Culture

Robots may one day tackle obstacles and traverse uneven terrains thanks to collaborative research analysing the motion of lizards.

The study, which featured a University of Queensland researcher, used a slow motion camera to capture the nuanced movement of eight species of Australian agamid lizards that run on two legs - an action known as 'bipedal' movement.

UQ School of Biological Sciences researcher Nicholas Wu said the study's findings challenged existing mathematical models based on the animals' movement.

"There was an existing understanding that the backwards shift in these lizards' centre of mass, combined with quick bursts of acceleration, caused them to start running on two legs at a certain point," he said.

"It's just like a motorcycle driver doing a 'wheelie'.

"What we found though is that some lizards run bipedally sooner than expected, by moving their body back and winging their tail up.

"This means that they could run bipedally for longer, perhaps to overcome obstacles in their path."

Lead author Christofer Clemente from the University of the Sunshine Coast said these results may have important implications for the design of bio-inspired robotic devices.

"We're still teasing out why these species have evolved to run like this in the first place, but as we learn more, it's clear that these lessons from nature may be able to be integrated into robotics," Dr. Clemente said.

"It's been suggested that this movement might have something to do with increasing vision in moments of urgency, by elevating the head at the same time and helping to navigate over obstacles.

"Indeed, bipedalism would be advantageous for robots in specific habitats, for example, on open grasslands where, in nature, many bipedal running agamids are found.

"If obstacle negotiation is indeed improved with bipedal locomotion, then we have shown how the tail and body can be moved to enable it sooner and for longer.

"Maybe adding a tail to robots can help them go 'off-road' sooner."

The research is not only looking to the future, but to the past, by helping explain the evolution of bipedalism in dinosaurs and how they could have transitioned from walking on four legs to two legs.

Our responsiveness to seeing others in distress accounts for variability in helping behavior from early in development, according to a study published September 25 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Tobias Grossmann of the University of Virginia, and colleagues.

Altruistic behavior such as helping an unfamiliar person in need is considered a key feature of cooperation in human societies. Yet our propensity to engage in altruistic acts varies considerably among individuals, ranging from extraordinarily altruistic kidney donors to highly antisocial psychopaths. Past studies have suggested that greater sensitivity to fearful faces is linked to heightened levels of prosocial behavior, which can already be seen in preschool children. Examining responsiveness to fearful faces and its variability early in human development represents a unique opportunity to shed light on the precursors of altruistic behavior.

To address this question, Grossmann and colleagues tracked eye movements to examine whether attentional responses to fear in others at seven months of age predict altruistic behavior at 14 months of age. The analysis revealed that altruistic behavior in toddlerhood was predicted by infants' attention to fearful faces but not happy or angry faces. Moreover, infants' attentional bias to fearful faces and their altruistic behavior was predicted by brain responses in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex measured through functional near-infrared spectroscopy.

According to the authors, the findings suggests that, from early in development, variability in altruistic helping behavior is linked to our responsiveness to seeing others in distress and brain processes implicated in attentional control. These findings critically advance our understanding of the emergence of altruism in humans by identifying responsiveness to fear in others as an early precursor contributing to variability in prosocial behavior.

"Our results are in line with the notion that a caring continuum exists, along which individuals differ in their tendency to display sensitive responses to others' distress that motivate prosocial action," said Grossmann. "This study provides new insights into the nature of human altruism by uncovering its developmental and brain origins."

Is pain treatment more helpful if it is provided by a person from our own social group, or is the help of a stranger more efficient? A study conducted by researchers from the Universities of Wuerzburg, Amsterdam and Zurich investigated this question and found that people experience a stronger pain relief if they are treated by a person that belongs to a different social group.

The study has been published in the latest issue of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences. It was led by Grit Hein, a psychologist, neuroscientist and professor of Translational Social Neuroscience at the Center of Mental Health of the Würzburg University Hospital who teamed up with Jan B. Engelmann (Amsterdam) and Philippe N. Tobler (Zurich).

"Participants received pain on the back of their hand. In one group of participants, this pain was relieved by a person from their own social group, another group of participants received pain relief from a person from a different group. We measured how the pain relief treatment changed neural pain responses and subjective pain judgments." Grit Hein describes the scientists' approach.

Treatment by a stranger was more efficient

The result: "Before the treatment, both groups showed similarly strong responses to pain," Grit Hein explains. "In contrast, after being treated by what they considered a "stranger", the participants from this group rated their pain less intense than the other group. The effect was not limited to the subjective pain experience: "We also saw a reduction of the pain-related activation in the corresponding brain regions," the scientist says.

While being surprising to the lay person, the finding is in line with a core principle of learning theory according to which people learn particularly well when the results differ significantly from what they had expected. This is called "prediction error learning" in psychological language where the surprise contributes to "rooting" the new experience more effectively in the brain.

Analgesic effect of surprise

Related to the pain experiment, this means the following: "The participants who received pain relief from an outgroup member had not expected to actually get effective help from this person," the neuroscientist explains. And the less the participants had anticipated positive experiences, the bigger their surprise when the pain actually subsided and the more pronounced the reduction of their pain responses. "Of course this finding still needs to be verified outside the laboratory", says Grit Hein, " but it could be relevant for the clinical context where treatment by nurses and doctors from different cultures is common today."

University of Texas at Arlington researchers determined in a new study that subsidized housing is not affordable in the Dallas-Fort Worth region because its location does not make it transportation friendly.

Shima Hamidi, assistant professor in the College of Architecture, Planning and Public Affairs, and two of her doctoral students, Jinat Jahan and Somayeh Moazzeni, published "Does Location Matter? Performance Analysis of the Affordable Housing Programs with Respect to Transportation Affordability in Dallas Fort Worth (DFW) Metropolis" in the Transportation Research Record journal. The journal is sponsored by Transportation Research Board, one of seven program units of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

"We found out that Housing and Urban Development housing programs aren't affordable because of transportation costs," said Hamidi, who also is director of CAPPA's Institute of Urban Studies. "When people can't access mass transportation or if there isn't any mass transportation in a certain area, the transportation costs are prohibitive for where the public housing is located."

Adrian Parr, dean of the College of Architecture, Planning and Public Affairs, said Hamidi's work is essential to this region, which is one of the fastest growing parts of the country.

"It is important that as we set out to identify solutions to the challenges North Texas faces, we articulate the problems that frame our solutions from the vantage point of who is most impacted and how," Parr said. "This is one of the primary strengths of Dr. Hamidi's study. Namely, inequity is a product of how policy, planning and design overlap. Mitigating inequity then necessarily involves deliberately working at their points of intersection."

Federal authorities define affordable as a household spending less than 30 percent of its budget on housing.

Hamidi said that planners believe any household spending more than 15 percent of its budget on transportation is really over a realistic threshold.

"When you roll in the purchase or lease of a vehicle, insurance, upkeep, gasoline, parking fees and everything else, transportation becomes unaffordable for many people in the DFW region," Hamidi said.

She said millions are being spent on local HUD housing but users of that housing are spending even more money on transportation.

"The reason for the unaffordability is that many times, public housing users have no alternative than to purchase a car," Hamidi said. "There are no other transportation options for them."

About 69 percent of the public housing projects in DFW are spending more than 15 percent of their income for transportation and thus making it unaffordable. The majority of those public housing users are spending about 17 to 20 percent of their income on transportation.

The lowest expenditure, according to the study, found to be 2.14 percent for a home property located in downtown Dallas. In contrast, a property supported federal housing program located in a suburban area, 35 miles north from downtown Dallas, is spending 25.76 percent of their budget on transportation, the highest in the area.

For all cases in the study, location and distance from daily destinations, availability of transit services, accessibility, street connectivity and mixed-use development are found to be influential for properties' affordability in terms of transportation costs.

The findings make it clear that location matters for assisted housing properties to be truly affordable in terms of both housing and transportation costs.

Private sector health care providers, the first point of contact for 50-70% of patients with tuberculosis (TB) symptoms in India, are delivering a wide range of largely inadequate care to these patients according to a study published this week in PLOS Medicine. Researchers Ada Kwan, Ben Daniels, Jishnu Das (World Bank, Washington DC, United States), Madhukar Pai (McGill University, Montreal, Canada) and colleagues utilized 24 standardized patients (SPs) - actors trained to portray 4 different tuberculosis case scenarios during unannounced visits -- to assess management and quality outcomes of private care for TB in the Indian cities of Patna and Mumbai.

The researchers analyzed 2,602 SP-provider interactions across 473 Patna providers and 730 Mumbai providers and found that providers managed SP cases according to national and international standards in only 949 interactions (35% after weighting for city-representative interpretation; 95% CI 32%-37%). Allopathic providers with Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) degrees or higher were more likely to correctly manage cases than non-MBBS providers (odds ratio 2.80; 95% CI 2.05-3.82; p

The authors note that SPs cannot account for the broader mix of patients a provider sees or assess how a provider might manage a patient in subsequent visits. Neither are there data from the public sector to which this care can be compared. Nevertheless, these results indicate that improving TB management among urban India's private health sector should be a priority for India's TB elimination strategy.

Today, an international group of researchers, including Carnegie Mellon University's Rachel Mandelbaum, released the deepest wide field map of the three-dimensional distribution of matter in the universe ever made and increased the precision of constraints for dark energy with the Hyper Suprime-Cam survey (HSC).

The present-day universe is a pretty lumpy place. As the universe has expanded over the last 14 billion years or so, galaxies and dark matter have been increasingly drawn together by gravity, creating a clumpy landscape with large aggregates of matter separated by voids where there is little or no matter.

The gravity that pulls matter together also impacts how we observe astronomical objects. As light travels from distant galaxies towards Earth, the gravitational pull of the other matter in its path, including dark matter, bends the light. As a result, the images of galaxies that telescopes see are slightly distorted, a phenomenon called weak gravitation lensing. Within those distortions is a great amount of information that researchers can mine to better understand the distribution of matter in the universe, and it provides clues to the nature of dark energy.

The HSC map, created from data gathered by Japan's Subaru telescope located in Hawaii, allowed researchers to measure the gravitational distortion in images of about 10 million galaxies.

The Subaru telescope allowed them to see the galaxies further back in time than in other similar surveys. For example, the Dark Energy Survey analyzes a much larger area of the sky at a similar level of precision as HSC, but only surveys the nearby universe. HSC takes a narrower, but deeper view, which allowed researchers to see fainter galaxies and make a sharper map of dark matter distribution.

The research team compared their map with the fluctuations predicted by the European Space Agency Planck satellite's observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation -- radiation from the earliest days of the universe. The HSC measurements were slightly lower than, but still statistically consistent with Planck's. The fact that HSC and other weak lensing surveys all find slightly lower results than Planck raises the tantalizing question of whether dark energy truly behaves like Einstein's cosmological constant.

"Our map gives us a better picture of how much dark energy there is and tells us a little more about its properties and how it's making the expansion of the universe accelerate," Mandelbaum said. "The HSC is a great complement to other surveys. Combining data across projects will be a powerful tool as we try uncover more and more about the nature of dark matter and dark energy."

Measuring the distortions caused by weak gravitational lensing isn't easy. The effect is quite small and distortions in galaxy shapes can also be caused by the atmosphere, the telescope and the detector. To get precise, accurate results, researchers need to know that they are only measuring effects from weak lensing.

Mandelbaum, associate professor of physics and member of the McWilliams Center for Cosmology at Carnegie Mellon, is an expert at controlling for these outside distortions. She and her team created a detailed image simulation of the HSC survey data based on images from the Hubble Space Telescope. From these simulations, they were able to apply corrections to the galaxy shapes to remove the shape distortions caused by effects other than lensing.

These results come from the HSC survey's first year of data. In all, the HSC survey will collect five years of data that will yield even more information about the behavior of dark energy and work towards other goals such as studying the evolution of galaxies and massive clusters of galaxies across cosmic time, measuring time-varying objects like supernovae, and even studying our own Milky Way galaxy.

CHICAGO --- Treating insomnia with digital programs can improve insomnia symptoms, daytime functioning and overall health, a new study from the University of Oxford and Northwestern Medicine has found.

In a year-long study involving 1,711 people, researchers found online cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) improved not only insomnia symptoms, but functional health, psychological well-being and sleep-related quality of life.

The study was published Sept. 25 in JAMA Psychiatry.

A major limitation of insomnia treatments is the lack of providers to deliver CBT, but this study used an online platform that made it easily accessible to users. It also automated and tailored the treatment based on the user's sleep patterns.

Study co-author Jason Ong said there is a four-to-six month wait for an insomnia patient to get an appointment in his sleep clinic.

"We can reach many more patients with insomnia by using a digitally based program," said Ong, associate professor of neurology in sleep medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Insomnia has been identified as a risk factor for the development of mental health disorders, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.

"Sleep ranks with air, water and food as one of the essentials of life, yet 10 to 12 percent of the population doesn't get enough of it due to insomnia," said lead study author Colin Espie, Oxford University professor of sleep medicine and chief medical officer of Big Health, a provider of automated and personalized behavioral medicine programs for mental health. "Our study suggests that digital medicine could be a powerful way to help millions of people not just sleep better, but achieve better mental and physical well-being as a result."

The study provides new evidence that the clinical benefits of digital CBT extend beyond sleep to also improve a person's daytime functioning.

"Typically, what leads patients to seek treatment is when their insomnia begins to impact their quality of life or daytime functioning," Ong said. "The fact that we saw improvements in both of these areas shows that the digital program has benefits around the clock."

Though insomnia has traditionally been treated with pharmaceuticals, new guidelines published in 2016 by the American College of Physicians recommend that CBT be used first-line, ahead of sleeping pills.

Study participants received treatment using the Sleepio program and an associated iOS app. Sleepio, a digital sleep improvement program featuring CBT techniques designed by Espie, is a product of Big Health.

Delivery was structured into six sessions lasting an average of 20 minutes each, with participants having access to the intervention for up to 12 weeks. Researchers assessed the study participants online at 0 weeks (baseline), four weeks (mid-treatment), eight weeks (post-treatment), and 24 weeks (follow-up). Program content was based on CBT manuals and included behavioral, cognitive and educational components.

Additional study findings were as follows:

In the digital CBT (dCBT) group, 689 participants (80.8 percent) logged on for at least one session, 491 participants (57.6 percent) completed at least four sessions, and 413 participants (48.4 percent) completed all six sessions.

At weeks four, eight and 24, dCBT was associated with significant improvement in global health and mental wellbeing. Improvements in insomnia mediated these outcomes.

Symptoms of depression, anxiety, sleepiness and cognitive failures all demonstrated significant differences in favor of dCBT at weeks four, eight and 24. While the degree of change was relatively small, the changes were statistically significant.

The degree of change for fatigue was moderate to large at weeks four, eight and 24.

Regarding productivity at work due to sleep problems, results showed a small to moderate improvement after dCBT.

A small but significant effect in terms of reduced absenteeism attributed to poor sleep and increased job satisfaction was observed at week 24.

There were no significant effects at any time on relationship functioning.

"In clinical studies, dCBT has repeatedly achieved statistically significant and clinically meaningful results for outcomes including sleep, mental health and daytime functioning," Espie said. "Our latest results indicate that dCBT can be an effective, inexpensive way to help insomnia sufferers achieve better health over the long term through behavior change."

While a warming climate in recent decades may be a factor in the waning of some local populations of frogs, toads, newts and salamanders, it cannot explain the overall steep decline of amphibians, according to researchers.

After analyzing many years of data for 81 North American amphibian species including more than 500,000 observations collected at more than 5,000 sites in 86 study areas by a broad coalition of herpetologists, it is clear a warming climate is not the primary driver in their disappearance, according to lead researcher David Miller, associate professor of wildlife population ecology in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.

The researchers focused on how colonization and persistence of local populations were related to annual variation in five climate variables thought to affect key components of amphibian life cycles: winter severity, snowfall, breeding water availability, summer soil moisture and maximum temperature.

"The influence of climate on amphibian populations is complex," Miller said. "In the last 30 years, we have seen increases in temperature, while some spots have gotten drier and others have gotten wetter. In the big picture, those developments seem to counteract each other. As a result, the impact of climate change for the measures we focused on cannot explain the sharp decline we have seen and continue to see across amphibian populations."

The study showed that, on average, 3.4 percent of amphibian species are disappearing from local amphibian habitats each year. That is the equivalent of losing half the species in any wetland, stream reach or forest site every 20 years. Miller believes these declines are a continuation of losses of amphibian populations that have been occurring since the 19th century when human land-use began destroying their habitats.

"It is an alarming trend," he said. "Across species, on average, we lose more than three in 100 of the sites where they occur each year. Whether the sites are ponds, short stretches of streams or, if we're talking about salamanders, forest plots -- they're gone. Our research took place in the United States and Canada, but it's a trend worldwide."

In the study -- the findings of which were published today in Nature Communications -- 41 researchers estimated changes in amphibian numbers in plots they have been watching, in many cases, for a decade or more. They collected data on both public and private lands, including national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges.

Researchers correlated those changes with weather trends and climate-related conditions, directly measuring how climate drivers are affecting the processes that determine amphibian range shifts. For example, they found that less precipitation during breeding seasons generally has a negative effect on amphibian populations, while less snowfall during winter may benefit many populations.

The researchers determined that, while climate change likely has been and will be a factor in the decline of some local populations such as in the Rocky Mountain West -- where the effect of a warming climate seems to be more severe for amphibians -- it is not responsible for the current declines that are occurring.

That conclusion, of course, has scientists pondering the culprits most responsible for amphibian decline. Erin Muths, a scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey and a co-lead on the project, believes that the cause of declines comes down to a suite of local factors.

"It depends on the location whether habitat loss, disease, contaminants, climate, or a combination of these local factors is the culprit," she said. "Amphibians are challenged by a range of stressors that may be unique to location but in combination are leading to wide-range declines."

To better understand the causes of declines, Miller and colleagues from the USGS have initiated new work studying emerging pathogens that affect amphibians. A major concern for amphibian populations are new and deadly pathogens, mostly spread around the planet by humans -- likely propelled by the pet trade.

According to Evan Grant, with the USGS Amphibian Research and Monitoring Initiative, there are at least two new pathogens that researchers know of that are currently affecting North American amphibians.

"One is the chytrid fungus and the other is ranaviruses," he said. "We are trying to figure out how these affect populations of amphibians in the Northeast. We are still learning how infections are spread and why some species are more susceptible."

This past summer, for example, Miller's research group at Penn State watched the die-off of salamander larvae and tadpoles in the ponds they monitor in a Centre County, Pennsylvania, site called the Scotia Barrens. Preliminarily, Miller believes ranavirus caused the mortality event.

"Once these diseases make it to North America then the animals themselves can spread them around," he said. "But it really takes people to be involved in carrying the diseases from, say, Asia to the United States."

The Apollo moon landing was staged. The CIA killed JFK. 9/11 was a plot by the U.S. government to justify a war in the Middle East. President Barack Obama was not a natural born citizen. The massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school was staged as a pretense for increased gun control. The "deep state" is trying to destroy Donald Trump's presidency.

Conspiracy theories have been cooked up throughout history, but they are increasingly visible lately, likely due in part to the president of the United States routinely embracing or creating them.

Given that any particular conspiracy theory is unlikely to be the subject of mainstream consensus, what draws people to them?

New research by Josh Hart, associate professor of psychology, suggests that people with certain personality traits and cognitive styles are more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. The research was recently published in the Journal of Individual Differences.

"These people tend to be more suspicious, untrusting, eccentric, needing to feel special, with a tendency to regard the world as an inherently dangerous place," Hart said. "They are also more likely to detect meaningful patterns where they might not exist. People who are reluctant to believe in conspiracy theories tend to have the opposite qualities."

Hart and his student, Molly Graether '17, surveyed more than 1,200 American adults. Participants were asked a series of questions related to their personality traits, partisan bent and demographic background. They were also asked whether they agreed with generic conspiratorial statements, such as: "The power held by heads of state is second to that of small unknown groups who really control world politics," and "Groups of scientists manipulate, fabricate or suppress evidence in order to deceive the public."

Previous research has shown that people gravitate toward conspiracy theories that affirm or validate their political view: Republicans are vastly more likely than Democrats to believe the Obama "birther" theory or that climate change is a hoax. Democrats are more likely to believe that Trump's campaign "colluded" with the Russians, Hart said.

Some people are also habitual conspiracists who entertain a variety of generic theories. For example, they believe that world politics are controlled by a cabal instead of governments or that scientists systematically deceive the public. This indicates that personality or other individual differences might be at play.

Hart and Graether wanted to build on this research by testing how much each of several previously identified traits could explain generic conspiracy beliefs. By examining multiple traits simultaneously, the pair could determine which ones were most important.

"Our results clearly showed that the strongest predictor of conspiracy belief was a constellation of personality characteristics collectively referred to as 'schizotypy,' Hart said.

The trait borrows its name from schizophrenia, but it does not imply a clinical diagnosis.
Hart's study also showed that conspiracists had distinct cognitive tendencies: they were more likely than nonbelievers to judge nonsensical statements as profound (a tendency known as "BS receptivity").

In turn, they were more likely to say that nonhuman objects -- triangle shapes moving around on a computer screen -- were acting intentionally.

"In other words, they inferred meaning and motive where others did not," he said.

So what does this all mean?

"First, it helps to realize that conspiracy theories differ from other worldviews in that they are fundamentally gloomy," Hart said. "This sets them apart from the typically uplifting messages conveyed by, say, religious and spiritual beliefs. At first blush this is a conundrum. However, if you are the type of person who looks out at the world and sees a chaotic, malevolent landscape full of senseless injustice and suffering, then perhaps there is a modicum of comfort to be found in the notion that there is someone, or some small group of people, responsible for it all. If 'there's something going on,' then at least there is something that could be done about it."

Hart hopes the research advances the understanding of why some people are more attracted to conspiracy theories than others. But he said it is important to note that the study doesn't address whether or not conspiracy theories are true.

"After Watergate, the American public learned that seemingly outlandish speculation about the machinations of powerful actors is sometimes right on the money," he said. "And when a conspiracy is real, people with a conspiracist mindset may be among the first to pick up on it while others get duped.

"Either way, it is important to realize that when reality is ambiguous, our personalities and cognitive biases cause us to adopt the beliefs that we do. This knowledge can help us understand our own intuitions."

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Persistent lung inflammation may be one possible explanation for why having asthma during childhood increases your risk for developing anxiety later in life, according to Penn State researchers.

In a study with mice, researchers found that childhood exposure to allergens was linked with persistent lung inflammation. It was also connected to changes in gene expression related to stress and serotonin function.

Additionally, the study -- recently published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience -- found that episodes of labored breathing were associated with short-term anxiety.

"The idea of studying this link between asthma and anxiety is a pretty new area, and right now we don't know what the connection is," said Sonia Cavigelli, associate professor of biobehavioral health. "What we saw in the mice was that attacks of labored breathing may cause short-term anxiety, but that long-term effects may be due to lasting lung inflammation."

Previous research has shown that about 10 percent of children and adolescents have asthma, which is associated with a two to three times higher chance of developing an internalizing disorder like anxiety or depression.

The researchers said that finding the root cause of this connection is difficult because in addition to the biological aspects of asthma, there are many social and environmental factors that could lead to anxiety in humans. For example, air pollution or a parent's anxiety about their child's asthma could also influence the child's risk for anxiety.

"With the mice, we can look at the different components of asthma, like the lung inflammation or the airway constriction," said Jasmine Caulfield, graduate student in neuroscience and lead author on the study. "A person who's having an asthma attack may have inflammation in their lungs and labored breathing at the same time, so you can't separate which is contributing to later outcomes. But in mice, we can isolate these variables and try to see what is causing these anxiety symptoms."

To help tease apart these possible causes, the researchers studied four groups of mice: one with airway inflammation due to dust mite exposure; one that experienced episodes of labored breathing; one that experienced both conditions; and one that experienced neither, as a control. A total of 98 mice were used in the study.

The researchers found that three months after being exposed to the allergen, mice still had lung inflammation and mucus, suggesting that even when allergy triggers are removed, there are lasting effects in the lungs long into adulthood.

"We originally thought that once the allergen was removed, the lungs would clear themselves of inflammation relatively quickly," Cavigelli said. "If this translates to humans, it may suggest that if you grow up exposed to an allergen that you're reacting to, even if you get over that, you might still have these subtle, long-term changes in lung inflammation."

Additionally, they found that the mice that were exposed to the allergen and developed these changes in lung function also had changes in gene expression in brain areas that help regulate stress and serotonin.

"It makes sense to us because while labored breathing events may be scary and cause anxiety in the short term, it's the inflammation in the airways that persists into adulthood," Caulfield said. "So, it would make sense that long-term anxiety is linked with this long-term physical symptom."

The researchers also found differences in the results between male and female mice.

"In this study, the female mice had more inflammation in their lungs than the male mice three months after exposure to the allergen," Caulfield said. "In humans, girls are more likely to have persistent asthma while boys are more likely to outgrow it, so our animal model seems to map onto what we see in humans."

In the future, the researchers will continue to explore different possibilities for what causes the link between asthma and anxiety. For example, Caulfield and Cavigelli are working on a study in mice that examines whether a common class of daily asthma medication -- corticosteroids -- has long-term effects on anxiety.

CHICAGO, September 25, 2018 - For individuals carrying a genetic mutation that causes Alzheimer's disease, engaging in at least 2.5 hours of physical activity per week may have beneficial effects on markers of Alzheimer's disease brain changes and may delay cognitive decline, according to a new study available online by Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association as an article in press, corrected proof.

According to the authors, these results support the benefit of physical activity on cognition and dementia progression, even in individuals with autosomal dominant* Alzheimer's disease (ADAD), a rare genetically-driven form of the disease in which the development of dementia at a relatively young age is inevitable.

The authors say their results, "show a significant relationship between physical activity, cognition, functional status and Alzheimer's disease pathology even in individuals with genetically-driven ADAD. ... The officially recommended physical activity duration of ?150 minutes per week was associated with significantly better cognition and less Alzheimer's disease pathology in ADAD. From a public health perspective, this amount of physical activity was achieved by 70% of all ADAD individuals participating at the DIAN study. Therefore, a physically active lifestyle is achievable and may play an important role in delaying the development and progression of ADAD."

"The results of this study are encouraging, and not only for individuals with rare genetically-caused Alzheimer's disease," said Maria C. Carrillo, Ph.D., Chief Science Officer for the Alzheimer's Association. "If further research confirms this relationship between physical activity and later onset of dementia symptoms in ADAD, then we need to expand the scope of this work to see if it also is true in the millions of people with more common, late onset Alzheimer's."

Christoph Laske, M.D. and his research team at the University Hospital of Tübingen, Germany analyzed data generated from 275 individuals (average age 38.4) who carry a genetic mutation for ADAD and are participating in the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer's Network (DIAN), an international observational study of individuals and families with ADAD led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Researchers aimed to determine if at least 150 minutes of physical activity (walking, running, swimming, aerobics, etc.) per week - the current recommendation by the World Health Organization and the American College of Sports Medicine - would produce cognitive benefits for the study participants. One hundred fifty-six (156) were classified as high physical activity individuals (>150 minutes physical activity/week); 68 as low physical activity individuals (

Researchers found individuals who engaged in more physical activity scored better on the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and the Clinical Dementia Rating Sum of Boxes (CDR-SOB), which are well-accepted standard measures of cognition and function. Similarly, individuals who exercised more had lower levels of Alzheimer's disease biomarkers in cerebrospinal fluid, including lower tau, a protein that builds up in the brains of people living with Alzheimer's disease. However, individual trajectories of cognitive changes have not been assessed in this cross-sectional study.

"A physically active lifestyle is achievable and may play an important role in delaying the development and progression of ADAD. Individuals at genetic risk for dementia should therefore be counselled to pursue a physically active lifestyle," the study authors conclude.

"There is a growing and increasingly strong body of scientific evidence of the beneficial impact of lifestyle factors in reducing the risk for, and perhaps even preventing, cognitive decline and dementia," Carrillo said. "For example, at AAIC 2018 in July we heard preliminary results of SPRINT MIND, the first randomized clinical trial to demonstrate that intensive blood pressure treatment reduces new cases of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and the combined risk of MCI plus all-cause dementia. This adds credibility to the vision of future Alzheimer's therapy that combines drugs and modifiable risk factor interventions -- as we do now in heart disease."

To more definitively generate scientific evidence on how lifestyle choices affect brain health, the Alzheimer's Association is currently leading a large two-year clinical trial called the U.S. Study to Protect Brain Health Through Lifestyle Intervention to Reduce Risk (U.S. POINTER). The study is a two-year clinical trial to evaluate whether lifestyle interventions that simultaneously target many risk factors protect cognitive function in older adults who are at increased risk for cognitive decline. U.S. POINTER is the first such study to be conducted in a large group of Americans across the United States.

"Relationship between physical activity, cognition, and Alzheimer pathology in autosomal dominant Alzheimer`s disease," by Dr. Stephan Muller, et al, was supported by The Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer's Network (DIAN, U19AG032438), U.S. National Institute on Aging, German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE), Raul Carrea Institute for Neurological Research (FLENI), Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development, AMED, and Korea Health Industry Development Institute (KHIDI).

Forty per cent of older adults who leave hospital are discharged to home care or a long-term care facility, which, combined with where they lived before hospitalization, affects their risk of readmission, found a study published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

These data are important for both health care professionals and policy-makers to improve discharge planning for patients and to reduce readmissions.

"The information from this study will contribute to a better understanding of the extent to which complicated transitions to and from hospital influence readmission among older adults, which is essential for system planning, performance measurement, and the targeting and testing of interventions to improve transitions and reduce readmissions," writes Dr. Andrea Gruneir, Department of Family Medicine, University of Alberta and ICES, with coauthors.

While most research on readmissions focuses on people who are admitted to hospital from the community and who return to the community, this study considers the large number of older adults with more complex pathways across the system.

The large study of 701,527 hospitalized adults over age 65 in Ontario found that 31.5% of people were discharged to home care and 9.5% to long-term care, with 3% newly admitted to long-term care. More than half (53.5%) were women and 40% had five or more chronic conditions. Almost every patient (98%) had visited a doctor at least once during the year before hospital admission, 331,168 (47%) had visited the emergency department and 72,536 (10%) had been admitted.

The authors state that the study "shows that fundamental shortcomings in the health system's ability to meet older adults' needs, particularly those with dementia, manifest as frequent use of acute care, including readmissions, prolonged hospital stays with extended alternate levels of care periods and 'non-acute' reasons for hospital admission."

People who were discharged with home care were the most likely to be readmitted, and when readmitted, 19% were there for two or more weeks and nearly 20% were designated as alternate level of care (ALC), the longest of any group in the study. Conversely, people who were discharged to long-term care (as a new admission) were the least likely to be readmitted, but their first hospital stay was most often for dementia. More than 80% were in hospital for two or more weeks and were designated as ALC, which means they no longer need acute hospital care but can't be discharged as the appropriate level of care required is not available in another setting.

"By contextualizing hospitalization within these care settings, our findings suggest an approach to understanding readmissions as a signal of the health system's preparedness for the ageing population," the authors conclude.

SEATTLE - The United States ranks 27th in the world for its investments in education and health care as measurements of its commitment to economic growth, according to the first-ever scientific study ranking countries for their levels of human capital.

The nation placed just behind Australia (ranked 26th) and just ahead of Czech Republic (ranked 28th). In contrast, China's ranking of 44th in 2016 represents an increase from its 1990 ranking of 69th.

"The decline of human capital in the United States was one of the biggest surprises in our study," said Dr. Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. "Our findings show the association between investments in education and health and improved human capital and GDP - which policymakers here in the US ignore at their own peril. As the world economy grows increasingly dependent on digital technology, from agriculture to manufacturing to the service industry, human capital grows increasingly important for stimulating local and national economies."

The World Bank President, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, defines human capital as "the sum total of a population's health, skills, knowledge, experience, and habits." It is a concept that recognizes that not all labor is equal, and the quality of workers can be improved by investing in them.

The US's ranking of 27th in 2016 represents a significant decrease from its 1990 ranking of 6th. It comes from having 23 years of expected human capital, measured as the number of years a person can be expected to work in the years of peak productivity, taking into account life expectancy, functional health, years of schooling, and learning.

Overall, US residents had 43 out of a possible 45 years between the ages of 20 and 64; expected educational attainment of 12 years out of a possible of 18 years in school; and a learning score of 89 and a functional health score of 88, both out of 100. Learning is based on average student scores on internationally comparable tests. Components measured in the functional health score include: stunting, wasting, anemia, cognitive impairments, hearing and vision loss, and infectious diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.

"Clearly, China is on an upward trajectory, while the US, without more strategic investments, especially in education, risks falling behind even further," Murray said.

Kim has stated that measuring and ranking countries by their human capital will enable comparisons over time, thereby providing governments and investors insights into where critical investments are needed to improve health and education. Last year, he asked IHME to develop such a measurement.

"Measuring and ranking countries by their level of human capital is critical to focus governments' attention on investing in their own people," Kim said. "This study from IHME is an important contribution to the measurement of human capital across countries and over time."

The study, "Measuring human capital: A systematic analysis of 195 countries and territories, 1990 to 2016," was published in the international medical journal The Lancet. It is based on a systematic analysis of an extensive array of data from numerous sources, including government agencies, schools, and health care systems.

The study places Finland at the top. Turkey showed the most dramatic increase in human capital between 1990 and 2016; Asian countries with notable improvement include China, Thailand, Singapore, and Vietnam. Within Latin America, Brazil stands out for improvement. All these countries have had faster economic growth over this period than peer countries with lower levels of human capital improvement.

In addition, the greatest increase among sub-Saharan African countries was in Equatorial Guinea. Some of the world's most rapid improvements were in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

Over the past quarter century, there has been limited progress in building human capital in selected countries that started at a high baseline. The US was ranked sixth in human capital in 1990 but dropped to 27th in 2016 because of minimal progress, particularly in educational attainment, which declined from 13 years to 12.

Health and education advocates, economists, and others should use the findings as evidence to argue for greater attention to - and resources for - improving their nations' human capital.

"Underinvesting in people may be driven by lack of policy attention to the levels of human capital," Murray said. "No regular, comparable reporting across all countries on human capital currently exists. Such reporting over the next generation - as a way to measure investments in health and education - will enable leaders to be held accountable to their constituents."

Researchers found that nations with greater improvements in human capital also tend to have faster growth in per capita GDP. Countries in the highest quartile of improvements in human capital between 1990 and 2016 had a 1.1% higher median yearly GDP growth rate than countries in the bottom quartile of human capital improvements. For example, between 2015 and 2016, a 1.1% increase in the human capital growth rate in China equated to an additional $163 per capita; in Turkey, $268 per capita; and in Brazil, $177 per capita.

The study focuses on the number of productive years an individual in each country can be expected to work between the ages of 20 to 64, taking into account years of schooling, learning in school, and functional health. The calculation is based on systematic analysis of 2,522 surveys and censuses providing data on years of schooling; testing scores on language, math, and science; and health levels related to economic productivity.

Among other findings:

At the top of the listing of 195 nations, Finland's level of expected human capital in 2016 was 28 years, followed immediately by Iceland, Denmark, the Netherlands (each with 27 years), and Taiwan (26 years).

Niger, South Sudan, and Chad all ranked lowest in 2016 at 2 years, followed by Burkina Faso and Mali (each with 3 years).

In 2016, 44 countries surpassed more than 20 years of expected human capital, while 68 countries had fewer than 10 years.

Rankings for the 10 most populous countries in 2016, in addition to China, India, and the United States were Indonesia (131st), Brazil (71st), Pakistan (164th), Nigeria (171st), Bangladesh (161st), Russia (49th), and Mexico (104th).

There were notable differences in expected human capital by sex in 2016. Across the board, expected years lived between 20 and 64 years are greater in females than in males. In addition, health status tends to be higher among females than males, with the exception of high-income countries. In terms of the overall measure, for countries below 10 years of expected human capital, rates of human capital tend to be higher in males, while countries above 10 years tend to have higher expected human capital for females.

Termite colonies have been found to thrive and reproduce without males, new research from the University of Sydney reveals.

The findings provide new evidence that males aren't required to maintain some advanced animal populations. They add momentum to questions about the impact and function of males in animal societies.

It is well known that many hymenopteran insect species - which include bees and ants - are essentially all-female societies. But termites are from a different insect order and typically contain male and female reproductives and workers.

Population analysis by a team of researchers - including Professor Nathan Lo and postdoctoral researcher Dr Toshihisa Yoshiro from the University's School of Life and Environmental Sciences - has for the first time identified termite colonies that completely lack males.

Findings published in BMC Biology today showed six of 10 termite populations scrutinized by the researchers in Japan were entirely comprised of asexual females. Aside from a lack of males, the colonies' queens contained no sperm in their sperm storage organs and their eggs remained unfertilised. Furthermore, there was no significant difference in the hatching rate of these unfertilised eggs and that of fertilised eggs among mixed-sex termite populations.

All the populations studied were of the Glyptotermes nakajimai species based in Japan. This species typically inhabits forest areas and is not considered a pest.

"These results demonstrate males are not essential for the maintenance of animal societies in which they previously played an active social role," said Professor Lo.

The occasional development of unfertilised eggs in mixed-sex colonies suggests asexual female populations may have evolved from their mixed-sex counterparts.

Professor Lo says asexual reproduction could allow termites to successfully adapt to a range of new environments.

"All else being equal, asexual populations grow at twice the rate of sexual populations because only females are required to reproduce. This increased growth rate of colonies makes it easier for populations to entrench themselves in new environments."

While it is possible some of the 276 termite species in Australia, among the most primitive and ecologically diverse in the world, reproduce asexually further research is required to determine this, Dr Yashiro said.

Loss of males from mixed-sex societies in termites was co-written by researchers from the Laboratory of Insect Ecology at Kyoto University.

USC scientists say Alzheimer's could be diagnosed earlier if scientists focus on an early warning within the brain's circulation system.

That's important because researchers believe that the earlier Alzheimer's is spotted, the better chance there is to stop or slow the disease.

"Cognitive impairment, and accumulation in the brain of the abnormal proteins amyloid and tau, are what we currently rely upon to diagnose Alzheimer's disease, but blood-brain barrier breakdown and cerebral blood flow changes can be seen much earlier," said Berislav Zlokovic, the Mary Hayley and Selim Zilkha Chair in Alzheimer's Disease Research at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. "This shows why healthy blood vessels are so important for normal brain functioning."

In a new review article in the Sept. 24 issue of Nature Neuroscience, Zlokovic and his colleagues recommend that the blood-brain barrier, or BBB, be considered an important biomarker -- and potential drug target -- for Alzheimer's disease. Because Alzheimer's is irreversible, and not fully understood, understanding the first step in the disease process is a critical step in fighting it.

Alzheimer's afflicts 5.7 million Americans and is expected to impair about 14 million by 2050, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Treatment costs total hundreds of billions of dollars annually in the United States. Alzheimer's kills more people than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined.

The blood-brain barrier is a filtration system, letting in good things (glucose, amino acids) and keeping out bad things (viruses, bacteria, blood). It's mostly comprised of endothelial cells lining the 400 miles of arteries, veins and capillaries that feed our brains.

Some evidence indicates that leaks in the blood-brain barrier may allow a protein called amyloid into the brain where it sticks to neurons. This triggers the accumulation of more amyloid, which eventually overwhelms and kills brain cells.

"Something is off with the system when that happens," said Arthur Toga, director of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI) and the USC Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute at the Keck School of Medicine. "Healthy people have amyloid in their bodies. When the system is dysregulated, amyloid can build up and cells die off."

Blood-to-brain leaks are seen in other neurodegenerative diseases, such as Huntington's disease, Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis.

BBB leaks can be detected with an intravenously administered contrast substance in concert with magnetic resonance imaging. Brain microbleeds, another sign of leakage, also can be picked up with MRI. A slowdown in the brain's uptake of glucose, visible via PET scan, can be a another result of BBB breakdown.

Zlokovic notes that these aren't tests routinely offered at a doctor's office.