Culture

A pioneering new report has devised a seven-point plan to help policymakers devise new, coherent and collaborative strategies to tackle the greatest global environmental threats.

A team of international researchers, including experts from the Land, Environment, Economics and Policy (LEEP) Institute at the University of Exeter, has examined how politicians and legislators can develop a new way to tackle the growing threat of climate change.

The perspective piece, which is published as the cover article in Nature Sustainability, comes in response to advice from leading scientists, suggesting that the human impact on the environment are already tipping the world into a new geologically significant era.

Called the Anthropocene, this new era is defined by the effect human-kind has already caused on Earth, from mass extinctions of plant and animal species, polluted oceans and altered atmosphere.

In the new report, the scientists argue that while policies are available, there also needs to be a new way to tackle the geographical, boundary, spatial, ecological and socio-political complexities of the issue; and that will require working together across disciplines.

Professor Ian Bateman of LEEP and co-author of the paper said: "The paper shows that the integrated nature of the planetary boundary problems requires an integrated policy response.

"Traditional policies tend to be highly piecemeal, highly inefficient, prone to failure and can even be counterproductive. Such policies take vital resources from key areas while providing short term sticking-plaster efforts for high visibility, often politically motivated causes."

Recent research into the Anthropocene has suggested that there are multiple threats to the resilience of the Earth systems.

While the report acknowledges that there are no 'simple solutions', it does outline seven guiding principles to help tackle the growing environmental threat brought by man-made climate change.

These include selecting existing, robust policies to help formulate policy decisions, the need for decisions to be made consistently across regional, national and global boundaries, and a more conclusive look at the true extent that the environment is being impacted.

The report is authored by Professor Bateman, Dr Donna Carless and Amanda Robinson from Exeter, alongside some of the world's leading researchers in the field.

These include acclaimed natural scientists Professor Johan Rockström (Stockholm Resilience Centre) and Professor Will Steffen (Australian National University) - who pioneered the planetary boundary and Anthropocene concepts - and eminent environmental economists including Professor Thomas Sterner (University of Gothenburg), Professor Edward Barbier (Colorado State University), Professor Carolyn Fischer (Resources for the Future, Washington) and Professor Stephen Polasky (University of Minnesota).

Together the team undertook the first unified assessment of the policy options for tackling the challenges of the Anthropocene. These include the integrated global problems of climate change; the pollution of air, land, freshwater and sea; and the rapid loss of genetic diversity around the world.

Analysis of the skulls of lions, wolves and hyenas has helped scientists uncover how prehistoric dogs hunted 40 million years ago.

A study has revealed that the first species of dog - called Hesperocyon gregarius - pounced on its prey in the same way that many species, including foxes and coyotes, do today.

The findings also show that the largest dog species ever to live - known as Epicyon haydeni - hunted in a similar way. The animals - which lived from 16 until seven million years ago - could grow to the size of a grizzly bear.

Comparisons between computerised scans of fossils and modern animals have shed light on the hunting methods used by prehistoric members of a group of mammals known as carnivorans. These include modern-day foxes, wolves, cougars and leopards.

Scientists at the Universities of Edinburgh and Vienna used the scans to create digital models of the inner ears of 36 types of carnivoran, including six extinct species.

The team found that the size of three bony canals in the inner ear - the organ that controls balance and hearing - changed over millions of years as animals adopted different hunting styles.

Faster predators - such as cheetahs, lions and wolves - developed large ear canals that enable them to keep their head and vision stable while ambushing or chasing prey at speed, the team says.

Their findings reveal that inner ear structure indicates whether a species descended from dog-like animals or belongs to one of four families of animals resembling cats. A distinctive angle between two parts of the inner ear is much larger in dog-like animals, the team found.

The study is based on research carried out by Julia Schwab, a current PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, during her MSc studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. It is published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Ms Schwab, based in the University of Edinburgh's School of GeoSciences, said: "For me, the inner ear is the most interesting organ in the body, as it offers amazing insights into ancient animals and how they lived. The first dog and the largest-ever dog are such fascinating specimens to study, as nothing like them exists in the world today."

Although male over-representation in politics is a worldwide phenomenon, the executive is the most male-dominated branch. There have been very few women presidents and prime ministers. The figure has stagnated since 1990 at twenty female national leaders per year. In recent years their presence has even decreased: in December 2017 there were only thirteen female leaders of their respective country.

Tània Verge and Javier Astudillo, lecturers with the Department of Political and Social Sciences at UPF and members of the Institutions and Political Actors Research Group, are the authors of the article "The gender politics of executive candidates election and reselection", published recently in the European Journal of Political Research.

In their work, they provide new hypotheses and empirical data on the "gender of politics" of the top executive offices, including both the selection and the reselection phases as a candidate, and conclude that in all these processes, the rules of the game are heavily gender-skewed.

Analysis of the people who have run for presidency in different European regions

Due to the low number of female national leaders and considering that holding the presidency of a region is often a springboard to achieving the presidency of a nation in the case of men, this article focuses on those who ran for presidency in several regions of Western Europe during the period 1990-2016. To do so it uses two original databases with regional party leaders and candidates from four different countries: Austria (9 regions), Germany (16 regions), Spain (17 regions), and the UK (3 regions).

"The empirical results indicate that we cannot assume that individual characteristics as well as organizational and institutional factors operate in the same way for male as for female politicians. In fact, the question 'why are there so few women?' has been accompanied by the question 'why are there so many men?', the other side of the coin", says Tània Verge.

Individual, organizational and institutional factors affecting selection

The study shows that, with regard to individual factors affecting selection, the over-representation of men is not the result of tangible qualities such as merit. Indeed, female candidates have more political experience in public positions than men, especially at national level. In addition, it should be noted that in the natural springboard for nomination, presiding the party at regional level, is far more advantageous for male candidates.

To compensate for this disadvantage, women must have overcome their rivals in the competition for the leadership of the party by a large margin of votes, i.e., they must be undisputed leaders. Moreover, "the fact that having children only has a negative impact on the selection of women candidates speaks of the biased organizational dynamics in favour of men that scarcely enhance the reconciliation of family life that still predominates in political institutions and sustain male politicians as the 'norm'", states Tània Verge.

As for the organizational factors, the party ideology and the selection method do not affect the selection of male or female candidates. However, the party's culture of equality is decisive. In this regard, the parties with more feminized organizational structures and parliamentary groups more often choose female candidates for prime minister, according to the study.

If we look at the institutional level, the presence of women as MPs or former prime ministers has a similar positive impact. The political context also establishes different opportunities according to individuals' gender: "Female candidates are more often selected when there is less at stake for the political parties, but they are less likely to be reappointed when they experience a loss of votes, which is inevitable in the context of the low popularity of their party", Tània Verge explains.

In addition, the factors that normally protect male candidates seeking reselection, such as being the outgoing prime minister or party leader, do not act as a safeguard in the case of female candidates. These political resources are more valued in men, and women are required to have more extensive political experience to achieve reselection as candidates.

"The results of the study indicate that the use of gender as a control variable is not enough. Gender must be included as an analytical variable in studies of political recruitment. Not doing so may lead to major errors in the analysis of politics and to disregarding the explanations of inequalities and their effects on the distribution of power in organizations and institutions", concludes the UPF researcher.

ANN ARBOR--Rather than building up plastic filaments layer by layer, a new approach to 3D printing lifts complex shapes from a vat of liquid at up to 100 times faster than conventional 3D printing processes, University of Michigan researchers have shown.

3D printing could change the game for relatively small manufacturing jobs, producing fewer than 10,000 identical items, because it would mean that the objects could be made without the need for a mold costing upwards of $10,000. But the most familiar form of 3D printing, which is sort of like building 3D objects with a series of 1D lines, hasn't been able to fill that gap on typical production timescales of a week or two.

"Using conventional approaches, that's not really attainable unless you have hundreds of machines," said Timothy Scott, U-M associate professor of chemical engineering who co-led the development of the new 3D printing approach with Mark Burns, the T.C. Chang Professor of Engineering at U-M.

Their method solidifies the liquid resin using two lights to control where the resin hardens--and where it stays fluid. This enables the team to solidify the resin in more sophisticated patterns. They can make a 3D bas-relief in a single shot rather than in a series of 1D lines or 2D cross-sections. Their printing demonstrations include a lattice, a toy boat and a block M.

"It's one of the first true 3D printers ever made," said Burns, professor of chemical engineering and biomedical engineering.

But the true 3D approach is no mere stunt--it was necessary to overcome the limitations of earlier vat-printing efforts. Namely, the resin tends to solidify on the window that the light shines through, stopping the print job just as it gets started.

By creating a relatively large region where no solidification occurs, thicker resins--potentially with strengthening powder additives--can be used to produce more durable objects. The method also bests the structural integrity of filament 3D printing, as those objects have weak points at the interfaces between layers.

"You can get much tougher, much more wear-resistant materials," Scott said.

An earlier solution to the solidification-on-window problem was a window that lets oxygen through. The oxygen penetrates into the resin and halts the solidification near the window, leaving a film of fluid that will allow the newly printed surface to be pulled away.

But because this gap is only about as thick as a piece of transparent tape, the resin must be very runny to flow fast enough into the tiny gap between the newly solidified object and the window as the part is pulled up. This has limited vat printing to small, customized products that will be treated relatively gently, such as dental devices and shoe insoles.

By replacing the oxygen with a second light to halt solidification, the Michigan team can produce a much larger gap between the object and the window--millimeters thick--allowing resin to flow in thousands of times faster.

The key to success is the chemistry of the resin. In conventional systems, there is only one reaction. A photoactivator hardens the resin wherever light shines. In the Michigan system, there is also a photoinhibitor, which responds to a different wavelength of light.

Rather than merely controlling solidification in a 2D plane, as current vat-printing techniques do, the Michigan team can pattern the two kinds of light to harden the resin at essentially any 3D place near the illumination window.

U-M has filed three patent applications to protect the multiple inventive aspects of the approach, and Scott is preparing to launch a startup company.

A paper describing this research will be published in Science Advances, titled, "Rapid, continuous additive manufacturing by volumetric polymerization inhibition patterning."

MADISON, Wis. -- A University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher and his collaborators at the University of California, San Francisco have repurposed the gene-editing tool CRISPR to study which genes are targeted by particular antibiotics, providing clues on how to improve existing antibiotics or develop new ones.

Resistance to current antibiotics by disease-causing pathogens is a growing problem, one estimated to endanger millions of lives and cost over $2 billion each year in the U.S.

"What we need to do is to figure out new weaknesses in these bacteria," says Jason Peters, a UW-Madison professor of pharmaceutical sciences, who developed the new system.

The technique, known as Mobile-CRISPRi, allows scientists to screen for antibiotic function in a wide range of pathogenic bacteria.

Using a form of bacterial sex, the researchers transferred Mobile-CRISPRi from common laboratory strains into diverse bacteria, even including a little-studied microbe making its home on cheese rinds. This ease of transfer makes the technique a boon for scientists studying any number of bacteria that cause disease or promote health.

Peters worked with Carol Gross, Oren Rosenberg and other colleagues at UCSF and other institutions to design and test Mobile-CRISPRi. The system reduces the production of protein from targeted genes, allowing researchers to identify how antibiotics inhibit the growth of pathogens. That knowledge can help direct research to overcome resistance to existing drugs.

The researchers published their findings Jan. 7 in the journal Nature Microbiology. They took advantage of the increasingly popular molecular tool CRISPR, but in a unique way.

"Most people, when they think about CRISPR, think about gene editing," says Peters, who earned his doctorate at UW-Madison and recently joined the School of Pharmacy as an assistant professor. "But that's not what I do."

Normally, the CRISPR system gets targeted to a gene where it cuts the DNA in two. The gene can be edited while the cell repairs the damage.

But Peters and his collaborators worked with a defanged form of CRISPR known as CRISPRi. CRISPRi has been engineered to be unable to cut DNA. Instead, it just sits on the DNA, blocking other proteins from gaining access to and turning on a particular gene. The result is lower expression of the gene and a reduced amount of the protein it codes for.

The researchers showed that if they decreased the amount of protein targeted by an antibiotic, bacteria became much more sensitive to lower levels of the drug -- evidence of an association between gene and drug. Thousands of genes at a time can be screened as potential antibiotic targets this way, helping scientists learn how antibiotics work and how to improve them.

To make CRISPRi mobile, the researchers developed methods to transfer the system from common lab models like E. coli to disease-causing species, which are often harder to study. Peters' team turned to one of the natural ways bacteria link up and exchange DNA, a kind of bacterial sex called conjugation. Former UW-Madison Professor of Genetics Joshua Lederberg discovered conjugation, which earned him a Nobel Prize in 1958.

"You basically mix the bacteria together and it happens," Peters says of conjugation. "It doesn't get much easier than that."

Using conjugation, Peters' team transferred Mobile-CRISPRi to the pathogens Pseudomonas, Salmonella, Staphylococcus and Listeria, among others.

"What that means is that you can now do studies on how antibiotics work directly in these pathogens," says Peters. "That could give us a better clue about how these drugs work in the different organisms and potentially what we can do to make them better."

The real test of Mobile-CRISPRi's mobility came from cheese.

As cheese ages, it curates its own landscape of microbes. Scientists are just starting to investigate the immense diversity of bacteria and fungi on cheeses, which contribute to their complex flavors. One of those bacteria, Vibrio casei, was found on the rind of a French cheese in 2010 by Peters' collaborator Rachel Dutton of the University of California, San Diego.

Manipulating genes is simple in established laboratory bacteria such as E. coli, but there is often no way to study genes in bacteria recently isolated from the environment, such as V. casei. But Mobile-CRISPRi was easily transferred into the strain, opening up new avenues for understanding how the bacteria colonizes and helps age cheese. As a proof-of-concept, V. casei suggests that Mobile-CRISPRi should be useful for any number of previously understudied bacteria, both those that harm us and those we rely on.

Now Peters is offering up Mobile-CRISPRi to other researchers to study their germs of choice.

"So now it's going to be completely available to the community," says Peters. "Now this gives people a path forward."

In a four-year study, a group of science faculty finds that student buy-in to a new curriculum, and therefore satisfaction, increases with each successive undergraduate cohort -- and learning gains did not suffer. The researchers say the results of their longitudinal study should help encourage college faculty and administration to create, adapt, and support innovative courses for their students.

Over the past few decades, biologists have learned that the most effective ways of teaching biology are to move away from lecture-based classes and to be more inclusive to students across majors, with student-centered curricula and hands-on discovery as a critical component to learning.

"It takes a long time for programs and institutions to adopt changes," said Suann Yang, an assistant professor of biology at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Geneseo. "But because of the strong evidence for better methods in teaching biology, we decided to incorporate them into an innovative curriculum where students are grappling with bigger, complex issues, and try to solve problems using ideas throughout biology in an integrative fashion. To better understand curricular transformations more fully, we also decided to administer assessments for student attitudinal changes in addition to the usual learning gains."

The full study appears in PLOS ONE.

Yang, along with four colleagues, who, at the time, taught at the same small liberal arts college, devised a new introductory course, Integrating Biology with Inquiry (IBIS), that teaches the standard biology curriculum in nine overarching modules, or scenarios. The course was taught to 724 students by 13 faculty members over four years.

"As students work through each scenario, they are integrating their knowledge as they go," said Tarren Shaw, Ph.D., co-author and lecturer of biology at the University of Oklahoma. "One example is that students will study the immune system, the ecology of population growth, and coevolution in a module about disease. This format takes students from the cellular level to beyond the species level, while studying short- and long-term processes, in one scenario."

Together with the scenario framework, the IBIS coursework has students investigating particular questions they design in the lab that are related to the scenario.

"This is very different from conventional, lecture-based classes that are accompanied by cookbook labs, a protocol that all students follow to arrive at the same result," added Shaw. "The IBIS curriculum is not just about learning the biological concepts but how to study it, how to be curious about it, ask questions, and use your knowledge to discover more."

Jeffrey Grim, an assistant professor at the University of Tampa, noted that multiple assessments were needed to measure student learning. "Besides pretests and posttests, we also did fairly extensive attitudinal surveys and other surveys to try to understand how or if students associate any learning they acquired with the curriculum they've experienced. We had success all around -- we had good learning gains, and we also found that over time, students recognized that how they were taught was linked to their understanding of how much they learned," Grim said. "Students were able to increasingly attribute specific components of the new student-centered course to their learning.

"The second part of the story is that change takes time and it's hard," said Grim. "Experts in institutional change theory have established this, but experiencing it firsthand was useful to us, because as individual faculty members who are trying to make changes in the way we teach, it's often very frustrating when students are upset because 'this isn't how my older brother or people in my sorority did it.' Of course, it may not be any harder; it's just different."

The researchers report that all of the analysis shows that there was some resistance at the beginning when students first faced the curriculum change. But after four years, when it became the norm throughout the student body, it was fully adopted by the students.

"We worked hard every year to make the course better. We'd take the course evaluations and address any issues students identified," said Yang. "When we're in the thick of it we tended to focus on what we needed to improve rather than the bigger patterns. But when we were able to look back and see these larger longitudinal trends, we saw that most of our students say the course was really good for them -- that they learned a lot and know why they learned it -- we were super excited!"

The researchers point out that faculty who want to make changes should not hesitate, but everyone in the program should recognize that it will take time. "If everyone shares a goal, then it is important to support each other and stick with it," said Yang.

The researchers are making the IBIS curriculum available as an open educational resource (OER) with support from SUNY Geneseo's Milne Library's Open Services Team. As well as being free to access and download, the curriculum materials are openly licensed so other faculty and schools can adopt and make adaptations. Currently, two modules have been released, with more to be published this year. Each module is centered on a framing scenario that serves to engage students and provide a context for them to explore the intended learning outcomes with an emphasis on collaborative investigation.

Rockville, Md. (January 10, 2019)--Research suggests that a gene that governs the body's biological (circadian) clock acts differently in males versus females and may protect females from heart disease. The study is the first to analyze circadian blood pressure rhythms in female mice. The research, published ahead of print in the American Journal of Physiology--Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology, was chosen as an APSselect article for January.

The body's circadian clock--the biological clock that organizes bodily activities over a 24-hour period-- contributes to normal variations in blood pressure and heart function over the course of the day. In most healthy humans, blood pressure dips at night. People who do not experience this temporary drop, called "non-dippers," are more likely to develop heart disease. The circadian clock is made up of four main proteins (encoded by "clock genes") that regulate close to half of all genes in the body, including those important for blood pressure regulation.

Previous research has shown that male mice that are missing one of the four clock genes (PER1) become non-dippers and have a higher risk for heart and kidney disease. A research team studied the circadian response and blood pressure of female mice that lack PER1 and compared them with a healthy female control group. On both low- and high-salt diets, both groups "retained an apparent circadian rhythm" of blood pressure, the researchers explained. Unlike the male mice in previous research, the females without PER1 showed normal dips in blood pressure overnight.

These results suggest that the lack of PER1 acts differently in males and females. The findings are consistent with research showing that premenopausal women are less likely to be non-dippers than men of the same age. "This study represents an important step in understanding sex differences in the regulation of cardiovascular function by the circadian clock," the researchers wrote.

The Neurometabolic Diseases research team at IDIBELL and CIBER of Rare Diseases (CIBERER), led by ICREA Professor Aurora Pujol, has uncovered a novel disease of children affecting the brain white matter -the myelin sheath-, leading to severe incapacity and death in some cases.

The gene causing the disorder is called DEGS1 and was identified using whole exome sequencing (WES) of 19 patients from around the globe (China, Iran, Morocco, USA, and France). "Sample collection for such a rare disease was extremely fast thanks to our collaboration with reference centers for leukodystrophies in France (Dr Odile Boespflug-Tanguy) and in Baltimore (Dr Ali Fatemi), and to the freely accessible genomic information exchange platform GeneMatcher", Dr Pujol explains.

DEGS1 is an enzyme of lipid metabolism that converts dihydroceramides to ceramides, at a hub essential for brain function. Indeed, defects in other enzymes along this pathway cause similar rare diseases like Krabbe disease or Metachromatic Leukodystrophy, also affecting the myelin..

A zebrafish model with deficient DEGS1 function was generated in the laboratory of Dr Cristina Pujades, UPF Barcelona, and exhibited swimming difficulties, loss of myelin forming cells (oligodendrocytes) and ceramide imbalances. These defects were corrected by a treatment with fingolimod, a drug in use for multiple sclerosis which interferes with this pathway. "These results pave the way to clinical trials, illustrating the transformative impact of clinical and functional genomics in the continuum from diagnostics to treatment", adds Dr Pujol.

Vitamin D supplements have been found to reduce the risk of potentially fatal lung attacks in some chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients, according to a study led by Queen Mary University of London.

The findings add to a growing list of health benefits for the 'sunshine vitamin'. While vitamin D is best known for its effects on bone health, previous studies by Queen Mary researchers have revealed its role in protecting against colds, flu and asthma attacks, and even helping with weight gain and brain development in malnourished children.

The latest research, carried out at Queen Mary and funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), found that the use of vitamin D supplements led to a 45 per cent reduction in lung attacks among COPD patients who were deficient in vitamin D. No benefit was seen for patients with higher vitamin D levels.

COPD describes a number of lung conditions, including emphysema and chronic bronchitis, where a person's airways become inflamed, making it harder to breathe 1. Almost all COPD deaths are due to lung attacks (termed 'exacerbations') in which symptoms worsen acutely. These are often triggered by viral upper respiratory infections - the type that cause the common cold.

The disease affects more than 170 million people worldwide, and caused an estimated 3.2 million deaths in 2015. 1.2m people have COPD in the UK, which is the cause of five per cent of the UK's total deaths (around 30,000 per year), and costs the NHS £800m per year.

Lead researcher Professor Adrian Martineau from Queen Mary University of London said: "New treatments are urgently needed to prevent COPD attacks. Our study shows that giving supplements to vitamin D-deficient COPD patients nearly halves their rate of potentially fatal attacks.

"Vitamin D supplementation is safe, and it costs just a few pence to supplement a person for a year - so this is a potentially highly cost-effective treatment that could be targeted at those who have low vitamin D levels following routine testing.

"Around a fifth of COPD patients in the UK - about 240,000 people - have low levels of vitamin D. Reducing risk of attacks in such a large group would have major benefits for patients and for the NHS, since many attacks require costly hospital admission."

The study, published in the journal Thorax, is based on a new analysis of data from 469 patients across three clinical trials in the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Clinical trials investigating effects of vitamin D supplementation on COPD have shown conflicting results. By pooling all the individual patient data from different clinical trials, the team set out to determine whether vitamin D might have a protective effect on certain groups of COPD patients.

The analysis found that vitamin D supplements, given by mouth, reduced the rate of moderate/severe COPD exacerbations in patients with low vitamin D levels (less than 25 nmol per litre of blood or 10 nanograms per millilitre).

Doses of vitamin D ranged from 30 micrograms daily to 2500 micrograms monthly. Supplementation did not influence the proportion of participants experiencing serious adverse events, indicating that it was safe.

Giving supplements to patients who did not have such low levels of vitamin D did not reduce their risk of COPD attacks. The researchers therefore highlight that this would need to be a targeted therapy, with doctors first testing vitamin D levels in COPD patients who experience frequent attacks, and then giving vitamin D supplements to those who are deficient.

This echoes the Queen Mary team's previous studies which found that vitamin D had the strongest protective effects against asthma exacerbation and acute respiratory infections such as colds and flu in people who had the lowest vitamin D levels to start with.

Public Health England and the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition advise a daily intake of 10 micrograms of vitamin D.

The study is limited in that the data come from a relatively small number of trials, so the authors warn that the findings should be interpreted with a degree of caution.

Osaka, Japan - It's one of the first questions asked by many newly-diagnosed cancer patients--"What are my chances of beating this?" Often there is no clear answer, with survival rates differing widely depending on the cancer stage and available treatment options. However, post-operative testing that provides an accurate prediction of long-term treatment outcomes is the next best thing to a crystal ball, allowing clinicians to plan further treatment or follow-up strategies and more accurately inform patients about their prognoses.

But is this possible? Researchers in Japan think that it might be, at least for esophageal cancer patients. In a recent study published in Annals of Surgery, a team led by researchers at Osaka University retrospectively examined tissue specimens from 120 esophageal cancer patients following treatment, allowing them to both assess tumor characteristics and investigate how these related to long-term treatment outcomes.

Esophageal cancer is the sixth most common cause of cancer-related death worldwide and, despite various treatment options, has a poor long-term prognosis. Most locally-advanced esophageal cancers are treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC), which aims to increase the likelihood of successful curative surgery by reducing tumor size and eradicating systemic micro-metastases. Tissue specimens are usually examined after surgery to assess how a tumor has responded to chemotherapy treatment. However, standard methods do not map the remaining tumor cells to the different layers of the esophageal wall, and therefore provide an incomplete picture of treatment outcome.

The team hypothesized that there might be specific patterns of residual tumors after NAC, and that they might have different clinical implications for patients

The researchers therefore mapped the exact locations of residual tumors in the esophageal wall of patients after NAC and assessed whether tumor location was associated with clinicopathological parameters including specific oncological outcomes.

After NAC, they identified four tumor remnant patterns that are clearly different from those reported previously; the most common residual tumor pattern was a 'shallow type.' However, in approximately 40% of cases, tumor cells unexpectedly disappeared in the superficial (mucosal) layer of the esophageal wall, indicating that it would be difficult to diagnose whether or not tumor cells completely disappeared after NAC based only on an endoscopic mucosal biopsy. When the team examined associations between these patterns and disease factors, including prognosis, they found that pattern types 3 and 4 had higher risks of pleural dissemination and distant metastases than types 1 or 2. These results shows that patients displaying patterns 3 or 4 should have more regular follow-up appointments than those with pattern types 1 or 2. Interestingly, survival was similar among the four groups.

According to lead authors Tadayoshi Hashimoto and Tomoki Makino, these findings have significant clinical implications. They explained that by determining the tumor remnant pattern from resected specimens and post-operative image examination, a personalized treatment plan for each patient can be developed. This customized approach is expected to significantly improve esophageal cancer treatment outcomes.

A budding relationship or just a one-night stand? The difference may not be immediately obvious, least of all to those directly involved. However, sex helps initiate romantic relationships between potential partners, a new study finds.

A team of psychologists from the Israeli-based Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya and the University of Rochester's Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology conclude that sexual desire may play a major role not only in attracting potential partners to each other, but also in encouraging the formation of an attachment between them.

"Sex may set the stage for deepening the emotional connection between strangers," says the study's lead author Gurit Birnbaum, a social psychologist and associate professor of psychology at the IDC Herzliya. "This holds true for both men and women. Sex motivates human beings to connect, regardless of gender."

The study was limited to heterosexual relationships. According to Birnbaum, some believe that men are more likely than women to initiate relationships when sexually aroused, but when one focuses on more subtle relationship-initiating strategies, such as providing help, this pattern does not hold true: in fact, both men and women try to connect with potential partners when sexually aroused.

In four interrelated studies, participants were introduced to a new acquaintance of the opposite sex in a face-to-face encounter. The researchers demonstrate that sexual desire triggers behaviors that can promote emotional bonding during these encounters.

"Although sexual urges and emotional attachments are distinct feelings, evolutionary and social processes likely have rendered humans particularly prone to becoming romantically attached to partners to whom they are sexually attracted," says co-author Harry Reis, a professor of psychology and Dean's Professor in Arts, Sciences & Engineering at the University of Rochester.

In the first study, the researchers looked at whether sexual desire for a new acquaintance would be associated with non-verbal cues signaling relationship interest. These so-called immediacy behaviors are displayed in the synchronization of movements, close physical proximity, and frequent eye contact with a study insider who worked with the scientists. The study participants, all of whom identified as single and heterosexual, were recruited at a university in central Israel.

Study 1 included 36 women and 22 men who lip-synched to pre-recorded music with an attractive, opposite-sex study insider. Afterwards, participants rated their desire for the insider, whom they believed to be another participant. The scientists found that the greater the participant's desire for the insider, the greater their immediacy behaviors towards, and synchronization with, the insider.

Study 2 replicated the finding with 38 women and 42 men who were asked to slow dance with an attractive, opposite-sex insider, whom they believed to be a study participant. Again, the researchers found a direct association between synchronization of body movement and desire for the insider.

Study 3 included 42 women and 42 men and established a causal connection between activating the sexual behavior system and behaviors that help initiate relationships. In order to activate the sexual system, the researchers used a subliminal priming technique in which they flashed an erotic, non-pornographic image for 30 milliseconds on a screen, which participants were not aware of seeing. Next, participants interacted with a second study participant--essentially a potential partner--discussing interpersonal dilemmas while being videotaped. Afterwards judges rated the participants' behaviors that conveyed responsiveness and caring. The scientists found the activation of the sexual system also resulted in behaviors that suggested caring about a potential partner's well-being--an established signal for interest in a relationship.

Study 4 included 50 women and 50 men. Half the group watched an erotic, non-pornographic video scene from the movie The Boy Next Door. The other half watched a neutral video of rainforests in South America. Next, study participants were assigned an attractive opposite-sex insider and told to complete a verbal reasoning task. The insider pretended to get stuck on the third question and asked the participant for help. The researchers found that those participants who had watched the erotic movie scene were quicker to help, invested more time, and were perceived as more helpful, than the neutral video control group.

What then could explain the role of sex in fostering partnerships? Human sexual behavior evolved to ensure reproduction. As such, sex and producing offspring don't depend on forming an attachment between partners. However, the prolonged helplessness of human children promoted the development of mechanisms that keep sexual partners bonded to each other so that they can jointly care for their offspring, says Birnbaum, whose collaboration with Reis spans 20 years, dating back to her postdoc days at the University of Rochester.

"Throughout human history, parents' bonding greatly increased the children's survival chances," she says.

Prior neuroimaging research has shown that similar brain regions (the caudate, insula, and putamen) are activated when a person experiences either sexual desire or romantic love. The researchers surmise that this pattern hints at a neurological pathway that causes sexual activation--the neural processes that underlie a sexual response--to affect emotional bonding.

They conclude that experiencing sexual desire between previously unacquainted strangers may help facilitate behaviors that cultivate personal closeness and bonding.

"Sexual desire may play a causally important role in the development of relationships," says Birnbaum. "It's the magnetism that holds partners together long enough for an attachment bond to form."

Observations from Gemini Observatory identify a key fingerprint of an extremely distant quasar, allowing astronomers to sample light emitted from the dawn of time. Astronomers happened upon this deep glimpse into space and time thanks to an unremarkable foreground galaxy acting as a gravitational lens, which magnified the quasar's ancient light. The Gemini observations provide critical pieces of the puzzle in confirming this object as the brightest appearing quasar so early in the history of the Universe, raising hopes that more sources like this will be found.

Before the cosmos reached its billionth birthday, some of the very first cosmic light began a long journey through the expanding Universe. One particular beam of light, from an energetic source called a quasar, serendipitously passed near an intervening galaxy, whose gravity bent and magnified the quasar's light and refocused it in our direction, allowing telescopes like Gemini North to probe the quasar in great detail.

"If it weren't for this makeshift cosmic telescope, the quasar's light would appear about 50 times dimmer," said Xiaohui Fan of the University of Arizona who led the study. "This discovery demonstrates that strongly gravitationally lensed quasars do exist despite the fact that we've been looking for over 20 years and not found any others this far back in time."

The Gemini observations provided key pieces of the puzzle by filling a critical hole in the data. The Gemini North telescope on Maunakea, Hawai'i, utilized the Gemini Near-InfraRed Spectrograph (GNIRS) to dissect a significant swath of the infrared part of the light's spectrum. The Gemini data contained the tell-tale signature of magnesium which is critical for determining how far back in time we are looking. The Gemini observations also led to a determination of the mass of the black hole powering the quasar. "When we combined the Gemini data with observations from multiple observatories on Maunakea, the Hubble Space Telescope, and other observatories around the world, we were able to paint a complete picture of the quasar and the intervening galaxy," said Feige Wang of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who is a member of the discovery team.

That picture reveals that the quasar is located extremely far back in time and space - shortly after what is known as the Epoch of Reionization -- when the very first light emerged from the Big Bang. "This is one of the first sources to shine as the Universe emerged from the cosmic dark ages," said Jinyi Yang of the University of Arizona, another member of the discovery team. "Prior to this, no stars, quasars, or galaxies had been formed, until objects like this appeared like candles in the dark."

The foreground galaxy that enhances our view of the quasar is especially dim, which is extremely fortuitous. "If this galaxy were much brighter, we wouldn't have been able to differentiate it from the quasar," explained Fan, adding that this finding will change the way astronomers look for lensed quasars in the future and could significantly increase the number of lensed quasar discoveries. However, as Fan suggested, "We don't expect to find many quasars brighter than this one in the whole observable Universe."

The intense brilliance of the quasar, known as J0439+1634 (J0439+1634 for short), also suggests that it is fueled by a supermassive black hole at the heart of a young forming galaxy. The broad appearance of the magnesium fingerprint captured by Gemini also allowed astronomers to measure the mass of the quasar's supermassive black hole at 700 million times that of the Sun. The supermassive black hole is most likely surrounded by a sizable flattened disk of dust and gas. This torus of matter -- known as an accretion disk -- most likely continually spirals inward to feed the black hole powerhouse. Observations at submillimeter wavelengths with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Maunakea suggest that the black hole is not only accreting gas but may be triggering star birth at a prodigious rate -- which appears to be up to 10,000 stars per year; by comparison, our Milky Way Galaxy makes one star per year. However, because of the boosting effect of gravitational lensing, the actual rate of star formation could be much lower.

Quasars are extremely energetic sources powered by huge black holes thought to have resided in the very first galaxies to form in the Universe. Because of their brightness and distance, quasars provide a unique glimpse into the conditions in the early Universe. This quasar has a redshift of 6.51, which translates to a distance of 12.8 billion light years, and appears to shine with a combined light of about 600 trillion Suns, boosted by the gravitational lensing magnification. The foreground galaxy which bent the quasar's light is about half that distance away, at a mere 6 billion light years from us.

Fan's team selected J0439+1634 as a very distant quasar candidate based on optical data from several sources: the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System1 (Pan-STARRS1; operated by the University of Hawai'i's Institute for Astronomy), the United Kingdom Infra-Red Telescope Hemisphere Survey (conducted on Maunakea, Hawai'i), and NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope archive.

The first follow-up spectroscopic observations, conducted at the Multi-Mirror Telescope in Arizona, confirmed the object as a high-redshift quasar. Subsequent observations with the Gemini North and Keck I telescopes in Hawai'i confirmed the MMT's finding, and led to Gemini's detection of the crucial magnesium fingerprint -- the key to nailing down the quasar's fantastic distance. However, the foreground lensing galaxy and the quasar appear so close that it is impossible to separate them with images taken from the ground due to blurring of the Earth's atmosphere. It took the exquisitely sharp images by the Hubble Space Telescope to reveal that the quasar image is split into three components by a faint lensing galaxy.

The quasar is ripe for future scrutiny. Astronomers also plan to use the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, and eventually NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, to look within 150 light-years of the black hole and directly detect the influence of the gravity from black hole on gas motion and star formation in its vicinity. Any future discoveries of very distant quasars like J0439+1634 will continue to teach astronomers about the chemical environment and the growth of massive black holes in our early Universe.

Specific respiratory microbiome communities may be linked to influenza susceptibility, according to a study published January 9, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Betsy Foxman from the University of Michigan, USA, and colleagues.

Influenza virus, the causative agent of flu, primarily targets the respiratory tract and infects epithelial cells here. The epithelial cells of the nose and throat are enveloped by complex bacterial communities, leading Foxman and colleagues to hypothesize that this respiratory microbiome might interact with the virus - and could play a role in the body's defences against flu.

In this study, 144 Nicaraguan households with a member identified as having influenza were enrolled between 2012 and 2014 and all household adults and children monitored for up to two weeks. Study staff visited each household five times, sampling the respiratory microbiomes of all household members as well as testing for influenza infection; participants also kept symptom diaries. Using statistical modeling, the authors were able to categorize each participant's respiratory microbiome into one of five distinct community types at every visit, though approximately half of participants underwent changes in microbiome type between study visits. The authors could then compare participants' microbiome types to the likelihood of their contracting flu.

One of the five respiratory microbiome community types across age groups clearly demonstrated decreased susceptibility to the flu. This microbiome type was significantly less common in infants and young children, and when present also appeared less stable in these age groups compared to older children and adults. While the link between microbiome and influenza susceptibility was not shown to be causal in this study, the authors suggest that these microbiome differences might contribute to the increased influenza risk observed among young children.

The authors note that the further work could examine whether the high degree of change to microbiome types seen in many participants represents normal variation among healthy individuals or a response to influenza exposure. Nonetheless, the authors believe this is the first human population study to indicate that your respiratory microbiome may affect your susceptibility to flu.

The authors add: "The nose/throat microbiome may be a potential target for preventing the spread of influenza."

Children who experience physical, sexual, and emotional abuse or neglect are at least two to three times more likely to attempt suicide in later life, according to the largest research review carried out of the topic.

The analysis of 68 studies by psychologists at the University of Manchester and University of South Wales revealed that suicide attempts were:

Three times more likely for people who experienced sexual abuse as a child

Two and a half times more likely for people who experienced physical abuse as a child

Two and a half times more likely for people who experienced emotional abuse or neglect as a child

Also from the research published in Psychological Medicine today, children who experienced multiple abuse are as much as five times higher to attempt suicide.

And as those people who experienced abuse as children get older, the risk of suicide attempts increases.

People not in contact with mental health clinicians were found to be at the highest level of risk.

The sixty-eight studies were carried out across the world, producing about 262 thousand adults aged 18 years or older, who were exposed to childhood abuse and neglect.

Dr Maria Panagioti, from The University of Manchester, also based at the NIHR Greater Manchester patient safety translational research, led the research team.

She said: "Around one adult in every three has experienced abuse as a child".

"This study conclusively gives us solid evidence that childhood abuse and neglect is associated with increased likelihood that they will be at risk of suicide as adults.

"And that has important implications on healthcare. Other studies have shown that in the US, for example, the economic burden of childhood maltreatment is estimated to be around $124 billion."

"Current treatment for people with suicidal behaviour usually centres around Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

"But that assumes people will seek help themselves. This research identifies that people who are not under the care of clinicians are at risk.

"So, we need a new approach to identify these people and to focus our efforts on effective community intervention.

Dr Ioannis Angelakis from the University of South Wales said: "These findings not only provided a clear picture of the connection between abuse or neglect in childhood and suicide attempts later on in life, but also recognised that efficient interventions should take a broader community-based approach."