four times more likely to commit suicide than people without cancer, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers.

In a study using data on more than eight million cancer patients in the United States, the researchers also found that among people with cancer, white males; patients who were diagnosed at a younger age; and patients with lung, head and neck, testicular cancer, and lymphomas were more likely to commit suicide.

Nicholas Zaorsky, radiation oncologist in the Penn State Cancer Institute, said the study -- published today (Jan. 14) in Nature Communications -- highlights the importance of a comprehensive approach to treating cancer patients.

"Even though cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the United States, most cancer patients do not die from cancer, the patients usually die of another cause," Zaorsky said. "There are multiple competing risks for death, and one of them is suicide. Distress and depression can arise from cancer diagnosis, treatment, financial stress, and other causes. Ultimately, distress and depression may lead to suicide. Our goal was to quantify the risk of suicide among cancer patients."

Dr. Zaorsky said that while a lot of progress has been made in treating the cancer itself, not as much work and research has been put into how cancer affects patients mentally and emotionally. The researchers compared the suicide risk of cancer patients versus the general public, and they explored whether certain cancer patients had a higher risk than other patients.

The researchers used data gathered from the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program. SEER includes data about cancer incidence, survival, treatment, and age and year of diagnosis, and covers 28 percent of the US population.

For the study, the researchers used SEER data on more than 8.6 million patients who had been diagnosed with invasive cancer -- cancer that has spread beyond the tissue in which it originally developed -- between 1973 and 2014.

After analyzing the data, the researchers found that 13,311 of the patients in the dataset -- 0.15 percent -- died by suicide, more than four times the risk of the general population. This is a two-fold increase since a previous study in 2002 that reported a 1.9 increased risk.

Additionally, the researchers found that while the risk of suicide decreases five years after a diagnosis, the risk remains high for patients with Hodgkin lymphoma and testicular cancer.

"The interesting thing we found was that it does seem to matter at what age a patient is diagnosed and what type of cancer that person has," Zaorsky said. "Treatments for some cancers -- like leukemia and testicular cancer among adolescents and young adults, for example -- can decrease a patient's fertility, and that seems to be one of the risks for suicide in the long term. In contrast, elderly patients who are diagnosed with lung, prostate, and head and neck cancers, are at an increased risk of suicide for the remainder of their life. "

The researchers said the results could be used to help identify patients that may be at a higher risk for suicide and help health care providers tailor their treatments accordingly.

"This information could be helpful while developing guidelines and strategies for how and when to screen cancer patients for depression and distress," Zaorsky said. "For example, aiming suicide-prevention strategies at older patients and those with certain cancers, such as prostate, lung, leukemias and lymphomas, may be beneficial."

Additionally, Zaorsky said the study could help clinicians develop survivorship programs, which aim to care for and improve the quality of life for cancer patients that have gone through treatment and are on their way to recovery.

Scientists have made a step forward in understanding the evolution of human feet.

Unlike species such as chimpanzees, which have opposable digits on their feet, humans have evolved arched feet to enhance upright walking.

These arches were thought to be supported by plantar intrinsic muscles (PIMs) - but a study by the University of Queensland and the University of Exeter shows PIMs have a "minimal impact" on this.

The findings show that foot muscles are important for helping us push against the ground during walking and running. This suggests that strong foot muscles could be key to our ability to walk and run.

"Recent research suggests that muscles in our feet are key to how the foot functions during walking and running," said lead author Dr Dominic Farris, of the University of Exeter.

"Our study provides direct evidence showing the significance of these foot muscles in supporting the performance of the human foot.

"Contrary to expectations, PIMs contribute minimally to supporting the arch of the foot during walking and running.

"However, these muscles do influence our ability to produce forward propulsion from one stride into the next."

To test PIMs, the researchers compared foot and lower limb movement with and without a nerve block that prevented contraction of these muscles.

During ground contact in walking and running, the stiffness of the foot arch was not altered by the block, showing that the PIMs' contribution to arch support is minimal, probably due to their small size.

However, with the PIMs blocked, the distal joints of the foot could not be stiffened sufficiently to provide normal push off against the ground.

"This could have implications for understanding conditions such as flat feet, the value of training foot muscles and ideas around potential benefits of running barefoot," said Dr Farris.

"It turns out these muscles aren't important for supporting the arch of the foot, but they are important for propelling us forwards when we walk or run."

In the United States, there are persistent racial disparities in asthma prevalence, morbidity and mortality. These disparities can largely be explained by looking at socioeconomic and environmental factors, such as access to healthcare, a nationwide analysis shows.

The findings highlight the potential of targeted interventions, such as mobile asthma clinic programs and joint programs with schools where asthma prevalence is high. Asthma is a leading cause of school absence.

The analysis was published Jan. 9 in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

Public health researchers have observed that African Americans have a substantially higher rate of emergency hospital visits for asthma and a higher rate of asthma-related death, compared with Caucasians.

"It isn't clear why asthma outcomes are worse in African American patients. The findings from our study suggest that poorer asthma outcomes are not genetic or biological in nature, but are instead due to a number of socioeconomic and environmental factors that impact asthma care," says Anne Fitzpatrick, PhD. "These factors can be modified and improved with the right interventions."

Fitzpatrick is associate professor of pediatrics and director of the Asthma Clinical Research Program in the Department of Pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine.

A team of researchers led by Fitzpatrick analyzed data from the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute's Severe Asthma Research Program, which includes academic medical centers in California, Missouri, Wisconsin, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. This study included 579 participants 6 years and older, each observed for one year.

For each participant, investigators took participants' medical histories, surveyed them about how they manage their asthma, and measured their lung function and other asthma biomarkers to gauge the severity of their asthma. Blood samples were also taken to look for sensitization to various allergens.

African American patients were more than twice as likely to visit the emergency department for asthma, the SARP data showed. When the statistics were weighted -- based on community and family socioeconomic factors and environmental exposure - the racial differences evened out.

What remained after the statistical weighting was that African American patients were 43 percent less likely to see a doctor in an outpatient setting for asthma.

When seeking to address asthma disparities, access to healthcare is one of the most important factors to consider, Fitzpatrick says. It can be difficult to schedule preventive medical services, and asthma medications can be quite expensive, even with adequate insurance coverage.

Allergenic housing conditions are another concern, she says. Asthma medications won't work well if triggers of asthma, such as dust mites and mold, aren't eliminated from the home.

Types of intervention that can make a difference are mobile asthma programs, often in coordination with schools, and employer-endorsed health initiatives that incentivize wellness and preventive care. A local example: the Ronald McDonald Care Mobile, launched in 2016 and now serving 11 elementary and middle schools in Atlanta public schools.