Culture

More than 100 years ago, German Nobel laureate Paul Ehrlich popularized the "magic bullet" concept -- a method that clinicians might one day use to target invading microbes without harming other parts of the body. Although chemotherapies have been highly useful as targeted treatments for cancer, unwanted side effects still plague patients. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have demonstrated that specialized nucleic acid-based nanostructures could be used to target cancer cells while bypassing normal cells.

"Most of the therapeutic drugs are not able to discriminate the cancer cells from healthy cells," said David Porciani, a postdoctoral fellow in Donald Burke's lab at the MU Bond Life Sciences Center. "They are killing both cell populations (healthy and malignant), and the treatment can have harsher side effects than the cancer itself in the short term. We are developing 'smart' molecules that can bind with receptors that are found on the surface of cancer cells, thus representing a cancer signature. The idea is to use these smart molecules as vehicles to deliver chemotherapeutic drugs or diagnostics."

Using a molecular process that mimics a highly-accelerated form of natural evolution, Porciani and his team sought out nucleic acid ligands, or aptamers. Because of their three-dimensional structures, aptamers can be trained to bind to certain target molecules with high affinity and selectivity. When the target is a cancer-associated receptor, these aptamers can be used as molecular tools to recognize specifically diseased cells.

The team then "loaded" the aptamers with large, fluorescent RNAs generating nucleic-acid nanostructures. Upon incubation with target cancer and non-target cells, only malignant cells were illuminated by the nanostructure showing that the structures had correctly bonded with their intended targets.

"Next steps for our studies are to prove that these aptamers can be loaded with therapeutic molecules that specifically target and treat cancer cells leaving normal tissues untouched," Porciani said. "While aptamers have been proven in the past as tools to deliver small drugs, our method paves the way to deliver even larger and potentially more powerful RNA-based drugs possibly creating that 'magic bullet' that Erhlich described in the last century."

This research highlights the power of translational precision medicine and the promise of the proposed Translational Precision Medicine Complex at the University of Missouri. The TPMC will bring together industry partners, multiple schools and colleges on campus, and the federal and state government to enable precision and personalized medicine. Scientific advancements made at MU will be effectively translated into new drugs, devices and treatments that deliver customized patient care based on an individual's genes, environment and lifestyle, ultimately improving health and well-being of people.

Somewhere in the American Southwest or northern Mexico, there are probably the ruins of a scarlet macaw breeding operation dating to between 900 and 1200 C.E., according to a team of archaeologists who sequenced the mitochondrial DNA of bird remains found in the Chaco Canyon and Mimbres areas of New Mexico.

Remains of a thriving prehistoric avian culture and breeding colony of scarlet macaws exist at the northern Mexican site of Paquimé, or Casas Grande. However, this community existed from 1250 to 1450, well after the abandonment of Chaco Canyon, and could not have supplied these birds to Southwest communities prior to the 13th century, said Richard George, graduate student in anthropology, Penn State.

Historically, scarlet macaws lived from South America to eastern coastal Mexico and Guatemala, thousands of miles from the American Southwest. Previously, researchers thought that ancestral Puebloan people might have traveled to these natural breeding areas and brought birds back, but the logistics of transporting adolescent birds are difficult. None of the sites where these early macaw remains were found contained evidence of breeding -- eggshells, pens or perches.

"We were interested in the prehistoric scarlet macaw population history and the impacts of human direct management," said George. "Especially any evidence for directed breeding or changes in the genetic diversity that could co-occur with different trade networks."

The researchers sequenced the mitochondrial DNA of 20 scarlet macaw specimens, but were only able to obtain full sequences from 14. They then directly radiocarbon-dated all 14 birds with complete or near complete genomes and found they fell between 900 and 1200 CE.

"We looked at the full mitochondrial genome of over 16,000 base pairs to understand the maternal relationships represented in the Chaco Canyon and Mimbres regions," said George.

Mitochondrial DNA exists separate from the cell nucleus and is inherited directly from the mother. While nuclear DNA combines the DNA inherited from both parents, mitochondrial DNA can show direct lineage because all siblings have the same mtDNA as their mother, and she has the same mtDNA as her own siblings and mother, all the way back through their ancestry.

Scarlet macaws in Mexico and Central America have five haplogroups -- genetically similar, but not identical mitochondrial DNA lines -- and each haplogroup has a number of haplotypes containing identical DNA lines. The researchers found that their scarlet macaws were all from haplogroup 6 and that 71 percent of the birds shared one of four unique haplotypes. They report the results of this analysis today (Aug 13) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers found that the probability of obtaining 14 birds from the wild and having them all come from the same haplogroup, one that is small and isolated, was extremely small. A better explanation, especially because these specimens ranged over a 300-year period, is that all the birds came from the same breeding population and that this population existed somewhere in the American Southwest or northern Mexico.

"These birds all likely came from the same source, but we don't have any way to support that assumption without examining the full genome," said George. "However, the genetic results likely indicate some type of narrow breeding from a small founder population with little or no introgression or resupply."

However, no one has found macaw breeding evidence dating to the 900 to 1200 period in the American Southwest or northern Mexico.

"The next step will be to analyze macaws from other archaeological sites in Arizona and northern Mexico to narrow down the location of this early breeding colony," said Douglas Kennett, professor and head of anthropology, Penn State, and co-director or the project.

Tobacco content remains common on UK prime time TV, cropping up in a third of all programmes, despite advertising and broadcasting regulations designed to protect children from this kind of exposure, reveals research published online in the journal Tobacco Control.

The amount of exposure has hardly changed in five years, and is likely to heavily influence young people's take-up of smoking, say the researchers.

Tobacco content in film has been covered extensively, but relatively little attention has been paid to its inclusion on prime time TV, despite the fact that children are likely to spend more time watching TV than they are films, they point out.

The researchers therefore analysed the tobacco content of all programmes, adverts, and trailers broadcast on the five national free to air TV channels between 1800 and 2200 hours during the course of three separate weeks in September, October, and November 2015.

Their analysis included any actual or implied use, such as holding a cigarette without smoking it, or making a comment about smoking; smoking/tobacco paraphernalia; and presence of branding in 1 minute intervals. The results were then compared with those of a similar analysis carried out in 2010.

In all, 420 hours of broadcast footage, including 611 programmes, 909 adverts, and 211 trailers, were analysed.

Some 291 broadcasts (17% of all programmes) included tobacco content. The channel with the most tobacco content was Channel 5, and the one with the least was BBC2.

Tobacco content occurred in one in three TV programmes broadcast, and nearly one in 10 (8%) adverts or trailers.

Actual tobacco use occurred in one in eight (12%) programmes, while tobacco related content--primarily no smoking signs--occurred in just 2 percent of broadcasts. Implied use and branding were rare.

Although most tobacco content occurred after the 9 pm watershed, it still occurred on the most popular TV channels before then. And comparison with the previous analysis in 2010 showed that the number of 1 minute intervals containing any tobacco content increased, rising from 731 to 751 in 2015.

Tobacco advertising, promotion and sponsorship, including paid product placement in TV adverts, is banned in the UK, but tobacco imagery in TV programmes and trailers is exempt, and covered instead by media regulator, OfCom's, broadcasting code.

This code is designed to protect children by restricting depictions of tobacco use in children's programmes, and preventing the glamorisation of smoking in programmes broadcast before 9 pm.

"Audiovisual tobacco content remains common in prime-time UK television programmes and is likely to be a significant driver of smoking uptake in young people," emphasise the researchers.

"Guidelines on tobacco content need to be revised and more carefully enforced to protect children from exposure to tobacco imagery and the consequent risk of smoking initiation," they add.

To encourage innovation in health care, governments need to move away from current siloed funding to funding that encourages collaboration among providers in managing patients who need care in a variety of settings, argue the authors of an analysis in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal)

Funding in silos is a barrier to innovation, especially to improving transitions of care for patients who need multiple types of care in different settings. In Canada's health system, no player is well-positioned both to make the investment in an innovative model of care and to easily claim back the financial benefits.

"Although we often focus on who pays for health care (i.e., private versus public), how we fund health care providers also deserves attention," says Dr. Noah Ivers, a family physician at Women's College Hospital and assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario. "To better integrate care, we may need funding to be integrated, and then providers must learn to work together to make the most of that funding."

A key challenge for modern health care systems is to implement evidence-based health care. This is especially difficult when patients transition from one sector to another, such as after hospital discharge, or when multiple health care professionals are working with the same patient in an uncoordinated fashion.

There are many promising pilot projects to improve integration of care, but these typically are not implemented. One reason may be that current approaches to funding health care providers -- both individuals and organizations -- involve many independent, siloed budgets. The result is that even if a proven strategy can be implemented in one part of the system (e.g., primary care), to improve patient outcomes and produce savings in another part of the system (e.g., fewer hospitalizations) it may be impossible to find the funds to invest in that strategy.

Health systems around the world are experimenting with novel funding strategies to address this problem.

"A true learning health system would commit to experimenting with, and evaluating, changes in how we fund health care providers to constantly strive for better patient outcomes," he says.

WORCESTER, MA - Reports from cannabis users that the drug reduces the symptoms of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) may finally be explained by new research from the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the University of Bath showing that endocannabinoids help control and prevent intestinal inflammation in mice.

This is the first-time scientists have reported a biological mechanism to explain why some marijuana users have reported beneficial effects from cannabis on intestine inflammation conditions such as ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease. Researchers hope that their findings will lead to the development of drugs and treatments for gut disorders, which affect millions of people around the world and are caused when the body's immune defenses mistakenly attack the lining of the intestine.

The findings appear in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

"There's been a lot of anecdotal evidence about the benefits of medical marijuana, but there hasn't been a lot of science to back it up," said Beth A. McCormick, PhD, vice chair and professor of microbiology & physiological systems at UMass Medical School. "For the first time, we have an understanding of the molecules involved in the process and how endocannabinoids and cannabinoids control inflammation. This gives clinical researchers a new drug target to explore to treat patients that suffer from inflammatory bowel diseases, and perhaps other diseases, as well."

The researchers discovered that gut inflammation is regulated by two important processes, which are constantly in flux and responding to changing conditions in the intestinal environment. The first process, identified in previous scientific research, promotes an aggressive immune response in the gut that destroys dangerous pathogens, but which can also damage the lining of the intestine when immune cells attack indiscriminately.

The second pathway, first described in this paper, turns off the inflammation response via special molecules transported across the epithelial cells lining the gut by the same process already known to remove toxins from these cells into the intestine cavity. Crucially, this response requires a naturally-produced molecule called an endocannabinoid, which is very similar to cannabinoid molecules found in cannabis.

If the endocannabinoid isn't present, inflammation isn't kept in balance and it can run unchecked, as the body's immune cells attack the intestinal lining.

McCormick and colleagues believe that because cannabis use introduces cannabinoids into the body, these molecules could help relieve gut inflammation, as the naturally produced endocannabinoids normally would.

"We need to be clear that while this is a plausible explanation for why marijuana users have reported cannabis relieves symptoms of IBD, we have thus far only evaluated this in mice and have not proven this experimentally in humans. We hope, however, that these findings will help us develop new ways to treat bowel diseases in humans" said professor Randy Mrsny from the University of Bath Department of Pharmacy and Pharmacology.

You probably know Easter Island as "the place with the giant stone heads." This remote island 2,300 miles off the coast of Chile has long been seen as mysterious--a place where Polynesian seafarers set up camp, built giant statues, and then destroyed their own society through in-fighting and over-exploitation of natural resources. However, a new article in the Journal of Pacific Archaeology hints at a more complex story--by analyzing the chemical makeup of the tools used to create the big stone sculptures, archaeologists found evidence of a sophisticated society where the people shared information and collaborated.

"For a long time, people wondered about the culture behind these very important statues," says Field Museum scientist Laure Dussubieux, one of the study's authors. "This study shows how people were interacting, it's helping to revise the theory."

"The idea of competition and collapse on Easter Island might be overstated," says lead author Dale Simpson, Jr., an archaeologist from the University of Queensland. "To me, the stone carving industry is solid evidence that there was cooperation among families and craft groups."

The first people arrived on Easter Island (or, in the local language, Rapa Nui) about 900 years ago. "The founding population, according to oral tradition, was two canoes led by the island's first chief, Hotu Matu?a," says Simpson, who is currently on the faculty of the College of DuPage. Over the years, the population rose to the thousands, forming the complex society that carved the statues Easter Island is known for today. These statues, or moai, often referred to as "Easter Island heads," are actually full-body figures that became partially buried over time. The moai, which represent important Rapa Nui ancestors, number nearly a thousand, and the largest one is over seventy feet tall.

According to Simpson, the size and number of the moai hint at a complex society. "Ancient Rapa Nui had chiefs, priests, and guilds of workers who fished, farmed, and made the moai. There was a certain level of sociopolitical organization that was needed to carve almost a thousand statues," says Simpson.

Recent excavations of four statues in the inner region of Rano Raraku, the statue quarry, were conducted by Jo Anne Van Tilburg of Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA and director of the Easter Island Statue Project, along with her Rapa Nui excavation team. To better understand the society that fabricated two of the statues, Simpson, Dussubieux, and Van Tilburg took a detailed look at twenty one of about 1,600 stone tools made of volcanic stone called basalt that had been recovered in Van Tilburg's excavations. About half of the tools, called toki, recovered were fragments that suggested how they were used.

For Van Tilburg, the goal of the project was to gain a better understanding of how tool makers and statue carvers may have interacted, thus gaining insight into how the statue production industry functioned. "We wanted to figure out where the raw materials used to manufacture the artifacts came from," explained Dussubieux. "We wanted to know if people were taking material from close to where they lived."

There are at least three different sources on Easter Island that the Rapa Nui used for material to make their stone tools. The basalt quarries cover twelve thousand square meters, an area the size of two football fields. And those different quarries, the tools that came from them, and the movement between geological locations and archaeological sites shed light on prehistoric Rapa Nui society.

"Basalt is a grayish rock that doesn't look like anything special, but when you look at the chemical composition of the basalt samples from different sources, you can see very subtle differences in concentrations of different elements," explains Dussubieux. "Rock from each source is different because of the geology of each site."

Dussubieux led the chemical analysis of the stone tools. The archaeologists used a laser to cut off tiny pieces of stone from the toki and then used an instrument called a mass spectrometer to analyze the amounts of different chemical elements present in the samples. The results pointed to a society that Simpson believes involved a fair amount of collaboration.

"The majority of the toki came from one quarry complex--once the people found the quarry they liked, they stayed with it," says Simpson. "For everyone to be using one type of stone, I believe they had to collaborate. That's why they were so successful--they were working together."

To Simpson, this level of large-scale cooperation contradicts the popular narrative that Easter Island's inhabitants ran out of resources and warred themselves into extinction. "There's so much mystery around Easter Island, because it's so isolated, but on the island, people were, and still are, interacting in huge amounts," says Simpson. While the society was later decimated by colonists and slavery, Rapa Nui culture has persisted. "There are thousands of Rapa Nui people alive today--the society isn't gone," Simpson explains.

Van Tilburg urges caution in interpreting the study's results. "The near exclusive use of one quarry to produce these seventeen tools supports a view of craft specialization based on information exchange, but we can't know at this stage if the interaction was collaborative. It may also have been coercive in some way. Human behavior is complex. This study encourages further mapping and stone sourcing, and our excavations continue to shed new light on moai carving."
In addition to potentially paving the way for a more nuanced view of the Rapa Nui people, Dussubieux notes that the study is important because of its wider-reaching insights into how societies work. "What happens in this world is a cycle, what happened in the past will happen again," says Dussubieux. "Most people don't live on a small island, but what we learn about people's interactions in the past is very important for us now because what shapes our world is how we interact."

New research illuminates how some men and boys who are contemplating suicide are finding emotional support in an unexpected place: Reddit.

Sometimes referred to as the "front page of the Internet," Reddit is a social news aggregation and discussion website that's especially popular among young adult males.

The website includes several topic-specific subreddit discussion forums, one of which is SuicideWatch. The regulated space allows people who are experiencing suicidal thoughts to post anonymously about what they are going through and receive emotional support from other users.

As of this month, SuicideWatch has more than 96,000 subscribers.

University of Arizona sociology doctoral student Darla Still has been analyzing the content of anonymous posts made to SuicideWatch to learn more about what individuals go through when contemplating suicide and how they express those thoughts and feelings to others.

Among her early findings, which she presented today at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, is that the SuicideWatch subreddit may provide a unique source of gender-specific support for men and boys.

Although Reddit does not identify users by gender, Still focused on a subset of posts in which gender was implied by the posts' content. For example, users wrote things like "I am a joke of man," or referred to instances in which they've been told to "be a man" or "man up."

Responses to those posts often contained gendered language of their own, like, "Hey, bro, I've been through that before," or, "What's bothering you, man?"

Still suggests that the use of that type of gendered language is meaningful.

"It's about knowing that you're not the only one who's going through what you're going through, and being able to identify that you're not alone," she said. "We see this as a space where men may be a little more at ease to be vulnerable and express those emotions because of the screen and the anonymity."

Still decided to focus on posts by males because while females are twice as likely as males to attempt suicide, males are three times more likely to die by suicide.

Men also underreport mental health symptoms, and many scholars have theorized that men have more difficulty openly expressing emotions than women due to the ways in which they are socialized with masculine norms.

"If you think about stereotypical masculinity theories, men are socialized to believe that expressing emotions is weak," said Still, who presented her work with her collaborators Amelia Blume, a UA sociology doctoral student, and Charlene Hack, who earned her bachelor's degree in sociology from the UA in 2017.

"Our main goal was to bring attention to this issue and try to move away from the stigma that men, in particular, face," Still said.

Males who feel uncomfortable talking about their emotions with loved ones or mental health professionals - or those who are unable to do so - might find an alternative or supplemental option in posting anonymously online, Still said.

Still's initial findings were based on an analysis of 3,125 posts collected between mid-October 2017 and early January of this year.

Going forward, she will continue to analyze 165,000 posts and more than 1 million comments submitted to the SuicideWatch subreddit between 2009 and 2017. She hopes to gain a better understanding of what both men and women go through when contemplating suicide and how an online forum might offer support.

"We know that men underreport mental health symptoms, so this is giving us a better understanding of the suicidality experience of what men go through, and what's specific to men in comparison to women," Still said. "The fact that this space on Reddit is there - we don't know, but maybe it's helped somebody."

If you happen to have a box of spaghetti in your pantry, try this experiment: Pull out a single spaghetti stick and hold it at both ends. Now bend it until it breaks. How many fragments did you make? If the answer is three or more, pull out another stick and try again. Can you break the noodle in two? If not, you're in very good company.

The spaghetti challenge has flummoxed even the likes of famed physicist Richard Feynman '39, who once spent a good portion of an evening breaking pasta and looking for a theoretical explanation for why the sticks refused to snap in two.

Feynman's kitchen experiment remained unresolved until 2005, when physicists from France pieced together a theory to describe the forces at work when spaghetti -- and any long, thin rod -- is bent. They found that when a stick is bent evenly from both ends, it will break near the center, where it is most curved. This initial break triggers a "snap-back" effect and a bending wave, or vibration, that further fractures the stick. Their theory, which won the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize, seemed to solve Feynman's puzzle. But a question remained: Could spaghetti ever be coerced to break in two?

The answer, according to a new MIT study, is yes -- with a twist. In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report that they have found a way to break spaghetti in two, by both bending and twisting the dry noodles. They carried out experiments with hundreds of spaghetti sticks, bending and twisting them with an apparatus they built specifically for the task. The team found that if a stick is twisted past a certain critical degree, then slowly bent in half, it will, against all odds, break in two.

The researchers say the results may have applications beyond culinary curiosities, such as enhancing the understanding of crack formation and how to control fractures in other rod-like materials such as multifiber structures, engineered nanotubes, or even microtubules in cells.

"It will be interesting to see whether and how twist could similarly be used to control the fracture dynamics of two-dimensional and three-dimensional materials," says co-author Jörn Dunkel, associate professor of physical applied mathematics at MIT. "In any case, this has been a fun interdisciplinary project started and carried out by two brilliant and persistent students -- who probably don't want to see, break, or eat spaghetti for a while."

The two students are Ronald Heisser '16, now a graduate student at Cornell University, and Vishal Patil, a mathematics graduate student in Dunkel's group at MIT. Their co-authors are Norbert Stoop, instructor of mathematics at MIT, and Emmanuel Villermaux of Université Aix Marseille.

A deep dish dive

Heisser, together with project partner Edgar Gridello, originally took up the challenge of breaking spaghetti in the spring of 2015, as a final project for 18.354 (Nonlinear Dynamics: Continuum Systems), a course taught by Dunkel. They had read about Feynman's kitchen experiment, and wondered whether spaghetti could somehow be broken in two and whether this split could be controlled.

"They did some manual tests, tried various things, and came up with an idea that when he twisted the spaghetti really hard and brought the ends together, it seemed to work and it broke into two pieces," Dunkel says. "But you have to twist really strongly. And Ronald wanted to investigate more deeply."

So Heisser built a mechanical fracture device to controllably twist and bend sticks of spaghetti. Two clamps on either end of the device hold a stick of spaghetti in place. A clamp at one end can be rotated to twist the dry noodle by various degrees, while the other clamp slides toward the twisting clamp to bring the two ends of the spaghetti together, bending the stick.

Heisser and Patil used the device to bend and twist hundreds of spaghetti sticks, and recorded the entire fragmentation process with a camera, at up to a million frames per second. In the end, they found that by first twisting the spaghetti at almost 360 degrees, then slowly bringing the two clamps together to bend it, the stick snapped exactly in two. The findings were consistent across two types of spaghetti: Barilla No. 5 and Barilla No. 7, which have slightly different diameters.

Noodle twist

In parallel, Patil began to develop a mathematical model to explain how twisting can snap a stick in two. To do this, he generalized previous work by the French scientists Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch, who developed the original theory to describe the "snap-back effect," in which a secondary wave caused by a stick's initial break creates additional fractures, causing spaghetti to mostly snap in three or more fragments.

Patil adapted this theory by adding the element of twisting, and looked at how twist should affect any forces and waves propagating through a stick as it is bent. From his model, he found that, if a 10-inch-long spaghetti stick is first twisted by about 270 degrees and then bent, it will snap in two, mainly due to two effects. The snap-back, in which the stick will spring back in the opposite direction from which it was bent, is weakened in the presence of twist. And, the twist-back, where the stick will essentially unwind to its original straightened configuration, releases energy from the rod, preventing additional fractures.

"Once it breaks, you still have a snap-back because the rod wants to be straight," Dunkel explains. "But it also doesn't want to be twisted."

Just as the snap-back will create a bending wave, in which the stick will wobble back and forth, the unwinding generates a "twist wave," where the stick essentially corkscrews back and forth until it comes to rest. The twist wave travels faster than the bending wave, dissipating energy so that additional critical stress accumulations, which might cause subsequent fractures, do not occur.

"That's why you never get this second break when you twist hard enough," Dunkel says.

The team found that the theoretical predictions of when a thin stick would snap in two pieces, versus three or four, matched with their experimental observations.

"Taken together, our experiments and theoretical results advance the general understanding of how twist affects fracture cascades," Dunkel says.

For now, he says the model is successful at predicting how twisting and bending will break long, thin, cylindrical rods such as spaghetti. As for other pasta types?

"Linguini is different because it's more like a ribbon," Dunkel says. "The way the model is constructed it applies to perfectly cylindrical rods. Although spaghetti isn't perfect, the theory captures its fracture behavior pretty well,"

LAWRENCE -- In ethnic enclaves, Mexican immigrants tend to spend less on food per week while East Asian immigrants spend more, which could explain the difference in assimilation rates and contrast in ethnic population density among the two groups, according to a University of Kansas study.

The findings address questions on consumer behavior in the ethnically dense areas concentrated with businesses owned by immigrants of the same country. They also examine potentially why certain ethnic groups prefer to maintaining these types of enclaves instead of integrating their businesses more into the mainstream economy, said researchers ChangHwan Kim, professor of sociology, and Scott Tuttle, sociology graduate student.

Most past research on immigrant enclaves has only focused on how the conditions affect entrepreneurs in these metropolitan areas, and it has typically shown that Mexican-immigrant entrepreneurs tend to be less successful in ethnic enclaves than small business owners in other ethnic enclaves, such as Koreatown in Los Angeles.

"If we look at the flip side of this, it might benefit consumers," Kim said. "For Mexican immigrants living in Mexican communities, their cost of living is less."

The researchers will present their findings Aug. 12 at the American Sociological Association's annual meeting in Philadelphia.

Tuttle said they wanted to understand the complexity of enclave economies by examining how East Asian immigrants have higher assimilation rates as entrepreneurs than Latin American immigrants, particularly those from Mexico.

"We just want to try to understand why," he said. "Once we controlled for all the related variables, like income, educational level and whether they speak English, the level of spending on food is still a factor."

He added their findings also could implicate that for East Asian immigrants, living in ethnic enclaves might pose as a penalty for them as consumers.

"This might help explain, at least partially, why East Asian immigrants are less likely to self-select into enclave areas," Tuttle said.

The researchers examined the effect of co-ethnic immigrant density on degrees of consumer spending per week on food using data from the 1995-2015 Current Population Survey. As part of the survey, respondents report how much they spend per week on groceries.

They also found a difference in density among metropolitan statistical areas, or MSA, between the two immigrant groups. The East Asian immigrant density per MSA never exceeded 8 percent, but in some MSAs the numbers of Mexican immigrant density were as high as 58 percent.

"Of course, it's doubtful that the cost of groceries is the sole explanation, but it might shed some light onto the next series of steps future researchers should take," Tuttle said.

Kim said the findings could also explain the performance of business owners in these enclaves and how they fare economically, but the effect of what it means for consumers has been overlooked.

"Mexican immigrants as businessmen or women can be beneficial to Mexican immigrant consumers," he said.

LAWRENCE -- A group of Americans and Europeans has relocated to a Costa Rican community in recent decades, and despite the government cheering the economic jolt, their isolation from locals there more highlights the privilege of these migrants who drastically transform coastal villages, according to a study by a University of Kansas researcher.

"Americans and Europeans are not thought of as migrants, more like expatriates or tourists," said Erin Adamson, a doctoral candidate in sociology. "But they have a really large economic impact on the places they go."

Adamson is presenting her findings Aug. 12 at the American Sociological Association's annual meeting in Philadelphia.

In her research, Adamson conducted interviews with locals and two months of participant observation in a Costa Rican Caribbean coastal town identified with the pseudonym Los Reyes. She sought to give voice to the local understandings about the utopian idea of tropical beaches and rainforest there as "paradise" that they see as attracting migrants to live and work on the coast.

Instead, the process has left likely unintended consequences, including a type of gentrification when U.S. and European migrants build large housing and businesses and price out locals in places where they traditionally lived.

"The biggest influences are the land development and also the economic impact because many of the migrants are becoming employers," Adamson said. "Most of them end up opening up tourist-centered business, and the locals often experience them as the boss, even though the migrants think of themselves as someone opting out of the system back home to go live at the beach."

The flux of wealthier migrants in the community has also created a de facto racial segregation in a community that before was home mostly to black locals because the white migrants tend to build in their own housing developments and even send their children to private schools. She said the perception is interesting because most of the white migrants are likely politically liberal and see themselves as egalitarian people who want to experience another culture.

"I don't think that's what they are intending to create, but it is what is being created," Adamson said.

The locals do see some benefit to the influx of migrants as well.

"People also talk about how important lifestyle migrants are to the economy and providing jobs," Adamson said. "So they don't say all negative things."

For sociologists, studying this type of migration that has good intentions on the surface is important, she said.

"It is a kind of migration that is increasing globally," Adamson said. "There are a lot of countries with the exact same situation going on. You can call it neo-colonialism, but it is often ignored in that sense because those governments want the foreign investment. In some ways, they will bring real material investment that can pay for nice roads and infrastructure, but the long-term impact is that local people will get pushed out over time."

LAWRENCE -- When female athletes have strong mentors, the relationship helps them combat issues of sexism and helps them navigate problematic behaviors, according to a study by two University of Kansas researchers.

"Mentorship and the feeling of mattering is really important to female athletes in dealing with issues of discrimination or bullying that can impede women's full participation in sports, such as playing on a mostly male team or confronting sexual harassment," said Kathryn Vaggalis, the study's co-author and a KU doctoral candidate in American Studies.

Overall, when mentors instill self-esteem and the idea that the students' lives matter to others, it can boost athletic ability, provide opportunities for leadership, and leave a positive effect on women's continued involvement in sports.

Vaggalis and co-author Margaret Kelley, KU associate professor of American Studies, conducted 42 retrospective qualitative interviews with college undergraduates who were former high school athletes and identified teachers or coaches as natural mentors. Natural mentors are those identified by the student in their school environment rather than one assigned through a formal mentoring program.

The researchers will present their findings on Aug. 12 at the American Sociological Association's Annual Meeting in Philadelphia.

They found that mentors provided a safe space to receive advice and guidance from a trusted non-kin adult. Mentorship provided multiple benefits such as emotional support, reducing delinquency and instilling a positive work ethic.

Despite the positive findings that female athletes expressed that mentors helped empower them socially and athletically, the researchers also found mixed results elsewhere, including that mentors could reinforce problematic gendered aspects of sport socialization.

Male mentees, for example, cited less emotional support and open communication with their mentors than their female counterparts. And male-to-male mentors of young men tended to reinforce ideas of sports education through rhetoric of traditional masculinity, they found, though the participants expressed that this education improved self-esteem and work ethic, and also amplified athletic ability and performance.

However, the researchers also found that mentors -- in reinforcing traditional masculinity -- can exacerbate the problematic perception of sports serving as inherently male or masculine.

"Not all sports mentors are positive mentors. They can be problematic, too," Kelley said. "And the gender role socialization differences really spoke to us from the data in this regard."

Still, the researchers said the study indicates that natural mentorship and the idea of mattering are crucial in providing a positive influence on adolescents that can help reduce problem behavior and improve life chances.

"Sometimes kids are almost being discouraged from these relationships because there are so many boundaries in place between possible mentors," Kelley said. "Then they are losing out on these mentorships that can be deeply instructive."

The gender differences in the study can provide a caution for coaches and teachers who are in a position to mentor younger athletes, the researchers said.

"We need to be careful about recognizing sometimes we're continuing differences in inequalities in the way we treat boys and girls," Kelley said. " Looking at this allows us to be critical of the mentoring context and critically self-aware of how help young people learn about gender and the world."

But their findings surrounding mentorship are also positive for several reasons including stemming sexism that can impede women's participation in sports and serving as a positive influence for male students. The relationship between mentorship and mattering can be important in conversations surrounding how to prevent violence in schools and among youth, the researchers said.

"As adults we can make commitments to young people," Kelley said, "to reach out and to nurture them, make them feel like they are important, especially as natural mentors outside their families."

SAN FRANCISCO -- The bond between parent and child extends far beyond sharing similar looks or behaviors, as symptoms of depression in teens and parents appear to be linked, according to research presented at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association.

When a teen's depression improved through treatment, so did depression experienced by his or her parent, according to Kelsey R. Howard, MS, of Northwestern University, who presented the findings.

"More young people today are reporting persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness and suicidal thoughts," said Howard. "At the same time, suicide rates have climbed in nearly all U.S. states. This research may help health care providers as we grapple as a nation with how to address these alarming trends."

A total of 325 teens who had been diagnosed with depression and 325 of their parents or caregivers participated in this long-term study. The teens were randomly assigned to one of three groups: those who received cognitive behavioral therapy, those who took an antidepressant or those who used a combination of both. The first treatment period ran for nearly one year, with an additional year of follow-up visits.

One-quarter of the parents who participated also reported moderate to severe levels of depression before the treatment period, according to Howard.

The treatment process was not family-based, though some portions included the parent. Nonetheless, the results showed a positive ripple effect because when the severity of a teen's depression lessened, so did similar symptoms in the parent, regardless of what treatment was used.

"Depression is a massive public health concern that will take a variety of approaches to better manage. We believe our study is among the first to evaluate how the emotional health of a child can impact that of the parent," said Mark A. Reinecke, PhD, a co-author of the study.

The findings could be useful for clinicians, as they may wish to assess a parent's level of depression when treating his or her child, or provide appropriate referrals, according to Howard.

"The concept of emotions being 'contagious' and spreading from person to person is well-known by psychologists," Howard added. "This work opens up a range of possibilities for future research on the family-wide effects of treatment for adolescent depression."

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory's unique expertise in sun-viewing telescopes will be an integral part of the historic NASA Parker Solar Probe mission scheduled to launch Aug. 11 to better understand how the Sun affects our solar system.

The mission to "touch the Sun" is 60 years in the making and will bring a spacecraft carrying a suite of instruments the closest ever before to the Sun with NRL's Space Science Division's coronagraph telescopes called the Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe, or WISPR, being the only imager.

WISPR is built with telescopes that create a solar eclipse type image by blocking the actual sun so its atmosphere, or corona, can be captured. These images show the Sun's emissions, including streamers, plumes, and the energetic coronal mass ejections that burst from the star.

According to Dr. Russell Howard, the NRL WISPR principal investigator, and a leading world authority on coronagraph telescopes, it's not just the pictures that are important - it's where that energy goes.

Understanding how the Sun's atmosphere then flows through the solar system, called space weather, is extremely important because it can have dramatic effects on communications, power and other essential technologies that the U.S. Navy fleet relies on, said Howard.

"What this mission is going to be able do is pin down exactly what the structure close to the sun is -- the overall structure. We'll be able to image that," said Howard. "But also, there's an experiment that will measure the strength of the magnetic fields, the electric fields - the structure of the plasma we're running through."

This imaging capability is building on 40 years of NASA mission success with NRL's coronagraph telescopes, starting with the seventh of NASA's Orbiting Solar Observatories launched in September 1971.

Since then, NRL telescopes have captured extraordinary images of the Sun's atmosphere, including two of the most recent missions: The European Space Agency/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) mission [11] in 1995 and the NASA STEREO mission launched in 2006.

For Howard, who has personally worked on nearly all NRL coronagraph telescope launches, the Parker Solar Probe will be a culmination of decades of work. While the previous NRL telescopes are on spacecraft either on lower Earth orbit or just outside of Earth's orbit, they are still getting fuzzy views of the Sun.

With the closeness of the Parker Solar Probe to the Sun, WISPR will be capturing images with clarity like never before, he said, because those images actually pick up nearly at the same point where the other telescopes loose resolution.

"What we're going to achieve is just absolutely amazing. Stay tuned - we're going to see stuff that we just never would have imagined, I'm sure," said Howard.

Nature has provided us not only the fantastic materials, but also the inspiration for the design and fabrication of high-performance biomimetic engineering materials. Woods, which have been used for thousands of years, have received considerable attention due to the low density and high strength. The unique anisotropic cellular structure endow the woods with outstanding mechanical performances. In recent decades, various materials have been produced into monolithic materials with anisotropically cellular structures, trying to duplicate the lightweight and high-strength woods. However, the reported artificial wood-like materials suffer from unsatisfactory mechanical properties. Up to now, it is still a significant challenge to fabricate the artificial wood-like materials with the lightweight and high-strength properties.

Recently, a research team led by Prof. YU Shuhong from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) demonstrate a novel strategy for large-scale fabrication of a family of bioinspired polymeric woods with similar polyphenol matrix materials, wood-like cellular microstructures, and outstanding comprehensive performance by a self-assembly and thermocuring process of traditional resins (phenolic resin and melamine resin). This work was published on Science Advances entitled as "Bioinspired polymeric woods" on August 10th (Science Advances 2018, 4, eaat7223).

The liquid thermoset resins were firstly unidirectionally frozen to prepare a "green body" with the cellular structure, followed by the subsequent thermocuring to get the artificial polymeric woods. The artificial woods bear a close resemblance to natural woods in the mesoscale cellular structures, and exhibit well controllability in the pore size and wall thickness. Benefiting from the starting aqueous solution, it also represents a green approach to prepare multifunctional artificial woods by compositing various nanomaterials, such as cellulose nanofibers and graphene oxide.

The polymeric and composite woods manifest lightweight and high-strength properties with the mechanical strength comparable to that of natural wood. In contrast with natural woods, the artificial woods exhibit better corrosion resistance to water and acid with no decrease in mechanical properties, as well as much better thermal insulation (as low as ~21 mW m?1 K?1) and fire retardancy. The artificial polymeric woods even stand out from other engineering materials such as cellular ceramic materials and aerogels in terms of specific strength and thermal insulation properties. As a kind of biomimetic engineering materials, this new family of bioinspired polymeric woods is supposed to replace the natural wood when used in harsh environments.

This novel strategy provides a new and powerful route to fabricate and engineer a wide range of high-performance biomimetic engineering composite materials with desirable multifunctionality and advantages over the traditional counterparts, which will have broad applications in many technical fields.

BIDMC Research Briefs showcase groundbreaking scientific advances that are transforming medical care.

Bacteria--especially Gram-negative strains--are becoming increasingly resistant to current antibiotic drugs, and the development of new classes of antibiotics has slowed. Faced with these challenges, investigators are studying the potential of combination therapy, in which two or more drugs are used together to increase or restore the efficacy of both drugs against a resistant bacterial pathogen. Now new research indicates that such synergy may work even when bacteria become resistant to colistin, which is considered a treatment agent of last resort.

The findings are especially promising because recent evidence indicates the potential for rapid worldwide spread of colistin resistance. "For an infected patient, if the multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacterial pathogen is resistant to colistin, then there is a big problem," said senior author James Kirby, MD, Director of the Clinical Microbiology Laboratory at BIDMC.

In their Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy study, Kirby and his colleagues Thea Brennan-Krohn, MD and Alejandro Pironti, PhD screened 19 different antibiotics for synergy with colistin. The team discovered several combinations where synergy was present and infections with resistant pathogens could potentially be treated with the combination therapy.

Of particular interest, colistin demonstrated high rates of synergy with linezolid, fusidic acid, and clindamycin, which are protein synthesis inhibitor antibiotics that individually have no activity against Gram-negative bacteria. "It was remarkable to see two drugs, each of which is inactive on its own against these bacteria, inhibiting them in combination," notes Brennan-Krohn. "These findings suggest that colistin retains sub-lethal activity against colistin-resistant bacteria, which may enable drugs like linezolid to reach their targets."

"Faced with highly resistant pathogens, clinicians often currently treat with multiple antibiotics without knowing the benefit the combinations may provide," said Kirby. "This study now provides some scientific underpinning for these choices and direction for future investigation." He added that combination therapy may also allow clinicians to use lower effective doses of colistin and other drugs, which would help avoid toxicities associated with the medications as well as slow the development of antibiotic resistance.