Culture

Fewer children, distant relatives or friends, and an increasing plurality of family models: These factors impact on the availability of support and care in old age. Tiziana Nazio, a researcher at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, has explored how early family formation events relate to the emotional and practical support that people give and receive in older age. Her results show that women still bear the brunt of the burden of care. What people do at an early stage of life in terms of family building is a predictor of the size and composition of the emotional support networks they will have later in life. However, irrespective of the circumstances of older age, the number of children and the presence of a partner are the factors that ultimately strongly predict whether or not someone receives practical support and personal care.

Family formation early in life can influence the availability of kin later on by establishing ties with spouses, children, and in-laws. It may also affect the opportunity to establish long-term relationships and networks that can act as substitutes for kin in old age. With SHARE survey data from five countries for the birth cohorts 1927-1966, Tiziana Nazio, Marie Sk?odowska-Curie Research Fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, mapped typical family formation patterns in early adulthood and investigated whether they come to bear on social support given and received in later life.

Early family formation patterns were predictive of the size of old-age individuals' emotional support networks independent of the current family circumstance and number of children. Emotional support networks often include partners and children (in around half of the cases one or more). All else being equal, childless individuals and couples who had only one child tended to report smaller networks. Further, family disruption resulted in smaller networks, although this was only the case in the more traditional Czech Republic and Italy. Re-establishing a family, however, seemed to make up for the lost network: Multiple unions, where union dissolution was soon followed by stable re-partnering, did not result in a smaller network size anywhere except in the Czech Republic.

An important point is that although family trajectories may shape the size of emotional support networks, they do not change the probability of receiving (or giving) practical help or personal care. The strongest predictor of concrete instances of this other type of support is the number of living children and the presence of a partner. Early family trajectories may only play an indirect role, in that having larger networks also contributes to making care exchanges more likely.

The distribution of caregiving that couples provide to parents, parents-in-law, and to children or grandchildren reveals the highly gendered nature of care, with women doing the larger share. But do men shift their care responsibilities towards older generations onto their spouses? Parental care seems more likely to be shifted across siblings than onto partners, but more onto sisters than brothers, especially when caregiving becomes intense.

Tiziana Nazio pointed out that the number of informal caregivers is expected to decrease in the future with a growing mismatch between care demands and the capacity to respond with informal provision by families and close support networks. "An increasing proportion of elderly adults, especially women, will be in a position to provide care to both elderly parents and grandchildren at the same time, during longer employment careers," she says. Women's careers and pension contributions are particularly at risk from informal care provision, grandparenting, as well as elderly care, in those countries where public service provision is lower.

What could help to bridge this gap? Measures could include strengthening service provision, offering leave schemes and flexible working arrangements for informal caregivers independently from their relation to the caretaker, their living arrangements, and the makeup of their household. These measures might encourage men to take on care responsibilities and help reduce current gender disparities. Creating the possibility of counting periods of care as contributing towards social security might instead reduce the gendered risk of poverty in old age, especially the gender pension gap, due to women's higher risk of interrupted careers for assuming caretaking responsibilities.

How much water single-family residences use is closely related to a community's built environment, according to a University of Arizona-led study. In particular, design factors such as vegetated land cover, housing density and lot size appear to have a strong impact on water use.

The results can provide key data for city planners and water managers looking to develop sustainable water use strategies for their communities, the authors suggest in the paper that was published today in the Journal of the American Planning Association.

Philip Stoker, assistant professor in the UA College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, and a team of researchers focused on how water use is influenced by the built environment, which Stoker defines as "the way cities take shape - what the materials are made out of, what the land cover consists of, the arrangement of buildings and what kind of buildings are there."

The team obtained single-family residential property water-use records from 2011 in Phoenix; Salt Lake City; Portland, Oregon; and Austin, Texas. Researchers estimated models for both annual water use and water use during the summer months of June through August. The cities were selected because they each offer insights relative to the impacts of both climate change and rapid urban population growth on residential water consumption. Single-family residences are the principal form of residential development in each city and make up a large share of overall water use.

"As cities, especially in the Western U.S., continue to grow, planners need to think about their water supplies moving into the future," said Stoker, whose co-authors included then-graduate student Gabrielle Jehle, Elizabeth Wentz and Brint Crow-Miller of Arizona State University, and Matthew Bonnette of Portland State University. "With this study, we wanted to give them information to develop a strategy. We wanted to show how the planning and design of cities influence how water is used."

City Design is Key

The researchers examined the influence of five built environment measures on single-family residential water use: housing density, tax assessed value, lot size, vegetative cover and the age of housing. They found in each city, the built environment poses a stronger influence on urban water use than previously reported.

"In Austin, for example, we were able to explain 85% of the variation in water use among Austin neighborhoods with just the five measures of the built environment," Stoker said.

Some measures impacted water use across the board. The researchers found increased vegetated cover, combined with larger lots, in newer homes, with higher assessed values, were associated with higher water use in each city.

Vegetated cover was associated with an increased water demand more than any other built-environment variable in the drier cities. The effect was greatest in Salt Lake City, where each 1% increase in average vegetated surface was tied to a 0.48% increase in annual water use and a 0.7% increase in summer use.

Higher housing density was associated with lower water use in every city except Salt Lake City, where the measure was not statistically significant.

Surprises in the Data

Stoker says researchers had expected lot size to be a consistent predictor of water use. However, those findings varied across the four cities.

In Austin and Portland, larger lots were associated with higher water use. In Austin, a 1% increase in lot size was associated with an approximate 0.32% increase in summer water use. Lot size was not significantly associated with annual or summer water use in Salt Lake City, and there was an inverse relationship in Phoenix, with larger lot size tied to lower water use.

Stoker says he was also surprised by the findings on the age of housing, as the expectation was that newer housing would be associated with lower water use because of higher-efficiency appliances. However, the opposite was true in Austin, Portland and Salt Lake City. The association was strongest in Salt Lake City, where, for every 1% increase in housing age there was an approximate 0.31% decrease in annual water use and about 0.33% decrease in summer use.

Planning for Water Efficiency

Stoker says city planners and water managers can use the data to work together on developing zoning ordinances, form-based codes and landscaping ordinances that can lead to more efficient water usage. Regulations could, for example, specify smaller lot sizes for future developments, or call for reduced or different types of vegetated cover on single-family properties. In implementing these regulations, Stoker says, city leaders must balance factors such as whether the water-use reduction outweighs the benefit vegetated land has on temperature-cooling efforts.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Young adults with student loans who participate in financial education programs become better financial managers who are able to build their personal wealth after college, researchers at the University of Illinois found in a recent study.

Social work professor Min Zhan and graduate student Gaurav Sinha analyzed data on 1,924 young adults in the U.S. to explore which factors helped those with student loans prosper after college.

About 59% of the borrowers had federal student loans, 11% had private loans and the remaining 30% of borrowers had combinations of both types of loans.

Young adults' ability to build wealth was measured by whether they owned a home, saved for retirement and owned investments or securities. A plurality of respondents - 41% - had annual household incomes of $35,000-$75,000. About 44% were homeowners.

Zhan and Sinha found that people who participated in financial education programs were 1.5 times more likely to own employer-sponsored retirement accounts, were twice as likely to have other types of retirement and investment accounts, and were more likely to own homes as well.

"Whether the financial education programs were general information offered by their employers or loan-specific seminars offered by their colleges, participating in these programs increased young adults' likelihood of saving for retirement, investing and owning a home," Zhan said. "These programs may help young adults make informed decisions about financial matters, which, in turn, boosts their wealth-building."

Nearly 60% of the respondents had earned a bachelor's degree and 77% were employed, according to the study, published recently in the journal Social Development Issues.

However, less than half of the respondents - 45% - were using income-based repayment plans to repay their student loans.

When respondents were asked whether they had calculated the prospective monthly payment prior to taking out their most recent student loan, only 39% of borrowers said they had done so.

"Our findings indicate that simply knowing the amount that they'd be paying on their student loans boosted an individual's likelihood of saving for retirement, investing or owning a home," Zhan said.

Just over a third - 37% - of the sample scored high on financial literacy, based upon their answers to six questions that assessed their knowledge of general financial concepts such as interest rates. Four to six correct answers indicated high financial literacy, while zero to three correct answers suggested low financial literacy.

While income-based repayment plans helped people with student loan debt save for retirement and invest, Zhan and Sinha found that these programs were not positively associated with home ownership.

They hypothesized that while income-based repayment plans may have mitigated the financial stress associated with student loan debt, borrowers still may not have had sufficient resources to purchase homes.

Certain groups of young adults with student loan debt faced greater challenges building wealth, including women and those who lacked health insurance.

Women - who composed 60% of the study sample - were less likely to have retirement and investment accounts, and fewer of them were homeowners than their male peers, the researchers found.

About half - 49% - of all the respondents were married, and 52% had at least one dependent child.

"Having a bank account and/or certificates of deposit had particularly strong associations with all indicators of wealth-building among people with student loans," Zhan said. "These findings support our hypotheses that lack of both monetary resources and financial literacy, and a lack of access to mainstream financial services are barriers to wealth-building for young adults."

The study sample included people ages 24-35 who participated in the 2015 National Financial Capability Study, a survey conducted every three years that assesses the financial knowledge and practices of a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults ages 18 and over.

The survey, which began in 2009, assesses participants' general knowledge of financial concepts along with their use of credit cards, conventional financial institutions and alternative financial services.

(COLUMBUS, Ohio) - Button battery injuries in children have been increasingly severe--resulting in devastating injuries and even death. Button batteries damage esophageal tissue through isothermic hydrolysis reactions, resulting in alkaline caustic injury, which leads to tissue necrosis. Prompt removal of the battery is critical to minimizing damage. However, when children swallow a button battery, the injury can progress even after it is removed.

In a recent study from surgeon-researchers at Nationwide Children's Hospital, esophageal irrigation in the operating suite with dilute sterile vinegar, 0.25% acetic acid, after button battery removal was safe and improved mucosal appearance. Household cooking vinegar is typically a 5% concentration.

"Progression of esophageal tissue damage after removal is a hallmark of button battery injury," says Kris Jatana, MD, director of Pediatric Otolaryngology Quality Improvement at Nationwide Children's and lead author of the study publication. "Complications may be delayed up to 9 days for tracheoesophageal fistulas and up to 28 days for aortoesophageal fistulas."

The study, published in The Laryngoscope, followed data from six consecutive patients aged 19 months to 10 years who had a 3V lithium button battery lodged in the esophagus for 2 to 18 hours. Surgeons irrigated the injury site with sterile 0.25% acetic acid after removal.

"When we looked at the tissue in the OR, we could see that it was visually improved after the irrigation," says Dr. Jatana, who is also an associate professor in the Department of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery at The Ohio State University. "And none of these patients showed immediate or delayed esophageal complications."

The National Capital Poison Center Button Battery Guidelines currently recommends this new irrigation with 0.25% acetic acid during button battery removal. This is the first case series published in pediatric patients, using this initial concept that began at Nationwide Children's. It is now being performed around the world after esophageal button battery removal.

"This study highlights the importance of rapid endoscopic removal and the need for additional strategies to neutralize the injury site. Rapid neutralization of esophageal tissue pH as soon as possible after button battery removal may prevent the continued tissue injury associated with a prolonged alkaline environment and reduce long-term complications," concludes Dr. Jatana, who is also a Co-Chair of the National Button Battery Task Force, affiliated with the American Academy of Pediatrics and American Broncho-Esophagological Association. "This is something that all surgeons can consider to improve outcomes after esophageal button battery injury."

It is hard to get people excited about research software says Eliza Grames, a PhD candidate in ecology and evolutionary biology. Yet, the software she has developed is exciting and to understand why, it is important to put yourself into the shoes of a researcher.

Before embarking on a new research project, a thorough and exhaustive review of existing literature must be done to make sure the new project is novel. Researchers can also explore the entire body of previously published data on a subject to answer a new question using that same data.
This is a daunting task, especially considering that millions of new research articles are published each year. Where does one even begin to explore all of that data?

"Each new study contributes more to what we know about a topic, adding nuance and complexity that helps improve our understanding of the natural world. To make sense of this wealth of evidence and get closer to a complete picture of the world, researchers are increasingly turning to systematic review methods as a way to synthesize this information," says Grames.

"It is important to find all of the relevant information and to not find too much of it," says Grames.
The way to perform this search is through something called a systematic review, which Grames says started in the fields of medicine and public health, where keeping current with research can be a question of life or death.

"In those fields, there is an established system with Medical Subject Headers where articles get tagged with keywords associated with the work, but ecology does not have that." Other fields of research across the scientific spectrum were in the same boat.

The project sprang out of need. In her own process of reviewing, Grames noted she would miss articles and key terms and was interested in finding out how to identify those missing terms on the first try.

"As we were working on this software, we realized there was a much faster way to do the reviews than how others were doing them," says Grames, "The traditional way was mostly going through papers and pulling out a term and then reading the rest of the article to identify more terms to use."

Even with fairly specific key words, Grames notes the average systematic review in her field of conservation biology initially yields about 10,000 research papers for bigger projects. It is important to retrieve relevant information, without also retrieving too much irrelevant information.

"Each year, the amount of data just keeps increasing. There are some systematic reviews that if you look at the amount of time they would have taken just three years ago, they would take about 300 days to perform. If the same reviews were done today, they would take about 350 days because the number of publications just keeps going up and up."

Grames says it took about a month or two to hash out ideas for the software, then she spent a summer writing and fixing the code. The result is an open-source software package called litsearchr.

How it works, says Grames, is that a user will input their best faith effort of putting together a search into a few databases.

"The keywords should be fairly relevant to retrieve articles that are entered into the algorithm to extract all of the potential keywords, which are then put into a network. The original keywords are at the center of the network and are the most well-connected."

Grames says the time required to develop a search strategy has been decreased by 90%.

Presented with the most relevant articles, researchers then have significantly fewer papers to parse through manually. This review stage itself is partially automated now too, adds Grames.

Litsearchr is part of a collaborative effort by researchers, called metaverse, where the goal is to link several software packages together so researchers can perform their research from start to finish in the same coding language, R.

"Researchers can develop their systematic reviews, import data, and there is even a package that can write up the results section for the systematic review," says Grames.

Grames and her team set up the software so that it could be used by anyone, whether they can code or not, using templates ready to upload information to. There is also a detailed step-by-step video to take users through the process.

By keeping the software open source, Grames says debugging and editing is improved because users can point out details that need attention,

"Every time I get an email, it is so exciting. It is nice to have it open because people can let me know when there is a typo."

The software is currently being used by researchers in scientific fields such as nutritional science and psychology and for a massive undertaking of screening all papers pertaining to insect populations across the globe. Grames says it is nice to have the software in place to be able to take on such a big project.
"There is no way we could do this project without the level of automation we get using litsearchr. I built this out of a need from another project, but this software is making it possible to do even bigger analyses than before."

In the quest to prove that matter can be produced without antimatter, the GERDA experiment at the Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory in Italy is looking for signs of neutrinoless double beta decay. The experiment has the greatest sensitivity worldwide for detecting the decay in question. To further improve the chances of success, a follow-up project, LEGEND, uses an even more refined decay experiment.

While the Standard Model of Particle Physics has remained mostly unchanged since its initial conception, experimental observations for neutrinos have forced the neutrino part of the theory to be reconsidered in its entirety.

Neutrino oscillation was the first observation inconsistent with the predictions and proves that neutrinos have non-zero masses, a property that contradicts the Standard Model. In 2015, this discovery was rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

Are neutrinos their own antiparticles?

Additionally, there is the longstanding conjecture that neutrinos are so-called Majorana particles: Unlike all other constituents of matter, neutrinos might be their own antiparticles. This would also help explain why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the Universe.

The GERDA experiment is designed to scrutinize the Majorana hypothesis by searching for the neutrinoless double beta decay of the germanium isotope 76-Ge: Two neutrons inside a 76-Ge nucleus simultaneously transform into two protons with the emission of two electrons. This decay is forbidden in the Standard Model because the two antineutrinos - the balancing antimatter - are missing.

The Technical University of Munich (TUM) has been a key partner of the GERDA project (GERmanium Detector Array) for many years. Prof. Stefan Schönert, who heads the TUM research group, is the speaker of the new LEGEND project.

The GERDA experiment achieves extreme levels of sensitivity

GERDA is the first experiment to reach exceptionally low levels of background noise and has now surpassed the half-life sensitivity for decay of 10^26 years. In other words: GERDA proves that the process has a half-life of at least 10^26 years, or 10,000,000,000,000,000 times the age of the Universe.

Physicists know that neutrinos are at least 100,000 times lighter than electrons, the next heaviest particles. What mass they have exactly, however, is still unknown and another important research topic.

In the standard interpretation, the half-life of the neutrinoless double beta decay is related to a special variant of the neutrino mass called the Majorana mass. Based the new GERDA limit and those from other experiments, this mass must be at least a million times smaller than that of an electron, or in the terms of physicists, less than 0.07 to 0.16 eV/c^2 [1].

Consistent with other experiments

Also other experiments limit the neutrino mass: the Planck mission provides a limit on another variant of the neutrino mass: The sum of the masses of all known neutrino types is less than 0.12 to 0.66 eV/c^2.

The tritium decay experiment KATRIN at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) is set-up to measure the neutrino mass with a sensitivity of about 0.2 eV/c^2 in the coming years. These masses are not directly comparable, but they provide a cross check on the paradigm that neutrinos are Majorana particles. So far, no discrepancy has been observed.

From GERDA to LEGEND

During the reported data collection period, GERDA operated detectors with a total mass of 35.6 kg of 76-Ge. Now, a newly formed international collaboration, LEGEND, will increase this mass to 200 kg of 76-Ge until 2021 and further reduce the background noise. The aim is to achieve a sensitivity of 10^27 years within the next five years.

A new American Cancer Society study finds that colorectal cancer (CRC) incidence is increasing exclusively in young adults in nine high-income countries spanning three continents. The study, appearing in the journal Gut, finds the rising rates are in contrast to stable or declining trends in older adults, suggesting that changes in early-life exposures are increasing CRC risk.

Colorectal cancer is the third most commonly diagnosed cancer worldwide, with an estimated 1.8 million new cases in 2018. In general, CRC incidence is rising in low- and middle-income countries but beginning to stabilize or decline in high-income countries, especially those that have implemented screening. However, studies of cancer registry data indicate that favorable overall trends in the United States and Canada are masking an increase in young-onset CRC.

To learn more about contemporary patterns of early onset CRC on a global scale, investigators led by Rebecca Siegel, MPH, analyzed long-term population-based data on CRC occurrence in adults under 50 versus those 50 and older for 43 countries covering six continents using high-quality cancer incidence data from population-based cancer registries.

Of the 36 countries with sufficient numbers of cases to analyze trends, CRC incidence among adults under 50 was stable over the past ten years in 14 countries, decreased in three (Italy, Austria, and Lithuania), and increased in 19. In nine of those 19, the rise in early-onset CRC was in contrast to trends in those 50 and older, which were either dropping (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Germany, and United States) or stable (Denmark, Slovenia, Sweden, and United Kingdom). In all but one of these countries with long-term data, the uptick in early-onset CRC began in the mid-1990s.

In addition, in three countries (Cyprus, Netherlands, and Norway) where incidence rose in both younger and older age groups, the increase in young adults was twice as steep as that in older adults and also began in the mid-1990s. Early-onset CRC incidence increased most rapidly - by 4.2% per year - in South Korea, where the rate is already highest among all countries analyzed.

Declining incidence in older adults in many countries is partly attributed to CRC screening, which typically emerged over the past two decades and begins between the ages of 50 and 60 years. However, Austria and Italy, two of only three countries where early-onset CRC incidence is declining, have been screening adults beginning at age 40 and 45 years, respectively, since the early 1980s. In both Austria and Italy, declines in CRC under age 50 were confined to ages 40-49 years.

"These patterns potentially signal changes in early-age exposures conducive to large bowel carcinogenesis and highlight an urgent need for research to explore the potentially unique etiology of young-onset CRC," said Ms. Siegel. "Although the absolute risk of CRC in adults younger than 50 years is low relative to older adults, disease trends in young age groups are a key indicator of recent changes in risk factor exposures and often foreshadow the future cancer burden."

The authors note that while further studies elucidate potential causes for the increase, clinicians have an opportunity to help mitigate premature morbidity and mortality from CRC with active documentation of familial cancer history; timely follow-up of symptoms, regardless of patient age, and screening when appropriate.

Women who experienced six or more symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at some point in life had a twofold greater risk of developing ovarian cancer compared with women who never had any PTSD symptoms, according to a new study from researchers at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Moffitt Cancer Center.

The findings indicate that having higher levels of PTSD symptoms, such as being easily startled by ordinary noises or avoiding reminders of the traumatic experience, can be associated with increased risks of ovarian cancer even decades after women experience a traumatic event. The study also found that the link between PTSD and ovarian cancer remained for the most aggressive forms of ovarian cancer.

The findings were published in Cancer Research, on September 5, 2019.

"In light of these findings, we need to understand whether successful treatment of PTSD would reduce this risk, and whether other types of stress are also risk factors for ovarian cancer," said co-author Andrea Roberts, research scientist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Ovarian cancer is the deadliest gynecologic cancer and the fifth most common cause of cancer-related death among U.S. women. Studies in animal models have shown that stress and stress hormones can accelerate ovarian tumor growth, and that chronic stress can result in larger and more invasive tumors. A prior study found an association between PTSD and ovarian cancer in humans, but the study included only seven women with ovarian cancer and PTSD.

"Ovarian cancer has been called a 'silent killer' because it is difficult to detect in its early stages; therefore identifying more specifically who may be at increased risk for developing the disease is important for prevention or earlier treatment," said co-author Laura Kubzansky, Lee Kum Kee Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Harvard Chan School.

To better understand how PTSD may influence ovarian cancer risk, researchers analyzed data from the Nurses' Health Study II, which tracked the health of tens of thousands of women between 1989 and 2015 through biennial questionnaires and medical records. Participants were asked about ovarian cancer diagnosis on each questionnaire, and information was validated through a review of medical records.

In 2008, 54,763 Nurses' Health Study II participants responded to a supplemental questionnaire focused on lifetime traumatic events and symptoms associated with those events. Women were asked to identify the event they considered the most stressful, and the year of this event. They were also asked about seven PTSD symptoms they may have experienced related to the most stressful event.

Based on the responses, women were divided into six groups: no trauma exposure; trauma and no PTSD symptoms; trauma and 1-3 symptoms; trauma and 4-5 symptoms; trauma and 6-7 symptoms; and trauma, but PTSD symptoms unknown.

After adjusting for various factors associated with ovarian cancer, including oral contraceptive use and smoking, the researchers found that women who experienced 6-7 symptoms associated with PTSD were at a significantly higher risk for ovarian cancer than women who had never been exposed to trauma. Women with trauma and 4-5 symptoms were also at an elevated risk, but the risk did not reach statistical significance.

The study also showed that women who experienced 6-7 symptoms associated with PTSD were at a significantly higher risk of developing the high-grade serous histotype of ovarian cancer--the most common and aggressive form of the disease.

"Ovarian cancer has relatively few known risk factors - PTSD and other forms of distress, like depression, may represent a novel direction in ovarian cancer prevention research," said Shelley Tworoger, associate center director of population science at Moffitt. "If confirmed in other populations, this could be one factor that doctors could consider when determining if a woman is at high risk of ovarian cancer in the future."

The brain stores memories through a neuronal ensemble, termed engram cells. A unique system was established to transfer neuronal population activity into light with discrimination between engram and non-engram cells using fluorescence proteins. By using this system, it is revealed that engram sub-ensembles represent distinct pieces of information, which are then orchestrated to constitute an entire memory. In addition, some sub-ensembles preferentially reappear during post-learning sleep, and these replayed sub-ensembles are more likely to be reactivated during retrieval.

Japanese research group supervised by Dr Noriaki Ohkawa (Lecturer) and Professor Kaoru Inokuchi of University of Toyama succeeded to establish a system to investigate characteristic activity of cell ensemble acquiring memory and visualized ways for representation and consolidation of memory experienced novel episode in brain.

We are exposed to many episodic events and then memorize their information through our life. This kind of memory, episodic memory, is processed in several brain regions, and one of the regions is hippocampus. It is authorized that, in the hippocampus, one specific episodic memory is stored within and retrieved from a neuronal ensemble composed of neurons, termed engram cells, that are activated during learning. Indeed, activation or inhibition of engram cell ensemble induces or inhibits memory retrieval, respectively, thus, engram cell ensemble represents the physiological manifestation of a specific memory trace. However, one episodic memory is composed of several components of episode, and each component should be encoded by specific substrate, e.g. engram sub-ensemble. Nevertheless, it had not been clear how activity in these engram cells is assembled to represent the corresponding event because of technical limitations mean that it is difficult to distinguish the population activity of engram cells from that of non-engram cells.

To address how one episodic memory is represented and consolidated in engram cell ensemble, it is required to visualize the activity of engram and non-engram cells. Engram cells can be specifically targeted in c-fos-tTA mice because the neural activity associated with memory formation induces c-fos gene expression, which in turn induces activity-dependent tTA expression under the control of the c-fos promoter. In the absence of doxycycline, tTA can bind to the tetracycline responsive element (TRE), enabling downstream expression of the TRE-dependent transgene (Figure 1a). When neuron activates, Ca2+ flows into their soma. Thy1-G-CaMP7 mice express a Ca2+ indicator, G-CaMP7, in pyramidal neurons of hippocampal CA1 in the mice. Thus, neuronal activity is transferred into G-CaMP7 fluorescence, called Ca2+ imaging. We developed a technique that combines a head-mounted, miniature fluorescent microscope, with Thy1-G-CaMP7/c-fos-tTA double transgenic mice. The hippocampal CA1 region in double transgenic mice was injected with LV expressing a fluorescent protein, Kikume Green Red (KikGR), under the control of TRE (Figure 1a and 1b). Using this approach, engram cells can be identified with KikGR, and the Ca2+ signals corresponding to the activity of engram cells and non-engram cells can be tracked during experience of a novel episodic event (Figure 1c and 1d).

The data indicated that population activity of engram cell ensemble exhibited the characteristic trait of highly repetitive activity during novel episodic event. To address component of one memory, next, it was proposed to deconstruct population activity into sub-ensemble groups. Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) decomposes population activity into a time series of coactivated neuronal ensembles (Fig. 2a). Each sub-ensemble is composed of the different cells, which are spatially intermingled (Fig. 2b left), to make their synchronous activity even among the group of engram cells associated with a single event (Fig. 2b right). These results suggest that the total information of one event is structured into sub-engram ensembles.

In order to measure the activity of engram cells across different memory processing stages, recording of Ca2+ transients from novel experience through post-experience sleep to retrieval was conducted. Around 40% of the total number of sub-ensembles that appeared in a novel experience in engram reactivated during post-experience sleep and then preferentially reappeared in retrieval sessions, while almost none of sub-ensembles in non-engram did not show this feature. Thus, engram sub-ensembles formed during a novel experience and that were reactivated during sleep sessions were mostly reactivated during the retrieval session (Fig. 3). By contrast, most non-engram ensembles that were activated during the novel experience were not reactivated in the later sessions.

The findings reported in this study demonstrate that engram cells possess synchronous activity, formed by several sub-ensembles in the engram population. Only in engram cells does this synchronous activity survive through post-learning sleep sessions that contribute to the consolidation process. The present work sheds light on the relationship between ensemble activities and coding principles in learning and memory.

Increased consumption of sugar-sweetened and artificially sweetened soft drinks is associated with an increased risk of death. This is the main conclusion reached by a study based on 16-year follow-up of about 452,000 participants, male and female, from 10 European countries. Researchers from the Nutrition and Cancer group of the Catalan Institute of Oncology (ICO) and the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) have contributed to the findings.

Drinking two or more glasses a day (compared to less than one glass per month) of sugar-sweetened or artificially sweetened soft drinks has been associated with an increased risk of death from all causes. Additionally, positive associations between artificially sweetened soft drinks and deaths due to circulatory diseases and between sugar-sweetened soft drinks and deaths from digestive diseases were also found. On the other hand, no association was observed between soft drink consumption and cancer mortality.

These are the main results of the data analysis of the EPIC study (European Proactive Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition) corresponding to a 16-year follow-up during which 41,693 deaths occurred. Soft drink consumption rate was collected through diet questionnaires during the 1992-2000 period. The study includes participants from Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Spain. In Spain, the EPIC study includes participants from Asturias, Guipúzcoa, Navarra, Murcia and Granada, under the coordination of the Catalan Institute of Oncology.

The authors of the study suggest that the findings support public health campaigns aimed at limiting the consumption of soft drinks.

Forests with a large variety of species are more productive and stable under stress than monocultures: scientists from the University of Freiburg have confirmed this with data from the world's oldest field trial on the diversity of tropical tree species. The team around PhD student Florian Schnabel has published its results in the journal Global Change Biology.

As the researchers state, there is increasing scientific evidence of positive relationships between the diversity of tree species and ecosystem functioning. However most studies on this relationship to date have used either data from forests where the influence of biodiversity cannot be separated from other factors, or from young planted experiments, which do not provide data on longer periods of time. Therefore, the Freiburg research team analyzed data from the Sardinilla experiment which was planted in Panama in 2001. This experiment covers 22 plots planted with one, two, three or five native tree species. Since these grow at different rates, the plots with a greater variety of species also have a greater structural diversity with regard to the height and diameter of the trees. Annual data on the size and height of the trees, which are seen as indicators of the productivity and stability of the ecosystem, come from the period 2006 to 2016.

The study concludes that mixtures of two and three tree species have on average a 25 to 30 per cent higher productivity than monocultures, and those with five species even 50 percent higher. The differences during a severe dry period caused by the tropical climate phenomenon El Niño were especially pronounced. This indicates that forests with a greater diversity of tree species are not only more productive, but also more stable and resilient under drought stress - the researchers believe this is a particularly important finding in view of global climate change. In the context of initiatives that aim to reduce atmospheric CO2 with extensive reforestation, these results indicate that to store the same amount of CO2 in biomass, far less space is needed with mixed-species forests.

According to the team, these results offer new insights into the dynamics of tropical plantation forests and emphasize the importance of analyses that cover a longer development period, since they contribute to a better understanding of the connections between the diversity, productivity and stability of ecosystems. The study is based on Florian Schnabel's master thesis, for which he will be receiving the Hansjürg-Steinlin prize, a University of Freiburg award for new talent, in October at the start of the 2019/20 academic year. Florian Schnabel is now a PhD student involved in the TreeDì project at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) in Leipzig.

A research team of the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio) of the University of Barcelona has sequenced the genome of the spider Dysdera silvatica Schmidt 1981, an endemic species living in the laurel forests in the islands La Gomera, La Palma, and El Hierro -in the Canary Islands (Spain).

The new study reveals the first genome sequencing of an arthropod in the Canary Islands, an archipelago with a rich biodiversity regarding endemic species that are distributed around the insular area.

Participants in the new study, published in the journal GigaScience, are the experts Julio Rozas, Miquel Arnedo, José Francisco Sánchez-Herrero, Cristina Frías-López, Paula Escuer, Silvia Hinojosa-Alvarez and Alejandro Sánchez-Gracia (UB-IRBio).

Dysdera sylvatica: a ravening predator in the Canary laurel forests

The Dysdera genus, which belongs to the species Dysdera silvatica, includes more than 250 spider species mainly distributed around the Mediterranean area. The Macaronesian archipelagos represent the western limits of the distribution of this taxon, which reached a significant diversification in the Canary Islands, where there are about 50 endemic species currently.

"One of these species is Dysdera silvatica, integrated in an evolutionary lineage that became one of the main predators -both in abundance and diversity- in the insular terrestrial invertebrate trophic networks", notes Professor Miquel Arnedo, from the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences of the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio) of the UB.

"The species D. silvatica is a generalist predator. Unlike other spider groups, the Dysdera includes experts on hunting and consumption of terrestrial isopods. All these species live in the Canary Islands, where the crustacean trophic specialization seems to have evolved independently several times", adds the researcher, head of the research group on Arthropod Systematics and Animal Evolution of the UB.

The first genome sequencing in the Dysderoidea superfamily

This is the first sequencing of the nuclear and mitochondrial genome for a species of the Dysderoidea superfamily, and the second one known in the Synspermiata group, one of the main spider lineages. Regarding this group, the first species with the available genomic data was the brown recluse spider (Loxoceles reclusa Gertsch & Mulaik, 1940), a species distributed around the American continent and quite known for its necrotic venom.

According to the conclusions, the genome of the D. silvatica species is large (1.7 Gb) and shows a high complexity, with a high fraction of repetitive elements. According to Professor Julio Rozas (UB-IRBio), who co-led the study together with Alejandro Sánchez-Garcia, "Within this study, we created a 1.4 Gb genomic sequencing assembly, 54 % of which is built by repetitive elements"

"We identified and characterized a total of 36,000 protein-coding gens", notes Professor Julio Rozas (UB-IRBio), head of the research group on Evolutionary Genomics and Bioinformatics at the UB, part of the platform Bioinformatics Barcelona (BIB).

The D. silvatica species has a diploid chromosome set of six pairs of autosomes and two (females are XX) or one (males are X0) sex chromosomes (XX-X0), females have six non-sexual chromosome pairs (autosomes) and the XX sexual paired chromosomes. Males have six pairs of autosomes and only one X sexual chromosome.

Third generation sequencing techniques to treat a complex genome

The research study to sequence the genome of Dysdera silvatica started about five years ago with the application of next generation massive sequencing (NGS) such as Illumina. With this protocol, they created one billion short sequences (100 paired bases) that were not enough to get a quality assembly for the complex genome of the species.

Therefore, the research team completed these data with PacBio and Nanopore single molecule sequencing (SMS) techniques, "more expensive but more efficient methodologies to obtain larger genome sequencing, and provide a quality genomic assembly using the hybrid assembly strategy, combining data from the obtained sequencing through different technologies", notes José Francisco Sánchez-Herrero, member of the Department of Genetics, Microbiology and Statistics of IRBio and first author of the article.

Ecology, evolution and reproductive behavior

From a global perspective, the study brings new views to know more about the genetic bases of the eco-phenotype change that takes place during the adaptive radiation phenomena over biological evolution. In particular, the models from the Dysdera genus in the Canary Islands, the genome sequencing of this first species can bring valuable information on the underlying genetic architecture in the phenotype and physiological changes related to the trophic specialization, as well as the underground environment adaptations, a natural environment where some species got used to live exclusively in the lava tubes.

Regarding their reproductive behavior, the Dysderidae family includes species that show a cryptic female choice mechanism, that is, a reproductive strategy which consists on the female's post-copulatory choice of a male's sperm to fertilize their ova. This choice is conducted through a complex system of diverticulum and glands associated with the female vulva. Knowing the features of the genome of a species from this family could contribute to determine the genetic bases of this behavior, through a comparative study of several regions of the genome under different selective constrictions between sexes, and among species with different sexual strategies.

Last, the study provides useful resources to treat studies on other evolutionary and essential issues, such as the origins and evolution of products with medical and commercial interests produced by spiders (venom, silk, etc.).

An individual's premarital views about uncommitted sex may make it more difficult to remain blissfully married, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The research outlines several factors that can contribute to a marriage's long-term happiness or dissolution, including one big red flag: An individual's behaviors and attitudes about uncommitted sexual relationships even before the marriage.

"Marital satisfaction generally declines over time," said Juliana French, a Florida State University doctoral student and first author on the study. "But what we've found is that when, prior to their marriage, one or both spouses hold generalized beliefs that uncommitted sex is OK, that can contribute to the failure of a marriage."

French, along with fellow graduate student Emma Altgelt and Assistant Professor Andrea Meltzer, collected and analyzed data from 204 heterosexual, newly married couples. They collected information on their behaviors and attitudes prior to marriage as well as numerous factors related to their new marriages including their marital satisfaction.

Over the course of several years, researchers followed up with couples to collect information about their marital satisfaction and cataloged data on which couples separated or filed for divorce.

"We're generally interested in factors that predict the development of marriage over time and what contributes to marital success," French said.

In this study, the researchers focused on the degree to which people expressed "unrestricted sociosexual" behaviors, desires, and attitudes prior to marriage, which indicated they were more likely to engage in uncommitted sexual relationships such as one-night stands and generally believed that sex without love is okay.

Of the couples involved in the study, people who were relatively unrestricted were less satisfied at the start of their marriages; moreover, people who had relatively unrestricted partners experienced more rapid declines in satisfaction over the first several years of marriage, which ultimately predicted dissolution.

"What we found most surprising about these results was the fact that both couple members' sociosexuality play an important role in long-term, marital outcomes," French said.

The study doesn't weigh in on whether unrestricted sociosexuality is a negative or positive trait, French said. In fact, there were some contexts in which researchers found that it did not affect the marriage.

"We found evidence suggesting that couples who maintain a consistent, satisfying sexual relationship or couples who maintain low levels of stress are buffered against these negative outcomes," French said.

A new study, presented as 'Late Breaking Science' at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) annual congress and published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, highlights the feasible use of mobile health (mHealth) devices to help with the screening and detection of a common heart condition.

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a heart rhythm condition that causes an irregular and sometimes, abnormally fast heart rate. In AF, the heart's upper chambers (atria) contract randomly and sometimes so fast that the heart muscle cannot relax properly between contractions. This reduces the heart's efficiency and performance - but also leads to a higher risk of blood clots.

AF is the most common heart rhythm disturbance, affecting around one million people in the UK. People with AF are at increased risk of having a stroke and dying, as well as heart failure and dementia.

Currently, low detection due to lack of visible symptoms and nonadherence are major problems in current management approaches for patients with suspected AF.

Photoplethysmography technology

mHealth devices, such as fitness trackers, smart watches and mobile phones, may enable earlier AF detection, and improved AF management through the use of photoplethysmography (PPG) technology.

PPG is a simple and low-cost optical technique that can be used to detect blood volume changes in the microvascular bed of tissue. It is often used non-invasively to make measurements at the skin surface.

Researchers, led by Associate Professor Guo from Chinese PLA General Hospital in Beijing, and Professor Gregory Lip, Lead for the Liverpool Centre for Cardiovascular Science/Price-Evans Chair of Cardiovascular Medicine at University of Liverpool, aimed to determine the feasibility of AF screening in a large population-based cohort using smart devices with PPG technology, combined with a clinical care AF management pathway.

As part of the study AF screening was performed with smart wristbands* or watches** using PPG technology*** made available for the population aged over 18 years across China for approximately seven months (October 26, 2018 to May 20, 2019).

Results

Overall 187,912 participants used smart devices to monitor their pulse rhythm. During this time 424 (0.23%) of the individuals received a 'suspected AF' notification. Of those 227 (87%) were confirmed as having AF by health providers and other secondary examinations. These patients were provided with therapy and successfully anticoagulated.

Associate Professor Guo, said: "Based on our present study, continuous home-monitoring with smart device based PPG technology could be a feasible, cost-effective approach for AF screening. There were 95% patients following entry into a programme of integrated AF care, and approximately 80% of high risk patients were successfully anticoagulated. This would help efforts at screening and detection of AF, as well as early interventions to reduce stroke and other AF-related complications."

Professor Lip, said: "Improved AF care requires early detection and the opportunity for streamlined management decision-making. Better detection can be followed by implementing the priorities of AF management, which is as 'easy as ABC': Avoid stroke; Better symptom optimisation; Cardiovascular and risk factor management."

Bacteria are becoming increasingly resistant to common antibiotics. Often, resistance is mediated by resistance genes, which can simply jump from one bacterial population to the next. It's a common assumption that the resistance genes spread primarily when antibiotics are used, a rationale backed up by Darwin's theory: only in cases where antibiotics are actually being used does a resistant bacterium have an advantage over other bacteria. In an antibiotic-free environment, resistant bacteria have no advantage. This explains why health experts are concerned about the excessive use of antibiotics and call for more restrictions on their use.

However, a team of researchers led by scientists from ETH Zurich and the University of Basel have now discovered an additional, previously unknown mechanism that spreads resistance in intestinal bacteria that is independent of the use of antibiotics. "Restricting the use of antibiotics is important and the indeed the right thing to do, but this measure alone is not sufficient to prevent the spread of resistance," says Médéric Diard, who until recently held a post at ETH Zurich and is now a professor at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel. He continues, "If you want to control the spread of resistance genes, you have to start with the resistant microorganisms themselves and prevent these from spreading through, say, more effective hygiene measures or vaccinations." Diard led the research project together with Wolf-Dietrich Hardt, Professor for Microbiology at ETH Zurich.

Two resistance mechanisms combined

Persistent bacteria, also known as persisters, are responsible for this newly discovered resistance-spreading mechanism. Scientists have known for some time that, just like bacteria that carry resistance genes, persisters can survive antibiotic treatment. They fall into a temporary, dormant state and can reduce their metabolism to a minimum, which prevents the antibiotics from killing them. In the case of salmonella, the bacteria become dormant when they penetrate the body tissue from inside the gut. Once they have invaded the tissue, the persisters can live there undetected for months before awakening from their dormant state. If the conditions are conducive to bacterial survival, the infection can flare up again.

Even if the persisters don't cause a new infection, they can still have an adverse effect, as the scientists report in the journal Nature. In salmonella, a combination of the two resistance mechanisms is common: persisters that also carry small DNA molecules (plasmids) containing resistance genes.

Reservoir of genetic information

In experiments with mice, the researchers demonstrated that dormant salmonella in the gut can pass their resistance genes on to other individual bacteria of the same species and even to other species, such as E. coli from the normal intestinal flora. Their experiments showed that persisters are very efficient at sharing their resistance genes as soon as they awaken from their dormant state and encounter other bacteria that are susceptible to gene transfer. "By exploiting their persistent host bacterium, the resistance plasmids can survive for a prolonged period in one host before transferring into other bacteria. This speeds up their spread," ETH professor Hardt explains. It's important to note here that this transfer happens regardless of whether antibiotics are present or not.

The researchers now want to take their findings in mice and explore these more closely in livestock that frequently suffer from salmonella infections, such as pigs. The scientists also want to investigate whether it's possible to control the spread of resistance in livestock populations with probiotics or with a vaccination against salmonella.