Culture

ATLANTA--An organic chemical compound shows effective antiviral activity against Ebola virus and several other viruses, according to a study led by Georgia State University.

The researchers found benzoquinoline inhibited the ability of Ebola virus to multiply and reproduce in cell culture. The findings are published in the journal Antiviral Research.

Ebola virus, a member of the filovirus family, is an enveloped, single-stranded RNA virus that causes severe disease in humans. The largest outbreak on record for the filovirus family was caused by Ebola virus in West Africa between 2013 and 2016, resulting in more than 28,000 infections and more than 11,000 deaths.

Only experimental treatments were available, and survivors, including health care workers, are at risk for persistent infections from the virus remaining in sites that can tolerate foreign substances without eliciting an inflammatory immune response, such as the eye and testes. There are no approved drugs to treat Ebola virus or other filovirus infections, so there is a critical need for new therapeutic approaches. A potential antiviral target is the viral machinery and activities involved in carrying out RNA synthesis for Ebola virus.

"This work provides a foundation for the development of novel antiviral agents to combat Ebola virus," said Dr. Christopher Basler, director of the Center for Microbial Pathogenesis and professor in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Microbial Pathogenesis.

In this study, the researchers screened a library of 200,000 small molecule compounds to identify potential inhibitors of Ebola virus RNA synthesis. They identified 56 hits that inhibited Ebola virus activity by more than 70 percent, while showing less than a 20 percent chance of being toxic to cells. They discovered three chemical structures with potent antiviral activity against Ebola virus in cell culture.

Human lung epithelial cells and human embryonic kidney cells were exposed to several viruses, Ebola virus, Marburg virus, vesicular stomatitis virus and Zika virus, and the antiviral effects of the three chemical structures were observed.

One of these chemical structures, benzoquinoline, showed antiviral activity against Ebola virus and was also active against another deadly filovirus, Marburg virus. Benzoquinoline was also effective against vesicular stomatitis virus from the rhabdovirus family, which can infect insects, cattle, horses and pigs, and Zika virus, which is spread to humans by mosquitoes.

"This study is part of a larger effort to find new therapies to treat highly dangerous Ebola virus infections," said lead author Dr. Priya Luthra of Georgia State.

Researchers at the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas, in collaboration with co-leading authors at George Washington University and Yale, have demonstrated in a pilot study that a clinician-driven virtual learning platform, tailored to young adults on the autism spectrum, shows improved social competency. Findings published in Autism Research reveal that increases in socio-emotional and socio-cognitive abilities correlate with brain change. Results included increased activation in the brain's socio-cognition hub with gains linked to improvement on an empathy measure.

The present findings are among the first to demonstrate neural changes that are associated with significant behavioral gains in young adults with high-functioning autism. Researchers were particularly intrigued by the significant relationships between behavioral and brain changes, as there is a lack of research in this area. Historically, most autism research has focused on early childhood with treatment results typically measured solely by observable and self-reported behaviors.

"Brain change is a big deal in adults with autism. Many people implicitly believe that brain changes are unlikely for adults with autism, which might affect how they interact with those adults. This study challenges that very notion and has profound implications in the way people would view, interact, and treat adults with autism," said Daniel Yang, PhD, assistant research professor at the George Washington University Autism & Neurodevelopmental Disorders Institute.

"Many individuals with autism spend months and years in different forms of trainings with limited measurable gains," explained principal investigator Dr. Sandra Bond Chapman, founder and chief director of the Center for BrainHealth. "A major contribution of our study is the results challenge the outdated view that social cognition issues are difficult to remediate after childhood. Indeed, we find it promising that this intervention extended the potential to positively impact brain systems and social cognition into adulthood."

The social cognition virtual reality training, now available under the name CharismaTM through the Center for BrainHealth's Brain Performance Institute, demonstrated that study participants with autism shifted their attention from non-social information -- a behavior commonly displayed in autism -- to social information, a skill that is meaningful.

This study identified three significant brain-behavior changes.

1) Theory of mind, or the ability to realize the intention of others, is often lacking in individuals with autism. After the intervention, the part of the brain associated with socio-cognitive processing showed an increased activation of social stimuli compared to non-social stimuli.

2) The brain area responsible for socio-emotional processing showed individual gains in emotion recognition with decreased activation to social versus non-social stimuli. Thus, those that showed increased recognition of emotions paid more attention to social stimuli than non-social stimuli.

3) The part of the brain for visual attention showed significantly decreased activation to non-social versus social stimuli across all participants.

This virtual learning platform lays the foundation for scientifically based precision intervention for adult individuals with autism. "Platforms like Charisma allow for infinite flexibility in repeatable social practices in a motivating computer-based environment that offers a safe place to attempt interaction without the real-world consequences of failure", added Tandra Allen, the lead clinician who conducted the trainings at the Center for BrainHealth.

Young adults with high-functioning autism received the evidence-based behavioral intervention over five weeks for a total of ten hours. During the training session, the clinician and participants interacted entirely through virtual avatar characters and engaged in real-time, non-scripted, age-appropriate situations such as job interviewing or dating, while receiving real-time feedback from a coach clinician. Participants were given multiple opportunities within a session to practice these social skills and were tested pre- and post-training.

According to Chapman, virtual learning platforms have the potential to transform assessment, enhancement and motivation toward treatment in a wide range of populations needing practice in complex social environments.

"Our study suggests that our CharismaTM social cognition training, developed by the Center for BrainHealth's technology team, may offer an advantage in achieving gains to that conferred by traditional types of training in autism. Support of this potential is that the gains were achieved after just 10 hours of training and were present in both social skills as well as the strengthening and reorganizing of underlying brain networks that support social functioning," added Chapman.

DALLAS, March 28, 2018 -- Foreign-born adults living in the United States had a lower prevalence of coronary heart disease and stroke than U.S.-born adults in nationally representative data spanning 2006-2014, according to new research in Journal of the American Heart Association, the Open Access Journal of the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association.

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention compared the prevalence of coronary heart disease and stroke among U.S. adults by birthplace. The proportion of adults living in the United States who were born elsewhere has almost tripled from about 9.6 million in 1970 to 40 million in 2010.

After adjusting for age and select demographic and health characteristics, researchers found that overall:

The percentage of U.S. men who report having coronary heart disease was 8.2 percent among those born in the United State versus 5.5 percent for those born in another country.For women with coronary heart disease, the figures were 4.8 percent for those born in the United States and 4.1 percent for those born elsewhere.

The percentage of the population living with stroke was 2.7 percent for U.S.-born men and women compared to 2.1 percent for foreign-born men and 1.9 percent for foreign-born women.

The number of years people had been living in the United States was not related to risk of coronary heart disease or stroke after adjustment with demographic and health characteristics.

Comparing individual regions with those of U.S.-born, coronary heart disease prevalence was lower among people born in Asia, Mexico, Central America or the Caribbean. Stroke prevalence was lowest among men born in South America or Africa and women from Europe.

The reason foreign-born adults fare better could be explained by the "healthy immigrant effect", where those who decide to immigrate to another country are usually healthier than others, due to either self-selection or physical/legal barriers.

Researchers said these findings may support efforts to target high-risk groups with public health interventions.

A research team led by Monica Bettencourt Dias, from Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia (IGC, Portugal), discovered important features of cancer cells that may help clinicians fighting cancer.

The researchers observed that the number and size of tiny structures that exist inside cells, called centrioles, are increased in the most aggressive sub-types of cancer. This study will be published in Nature Communications* on the 28th of March.

Cancer is a very diverse disease with some tumours being more aggressive and more resistant to chemotherapy than others. Clinicians are eager to find novel diagnostic, prognostic and treatment tools that allow them to predict outcomes and treat patients in a more personalised way. The study now published may contribute to this process.

About 100 times smaller than the cross section of a hair, centrioles have been called the cell´s "brain", as they play crucial roles in cell multiplication, movement and communication. Their number and size are highly controlled in normal cells. Since their discovery, more than one century ago, it has been proposed that an abnormal increase in the number of these structures may induce cancer..

Bettencourt-Dias's team investigated the incidence of centriole abnormalities in human cancer cells. The researchers thoroughly analysed a panel of 60 human cancer lines originated from 9 distinct tissues. Their results reveal that cancer cells often have extra and longer centrioles, which are absent in normal cells. Importantly, the research team observed that supernumerary centrioles are more prevalent in aggressive breast - as the triple negative - and colon cancer. Also, the team discovered that longer centrioles are excessively active, which perturbs cell division and could favour cancer formation.

"Our data confirm that deregulated number and size of centrioles inside cells is associated with malignant features. This finding may help establishing centriole properties as a way of classifying tumours in order to establish prognosis and predict treatment response", says Gaelle Marteil, first author of this study and researcher at Bettencourt-Dias laboratory.

What is the next step? "The cell lines that we analysed are already well characterized in terms of genetic changes and resistance to therapeutics. We are pursuing our studies in collaboration with Nuno Barbosa-Morais' team at Instituto de Medicina Molecular, in Lisbon, and Joana Paredes at I3S, in Porto, to explore new mechanisms and therapeutics that could target centrioles in cancer", adds Monica Bettencourt-Dias.

It stands to reason that parents who physically or emotionally abuse their children do them lasting damage, in part by undermining their ability to trust others and accurately read their emotions.

But what about the children of parents who experience simple, everyday conflict?

New research published in the current issue of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships shows that the emotional processing of these children, too, can be affected - potentially making them over-vigilant, anxious and vulnerable to distorting human interactions that are neutral in tone, throwing them off-balance interpersonally as adults.

"The message is clear: even low-level adversity like parental conflict isn't good for kids," said Alice Schermerhorn, an assistant professor in the University of Vermont's Department of Psychological Sciences and the lead author of the study.

In the study, 99 nine-to-eleven-year-olds were divided into two groups based on a series of psychological assessments they took that scored how much parental conflict they experienced and how much they felt the conflict threatened their parents' marriage.

Children were then shown a series of photographs of couples engaged in happy, angry or neutral interactions and asked to choose which category the photos fit.

Children from the low conflict homes consistently scored the photos accurately. Those from high conflict homes who experienced the conflict as a threat were able to accurately identify the happy and angry couples, but not those in neutral poses - incorrectly reading them as either angry or happy or saying they didn't know which category they fit.

Schermerhorn sees two possible interpretations of the results.

The inaccuracy may attributable to hypervigilance.

"If their perception of conflict and threat leads children to be vigilant for signs of trouble, that could lead them to interpret neutral expressions as angry ones or may simply present greater processing challenges," she said.

Alternatively, it could be that neutral parental interactions may be less significant for children who feel threatened by their parents' conflict.

"They may be more tuned into angry interactions, which could be a cue for them to retreat to their room, or happy ones, which could signal that their parents are available to them," she said. "Neutral interactions don't offer much information, so they may not value them or learn to recognize them."

Shyness Compounds Problem

The study is also one of the first to measure the impact of temperamental shyness on the children's ability to process and recognize emotion.

The shy children in the study, who were identified via a questionnaire given to the mothers of the study subjects, were unable to correctly identify couples in neutral poses, even if they were not from high conflict homes.

Shyness also made them more vulnerable to parental conflict. Children who were both shy and felt threated by their parents' conflict had a high level of inaccuracy in identifying neutral interactions.

"Parents of shy children need to be especially thoughtful about how they express conflict," Schermerhorn said.

Implications for adulthood

The research results are significant, Schermerhorn said, for the light they shed on the impact relatively low-level adversity like parental conflict can have on children's development.

Either of her interpretations of the research findings could spell trouble for children down the road.

"One the one hand, being over-vigilant and anxious can be destabilizing in many different ways," she said.

"On the other, correctly reading neutral interactions may not be important for children who live in high conflict homes, but that gap in their perceptual inventory could be damaging in subsequent experiences with, for example, teachers, peers, and partners in romantic relationships."

"No one can eliminate conflict altogether," she said, "but helping children get the message that, even when they argue, parents care about each other and can work things out is important."

Norfolk's butterflies, bees, bugs, birds, trees and mammals are at major risk from climate change as temperatures rise -- according to new research from the University of East Anglia.

Researchers carried out the first in-depth audit of its kind for a region in the UK to see how biodiversity might be impacted in Norfolk as the world warms.

The study finds that the region's Swallowtail Butterfly, which can't be found anywhere else in the UK, is at risk - along with three quarters of bumblebee, grasshopper and moth species.

Dr Jeff Price analysed local populations of 834 species found throughout Norfolk to show how they might fare as climate change reaches 2oC -- the upper end of the UN's Paris Climate Agreement goals. He also looked at what will happen at 3.2oC -- the current global trajectory if countries meet their international pledges to reduce CO2.

The results, published today in Transactions of the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists' Society, are sobering.

At risk at 2oC of global warming

The project reveals that at just 2oC, 72 per cent of bumblebees in Norfolk could be lost, along with 75 per cent of grasshoppers and bush crickets, and 68 per cent of larger moths.

The new climate potentially becomes unsuitable for 15 species of birds including Lapland Bunting and Pink-footed Goose. Meanwhile the Common Shrew, Roe Deer and European Badger are among seven mammal species which may be lost from Norfolk.

The Swallowtail Butterfly, local only to the Norfolk Broads, and Red Admirals are among 11 types of butterfly which could be affected.

The Common Frog, Great Crested Newt, Adders, and the Common Lizard could also be lost.

At risk at 3.2oC of global warming

As climate change reaches 3.2oC, temperatures would be largely or completely unsuitable for mammals including Grey Squirrels, Whiskered Bats and Reeves' Muntjac and trees including Silver Birch, Horse Chestnut, Scots Pine and Norway Spruce.

Additionally, 83 per cent of shield bugs, 84 per cent of moths, 78 per cent of bumblebees, and 45 per cent of butterflies including the Small Tortoiseshell could also be affected.

The findings come after UEA research revealed that up to half of all plant and animal species in the world's most naturally rich areas could face local extinction by the turn of the century due to climate change if carbon emissions continue to rise unchecked.

Lead researcher Dr Jeff Price, from UEA's Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and School of Environmental Sciences, said: "This research shows that climate change really will pose increasing risks to biodiversity both globally and in Norfolk.

"This is a comprehensive investigation of how climate change will impact Norfolk's biodiversity. I was able to carry out this research thanks to a long tradition of citizen science in the county. The Norfolk and Norwich Naturalist's Society was founded in 1869 and their members provided data used in the study.

"Robert Marsham (1708-1797) of Stratton Strawless, Norfolk, is considered to be the founding father of the science of phenology through his painstaking studying over 60 years published as Indications of Spring. The effect of changing seasons on plants and animals is now one of the well-documented consequences of climate change.

"The important thing to remember here is that global warming has already reached 1oC above pre-industrial levels. We're currently on a trajectory for 3.2oC if international pledges to reduce CO2 are genuine. If so, major changes need to be made to how we use and produce our energy.

"Norfolk's offshore wind turbines are an excellent example of the beginning of the transition that is needed worldwide to protect biodiversity here in Norfolk and everywhere else.

"The Paris Climate Agreement aims to put the world on track to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to 1.5oC. If this is achieved, the climate would still be suitable for the majority of wildlife in Norfolk.

"But 2oC is a tipping point at which climate conditions will become largely or completely unsuitable for many species.

"Insects are essential food to many other species. Their decline will have a knock-on effect for the food webs of Norfolk's ecosystems of the Broads and the Coast.

"The loss of bumblebees potentially has a major impact on pollination of crops and other plants," he added.

David North, head of People and Wildlife at Norfolk Wildlife Trust, said: "'The likely impacts of climate change on our wildlife, shown by this detailed research, are hugely worrying.

"It is unthinkable that, with a warming of 2oC, swallowtails would very likely vanish from the Norfolk Broads -- and being totally dependent on their food plant, milk parsley, it won't be possible for them to adapt by moving elsewhere.

"Unless we take bold action to limit warming to below this level there will be huge changes to our wildlife -- both common and rare."

Not all taxa were examined as part of this study, but future work will look in detail at hoverflies, spiders and flowering plants.

'The potential impacts of climate change on the biodiversity of Norfolk Species' is published in Transactions of the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists' Society.

UTA researchers are leading an international team developing a new device that could enable physicists to take the next step toward a greater understanding of the neutrino, a subatomic particle that may offer an answer to the lingering mystery of the universe's matter-antimatter imbalance.

Physics tells us that matter is created side by side with antimatter. But if matter and antimatter are produced equally, then all of the matter created in the early universe should have been cancelled out by equal amounts of antimatter, eliminating existence itself instantly. And we would not exist.

To explain this asymmetry, some particle physicists claim that the tiny subatomic particle, the neutrino, and its antimatter particle, the antineutrino, are in fact the same particle. This might account for the overall excess of matter in the universe as a whole-- and why we are here.

UTA researchers are now taking advantage of a biochemistry technique that uses fluorescence to detect ions to identify the product of a radioactive decay called neutrinoless double-beta decay that would demonstrate that the neutrino is its own antiparticle.

Radioactive decay is the breakdown of an atomic nucleus releasing energy and matter from the nucleus. Ordinary double-beta decay is an unusual mode of radioactivity in which a nucleus emits two electrons and two antineutrinos at the same time. However, if neutrinos and antineutrinos are identical, then the two antineutrinos can, in effect, cancel each other, resulting in a neutrinoless decay, with all of the energy given to the two electrons.

To find this neutrinoless double-beta decay, scientists are looking at a very rare event that occurs about once a year, when a xenon atom decays and converts to barium. If a neutrinoless double-beta decay has occurred, you would expect to find a barium ion in coincidence with two electrons of the right total energy. UTA researchers' proposed new detector precisely would permit identifying this single barium ion accompanying pairs of electrons created within large quantities of xenon gas.

"If we observe even one such event, it would be a profound discovery in particle physics, on par with the discovery of the Higgs boson," said Ben Jones, UTA assistant professor of physics, who is leading this research for the American branch of the Neutrino Experiment with Xenon TPC - Time Projection Chamber or NEXT program, which searches for neutrinoless double-beta decay. Other UTA researchers also collaborated on the ATLAS experiment, which led to the Nobel Prize winning discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012.

The researchers, who published their discovery Monday in Physical Review Letters, have demonstrated the effectiveness of their technique on a small scale and now plan to use the device in a large-scale detector, which they envision as a chamber containing a ton of high-pressure, purified xenon gas.

David Nygren, UTA Presidential Distinguished Professor of Physics and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, had the idea to look at fluorescence when he realized how neuroscientists use the technique to look at calcium ions that jump from neuron to neuron in the brain.

"I realized that calcium and barium are not so different, so perhaps we could use the same technique to search for neutrinoless double-beta decay," Nygren said.

Early research with UTA graduate student Austin McDonald identified a chemical compound called FLUO-3 that not only works with calcium ions but is also sensitive to barium. From there, the team devised a device that could reveal barium ions in a large volume of gaseous xenon, which was proven in the published paper.

"The beauty of this research is that it brings together physicists and chemists in generating creative new solutions to enable discoveries in fundamental physics," said UTA physics chair Alex Weiss. "This work clearly demonstrates the ability of students and faculty at UTA to lead the way in international physics projects and represents an important example of the world-class research enabled by UTA's focus on data-driven discovery."

Chicago, March 27, 2018 - Stigma associated with Alzheimer's disease may be an obstacle for individuals to seek information about their risk of developing Alzheimer's disease and to participate in clinical studies that discover potential therapies. That's according to the results of a national survey about what beliefs, attitudes and expectations are most often associated with Alzheimer's disease. The survey results are published in Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association.

"We found that concerns about discrimination and overly harsh judgments about the severity of symptoms were most prevalent," said Shana Stites, Psy.D., from the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. "By understanding what the biggest concerns are about the disease, we can help develop programs and policies to reduce the stigma about Alzheimer's disease."

The random sample of 317 adults was asked to react to a fictional description of a person with mild stage Alzheimer's disease dementia. The study asked respondents to read a vignette and then complete the survey. Three different assessments were presented for the fictional person's condition. Respondents were told the person's condition would worsen, improve or remain unchanged.

Over half of the respondents (55 percent) expected the person with mild cognitive impairment or dementia due to Alzheimer's to be discriminated against by employers and to be excluded from medical decision-making. Almost half expected the person's health insurance would be limited due to data in the medical record (47 percent), a brain imaging result (46 percent) or genetic test result (45 percent). Those numbers increased when the survey participants were informed that the condition of the person with Alzheimer's would worsen over time.

The study findings suggest respondents continue to have concerns about documentation in the medical record or test results, despite the fact that there are some protections in place against gene-based health care insurance discrimination through the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA). However, those concerns of the public also include issues not addressed by that legislation, including brain imaging results.

In addition, the study authors found that when told the fictional person's prognosis would improve over time, 24 percent to 41 percent fewer respondents expected that the person would encounter discrimination or exclusion than when told the person's prognosis would worsen. According to the researchers, this suggests that advances in therapies that improve the prognosis of Alzheimer's could help reduce stigma.

"The unfortunate stigma associated with Alzheimer's may prevent people from getting the diagnosis they need or the opportunity for early intervention that could improve their quality of life," said Maria C. Carrillo, Ph.D., Chief Science Officer, Alzheimer's Association. "We need to reduce the stigma to encourage persons with mild or even no symptoms of Alzheimer's disease to enroll in prevention trials to find effective treatments. These survey findings could also have implications on the national goal of developing an effective therapy by 2025."
Dr. Carrillo stressed the importance of early diagnosis for people with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias and their families to provide more time to plan for the future by participating in decisions about treatments, living options, financial and legal matters, as well as building a care team to making it easier to manage the disease.
In the article's conclusion, the authors state that public education and policies are needed to shift Alzheimer's disease stigma by addressing these concerns about potential discrimination based on genetic and biomarker test results that may be keeping people from learning their own results and participating in prevention clinical trials.

Researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas have demonstrated a method to accelerate motor skill recovery after a stroke by helping the brain reorganize itself more quickly.

In a preclinical study, the scientists paired vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) with a physical therapy task aimed at improving the function of an upper limb in rodents. The results showed a doubled long-term recovery rate relative to current therapy methods, not only in the targeted task but also in similar muscle movements that were not specifically rehabbed. Their work was recently published in the journal Stroke.

A clinical trial to test the technique in humans is underway in Dallas and 15 other sites across the country.

Dr. Michael Kilgard, associate director of the Texas Biomedical Device Center (TxBDC) and Margaret Forde Jonsson Professor of Neuroscience in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, led the research team with Dr. Seth Hays, the TxBDC director of preclinical research and assistant professor of bioengineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, and postdoctoral researcher Eric Meyers PhD'17.

"Our experiment was designed to ask this new question: After a stroke, do you have to rehabilitate every single action?" Kilgard said. "If VNS helps you, is it only helping with the exact motion or function you paired with stimulation? What we found was that it also improves similar motor skills as well, and that those results were sustained months beyond the completion of VNS-paired therapy."

Kilgard said the results provide an important step toward creating guidelines for standardized usage of VNS for post-stroke therapy.

"This study tells us that if we use this approach on complicated motor skills, those improvements can filter down to improve simpler movements," he said.

Building Stronger Cell Connections

When a stroke occurs, nerve cells in the brain can die due to lack of blood flow. An arm's or a leg's motor skills fail because, though the nerve cells in the limb are fine, there's no longer a connection between them and the brain. Established rehab methods bypass the brain's damaged area and enlist other brain cells to handle the lost functions. However, there aren't many neurons to spare, so the patient has a long-lasting movement deficit.

The vagus nerve controls the parasympathetic nervous system, which oversees elements of many unconscious body functions, including digestion and circulation. Electrical stimulation of the nerve is achieved via an implanted device in the neck. Already used in humans to treat depression and epilepsy, VNS is a well-documented technique for fine-tuning brain function.

The UT Dallas study's application of VNS strengthens the communication path to the neurons that are taking over for those damaged by stroke. The experiments showed a threefold-to-fivefold increase in engaged neurons when adding VNS to rehab.

"We have long hypothesized that VNS is making new connections in the brain, but nothing was known for sure," Hays said. "This is the first evidence that we are driving changes in the brain in animals after brain injury. It's a big step forward in understanding how the therapy works -- this reorganization that we predicted would underlie the benefits of VNS."

In anticipation of the technique's eventual use in humans, the team is working on an at-home rehab system targeting the upper limbs.

"We've designed a tablet app outlining hand and arm tasks for patients to interact with, delivering VNS as needed," Meyers said. "We can very precisely assess their performance and monitor recovery remotely. This is all doable at home."

Expanding the Possibilities for Therapy

The researchers are motivated in part by an understanding of the practical limitations of current therapeutic options for patients.

"If you have a stroke, you may have a limited time with a therapist," Hays said. "So when we create guidelines for a therapist, we now know to advise doing one complex activity as many times as possible, as opposed to a variety of activities. That was an important finding -- it was exciting that not only do we improve the task that we trained on, but also relatively similar tasks. You are getting generalization to related things, and you're getting sustained improvement months down the line."

For stroke patients, the opportunity to benefit from this technology may not be far off.

"A clinical trial that started here at UTD is now running nationwide, including at UT Southwestern," Kilgard said. "They are recruiting patients. People in Dallas can enroll now -- which is only fitting, because this work developed here, down to publishing this in a journal of the American Heart Association, which is based here in Dallas. This is a homegrown effort.

"The ongoing clinical trial is the last step in getting approved as an established therapy," Kilgard said. "We're hopefully within a year of having this be standard practice for chronic stroke."

New research published in The Journal of Physiology shows that our brain clock can be shifted by light exposure, potentially to align it with night shift patterns. It highlights that a 'one size fits all' approach to managing sleep disruption in shift workers may not be appropriate. A personalised approach, with light-dark exposure scheduled and taking into account whether someone is a 'morning' or 'evening' person, could reduce the increased risk of health problems in shift workers.

Our sleep-wake cycle, in part controlled by our brain clock, encompasses physical, mental and behavioural changes that follow a daily cycle. Light is the dominant environmental time cue which results in, for example, sleeping at night and being awake during the day.

Night time shift work disrupts the normal sleep-wake cycle and our internal circadian (24-hour) rhythms, and has been associated with significant health problems, such as a higher risk of heart disease and cancer (1). Alertness levels are often markedly impaired while working night shifts.

While it has been known that there are considerable differences in how the brain clock of different individuals responds to changing shift cycles, we have known very little about the mechanisms that underlie these differences between people. If someone was able to realign their brain clock to their shift pattern, then it would improve sleep and could lead to health benefits. While such realignment is rare, in some circumstances such as on offshore oil rig platforms, complete adaption has been observed (2).

This new research aims to understand the relationship between light exposure and how an individual's circadian rhythm is affected across a transition from day to night shift schedules. The researchers found that timing of light exposure is the primary factor in determining how the brain clock responds to night shift work, accounting for 71% of the variability in timing of the clock observed in the study. It also found that the extent to which an individual is a 'morning' or 'evening' type affects how the body responds, which shows that a personalised approach is important.

This study was led by the CRC for Alertness, Safety and Productivity and saw nursing and medical staff recruited from an Intensive Care Unit at a major hospital in Melbourne, Australia. Staff members were enrolled into the study when working a schedule of day or evening shifts, or days off, followed by at least 3 or 4 consecutive night shifts.

To examine how the sleep-wake cycle responds to the shift schedule, the timing of the brain clock was measured on the day schedule, and at the end of the night shifts. It was measured by monitoring urinary concentration of the major metabolite of melatonin, which is a hormone produced in the pineal gland known to be involved in the regulation of sleep cycles. Individual light exposure was measured using wrist actigraphs, worn for the duration of the study.

Prof Shantha Rajaratnam, from Monash University and the CRC for Alertness, Safety and Productivity, corresponding author for the study, said:

"We know that night time shift workers are more likely to suffer health problems due to disruption of their circadian clock, and the mismatch between the timing of the clock and their sleep-wake cycle. This research is important because if we can realign a person's clock to fit their shift pattern, then they will sleep better and this may result in improved health, safety and productivity.

"These results will drive development of personalised approaches to improve sleep-wake cycles of shift workers and other vulnerable people, and could potentially reduce the increased risk of disease due to circadian disruption."

They die at the most inconvenient times.

Cellphones go dark during important conversations because a battery hasn't been recharged. Or the automotive industry revs up with excitement for a new battery-powered vehicle, but it needs frequent recharging. Or yardwork is delayed because the battery for your string trimmer is dead.

Researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas have developed a high-powered, environmentally safe lithium-sulfur substitute that could drastically lengthen battery life. Their work has been published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

"Common lithium-ion batteries only have a certain capacity," said Dr. Kyeongjae "K.J." Cho, professor of materials science and engineering. "And most people want to use their phones for a longer time."

Many smartphone users are familiar with the shelf life of lithium-ion batteries. Sometimes a charge can last roughly a day. Cho said most would agree it would be more convenient if that charge lasted a week or more.

Cho, along with research associate Dr. Jeongwoon Hwang, both of the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, worked with other regional scientists to improve lithium-sulfur batteries, long considered by many to be an evolution from lithium-ion batteries.

Lithium-Sulfur Might Be the Solution

Lithium-sulfur batteries have important advantages over lithium-ion batteries. According to Cho, they are less expensive to make, weigh less, store almost twice the energy of lithium-ion batteries and are better for the environment.

"A lithium-sulfur battery is what most of the research community thinks is the next generation of battery," Cho said. "It has a capacity of about three to five times higher than lithium-ion batteries, meaning if you are used to a phone lasting for three hours, you can use it for nine to 15 hours with a lithium-sulfur battery."

But lithium-sulfur batteries are not without problems. Sulfur is a poor electrical conductor and can become unstable over just several charge-and-recharge cycles. Electrodes breaking down is another reason lithium-sulfur batteries aren't mainstream.

Scientists have tried to improve lithium-sulfur batteries by putting lithium metal on one electrode and sulfur on the other. However, lithium metal often is too unstable, and sulfur too insulating. The scientists discovered a technology that produced a sulfur-carbon nanotube substance that created more conductivity on one electrode, and a nanomaterial coating to create stability for the other.

Cho and fellow researchers discovered that molybdenum, a metallic element often used to strengthen and harden steel, creates a material that adjusts the thickness of the coating when combined with two atoms of sulfur, a coating thinner than the silk of a spiderweb. They found it improved stability and compensated for poor conductivity of sulfur, thus allowing for greater power density and making lithium-sulfur batteries more commercially viable.

"This was what everyone was looking for, for a long time," Cho said. "That's the breakthrough. We are trying to suppress side reactions. It's a protection technology."

Scientists say this finding could change the way we look at batteries and experience battery life.

"We are taking this to the next step and will fully stabilize the material, and bring it to actual, practical commercial technology," Cho said.

MINNEAPOLIS - March 27, 2018 - New data from a study led by researchers from the University of Minnesota Medical School could change how future antimicrobial drug combinations are discovered and developed.

Trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole is a highly synergistic antimicrobial drug combination that is widely used to treat a variety of bacterial and fungal infections. These drugs are known to act by targeting specific steps in the folate biosynthetic pathway, and their combined activity is far greater than the sum of their individual activities. For the last fifty years it has been presumed that the basis for their synergistic antimicrobial activity was fairly simple--essentially, that the drugs work together by inhibiting sequential steps in a linear biosynthetic pathway.

A new study from Yusuke Minato, PhD, and Anthony D. Baughn, PhD, from the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Minnesota Medical School, demonstrates that there is an unrecognized cyclic pathway structure within the folate biosynthesis pathway, the target of these drugs, that allows each drug to enhance the activity of the other.

"We now understand how these two antibiotics work together. An overlooked loop structure of the folate biosynthetic pathway is crucial to produce synergistic activity of these two antibiotics," said Minato.

This discovery, recently published as a paper, "Mutual potentiation drives synergy between trimethoprim and sulfamethoxazole" in Nature Communications, has the potential to open new doors for identification of other synergistic drug combinations.

"It tells us the way we can look for other drug combinations that will have similar synergistic activity," said Baughn. "There is a major problem with drug resistance and lack of effective drugs, not just for Escherichia coli where our work was focused, but for pretty much all infectious diseases."

Drs. Baughn and Minato hope that the understanding of mechanisms for synergy will lead them and others to more potent drug combinations that can be deployed in the fight against pathogenic microbes as drug resistance becomes increasingly commonplace.

New research highlights the impact of traffic-related air pollution on childhood asthma.

The study also shows traffic-related air pollution could be specifically responsible for up to 24% of the total number of cases.

An international team of researchers has used a newly developed model to assess the impact exposure to nitrogen oxides - gases that make up air pollution - has on the development of childhood asthma.

Their study, published today in Environment International, used a model that knits together four distinct models of traffic, emissions, atmospheric dispersion and health impact assessments in Bradford. This allowed the researchers to chart the full chain of impact -- from the source of air pollution through the pathways in which it impacts children's health.

The results indicate that up to 38% of all annual childhood asthma cases in Bradford may be attributable to air pollution. More specifically, the model estimates showed that 12% of the annual childhood asthma cases would be attributable to traffic related air pollution.

"However, we knew our model was underestimating the traffic related fraction of air pollution. When we adjusted our results using actual measurements of air pollutants we saw that up to 24% of the annual cases could be attributable to traffic related air pollution," said study co-author, Professor Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, Director of the Urban Planning, Environment and Health Initiative at ISGlobal, a centre supported by The "la Caixa" Foundation.

Study lead author Dr Haneen Khreis carried out this research while at the Institute for Transport Studies at Leeds. She said: "Overall rates of childhood asthma cases in Bradford are higher than the national average as were emergency hospital admissions for asthmatic children under 16 years of age. Traffic-related air pollution is a real concern to the community.

"Our team's previous research has shown that children exposed to high levels of traffic-related air pollution have a higher risk of developing asthma. Quantifying the number of childhood asthma cases that are directly attributable to traffic-related air pollution has not been done in the past and as we show now, a significant portion of cases is largely preventable."

She added: "Our work demonstrates that while popular initiatives such as stopping vehicles from idling outside schools or providing walking routes away from roads are important, proposed solutions to mitigate traffic pollution shouldn't be restricted to localised areas.

"New policies aimed at reducing the effects of traffic-related air pollution need to target each link in the full chain of events -- from traffic volume and type, to exhaust and non-exhaust emissions, to dispersion to exposure."

The models used in the study allowed the team to chart how much air pollution is present in the city, and how much of that can be traced back to road traffic. By examining estimates of nitrogen oxide concentrations in Bradford they were also able to estimate the levels of nitrogen dioxide. Nitrogen dioxide are air pollutants produced as a result of road traffic. High concentrations of nitrogen dioxide can cause irritation to the respiratory system and significantly exacerbate existing respiratory problems.

Professor Nieuwenhuijsen said: "There is very little research that explores the impact of different exposure assessments. Cases of childhood asthma have been steadily increasing since the 1950s. Future progress with childhood asthma requires a focus beyond controlling and treating the disease toward asthma prevention starting with reducing traffic related air pollution."

The team's research is part of ongoing work in Bradford assessing emissions and air quality profile in the region and the associated childhood health effects and impacts on the community.

Professor John Wright, Director of the Bradford Institute for Health Research and chief investigator of Born in Bradford, said: "This important study adds to the overwhelming evidence that air pollution is harming our children. The air in our cities has become a tragedy of the commons whereby a common good is being poisoned by collective neglect.

"The good news is that we can all save lives by driving less and using cleaner fuels."

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Narcissists aren't necessarily on the hunt for partners who are already in a relationship - but that doesn't appear to stand in their way, either, new research suggests.

Researcher Amy Brunell of The Ohio State University wondered whether narcissists are particularly attracted to would-be partners who already have a significant other and set about answering that question in a four-part study.

"I thought it was possible that there might be something appealing about the 'game' of mate poaching that might appeal to narcissists, because they are known to play games," said Brunell, an associate professor of psychology at Ohio State's Mansfield campus.

But evidence of that type of pattern didn't emerge in the study, which appears online in the journal PLOS ONE.

Study participants with narcissistic traits reported that they have, with greater frequency than people who aren't narcissists, attempted to pursue relationships with someone who is in an existing relationship, Brunell said. But that wasn't necessarily because the person was taken.

"They seem to not discriminate between those in relationships and those who are single. It could be that they just go after whoever appeals to them without regard for relationship status," she said.

Previous research has shown that people in general - not just narcissists - tend to perceive others who are in relationships as more desirable.

Combine that with the traits of narcissism, Brunell figured, and you might have a recipe for aggressive "mate poaching" - the scientific term for making a play for someone already in a relationship.

Narcissism is marked by selfishness, arrogance, an inflated sense of self and extroversion. Furthermore, narcissists believe they're special, unique and entitled. They tend to take advantage of others and experience less guilt. And they also report more casual sex, more sexual partners and a greater desire for short-term relationships.

In the first study, Brunell and her collaborators surveyed 247 college students from introductory psychology courses and assessed them for narcissism through a commonly used 40-item test. The participants also completed a personality survey and a survey designed to assess the students' past experiences in mate poaching. Narcissism was linked with more frequent short-term and long-term attempts to connect sexually with people in other relationships.

In a second study designed to test the results of the first, though, only narcissistic women reported more frequent attempts at mate poaching, leading the researchers to conclude that it's possible that narcissistic women are more frequently guilty of the behavior.

A third study that included 249 students were asked to assess potential romantic partners in a manner similar to popular dating services such as eHarmony.com or match.com. Next, the participants were shown a picture of a target individual and told that they had "similar interest" with the target. Some participants were told the target was single, and some were told the target was in a relationship. Then they were asked about their level of interest in the person.

The study found no evidence that narcissists were preferentially drawn to people in a relationship.

"It is likely people are simply interested in the target and not necessarily as concerned that the target is in a relationship," the researchers concluded.

In the last study, the researchers recruited 240 participants and again compared their narcissism scores and likelihood to mate poach a "target" individual. They found that narcissists had a greater likelihood of hooking up with the target for a short-term fling, but not for a relationship.

Taken as a whole, the studies point to a pattern: Narcissists are more likely to engage in mate poaching, but are not more interested in people who are already in a relationship - with the exception of opportunities for a low-cost sexual encounter, such as a one-night stand, Brunell said.

"Understanding the behavior of narcissists is important because it helps us better understand the people who are in our lives - and the types of people we don't necessarily want in our lives," Brunell said.

Researchers have identified a previously unknown feature of human anatomy with implications for the function of all organs, most tissues and the mechanisms of most major diseases.

Published March 27 in Scientific Reports, a new study co-led by an NYU School of Medicine pathologist reveals that layers of the body long thought to be dense, connective tissues - below the skin's surface, lining the digestive tract, lungs and urinary systems, and surrounding arteries, veins, and the fascia between muscles - are instead interconnected, fluid-filled compartments.

This series of spaces, supported by a meshwork of strong (collagen) and flexible (elastin) connective tissue proteins, may act like shock absorbers that keep tissues from tearing as organs, muscles, and vessels squeeze, pump, and pulse as part of daily function.

Importantly, the finding that this layer is a highway of moving fluid may explain why cancer that invades it becomes much more likely to spread. Draining into the lymphatic system, the newfound network is the source of lymph, the fluid vital to the functioning of immune cells that generate inflammation. Furthermore, the cells that reside in the space, and collagen bundles they line, change with age, and may contribute to the wrinkling of skin, the stiffening of limbs, and the progression of fibrotic, sclerotic and inflammatory diseases.

The field has long known that more than half the fluid in the body resides within cells, and about a seventh inside the heart, blood vessels, lymph nodes, and lymph vessels. The remaining fluid is "interstitial," and the current study is the first to define the interstitium as an organ in its own right, and as one of the largest of the body, say the authors.

The researchers say that no one saw these spaces before because of the medical field's dependence on the examination of fixed tissue on microscope slides, believed to offer the most accurate view of biological reality. Scientists prepare tissue for this examination by treating it with chemicals, slicing it thinly, and dying it to highlight key features. The "fixing" process makes vivid details of cells and structures, but drains away any fluid. The current research team found that the removal of fluid as slides are made causes the connective protein meshwork surrounding once fluid-filled compartments to pancake, like the floors of a collapsed building.

"This fixation artifact of collapse has made a fluid-filled tissue type throughout the body appear solid in biopsy slides for decades, and our results correct for this to expand the anatomy of most tissues," says co-senior author Neil Theise, MD, professor in the Department of Pathology at NYU Langone Health. "This finding has potential to drive dramatic advances in medicine, including the possibility that the direct sampling of interstitial fluid may become a powerful diagnostic tool."

The study findings are based on newer technology called probe-based confocal laser endomicroscopy, which combines the slender camera-toting probe traditionally snaked down the throat to view the insides of organs (an endoscope) with a laser that lights up tissues, and sensors that analyze the reflected fluorescent patterns. It offers a microscopic view of living tissues instead of fixed ones.

Using this technology in the fall of 2015 at Beth Israel Medical Center, endoscopists and study co-authors David Carr-Locke, MD, and Petros Benias, MD, saw something strange while probing a patient's bile duct for cancer spread. It was a series of interconnected cavities in this submucosal tissue level that did not match any known anatomy.

Faced with a mystery, the endoscopists walked the images into the office of their partnering pathologist in Theise. Strangely, when Theise made biopsy slides out of the same tissue, the reticular pattern found by endomicroscopy disappeared. The team would later confirm that very thin spaces seen in biopsy slides, traditionally dismissed as tears in the tissue, were instead the remnants of collapsed, previously fluid-filled compartments.

A New Bodily Space

For the current study, the team collected tissue specimens of bile ducts during twelve cancer surgeries that were removing the pancreas and the bile duct. Minutes prior to clamping off blood flow to the target tissue, patients underwent confocal microscopy for live tissue imaging.

Once the team recognized this new space in images of bile ducts, they quickly recognized it throughout the body, wherever tissues moved or were compressed by force. The cells lining the space are also unusual, perhaps responsible for creating the supporting collagen bundles around them, say the authors. The cells may also be mesenchymal stem cells, says Theise, which are known to be capable of contributing to the formation of scar tissue seen in inflammatory diseases. Lastly, the protein bundles seen in the space are likely to generate electrical current as they bend with the movements of organs and muscles, and may play a role in techniques like acupuncture, he says.

The other first study author was Rebecca Wells of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, who determined that the mesh in the newfound sinus was comprised of collagen and elastin bundles. Also study authors were Jason Reidy of the Electron Microscopy Lab within the Department of Pathology at NYU School of Medicine; Heather Klavan, Markus Miranda, Darren Buonocore, Susan Kornacki, and Michael Wayne of Mount Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center; and Bridget Sackey-Aboagye from the University of Pennsylvania. Carr-Locke is currently clinical director for the Center for Advanced Digestive Care at Weill Cornell Medicine. Benias is an assistant professor at the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell Health.

This work was funded in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (DK081523).