Culture

New research has found that positive community action can boost fish numbers in coral reefs and safeguard fish numbers there in the future.

The research collaboration, which included academics from Swansea University's College of Science, published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper details the social and ecological outcomes of the work being done in the Muluk and Wadau communities on Karkar Island, Papua New Guinea since 2001.

While coral reefs provide food and income for millions of people, reef health is declining worldwide, but these communities have established a traditional system of rotational fishing closures to manage their fisheries resources.

The communities ban fishing on part of their reefs for a few years, and open these closures when village elders and fishers believe that fishes have changed their behaviour and fish populations have recovered.

They then close a different part of their reef, and repeat the process. The researchers found that these practices resulted in more than twice as much fish on the closed reefs compared to open ones, and closures made fish less scared of people and easier to catch.

The local people saw the closure system as good for their livelihoods and each period of closure was celebrated with a feast which meant that closures were remembered positively by the community.

Lead author, Professor Josh Cinner of James Cook University in Australia said: "The communities use a carrot and stick approach to ensure everyone complies with the closures. If they follow the rules they earn the right to do a special type of night fishing called 'bom bom', but if someone breaks these rules, they are publically shamed."

"These incentives to follow the rules are complemented with strong leadership and decision-making processes that allow the whole community to get involved and have a say."

However the team did find that while the closures boosted the number of fish in the short term, it may not be enough to stop the overall impact of fishing. However the academics say that because the communities manage their reefs themselves they can shorten the period between closures which could lessen the impact on fish numbers.

Swansea University scientist, Dr Fraser Januchowski-Hartley said: "Our findings also show that while rotational closure system may not work everywhere, there could be some lessons that can be transferred to other places. For example, by adopting a system of property rights, encouraging participation and creating social norms communities can encourage more pro-environmental practices in the future."

A solar energy material that is remarkably durable and affordable is regrettably also unusable if it barely generates electricity, thus many researchers had abandoned emerging organic solar technologies. But lately, a shift in the underlying chemistry has boosted power output, and a new study has revealed counterintuitive tweaks making the new chemistry successful.

The shift is from "fullerene" to "non-fullerene acceptors" (NFAs), terms detailed below, and in photovoltaic electricity generation, the acceptor is a molecule with the potential to be to electrons what a catcher is to a baseball. Corresponding donor molecules "pitch" electrons to acceptor "catchers" to create electric current. Highly cited chemist Jean-Luc Brédas at the Georgia Institute of Technology has furthered the technology and also led the new study.

"NFAs are complex beasts and do things that current silicon solar technology does not. You can shape them, make them semi-transparent or colored. But their big potential is in the possibility of fine-tuning how they free up and move electrons to generate electricity," said Brédas, a Regents Professor in Georgia Tech's School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

Gaining on silicon

In just the last four years, tuning NFA chemistry has boosted organic photovoltaic technology from initially converting only 1% of sunlight into electricity to 18% conversion in recent experiments. By comparison, high-quality silicon solar modules already on the market convert about 20%.

"Theory says we should be able to reach over 25% conversion with organic NFA-based solar if we can control energy loss by way of the morphology," said Tonghui Wang, a postdoctoral researcher in Brédas' lab and first author of the study.

Morphology, the shapes molecules take in a material, is key to NFA solar technology's heightened efficiency, but how that works on the molecular level has been a mystery. The new study carefully modeled tiny tweaks to molecular shapes and calculated corresponding energy conversion in a common NFA electron donor/acceptor pairing.

Improved performance came not from tweaks to the metaphorical hand of the catcher nor from the donor's pitching hand but from something akin to positions of the catcher's feet. Some positions better aligned the "body" of the acceptor with that of the electron donor.

The "feet" were a tiny component, a methoxy group, on the acceptor, and two positions out of four possible positions it took boosted the conversion of light into electricity from 6% to 12%. Brédas and Wang published their study, Organic Solar Cells Based on Non-Fullerene Small Molecule Acceptors: Impact of Substituent Position, on November 20, 2019, in the journal Matter. The research was funded by the Office of Naval Research.

(The donor/acceptor chemical pair was PBDB-T / IT-OM-1, -2, -3, or -4, with -2 and -3 showing superior electricity generation. See the citation at bottom for a complete chemical name.)

Clunky silicon cells

Marketable NFA-based solar cells could have many advantages over silicon, which requires mining quartz gravel, smelting it like iron, purifying it like steel, then cutting and machining it. By contrast, organic solar cells start as inexpensive solvents that can be printed onto surfaces.

Silicon cells are usually stiff and heavy and weaken with heat and light stress, whereas NFA-based solar cells are light, flexible, and stress-resistant. They also have more complex photoelectric properties. In NFA-based photoactive layers, when photons excite electrons out of the outer orbits of donor molecules, the electrons dance around the electron holes they have created, setting them up for a customized handoff to acceptors.

"Silicon pops an electron out of orbit when photons excite it past a threshold. It's on or off; you either get a conduction electron or no conduction electron," said Brédas, who is also Vasser Woolley Chair in Molecular Design at Georgia Tech. "NFAs are subtler. An electron donor reaches out an electron, and the electron acceptor tugs it away. The ability to adjust morphology makes the electron handoff tunable."

Not a fullerene

Like the name says, non-fullerene acceptors are not fullerenes, which are pure carbon molecules with rather uniform and geometric structures of repeating pentagonal or hexagonal elements. Nanotubes, graphene, and soot are examples of fullerenes, which are named after architect Buckminster Fuller, who was famous for designing geodesic domes.

Fullerenes are more ridged in molecular structure and tunability than non-fullerenes, which are more freely designed to be floppy and bendable. NFA-based donors and acceptors can wrap around each other like precise swirls of chocolate and vanilla batter in a Bundt cake, giving them advantages beyond electron donating and accepting - such as better molecular packing in a material.

"Another point is how the acceptor molecules are connected to each other so that the accepted electron has a conductive path to an electrode," Brédas said. "And it goes for the donors, too."

As in any solar cell, conduction electrons need a way out of the photovoltaic material into an electrode, and there has to be a return path to the opposite electrode for arriving electrons to fill holes that departing electrons left behind.

Highly impactful citations

Brédas' accolades are numerous, but he has particularly gained attention for his Google Scholar h-index score, a calculation of the impact of a researcher's publications. Breda's current score of 146 likely places him in the 700 most-impactful published researchers in modern global history.

He has been a particularly noted leader in photoelectric and semiconductor research based on affordable and practical organic chemistry.

LAWRENCE -- Earlier this year, a remarkable new fossil specimen was unearthed in the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation of China by area fossil hunters - possibly a huge ancient spider species, as yet unknown to science.

The locals sold the fossil to scientists at the Dalian Natural History Museum in Liaoning, China, who published a description of the fossil species in Acta Geologica Sinica, the peer-reviewed journal of the Geological Society of China. The Chinese team gave the spider the scientific name Mongolarachne chaoyangensis.

But other scientists in Beijing, upon seeing the paper, had suspicions. The spider fossil was huge and strange looking. Concerned, they contacted a U.S. colleague who specializes in ancient spider fossils: Paul Selden, distinguished professor of invertebrate paleontology in the Department of Geology at the University of Kansas.

"I was obviously very skeptical," Selden said. "The paper had very few details, so my colleagues in Beijing borrowed the specimen from the people in the Southern University, and I got to look at it. Immediately, I realized there was something wrong with it - it clearly wasn't a spider. It was missing various parts, had too many segments in its six legs, and huge eyes. I puzzled and puzzled over it until my colleague in Beijing, Chungkun Shih, said, 'Well, you know, there's quite a lot of crayfish in this particular locality. Maybe it's one of those.' So, I realized what happened was I got a very badly preserved crayfish onto which someone had painted on some legs."

Selden and his colleagues at KU and in China (including the lead author of the paper originally describing the fossil) recently published an account of their detective work in the peer-reviewed journal Palaeoentomology.

"These things are dug up by local farmers mostly, and they see what money they can get for them," Selden said. "They obviously picked up this thing and thought, 'Well, you know, it looks a bit like a spider.' And so, they thought they'd paint on some legs - but it's done rather skillfully. So, at first glance, or from a distance, it looks pretty good. It's not till you get down to the microscope and look in detail that you realize they're clearly things wrong with it. And, of course, the people who described it are perfectly good paleontologists - they're just not experts on spiders. So, they were taken in."

In possession of the original fossil specimen at KU, Selden teamed up with his graduate student Matt Downen and with Alison Olcott, associate professor of geology. The team used fluorescence microscopy to analyze the supposed spider and differentiate what parts of the specimen were fossilized organism, and which parts were potentially doctored.

"Fluorescence microscopy is a nice way of distinguishing what's painted on from what's real," Selden said. "So, we put it under the fluorescence microscope and, of course, being a huge specimen it's far too big for the microscope. We had to do it in bits. But we were able to show the bits that were painted and distinguish those from the rock and from the actual, real fossil."

The team's application of fluorescence microscopy on the fossil specimen showed four distinct responses: regions that appear bright white, bright blue, bright yellow, and ones that are dull red. According to the paper, the bright white areas are probably a mended crack. The bright blue is likely from mineral composition of the host rock. The yellow fluorescence could indicate an aliphatic carbon from oil-based paint used to alter the crayfish fossil. Finally, the red fluorescence probably indicates the remnants of the original crayfish exoskeleton.

"We produced this little paper showing how people could be very good at faking what was clearly a rather poor fossil - it wasn't going to bring in a lot of money - and turning it into something which somebody bought for quite a lot of money, I imagine, but it clearly was a fake," the KU researcher said.

Selden said in the world of fossils fakery is commonplace, as impoverished fossil hunters are apt to doctor fossils for monetary gain.

What's less common, he said, was a fake fossil spider, or a forgery making its way into an academic journal. However, he acknowledged the difficulty of verifying a fossil and admitted he'd been fooled in the past.

"I mean, I've seen lots of forgeries, and in fact I've even been taken in by fossils in a very dark room in Brazil," he said. "It looked interesting until you get to in the daylight the next day realize it's been it's been enhanced, let's say, for sale. I have not seen it with Chinese invertebrates before. It's very common with, you know, really expensive dinosaurs and that sort of stuff. Maybe they get two fossils and join them together, this kind of thing. Normally, there's not enough to gain from that kind of trouble with an invertebrate.

"But somebody obviously thought it wasn't such a big deal to stick a few legs onto this, because a giant spider looks very nice. I'm not sure the people who sell them necessarily think they're trying to dupe scientists. You tend to come across these things framed - they look very pretty. They're not necessarily going to be bought by scientists, but by tourists."

Selden's coauthors on the paper were Olcott and Downen of KU, along with Shih of Capital Normal University in Beijing, and Dong Ren of Capital Normal University and the Smithsonian Institution, and Ciaodong Cheng of Dalian Natural History Museum.

Selden didn't know the eventual fate of the enhanced spider fossil, which he likened to the famed "jackalope."

He said he thought it would go back to China where it could be put on display as a cautionary tale. One thing is for certain: it will be stripped of the scientific name Mongolarachne chaoyangensis and rechristened as a crayfish. Because of the fossil's alterations and state of preservation, Selden said it was hard to pin down its exact species. The team tentatively placed the fossil in Cricoidoscelosus aethus, "because this is marginally the commoner of the two crayfish recorded from the Yixian Formation."

Microorganisms play important roles in the health and protection of coral reefs, yet exploring these connections can be difficult due to the lack of unspoiled reef systems throughout the global ocean. A collaborative study led by scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the Centro de Investigaciones Marinas - Universidad de La Habana (CIM-UH) compared seawater from 25 reefs in Cuba and the U.S. Florida Keys varying in human impact and protection, and found that those with higher microbial diversity and lower concentrations of nutrients and organic carbon--primarily caused by human activities--were markedly healthier.

"Human impacts such as overfishing and pollution lead to changes in reef structure," says WHOI graduate student Laura Weber, lead author of the paper. A healthy reef provides home to a diverse group of marine animals, including herbivores that in turn help control algal growth. "Removal of algae grazers such as herbivorous fish and sea urchins leads to increases in macroalgae, which then leads to increased organic carbon, contributing to the degradation of coral reefs," Weber adds.

Researchers sampled seawater from each site and measured nutrients as well as a suite of parameters that offer insights into the microbial community. They found a notable difference between the heavily protected offshore reefs in Cuba and the more impacted nearshore ones in the Florida Keys.

Jardines de la Reina (Gardens of the Queen), the largest protected area in the Caribbean, is a complex ecosystem of small islands, mangrove forests, and coral reefs located about 50 miles off the southern coast of Cuba. These highly-protected offshore reefs provide habitat and feeding grounds for large numbers of fish, including top predators like sharks and groupers. Here, researchers found low concentrations of nutrients, and a high abundance of Prochlorococcus--a photosynthetic bacterium that thrives in low nutrient waters.

"Cuba does not have large-scale industrialized agriculture or extensive development along most of its coastline," says Patricia González-Díaz, Director of CIM-UH and co-author of the study. "So there is not a lot of nutrient run-off and sedimentation flowing on to the reefs." Additionally, the reefs of Jardines de la Reina may be further buffered from impacts by the mangroves and seagrass meadows that lie between the island of Cuba and the reef system of Jardines de la Reina.

Conversely, seawater from the more accessible reefs of Los Canarreos, Cuba--which are more impacted by humans through subsistence and illegal fishing, tourism, and the diving industry--and the nearshore reefs in the Florida Keys both contained higher organic carbon and nitrogen concentrations.

The study demonstrates that protected and healthier offshore Cuban reefs have lower nutrient and carbon levels, and microbial communities that are more diverse with abundant photosynthetic microbes compared to the more impacted, nearshore reefs of Florida. This work suggests that the offshore nature and highly protected status of reefs in Jardines de la Reina have played a role in keeping these reefs healthy by being far from or minimizing human impacts. These findings may aid resource managers in decision making to protect and restore Caribbean coral reefs in the face of habitat and climate-based change.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered a faint but sprawling glow of high-energy light around a nearby pulsar. If visible to the human eye, this gamma-ray "halo" would appear about 40 times bigger in the sky than a full Moon. This structure may provide the solution to a long-standing mystery about the amount of antimatter in our neighborhood.

"Our analysis suggests that this same pulsar could be responsible for a decade-long puzzle about why one type of cosmic particle is unusually abundant near Earth," said Mattia Di Mauro, an astrophysicist at the Catholic University of America in Washington and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "These are positrons, the antimatter version of electrons, coming from somewhere beyond the solar system."

A paper detailing the findings was published in the journal Physical Review D on Dec. 17 and is available online.

A neutron star is the crushed core left behind when a star much more massive than the Sun runs out of fuel, collapses under its own weight and explodes as a supernova. We see some neutron stars as pulsars, rapidly spinning objects emitting beams of light that, much like a lighthouse, regularly sweep across our line of sight.

Geminga (pronounced geh-MING-ga), discovered in 1972 by NASA's Small Astronomy Satellite 2, is among the brightest pulsars in gamma rays. It is located about 800 light-years away in the constellation Gemini. Geminga's name is both a play on the phrase "Gemini gamma-ray source" and the expression "it's not there" -- referring to astronomers' inability to find the object at other energies -- in the dialect of Milan, Italy.

Geminga was finally identified in March 1991, when flickering X-rays picked up by Germany's ROSAT mission revealed the source to be a pulsar spinning 4.2 times a second.

A pulsar naturally surrounds itself with a cloud of electrons and positrons. This is because the neutron star's intense magnetic field pulls the particles from the pulsar's surface and accelerates them to nearly the speed of light.

Electrons and positrons are among the speedy particles known as cosmic rays, which originate beyond the solar system. Because cosmic ray particles carry an electrical charge, their paths become scrambled when they encounter magnetic fields on their journey to Earth. This means astronomers cannot directly track them back to their sources.

For the past decade, cosmic ray measurements by Fermi, NASA's Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) aboard the International Space Station, and other space experiments near Earth have seen more positrons at high energies than scientists expected. Nearby pulsars like Geminga were prime suspects.

Then, in 2017, scientists with the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Gamma-ray Observatory (HAWC) near Puebla, Mexico, confirmed earlier ground-based detections of a small gamma-ray halo around Geminga. They observed this structure at energies from 5 to 40 trillion electron volts -- light with trillions of times more energy than our eyes can see.

Scientists think this emission arises when accelerated electrons and positrons collide with nearby starlight. The collision boosts the light up to much higher energies. Based on the size of the halo, the HAWC team concluded that Geminga positrons at these energies only rarely reach Earth. If true, it would mean that the observed positron excess must have a more exotic explanation.

But interest in a pulsar origin continued, and Geminga was front and center. Di Mauro led an analysis of a decade of Geminga gamma-ray data acquired by Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT), which observes lower-energy light than HAWC.

"To study the halo, we had to subtract out all other sources of gamma rays, including diffuse light produced by cosmic ray collisions with interstellar gas clouds," said co-author Silvia Manconi, a postdoctoral researcher at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. "We explored the data using 10 different models of interstellar emission."

What remained when these sources were removed was a vast, oblong glow spanning some 20 degrees in the sky at an energy of 10 billion electron volts (GeV). That's similar to the size of the famous Big Dipper star pattern -- and the halo is even bigger at lower energies.

"Lower-energy particles travel much farther from the pulsar before they run into starlight, transfer part of their energy to it, and boost the light to gamma rays. This is why the gamma-ray emission covers a larger area at lower energies ," explained co-author Fiorenza Donato at the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics and the University of Turin. "Also, Geminga's halo is elongated partly because of the pulsar's motion through space."

The team determined that the Fermi LAT data were compatible with the earlier HAWC observations. Geminga alone could be responsible for as much as 20% of the high-energy positrons seen by the AMS-02 experiment. Extrapolating this to the cumulative emission from all pulsars in our galaxy, the scientists say it's clear that pulsars remain the best explanation for the positron excess.

"Our work demonstrates the importance of studying individual sources to predict how they contribute to cosmic rays," Di Mauro said. "This is one aspect of the exciting new field called multimessenger astronomy, where we study the universe using multiple signals, like cosmic rays, in addition to light."

A group led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine has identified significant differences at the epigenetic level - the chemical tags in DNA that help regulate gene expression - between two clinically distinct forms of acute childhood malnutrition known as edematous severe acute malnutrition (ESAM) and non-edematous SAM (NESAM).

The researchers report in the journal Nature Communications that ESAM, but not NESAM, is characterized by a reduction in methyl chemical tags in DNA and complex changes in gene activity, including both enhanced and reduced gene expression. Some of the genes that lost their methyl tags have been linked to other disorders of nutrition and metabolism, such as abnormal blood sugar and fatty liver disease, conditions that also have been observed in ESAM. The findings support consideration of methyl-group supplementation in ESAM.

What is ESAM and NESAM?

"Severe acute childhood malnutrition presents in two clinically distinct forms: ESAM and NESAM," said corresponding author Dr. Neil Hanchard, assistant professor of molecular and human genetics and the USDA/ARS Children's Nutrition Research Center at Baylor. "ESAM is characterized by body swelling and extensive dysfunction of multiple organs, including liver, blood cells and the gut, as well as skin and hair abnormalities. NESAM, on the other hand, typically presents with weight loss and wasting."

The differences between ESAM and NESAM are still not fully explained despite decades of studies addressing this question. In the current study, Hanchard and his colleagues looked to better understand the conditions by investigating whether there were differences at the molecular level, specifically on DNA methylation.

Linking DNA modifications to ESAM

"The decision to look at DNA methylation was partly driven by previous studies looking at biochemical markers in these individuals. In particular, the turnover of a particular amino acid called methionine," said Hanchard.

Previous work has shown that methionine turnover is slower in ESAM than in NESAM. Methionine is a central ingredient of 1-carbon metabolism, a metabolic pathway that is key to DNA methylation. Lower methionine turnover suggested the possibility of alterations in DNA methylation.

"First, we conducted a genome-wide analysis of DNA methylation. When we found in children acutely ill with ESAM genes with levels of DNA methylation that were significantly different from those in NESAM patients, the levels were always lower. Of the genes analyzed, 161 showed a highly significant reduced level of methylation in ESAM, when compared to the same genes in NESAM," Hanchard said.

Interestingly, a group of adults who had recovered from having ESAM malnutrition in their childhood did not show the same reduction in DNA methylation the researchers observed in childhood acute cases. This suggested that lower DNA methylation was probably related to acute ESAM.

Gene expression examined

Knowing that DNA methylation helps regulate gene expression, Hanchard and his colleagues next investigated whether there were differences in gene expression between ESAM and NESAM. They found that reduced overall methylation in ESAM resulted in a complex pattern of gene expression changes. For some genes, having reduced methylation enhanced their expression, while for others it reduced it.

Among the genes that were highly affected by reduced methylation were some of those related to conditions such as blood sugar regulation, fatty liver disease and other metabolic problems, which are also commonly seen more often in ESAM than NESAM.

"Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the molecular events that likely result in the differences between ESAM and NESAM," Hanchard said. "Although we still don't know why malnutrition leads to ESAM in some children, while it results in NESAM in others, our findings suggest that, once ESAM gets on its way, methylation changes are likely involved in the clinical signs and symptoms of the condition. There is also evidence that individual genetic variation also influences the level of DNA methylation. Furthermore, I am excited about the possibility that altering the molecular outcome of malnutrition with specific interventions could one day help alter the clinical outcome."

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] -- There's an interesting fluid dynamics phenomenon that happens every morning in millions of cereal bowls. When there are just a few bits of cereal left floating on top of the milk, they tend to cluster together in the middle or around the edges of the bowl, rather than dispersing across the surface.

Now a team of Brown University researchers has developed a way to measure the forces involved in this type of clustering. It's the first time, the researchers say, that these forces have been experimentally measured in objects at the millimeter/centimeter scale. And the implications of the work go far beyond cereal bowls -- the results could be useful in guiding the self-assembly of micromachines or in designing microscale robots that operate in and around water.

"There have been a lot of models describing this Cheerios effect, but it's all been theoretical," said Ian Ho, an undergraduate student at Brown and lead author of a paper describing the work. "Despite the fact that this is something we see every day and it's important for things like self-assembly, no one had done any experimental measurements at this scale to validate these models. That's what we were able to do here."

The research is published in Physical Review Letters. Ho's co-authors were Giuseppe Pucci, a visiting scholar at Brown, and Daniel Harris, an assistant professor in Brown's School of Engineering.

The Cheerios effect arises from the interaction of gravity and surface tension -- the tendency of molecules on the surface of a liquid to stick together, forming a thin film across the surface. Small objects like Cheerios aren't heavy enough to break the surface tension of milk, so they float. Their weight, however, does create a small dent in the surface film. When one Cheerio dent gets close enough to another, they fall into each other, merging their dents and eventually forming clusters on the milk's surface.

In order to test just how strongly Cheerios -- and other objects in the Cheerio size and weight range -- attract each other, the researchers used a custom-built apparatus that uses magnetism to measure forces. The experiment involves two Cheerio-sized plastic disks, one of which contains a small magnet, floating in a small tub of water. Electrical coils surrounding the tub produce magnetic fields, which can pull the magnetized disk away while the other is held in place. By measuring the intensity of the magnetic field at the instant the disks begin moving away from each other, the researchers could determine the amount of attractive force.

"The magnetic field gave us a non-mechanical way of applying forces to these bodies," Harris said. "That was important because the forces we're measuring are similar to the weight of a mosquito, so if we're physically touching these bodies we're going to interfere with the way they move."

The experiments revealed that a traditional mathematical model of the interaction actually under-predicts the strength of the attraction when the disks are positioned very close together. At first the researchers weren't sure what was happening, until they noticed that as two disks draw closer, they start to tilt toward each other. The tilt causes the disk to push harder against the surface of the liquid, which in turn increases the force by which the liquid pushes back. That extra push results in a slightly increased attractive force between the disks.

"We realized that there was one extra condition that our model wasn't satisfying, which was this tilt," Harris said. "When we added that one ingredient to the model, we got much better agreement. That's the value of going back and forth between theory and experiment."

The findings could be useful in the design of microscale machines and robots, the researchers say. There's interest, for example, in using small spider-like robots that can skitter across the surface of water to do environmental monitoring. This work sheds light on the kinds of forces these robots would encounter.

"If you have multiple little machines moving around or two or more legs of a robot, you need to know what forces they exert on each other," Harris said. "It's an interesting area of research, and the fact that that we could contribute something new to it is exciting."

In most cases, your genes have less than five per cent to do with your risk of developing a particular disease, according to new research by University of Alberta scientists.

In the largest meta-analysis ever conducted, scientists have examined two decades of data from studies that examine the relationships between common gene mutations, also known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and different diseases and conditions. And the results show that the links between most human diseases and genetics are shaky at best.

"Simply put, DNA is not your destiny, and SNPs are duds for disease prediction," said David Wishart, professor in the University of Alberta's Department of Biological Sciences and the Department of Computing Science and co-author on the study. "The vast majority of diseases, including many cancers, diabetes, and Alzheimer's disease, have a genetic contribution of 5 to 10 per cent at best."

The study also highlights some notable exceptions, including Crohn's disease, celiac disease, and macular degeneration, which have a genetic contribution of approximately 40 to 50 per cent.

"Despite these rare exceptions, it is becoming increasingly clear that the risks for getting most diseases arise from your metabolism, your environment, your lifestyle, or your exposure to various kinds of nutrients, chemicals, bacteria, or viruses," explained Wishart.

Wishart and his research collaborators suggest that measuring metabolites, chemicals, proteins, or the microbiome provides a much more accurate measure of human disease risk and are also more accurate for diagnosis. The findings fly in the face of many modern gene testing businesses models, which suggest that gene testing can accurately predict someone's risk for disease.

"The bottom line is that if you want to have an accurate measure of your health, your propensity for disease or what you can do about it, it's better to measure your metabolites, your microbes or your proteins--not your genes," added Wishart. "This research also highlights the need to understand our environment and the safety or quality of our food, air, and water."

CORVALLIS, Ore. - Eating watermelon in the form of powdered supplements helped adult obese mice avoid some detrimental health effects of an unhealthy diet, according to a new Oregon State University study.

The study is published in the Journal of Nutrition.

A significant next step in this research would be a human clinical trial, said study co-author Neil Shay, professor of food science in OSU's College of Agricultural Sciences.

In the study, 10-week-old male laboratory mice were fed either a low-fat or high-fat diet over a 10-week period. Groups of high-fat-fed mice were given watermelon supplements in the form of a powder made from a freeze-dried process. The amount of water melon flesh supplement was equivalent to 1½ human servings a day, and the skin and rind supplement were equivalent to the amount in a typical dietary fiber supplement.

At the beginning and end of the trial, the researchers recorded the body weight and glucose tolerance of each mouse. Mice that were fed a high-fat diet supplemented with watermelon products had significantly better blood glucose levels than the mice on the high-fat-only diet.

An elevated blood-glucose level may be an indicator of Type 2 diabetes, a disease in which the body doesn't make enough or properly use insulin, a hormone that turns food into energy. Type 2 is the most common form of diabetes in the United States.

The researchers also saw a significant increase in the family of beneficial bacteria in the mice that were given powder supplements, Shay said.

"Even though the two groups of mice were eating the same amount of fat and sugar, that consumption of 1½ servings of watermelon flesh or 2% of high-fiber rind or skin products had significant effects," Shay said.

The study was funded by the National Watermelon Promotion Board, an industry group that is seeking new ways to use byproducts such as skin and rind that end up as food waste.

Worldwide production of watermelon topped 117 million metric tons in 2016. In Oregon, watermelon is a multimillion industry in the lower Umatilla basin near Hermiston. Despite all that fruit, there hasn't been much research into the health impacts of watermelon, said Shay, who studies the compounds of fruits and vegetables and their influence on heart disease and diabetes.

This is the latest OSU study led by Shay that revealed health benefits of certain foods in laboratory mice. One study showed that walnuts helped improve metabolism and another showed that raspberries curbed weight gain even when they were fed a high-fat diet.

Scientists have identified the last known occurrence of Homo erectus--in Central Java, Indonesia between 117,000 and 108,000 years ago. An ancient ancestor of modern humans that lived in the Pleistocene era, Homo erectus first appeared approximately 2 million years ago.

An international team of researchers including the University of Alberta's John-Paul Zonneveld applied modern dating technology to a group of fossils originally found in the 1930s. The fossils include 12 skull caps and 2 lower leg bones found in a bone bed 20 metres above the Solo River at Ngandong, Central Java, Indonesia.

"Uncertainty of the age of the Ngandong Homo erectus beds has prevented us from accurately assessing the relationship of these early humans to other human species," said Zonneveld, professor in the University of Alberta's Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "It is also intriguing that these dates indicate that Homo erectus overlapped temporally with one or more other human species."

The fossils are part of a mass death event that occurred as a result of a change in climate. Approximately 130,000 years ago, Indonesia's climate shifted from dry grasslands to tropical rainforest, and the Homo erectus species could not adapt. It is here that they went extinct. According to the study, the bone bed was formed when the remains were washed into the river and deposited downstream.

"This was an exciting project to be involved in. I was honored to be able to contribute to analyses of the fauna associated with Homo erectus at Ngandong," added Zonneveld.

Environmental and lifestyle issues were popular this year, with pick up from both ESC journals and congresses.

Here is a list of the top ten ESC stories that generated the most media coverage worldwide:

1. Air pollution causes 800,000 extra deaths a year in Europe and 8.8 million worldwide: 1,650 clippings (European Heart Journal)

2. Bed time is the best time to take blood pressure medication: 1,404 clippings (European Heart Journal)

3. Brush your teeth to protect the heart: 750 clippings (European Journal of Preventive Cardiology)

4. Fathers-to-be should avoid alcohol six months before conception: 513 clippings (European Journal of Preventive Cardiology)

5. Eating nuts linked with lower risk of fatal heart attack and stroke: 351 clippings (ESC Congress 2019 together with the World Congress of Cardiology)

6. Ability to lift weights quickly can mean a longer life: 498 clippings (EuroPrevent 2019)

7. Late dinner and no breakfast is a killer combination: 467 clippings (European Journal of Preventive Cardiology)

8. Move more to live longer: 436 clippings (EuroPrevent 2019)

9. Women call ambulance for husbands with heart attacks but not for themselves: 386 clippings (Acute Cardiovascular Care 2019)

10. Fathers-to-be: smoking could harm your baby: 239 clippings (European Journal of Preventive Cardiology)

Check out all 2019 ESC press releases here.

Have a safe and joyful holiday season. We look forward to sharing more ESC science with you in the New Year!

Philadelphia, December 19, 2019—Final results are published from an evaluation of 42 patients treated with the immune checkpoint inhibitor nivolumab in the large multi-arm precision medicine trial, NCI-Molecular Analysis for Therapy Choice (NCI-MATCH or EAY131). The Journal of Clinical Oncology reports results for Arm Z1D of NCI-MATCH,investigating the activity of nivolumab in tumors with DNA mismatch repair deficiencies. The ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group is leading the trial with the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health.

Nivolumab showed promising activity in DNA mismatch repair (MMR)-deficient tumors that had complete loss of the tumor suppressor proteins MLH1 or MSH2. Responses were observed across a wide variety of histopathological types. Cells with MMR deficiency have defects in DNA damage repair, which can lead to cancer, so knowing if a tumor is MMR-deficient may help guide cancer treatment.

Nivolumab previously showed activity in MMR-deficient colon cancer; therefore, colon cancers were excluded from Arm Z1D.

The primary objective of each arm in NCI-MATCH is to determine the proportion of patients who have an objective response. Under predefined criteria, an overall response rate greater than 16% in a given arm signals that the therapy warrants further study. The 36% response rate across a range of cancers compares well with a previous 31% response in colon cancer (Overman MJ, Lancet Oncology, Sep 2017).

“Median overall survival was 17.3 months in a heavily pre-treated population,” said Dr. Azad. “The estimated six-month, 12-month and 18-month progression-free survival rates in Arm Z1D were 51.3%, 46.2%, and 31.4%, respectively.”

Nivolumab was provided by Bristol-Myers Squibb under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with NCI for Arm Z1D.

What We Are Learning From NCI-MATCH

Each NCI-MATCH treatment arm is contributing valuable information on responsive versus unresponsive tumor types, especially in rare cancers where there are little or no data available. In Arm Z1D, responses were observed across a broad range of tumor types, and every single patient in the trial provided new information. The results are an important signal that should prompt larger trials.

The NCI-MATCH trial also provides patients with access to innovative trials. More than 1100 trial sites are participating in the trial, making it possible to identify patients with a very wide range of common and uncommon tumor types.

For example, Arm Z1D evaluated nivolumab in 18 different cancer types with MMR deficiency:

Endometrioid endometrial adenocarcinoma (n=13)
Prostate adenocarcinoma (n=5)
Uterine carcinosarcoma (n=4)
Adenocarcinoma of esophagus/esophagogastric junction (n=3)
Cholangiocarcinoma (n=3)
Ductal carcinoma of breast (n=3)
Pancreatic neuroendocrine carcinoma (n=1)
Other (n=10)

Other cases were mucinous adenocarcinoma of the small intestine; adenocarcinoma of lung; carcinoma of parathyroid; chordoma of clivus of skull; leiomyosarcoma of uterus; epithelial/myoepithelial carcinoma of submandibular salivary gland; small cell lung carcinoma; follicular carcinoma of the thyroid with Hȕrthle cell features; squamous cell carcinoma of the esophagogastric junction; squamous cell carcinoma of cervix and vagina; and clear cell adenocarcinoma of the female genital tract/Mullerian origin.

A Second Key Finding in Arm Z1D

“The silencing of the proteins MLH1 or MSH2 is the most common cause of DNA repair defects due to mismatch repair deficiency, and, a little less commonly, MSH6 or PMS2. This can happen through DNA mutation, as well as promoter methylation,” said Dr. Azad.

Dr. Azad explained. “In Arm Z1D, we confirmed that testing for complete loss of either the MLH1 or MSH2 tumor suppressing proteins is a useful biomarker for selecting single-agent nivolumab immunotherapy beyond colon cancer.”

The NCI-MATCH assay made it possible to validate complete loss of MLH1 or MSH2 as a biomarker, as reported previously (Khoury JD, Clinical Cancer Research, Aug 2017).

The FDA granted accelerated approval for nivolumab alone or in combination with ipilimumab for the treatment of microsatellite instability-high or mismatch repair-deficient metastatic colorectal cancer that has progressed following treatment with fluoropyrimidine, oxaliplatin, and irinotecan. Continued approval for this indication may be contingent upon verification and description of clinical benefit in confirmatory trials. Another drug, pembrolizumab, is FDA-approved for pretreated mismatch repair-deficient cancer regardless of cancer type.

Arm Z1D Background

Arm Z1D opened May 31, 2016. Of 4902 patients tested by immunohistochemistry, 2.0% (99) had complete loss of nuclear expression of either MLH1 or MSH2, making them eligible for Arm Z1D. Within 11 months, 47 patients enrolled and began treatment. The results of Arm Z1D pertain to 42 evaluable patients. The most common reason for a patient with complete MLH1 or MSH2 loss not enrolling was ineligible histology (colorectal cancer or endometrial cancer, the latter during expansion of accrual, because MMR deficiency is common in these cancers).

“Nivolumab Is Effective in Mismatch Repair-Deficient Noncolorectal Cancers: Results From Arm Z1D—A Subprotocol of the NCI-MATCH (EAY131) Study” is available online at Journal of Clinical Oncology website, https://doi.org/10.1200/JCO.19.00818. Subscription required.

All of the NCI-MATCH treatment arms are posted at https://ecog-acrin.org/trials/nci-match-eay131.

While many conservation plans focus on only environmental indicators for success, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)'s coral reef program is trying a relatively new approach: focusing on both social and ecological processes and outcomes to ensure a long-term future for coral reef systems, according to a newly published study.

In the new study, scientists from WCS and James Cook University in Australia developed and implemented a cutting-edge monitoring approach that incorporates social and ecological indicators to uncover drivers of coral reef conservation success. The framework was developed and implemented in four countries across Africa, Asia and the Pacific where millions of people rely on coral reef ecosystems for livelihoods, food security and cultural practices.

The study titled "Implementing a social-ecological systems framework for conservation monitoring: lessons from a multi-country coral reef program" appears in the latest edition of the journal Biological Conservation.

"People depend on coral reefs for multiple dimensions of their wellbeing, and working with people, rather than fish or coral, is at the heart of reef management. A social-ecological systems perspective for management is critical to achieving positive outcomes for people and nature," said lead author Dr. Georgina Gurney of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University.

Dr. Emily Darling, co-author and leader of WCS's global coral reef monitoring program, said: "Measuring both the social and ecological outcomes of coral reef management is crucial for resource users, reef managers and governments, and can help effectively and equitably manage coral reefs in a changing climate."

This approach is based on Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom's social-ecological systems framework, with this work being the first to implement it for monitoring practice across multiple countries. The framework was developed using a transdisciplinary approach, involving collaborations between applied scientists and academics across social and ecological disciplines.

The framework includes 90 social and ecological indicators that can be collected using standard underwater diver surveys and surveys conducted with local community members, fishers, and marine managers. This allows monitoring to shed light on local coral reef management contexts, resource use and dependence, and local stakeholders' perceptions of impact and equity of management.

The new social-ecological systems monitoring framework has been implemented in more than 85 communities in four countries (Fiji, Kenya, Madagascar, and Indonesia). Data collection and analysis workflows are supported by two open-source data platforms: Kobo Toolbox (kobotoolbox.org) and a new platform for coral reef ecological surveys developed by WCS and WWF called MERMAID (datamermaid.org).

A major lesson learned in the study is that global monitoring approaches can be designed and implemented from the ground up. Darling added: "Tracking standardized and comparable metrics require intensive design and collaboration across research disciplines and sectors. Understanding people's experiences with management and the health of coral reefs is providing new insights for international conservation and management policy frameworks, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Sustainable Development Goals."

To ensure a future for the world's coral reefs, continued investments in long-term in-situ coral reef conservation are urgently needed. Alongside these efforts, improved data collection, analysis and learning are required such that both reefs and people can adapt to the ongoing local and global threats, most notably from global climate change. There is hope for coral reefs, but it will take both bottom up action on the ground, as evidenced by this study, in combination with global political will.

Returning croplands to forests is a sustainability gold standard to mitigate climate change impacts and promote conservation. That is, new research shows, unless you're a poor farmer.

"Those sweeping conservation efforts in returning cropland to vegetated land might have done so with an until-now hidden consequence: it increased the wildlife damage to remaining cropland and thus caused unintended cost that whittled away at the program's compensation for farmers," said Hongbo Yang, lead author in a recent paper in the Ecological Economics journal.

Yang, who recently earned a PhD at from Michigan State University (MSU) and is currently a research associate at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and his colleagues analyzed the reforestation achieved via programs that encourage, and compensate, farmers to convert their cropland to forests via China's enormous Grain-to-Green Program (GTGP).

The research found that even as newly regrown forests are sucking up greenhouse gases, they're also sheltering critters bent on destroying crops. And while farmers were compensated, they ultimately took a financial beating. Not only did they find that converting a portion of their fields brought wildlife that much closer to their remaining crops, but they were also now farming smaller areas and thus recognizing lower yields.

Bottom line: The costs of conservation were being borne by poor people and those impacts have been slow to be revealed.

"Conservation policies only can endure, and be declared successful, when both nature and humans thrive," said Jianguo "Jack" Liu, senior author and Rachel Carson Chair in Sustainability at MSU'S Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability. "Many of these trade-offs and inequities are difficult to spot unless you take a very broad, deep look at the situation, yet these balances are crucial to success."

As a first attempt to quantify this previously hidden cost, the authors estimated the impact of converting cropland to forest under the GTGP, which is one of the world's largest conservation programs, on crop raiding in a demonstration site.

They found that GTGP afforestation was responsible for 64% of the crop damage by wildlife on remaining cropland, and that cost was worth 27% of GTGP's total payment to local farmers. That loss was not anticipated as the policy was designed and was in addition to the known loss of income from farming smaller plots, Yang said.

"The ignorance of this hidden cost might leave local communities under-compensated under the program and exacerbate poverty," Yang said. "Such problems may ultimately compromise the sustainability of conservation. As losses due to human-wildlife conflicts increase, farmers may increasingly resent conservation efforts."

The connective tissue cells known as fibroblasts are vitally important for our recovery from injury. Sensing tissue damage, they gravitate to the site of a wound, instigating an inflammatory response that mends damaged tissue.

A new Tel Aviv University study published in Nature Communications on September 26 finds that fibroblasts also play a devastating role in the development of breast cancer. In cancer tumors, fibroblasts are triggered to respond to tissue damaged by tumors and create inflammation. This inflammation facilitates tumor growth as well as metastases in the lungs.

"We have shown, for the first time, that in breast cancer these fibroblasts activate a 'misguided' wound healing response, responding to the tissue damage caused by the cancerous growth," explains Prof. Neta Erez of TAU's Sackler Faculty of Medicine, who led the research for the study. "Inhibiting these inflammatory signaling pathways may be beneficial in preventing metastatic relapse of breast cancer."

The study was conducted by former TAU student Yoray Sharon and TAU MD-PhD student Nour Ershaid in Prof. Erez's lab at TAU's Department of Pathology.

According to the study, the inflammatory response of fibroblasts not only supports local tumor growth in the breast, but it also creates a hospitable niche for metastatic growth in the lungs. "The fibroblasts are 'activated' and, because of this activation, they recruit immune cells and affect blood vessels," adds Prof. Erez. "In other words, breast tumors 'hijack' the physiologic response to tissue damage to facilitate their growth, and create a niche in a distant organ, the lungs, by 'remote control.'"

Research for the study was performed using transgenic and transplantable mouse models of breast cancer, and validated in human samples of breast cancer and in human expression data.

The researchers isolated fibroblasts in transgenic mice from different stages of breast carcinogenesis and profiled the expression of all their genes. They were then able to identify that the inflammation pathway is unregulated in cancer-associated fibroblasts, as compared with fibroblasts isolated from normal mammary glands. Finally, they performed functional experiments to understand the role of this pathway in breast cancer.

"Our findings encourage the design of preclinical and clinical studies to examine the benefits of targeting the inflammation pathway in breast cancer, which may be effective in blocking metastatic relapse," concludes Prof. Erez. "We are now studying the microenvironment of metastasis in an effort to identify targets for preventive intervention that may inhibit metastatic relapse."