Culture

Washington, DC - Immigrating to a new country brings many challenges, including figuring out how to be part of a new community. For some people, voluntarily adopting a name similar to where someone is living, rather than keeping an original name, is one part of trying to assimilate or fit in with the new community. According to a new study focused on the United States, where anglicized names are more typical, anglicizing ethnic names may reduce bias towards immigrants.

The results appear in Social Psychological and Personality Science.

"We do not suggest immigrants to Anglicize their ethnic names in order to avoid discrimination," says Xian Zhao (University of Toronto), lead author on the study. "This certainly puts the onus on immigrants to promote equity and our previous studies also suggest that Anglicizing names may have negative implications for one's self-concept."

To detect bias, the researchers ran a trilogy of hypothetical transportation accidents: trolley, plane dilemma, and lifeboat. In each variation of these moral dilemmas, participants were asked to imagine that men's lives were at risk. The men that could be saved or sacrificed might be white with a name like "Dan" or "Alex," an immigrant with the name "Mark" or "Adam," or an immigrant with a name associated with China or the Middle East, such as "Qiu," "Jiang," or "Ahmed."

The researchers focused most of their effort on using white participants, to more clearly delineate ingroups and outgroups in their research

In the trolley scenario, people tended to sacrifice the one to save the many, which is a common finding. However, white participants were more likely to sacrifice an immigrant with their original name than someone white or an immigrant with an anglicized name.

Their second study involved a plane crash scenario and possibly leaving someone behind with a broken leg. The white men continued to show similar bias patterns, but the women did not.

In the final scenario, throwing a life preserver to a man named Muhammad and risking the lives of everyone on board a lifeboat, brought similar results. However, for participants who scored as favorable towards multicultural groups, being an immigrant named "John" actually improved ones' chances for survival. But for participants who scored as favorable towards assimilating minority groups, only being white increased the chance to be saved. Zhao says they've seen this bias before in some of their other research.

The authors stress that encouraging people to change their name is not the desired outcome of this research. What's needed, says Zhao, is "the whole society should work together to improve the system to promote diversity and inclusion."

To that end, Zhao and colleagues are working on intervention studies in which to train people to recognize and pronounce common ethnic names and phonemes, hopefully improving intergroup communication and reducing the need for Anglicizing ethnic names.

For the first time, scientists at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown (CCU), in Lisbon, Portugal, have shown that neuronal cell death in Alzheimer's disease (AD) may actually not be a bad thing - on the contrary, it may be the result of a cell quality control mechanism trying to protect the brain from the accumulation of malfunctioning neurons. Their results, which were obtained using fruit flies that had been genetically modified to mimic the symptoms of human AD, were published in the journal Cell Reports.

The cell quality control mechanism at play is called cell competition. It leads to the selection of the fittest cells in a tissue by enabling a "fitness comparison" between each cell and its neighbors - with the fitter cells then triggering the suicide of less fit ones.

It has been recently shown that cell competition is a normal, powerful anti-aging mechanism in the body in general and in the brain in particular. "In 2015, we discovered that clearing unfit cells from a tissue was a very important anti-aging mechanism to preserve organ function, says Eduardo Moreno, principal investigator of the Cell Fitness lab at the CCU.

His team reasoned that, if these fitness comparisons happened in normal aging, they could also be involved in neurodegenerative diseases associated with accelerated aging, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease or Huntington's disease, Moreno explains. "This had never been tested", he says. In collaboration with Christa Rhiner's Stem Cells and Regeneration lab at the CCU, they started by testing AD hallmarks in fruit fly models of the disease.

For this, they bred fruit flies that had been genetically manipulated to express in their brain the human amyloid-beta protein, that forms aggregates in the brains of AD patients. The formation of amyloid-β aggregates in the brain is a crucial step in the development of AD.

The transgenic flies displayed symptoms and pathologies similar to those of AD patients: "they showed loss of long-term memory, accelerated aging of the brain and motor coordination problems, all of which got worse with age", specifies Christa Rhiner, whose team studied the cognitive and motor functions of the flies.

The first thing the scientists wanted to do was to see whether in these flies, neuronal death was indeed activated by the process of fitness comparison - in other words, "that the neurons were not dying on their own but being killed by fitter neighbors", Moreno points out.

"When we started, the current view was that neuronal death must be always detrimental. And much to our surprise, we found that neuronal death actually counteracts the disease", says Dina Coelho, first author of the study. What happened was that when she blocked neuronal death in the flies' brain, the insects developed even worse memory problems, worse motor coordination problems, died earlier and their brain degenerated faster.

However, when she boosted the fitness comparison process, thus accelerating the death of unfit neurons, the flies expressing the AD-associated amyloid-beta proteins showed an impressive recovery. "The flies almost behaved like normal flies with regard to memory formation, locomotive behavior and learning", says Rhiner, and this at a time point where the AD flies were already strongly affected.

This means that the anti-aging mechanism in question keeps working well in Alzheimer's disease and shows that, in fact, "the neuronal death protects the brain from more widespread damage and therefore the neuronal loss is not what is bad, it is worse not to let those neurons die", Moreno emphasizes. "Our most important finding is that we have probably been thinking the wrong way about Alzheimer's disease. Our results suggest that neuronal death is beneficial because it removes neurons that are affected by noxious beta-amyloid aggregates from brain circuits, and having those dysfunctional neurons is worse than losing them" Moreno concludes.

The results could have crucial therapeutical implications. "Some molecules have already been identified as potential inhibitors of cell suicide, and some experimental drugs exist, and are being tested which inhibit those inhibitors of cell death, therefore accelerating neuronal death", says Moreno.

But he cautions: "this work has been done in fruit flies". It will be necessary to see, whether these results on neuronal death in Alzheimer's also hold true for humans.

COLUMBUS, Ohio--Humans can get by in the most basic of shelters, can scratch together a meal from the most humble of ingredients. But we can't survive without clean water. And in places where water is scarce--the world's deserts, for example--getting water to people requires feats of engineering and irrigation that can be cumbersome and expensive.

A pair of new studies from researchers at The Ohio State University offers a possible solution, inspired by nature.

"We thought: 'How can we gather water from the ambient air around us?'" said Bharat Bhushan, Ohio Eminent Scholar and Howard D. Winbigler Professor of mechanical engineering at Ohio State. "And so, we looked to the things in nature that already do that: the cactus, the beetle, desert grasses."

Their findings were published Dec. 24 in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The works were co-authored with Ohio State Ph.D. student Dev Gurera and with Ohio State engineering researcher Dong Song.

Bhushan's work focuses on finding nature-inspired solutions to societal problems. In this case, his research team looked to the desert to find life that survives despite limited access to water.

The cactus, beetle and desert grasses all collect water condensed from nighttime fog, gathering droplets from the air and filtering them to roots or reservoirs, providing enough hydration to survive.

Drops of water collect on wax-free, water-repellant bumps on a beetle's back, then slide toward the beetle's mouth on the flat surface between the bumps. Desert grasses collect water at their tips, then channel the water toward their root systems via channels in each blade. A cactus collects water on its barbed tips before guiding droplets down conical spines to the base of the plant.

Bhushan's team studied each of these living things and realized they could build a similar--albeit larger--system to allow humans to pull water from nighttime fog or condensation.

They started studying the ways by which different surfaces might collect water, and which surfaces might be the most efficient. Using 3D printers, they built surfaces with bumps and barbs, then created enclosed, foggy environments using a commercial humidifier to see which system gathered the most water.

They learned that conical shapes gather more water than do cylindrical shapes--"which made sense, given what we know about the cactus," Bhushan said. The reason that happens, he said, is because of a physics phenomenon called the Laplace pressure gradient. Water gathers at the tip of the cone, then flows down the cone's slope to the bottom, where a reservoir is waiting.

Grooved surfaces moved water more quickly than ungrooved surfaces--"which seems obvious in retrospect, because of what we know about grass," Bhushan said. In the research team's experiments, grooved surfaces gathered about twice as much water as ungrooved surfaces.

The materials the cones were made out of mattered, too. Hydrophilic surfaces--those that allowed water to bead up rather than absorbing it--gathered the most water.

"The beetle's surface material is heterogeneous, with hydrophilic spots surrounded by hydrophobic regions, which allows water to flow more easily to the beetle's mouth," Bhushan explained.

The research team also experimented on a structure that included multiple cones, and learned that more water accumulated when water droplets could coalesce between cones that were one or two millimeters apart. The team is continuing those experiments, Bhushan said.

The work so far has been done on a laboratory-only level, but Bhushan envisions the work scaled up, with structures in the desert that could gather water from fog or condensation. That water, he thinks, could supplement water from public systems or wells, either on a house-by-house basis, or on a community-wide basis.

There is precedent for the idea: In areas around the world, including the Atacama Desert in Chile, large nets capture water from fog and collect it in reservoirs for farmers and others to use. Those nets might not be the most efficient way of harnessing water from the air, Bhushan believes.

"Water supply is a critically important issue, especially for people of the most arid parts of the world," Bhushan said. "By using bio-inspired technologies, we can help address the challenge of providing clean water to people around the globe, in as efficient a way as possible."

Fathers as well as mothers can experience post-natal depression - and it is linked to emotional problems for their teenage daughters, new research has found.

Almost one in 20 new fathers suffered depression in the weeks after their child was born, according to a study published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry and co-authored by Professor Paul Ramchandani of the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge.

The research, based on a sample of more than 3,000 families in Bristol, UK, also identified a link between post-natal depression in men and depression in their daughters as they reached adulthood.

At 18, girls whose fathers had experienced depression after their birth were themselves at greater risk of the condition, researchers found. The "small but significant" increased risk applied only to daughters; sons were not affected.

One reason for this "handing on" effect could be that post-natal depression in fathers is sometimes linked with an increased level of maternal depression, researchers concluded. This might mean that family life is more disrupted for everyone with higher levels of stress for all. It may also be that the having one or both parents with depression affects the way in which parents interact with their children.

It is unclear why girls may be more affected at this age. There may be links to specific aspects of father-daughter relationships as girls go through adolescence, the research team suggests.

The findings are important because they have implications for perinatal services, which have traditionally considered post-natal depression to be a potential problem for mothers only, the study's authors say. They highlight the importance of recognising and treating depression in fathers during the postnatal period, and call on health professionals to consider both parents when one reports depression.

Professor Ramchandani said: "Research from this study of families in Bristol has already shown that fathers can experience depression in the postnatal period as well as mothers. What is new in this paper is that we were able to follow up the young people from birth through to the age of 18, when they were interviewed about their own experience of depression. Those young people whose fathers had been depressed back when they were born had an increased risk of depression at age 18 years.

"We were also able to look at some of the ways in which depression in fathers might have affected children. It appears that depression in fathers is linked with an increased level of stress in the whole family, and that this might be one way in which offspring may be affected.

"Whilst many children will not be affected by parental depression in this way, the findings of this study highlight the importance of providing appropriate help to fathers, as well as mothers, who may experience depression."

Paternal depression campaigner Mark Williams, who set up the lobby group Fathers Reaching Out and campaigns for mental health screening for new fathers as well as mothers, said: "Fathers' Postnatal Depression impacts on the whole family when unsupported, often resulting in fathers using negative coping skills, avoiding situations and often feeling anger.

"In my experience of working with families, it's sometimes only the father who is suffering in silence but sadly very few are asked about their mental health after becoming a parent."

Earlier research by the same academic team found post-natal depression in fathers was linked to behavioural and emotional problems in their children at three and a half and seven. The effect seems to happen because paternal depression may negatively affect the way a family functions - causing conflict between partners and prompting maternal depression.

The new paper, Association of Maternal and Paternal Depression in the Postnatal Period with Offspring Depression at Age 18 Years, was based on the experiences of 3,176 father and child pairs drawn from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children - an ongoing cohort study launched in 1991.

A new Tel Aviv University study describes a process to make bioplastic polymers that don't require land or fresh water -- resources that are scarce in much of the world. The polymer is derived from microorganisms that feed on seaweed. It is biodegradable, produces zero toxic waste and recycles into organic waste.

The invention was the fruit of a multidisciplinary collaboration between Dr. Alexander Golberg of TAU's Porter School of Environmental and Earth Sciences and Prof. Michael Gozin of TAU's School of Chemistry. Their research was recently published in the journal Bioresource Technology.

According to the United Nations, plastic accounts for up to 90 percent of all the pollutants in our oceans, yet there are few comparable, environmentally friendly alternatives to the material.

"Plastics take hundreds of years to decay. So bottles, packaging and bags create plastic 'continents' in the oceans, endanger animals and pollute the environment," says Dr. Golberg. "Plastic is also produced from petroleum products, which has an industrial process that releases chemical contaminants as a byproduct.

"A partial solution to the plastic epidemic is bioplastics, which don't use petroleum and degrade quickly. But bioplastics also have an environmental price: To grow the plants or the bacteria to make the plastic requires fertile soil and fresh water, which many countries, including Israel, don't have.

"Our new process produces 'plastic' from marine microorganisms that completely recycle into organic waste."

The researchers harnessed microorganisms that feed on seaweed to produce a bioplastic polymer called polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA). "Our raw material was multicellular seaweed, cultivated in the sea," Dr. Golberg says. "These algae were eaten by single-celled microorganisms, which also grow in very salty water and produce a polymer that can be used to make bioplastic.

"There are already factories that produce this type of bioplastic in commercial quantities, but they use plants that require agricultural land and fresh water. The process we propose will enable countries with a shortage of fresh water, such as Israel, China and India, to switch from petroleum-derived plastics to biodegradable plastics."

According to Dr. Golberg, the new study could revolutionize the world's efforts to clean the oceans, without affecting arable land and without using fresh water. "Plastic from fossil sources is one of the most polluting factors in the oceans," he says. "We have proved it is possible to produce bioplastic completely based on marine resources in a process that is friendly both to the environment and to its residents.

"We are now conducting basic research to find the best bacteria and algae that would be most suitable for producing polymers for bioplastics with different properties," he concludes.

New York, NY (December 24, 2018) - Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and The Rockefeller University have discovered a new use for a long-standing computational concept known as "blacklisting," which is commonly employed as a form of access or spam control, blocking unwanted files and messages. Using blacklisting as a filter to single out genetic variations in patient genomes and exomes that do not cause illness, researchers have successfully streamlined the identification of genetic drivers of disease. This method is described in the December 2018 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America.

In whole-exome sequencing--the process of identifying variations in protein-coding genes to determine the genetic underpinnings of any given illness--tens of thousands of genetic variants are identified, but only a few are deemed pathogenic, meaning disease-causing. Traditionally, in order to identify pathogenic mutations, scientists must sift through considerable amounts of data and remove genetic variants that are unlikely to cause disease, slowing down the process of genetic analysis and, subsequently, clinical treatment. To address this cumbersome process, researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine and The Rockefeller University investigated and subsequently identified a large portion of the non-pathogenic genetic variants, from which the "blacklist" was generated. Following this, they developed a program, known as ReFiNE, and a corresponding webserver that other researchers can use to automate the creation of their own blacklists.

"Until now, there has been no viable published method for filtering out non-pathogenic variants that are common in human genomes and absent from current genomic databases," said Yuval Itan, PhD, Assistant Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine and senior author of the publication. "Using the blacklist, researchers will now be able to remove genetic 'noise' and focus on true disease-causing mutations."

Noting the data-centric society we live in, Dr. Yuval says efficiency is key. His hope is that this contemporary tool can be used by clinicians, researchers, and scientists across the globe to conduct genetic analysis more quickly and accurately, helping to accelerate the pace of genomic medicine.

The paper appeared in IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation.

Meteor burst communication is based on using meteors as cryptography assistants. Meteor trails reflect radio waves, which makes them suitable for radio transmissions at distances of up to 2,000 kilometers. Unpredictable nature of meteors makes pose a significant hindrance for signal interception.

Associate Professor Amir Sulimov explains, "Each meteor trail forms a kind of a shadow resembling an ellipse on the Earth's surface. All communication stations within that area can tune in on the channel. Meteor trails help determine a specific area where potential malefactors can try to intercept the signal."

Traditionally, it was theorized that the longest radius of interception lies along the radio line between legal points A and D, while the shortest radius, conversely, is perpendicular to that axis.

"In our research, we are the first to show that this trend may not be persistent in meteor systems, especially on short lines of less than 500 km. Because of the random nature of meteor arrivals, orientations of the large and small radiuses can differ significantly. And the degree of that difference is also variating, depending on seasonal and daily meteor cycles. Such regularities make meteor communication interception quite difficult.

"Experiments and models showed that the practical possibility of intercepting a meteor channel disappears at 30 kilometer distances, but theoretical chances persist at distances of up 300 km along small radiuses and 850 kilometers along large radiuses," concludes Sulimov.

The obtained data may be used for meteor cryptography. Further research should show the distances at which partial interception of cryptographic keys is feasible.

The relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and brain anatomy is mostly stable from childhood to early adulthood, according to a longitudinal neuroimaging study of more than 600 healthy young people published in JNeurosci. This finding draws attention to the importance of preschool life as a period when associations between SES and brain organization may first develop.

Cassidy McDermott, Armin Raznahan, and colleagues analyzed brain scans of the same individuals collected over time between five and 25 years of age. Comparing this data to parental education and occupation and each participants' intelligence quotient (IQ) allowed the researchers to demonstrate positive associations between SES and the size and surface area of brain regions involved in cognitive functions such as learning, language, and emotions. In particular, this is the first study to associate greater childhood SES with larger volumes of two subcortical regions - the thalamus and striatum - thereby extending previous SES research that has focused on its relationship to the cortex. Finally, the researchers identify brain regions underlying the relationship between SES and IQ. A better understanding of these relationships could clarify the processes by which SES becomes associated with a range of life outcomes, and ultimately inform efforts to minimize SES-related variation in health and achievement.

Galanin-like peptide (GALP) is a short peptide made up of 60 amino acid residues. This sequence is homologous across several species. The hypothalamic arcuate nucleus is the place where GALP is produced. GALP has diverse physiological effects such as the regulation of feeding, energy metabolism, and reproductive behavior. Neurons that contain GALP also express leptin receptors; at the same time these neurons form a network in the hypothalamus and these contain various amounts of peptides that regulate their feeding behavior.

New research has shown that, GALP consists of anti-obesity action when it comes to its role in consumption of food and nutrition. After the administration of GALP into the lateral ventricle a decline in the respiratory quotient was also found. It is inferred that that because of GALP, lipid metabolism could be accelerated. This is a recently discovered physiological action for this peptide.

In this review, recent research about how GALP regulates feeding and energy metabolism has been summarized. Attention on the regulation mechanism of lipid metabolism that takes place in peripheral tissues through the autonomic nervous system is also given. The effectiveness of the nasal administration of GALP is also presented from a perspective of basic research and clinical application.

Adaptations to environmental change are the most important asset for the persistence of any plant or animal species. This is usually achieved through genetic mutation and selection, a slow process driven by chance. Faster and more targeted are so called epigenetic modifications. They do not alter the genetic code but promote specialisations during cell maturation. A new study carried out by scientists from the Leibniz-IZW in Germany shows for wild guinea pigs that epigenetic modifications specific to individual environmental factors are passed on to the next generation. The study is published in the scientific journal Genes.

The team of researchers around Alexandra Weyrich from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) in Berlin, Germany, studied two groups of male wild guinea pigs. One group was fed a protein-reduced diet for two months, the other group was exposed to an increase in ambient temperature of ten degrees (Celsius) for the same period. The animals responded to these changes through epigenetic modifications at the cellular level. "Epigenetic modifications have been studied for some time. What we were after was to determine, whether these modifications are passed on to the next generation of guinea pigs and whether fathers played a role in this", says Weyrich. The team studied offspring sired by males prior to their exposure to the environmental change and those sired by these males after the two-month experimental period - each time sired with the same females who were not exposed to these changes in conditions. The comparison revealed significant differences in the the methylation pattern of the offsprings' DNA - for the scientists documentation that "inheriting" parental epigenetic responses to environmental changes is possible and that males can play an important role in these processes. "We were most interested in comparing the two different groups", Weyrich adds. "Our results show for the first time that the epigenetic response to environmental changes comprises two parts: A general part, which reflects the fact that there was some environmental change - independent of the specific factor of change. And a very specific part that is the specific response to a particular environmental change."

Rapid environmental change in the context of man-made global change, including climate change, for example rising temperatures or changes in resource availability and food supply, pose significant challenges to plants and animals. For some species these challenges can become existential threats. Corals for instance are highly temperature-sensitive and the reproduction of some frog and crocodile species are closely linked to specific temperature constellations. With the radical environmental changes currently underway, species that show a high adaptability have an advantage. The well-known mechanism of mutation and selection, however, may be too slow to cope with rapid changes. It relies on accidental changes to the genetic code which may or may not provide an advantage to survival and reproduction (natural selection). So-called epigenetic modifications can translate environmental changes much faster provided the genome already contains the necessary flexibility for an adequate response. During epigenetic modifications, the genetic code is not altered but specific genes are activated and strengthened or shut down through several chemical processes. These processes are also common during cell maturation, when cells specialise to differentiate into skin, bone or liver cells.

"One of the most important epigenetic modifications is the so-called DNA methylation", Weyrich explains. The scientists compared methylation patterns of the offspring sired before and after environmental conditions experienced by the fathers, focsuing on sections of the genome that showed differential methylation (differentially methylated regions, DMRs). Specific responses both to rising temperatures and to the altered diet could be traced to the methylation patterns in the genomes of the offspring. "Previously, most epigenetic studies were carried out using populations of laboratory animals that have been living under artificial conditions for generations. Studies on wild species are still rare", Weyrich says. "Our comparative study design fostered these new insights." In order to understand in more detail how epigenetic modifications in the context of environmental changes are passed on to future generations, further studies in this field are required.

ANN ARBOR--A new University of Michigan study of interbreeding between two species of howler monkeys in Mexico is yielding insights into the forces that drive the evolution of new species.

How do new species emerge in nature? One common but overly simplified version of the story goes like this: A population of animals or plants becomes geographically isolated--by a river that changes course or a mountain range that rises up, for example--and the two separated groups accumulate genetic differences over time as they adapt to their environments in isolation.

Eventually, the DNA of the two groups is so different that the two populations are considered distinct species. Voilà, speciation has occurred.

In reality, the process is much more complex than that. While geographic isolation can start the speciation process, evolutionary biologists believe that other forces--including various forms of natural selection--can help to complete it.

The new U-M study provides rare empirical evidence that multiple forms of natural selection, including a contentious one called reinforcement, are helping to complete the speciation process in a natural howler monkey "hybrid zone," a place where the two species coexist and occasionally interbreed in a process called hybridization.

The study is scheduled for online publication Dec. 22 in the journal Molecular Ecology. In the paper, the researchers use the primate hybrid zone to identify parts of the genome that are likely to contain genes underlying speciation and to test for signals of the selection forces that shaped them.

"We observed patterns in the genetic data suggesting that hybridization is playing a direct role in completing the speciation process by enhancing genetic differences between species," said U-M doctoral candidate Marcella Baiz, the study's first author. The other authors are Liliana Cortés-Ortiz and Priscilla Tucker of the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

"We found a signal for multiple forms of natural selection driving species differences, including reinforcement, a process that has been highly debated," Baiz said. "This result is particularly notable because empirical evidence for reinforcement is extremely rare, especially genetic evidence."

The two species at the center of the study, mantled howler monkeys and black howler monkeys, diverged about 3 million years ago and lived apart until relatively recently when they came into contact again--perhaps within the last 10,000 years--in a roughly 12-mile-wide hybrid zone in the southeastern Mexican state of Tabasco.

A species was once defined as a group of actually or potentially interbreeding individuals that are reproductively isolated from other such groups. The concept of reproductive isolation is key to that definition and means that despite any hybridization, true species maintain their uniqueness.

However, the modern view of what a species is does not require full reproductive isolation, and hybridization has been discovered to be quite common in nature.

At the howler monkey hybrid zone in Mexico where U-M's Cortés-Ortiz and her colleagues have worked for about two decades, analysis of DNA samples has confirmed that black and mantled howler monkeys interbreed and produce hybrid offspring. The fact that hybridization is occurring between the two groups means that reproductive isolation is incomplete.

Evolutionary biologists believe that various natural selection pressures can help complete the process by strengthening barriers to gene flow between two groups, pushing them toward full reproductive isolation.

And because natural selection favors organisms that successfully reproduce over those that don't, it is biased against hybrids, which sometimes die before reproducing or are simply incapable of reproducing.

Natural selection tries to block the formation of these "unfit" hybrids. One way to do that is to gradually increase the genetic differences between two groups of organisms--in this case black and mantled howler monkeys--so that it's more difficult for them to mate and to produce hybrid offspring.

While working to thwart the formation of hybrids in this way, natural selection strengthens reproductive isolation by increasing genetic differences. This process is called reinforcement; while the idea has been around for more than a century, empirical evidence to support it is scarce.

To test for the presence of reinforcement, Baiz and her colleagues compared the DNA of black and mantled howler monkeys living the Tabasco hybrid zone to the DNA of black and mantled howler monkeys living far from the hybrid zone.

If reinforcement is working to thwart hybridization and to strengthen reproductive isolation, then the genetic differences between the two species in the hybrid zone should be greater than the genetic differences between monkeys of these two species living on either side of the hybrid zone.

And that's exactly what Baiz and her colleagues found when they compared genetic markers that are at or near genes likely associated with reproductive isolation.

"Speciation is a complex process that can be driven by direct and indirect mechanisms that interact to maintain and strengthen the process, and this study is one of the few natural examples that documents this," Baiz said.

FINDINGS

Emergency medical personnel in Alameda County, California, use a screening process for determining whether to "medically clear" patients experiencing psychiatric emergencies before transporting them. They identify patients who are at low risk for medical emergencies and take them directly to a special Psychiatric Emergency Service facility specifically designed for people experiencing psychiatric crises. The protocol used by Alameda County emergency medical staff is an alternative to standard protocols, in which all patients are transported to the nearest emergency department. During a five-year period ended Nov. 1, 2016, Emergency Medical Services staff used the protocol to transport 41 percent of 53,000 psychiatric emergency cases to the stand-alone psychiatric emergency service facility. As a result, 22,000 psychiatric patients were treated at a specialized facility without first undergoing the standard trip to the emergency department.

BACKGROUND

Patients with psychiatric emergencies on involuntary holds are often taken to traditional hospital emergency departments. However, patients sometimes spend hours to days in an emergency department bed waiting for treatment and access to specialized psychiatric personnel to conduct mental health evaluations. Psychiatric Emergency Services were established to address this gap. Patients still are evaluated to determine that they are not suffering from a life-threatening illness before they are transported to a psychiatric emergency services facility.

METHOD

The researchers examined data for 542,000 Emergency Medical Service encounters in Alameda County over five years. They noted that because the data are from just one county, the results may not be applicable to counties that have a fundamentally different strategy for managing psychiatric crises before transportation.

IMPACT

Paramedics have the ability to distinguish acute psychiatric crises, which can mimic symptoms of a physical ailment, from life-threatening medical illnesses. As a result, they can safely divert psychiatric cases from frequently overextended emergency departments in hospitals to specialized psychiatric facilities. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of using protocols to assist paramedics in evaluating patients' medical conditions in the field in order to help direct them to an appropriate facility.

Does alcohol on greeting cards undermine public health messages about harmful drinking?

Themes of drunkenness on cards are popular, but sends the message that this is normal

Birthday and Christmas cards featuring alcohol or harmful drinking "reflect and reinforce a social attitude that excess alcohol consumption is acceptable and associated with celebration," warn experts in The BMJ today.

Tracey Polak, Assistant Director of Public Health, and Virginia Pearson, Chief Officer for Communities, Public Health, Environment and Prosperity at Devon County Council say these cards "influence views on drinking and reinforce this as a social norm."

And with the UK buying more cards per person than any other nation (an average of 33 each a year) they urge the public to reflect on whether the message is one that they condone and wish to pass on.

Sir Henry Cole is widely credited with 'inventing' the first Christmas card in the UK in 1843, depicting a scene showing people drinking.

In 1980, an analysis of greeting cards revealed themes that suggested getting drunk is a natural and desirable concomitant of celebrations, and that drunkenness is humorous, enjoyable, and harmless.

Today, one billion greeting cards are sold in the UK annually, and alcohol remains a popular theme.

Illustrations and texts portray alcohol as enjoyable and fun, and can range from a glass of champagne with the word 'Cheers' to those that are more excessive and encourage binge drinking, explain the authors.

Phrases such as 'let's get wrecked', 'all the gin' and 'trollied' are printed across images of people clearly drunk, surrounded by empty bottles, drinking directly from a bottle, or in some case unconscious.

But the idea that excess drinking as shown on many greeting cards cards is normal, enjoyable and to be encouraged is at variance with public health messages, they argue.

They point out that over 10 million people across the UK are drinking at levels which increase their risk of health harms, and alcohol consumption is the leading risk factor for ill-health, early death and disability in those aged 15 to 49.

As the card market adapts and produces new themes, they say it is worth considering whether it influences societal views or whether societal views influence the card market.

They suspect the truth lies probably in the middle. "As cards with alcohol themes become more prevalent then a cultural norm develops where drinking in association with celebration becomes the expected."

And while manufacturers are unlikely to respond to public health lobbying to depict more responsible drinking, "they may change what they produce if consumers choose not to buy cards depicting irresponsible drinking."

But whether this leads to changes in alcohol consumption is, however, another question, they say. There is little evidence of effective interventions which impact on social norm, with marketing, labelling, and advertisements designed to reduce excess drinking being shown to have small, short term and inconsistent impacts.

Ultimately the authors believe that the responsibility for choosing cards lies with the purchaser "so perhaps it is worth reflecting the next time that you choose one whether the message is one that you condone and wish to pass on," they conclude.

Bats and dolphins emit sound waves to sense their surroundings; like a battery, electric fish generate electricity to help them detect motion while burrowed in their refuges; and humans use tiny movements of the eyes to perceive objects in their field of vision.

Each is an example of "active sensing" -- a process found across the animal kingdom, which involves the production of motion, sound or other signals to gather sensory feedback about the external environment. Until now, however, researchers have struggled to understand how the brain controls active sensing, partly due to how tightly linked active sensing behavior is with the sensory feedback it creates.

In a new study, NJIT and Johns Hopkins researchers have used augmented reality technology to alter this link and unravel the mysterious dynamic between active sensing movement and sensory feedback. The findings report that subtle active sensing movements of a special species of weakly electric fish -- known as the glass knifefish (Eigenmannia virescens) -- are under sensory feedback control and serve to enhance the sensory information the fish receives. The study proposes the fish use a dual-control system for processing feedback from active sensing movements, a feature that may be ubiquitous in animals.

Researchers say the findings, published in the journal Current Biology, could have implications in the field of neuroscience as well as in the engineering of new artificial systems -- from self-driving cars to cooperative robotics.

"What is most exciting is that this study has allowed us to explore feedback in ways that we have been dreaming about for over 10 years," said Eric Fortune, associate professor of biology, who led the study at NJIT. "This is perhaps the first study where augmented reality has been used to probe, in real time, this fundamental process of movement-based active sensing, which nearly all animals use to perceive the environment around them."

Eigenmannia virescens is a species of electric fish found in the Amazon river basin that is known to hide in refuges to avoid the threat of predators in their environment. As part of their defenses, Fortune says that the species and its relatives can display a magnet-like ability to maintain a fixed position within their refuge, known as station-keeping. Fortune's team sought to learn how the fish control this sensing behavior by disrupting the way the fish perceives its movement relative to its refuge.

"We've known for a long time that these fish will follow the position of their refuge, but more recently we discovered that they generate small movements that reminded us of the tiny movements that are seen in human eyes," said Fortune. "That led us to devise our augmented reality system and see if we could experimentally perturb the relationship between the sensory and motor systems of these fish without completely unlinking them. Until now, this was very hard to do."

To investigate, the researchers placed weakly electric fish inside an experimental tank with an artificial refuge enclosure, capable of automatically shuttling back and forth based on real time video tracking of the fish's movement. The team studied how the fish's behavior and movement in the refuge would be altered in two categories of experiments: "closed loop" experiments, whereby the fish's movement is synced to the shuttle motion of the refuge; and "open loop" experiments, whereby motion of the refuge is "replayed" to the fish as if from a tape recorder. Notably, the researchers observed that the fish swam the farthest to gain sensory information during closed loop experiments when the augmented reality system's positive "feedback gain" was turned up -- or whenever the refuge position was made to mirror the movement of the fish.

"From the perspective of the fish, the stimulus in closed- and open-loop experiments is exactly the same, but from the perspective of control, one test is linked to the behavior and the other it is unlinked," said Noah Cowan, professor at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of the study. "It is similar to the way visual information of a room might change as a person is walking through it, as opposed to the person watching a video of walking through a room."

"It turns out the fish behave differently when the stimulus is controlled by the individual versus when the stimulus is played back to them," added Fortune. "This experiment demonstrates that the phenomenon that we are observing is due to feedback the fish receives from its own movement. Essentially, the animal seems to know that it is controlling the sensory world around it."

According to Fortune, the study's results indicate that fish may use two control loops, which could be a common feature in how other animals perceive their surroundings -- one control for managing the flow of information from active sensing movements, and another that uses that information to inform motor function.

Fortune says his team is now seeking to investigate the neurons responsible for each control loop in the fish. He also says that the study and its findings may be applied to research exploring active sensing behavior in humans, or by engineers in developing advanced robotics.

"Our hope is that researchers will conduct similar experiments to learn more about vision in humans, which could give us valuable knowledge about our own neurobiology," said Fortune. "At the same time, because animals continue to be so much better at vision and control of movement than any artificial system that has been devised, we think that engineers could take the data we've published and translate that into more powerful feedback control systems."

While examining a skull from an ancient burial ground in a pre-Columbian village in Panama, Nicole Smith-Guzmán, bioarchaeologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), was surprised to discover an example of surfers' ear: a small, bony bump in the ear canal common among surfers, kayakers and free divers in cold climates. After inspecting more skulls, she concluded that a select group of male divers--perhaps looking for pearls and oyster shells coveted for jewelry making, may have lived along Panama's Pacific coast long ago.

"Bone is a dynamic tissue that responds to external stimuli, so changes in bone structure provide great clues about where and how a person lived and died," Smith-Guzmán said. "When I looked at an additional 125 skulls from nine burial sites across Panama, I found seven cases of surfers' ear in males and one in a female skull, all from sites near the Gulf of Panama."

No one really understands exactly how the bony growths, technically called exostoses, form. But the skin is thin in the ear canal and the accepted theory is that cold water or cold temperatures caused by wind and water make the bone react by growing extra layers, similar to the way bone spurs form on the feet and in other places where there is constant irritation or stress. Almost half of the members of a swimming club in England had surfer's ear according to a report cited in the study.

Unlike most tropical countries where seawater is warm, water temperature in the Gulf of Panama plummets between January and April when strong trade winds from the north force warm surface water out into the Pacific and colder, deep water rises to the surface to replace it. This deep, nutrient-rich water feeds tiny sea organisms, which in turn are eaten by fish and whales. The Gulf becomes an extraordinarily productive fishing ground supporting a thriving fishing industry and attracting dolphins, sharks and other top-of-the-food-chain animals.

Years ago, when co-author Richard Cooke, zooarchaeologist at STRI, unearthed a male skeleton with surfer's ear in Sitio Sierra, near Aguadulce in Panama, he was a STRI post-doctoral student with only rudimentary knowledge of physical anthropology. But he collected all of the human remains he found, enabling Nicole-Smith Guzmán to reexamine them 43 years later.

Cooke spent much of his career studying ancient fishing practices. He found that Panama's pre-Columbian peoples fished from boats all along both the Pacific and Caribbean coasts of Panama. If fishing alone put people at higher risk for surfer's ear, then more cases of the bony growth would be present at all of the sites, but all of the examples came from areas near the Gulf.

"We think it more likely that diving in the cold waters of the Gulf caused these cases of surfer's ear," Smith-Guzmán said. "Silvery mother-of-pearl ornaments, and orange and purple ones from two large 'thorny' oysters in the Spondylus genus were common in burials and comprised an important trade item in the region. Some of these shells wash up on beaches, but by the time Vasco Nuñez de Balboa and other Spanish explorers arrived, their chronicles tell us that expert divers were trained from childhood to dive down to four fathoms to retrieve pearl oysters of desirable large size."

The Spanish encouraged this industry and for many years, Panama was known for its pirates and pearls, including La Peregrina, the largest pearl known at the time it was found.

The team also ruled out fungal or bacterial ear infections common in the tropics that sometimes cause bone deformations: most of the skulls affected were from males, and infections should occur in both male and females at about the same rate. From the evidence they have so far, it looks like mostly males were involved in whatever activity caused surfer's ear in Panama. In another study, archaeologists in the Canary Islands found roughly equal numbers of cases of surfer's ear in ancient male and female skulls, suggesting that aquatic activities there were not restricted to one gender.

"I spoke to one ear, nose and throat specialist in Panama and she has never seen a case of surfer's ear here, but we want to do a follow-up study in which we look at skulls from a much wider area and also do a survey of doctors in Panama to find out if surfers or divers ever show up with surfer's ear these days," Smith-Guzmán said.

Surfer's ear is an intriguing subject that archaeologists, anthropologists and medical doctors have explored for more than a century. Although the exact causes of this phenomenon is still debated, these bony growths offer important clues into the cultural activities, gendered division of labor and environmental conditions in the past.