Culture

New Marketing Science Study Key Takeaways:

Patients are positively influenced by hospital advertising.

Older patients and those with more restrictive forms of insurance are less sensitive to ads.

Wealthy patients and patients who live far from a hospital respond well to advertising.

A blanket ban on hospital advertising can lead to hospital readmissions.

CATONSVILLE, MD, August 20, 2019 - Should hospital advertising be banned? A few policymakers in Washington, D.C., have recently considered such an action based on a long-standing debate on whether it poses the spread of misinformation, and that it is not an effective or responsible use of an already limited healthcare budget. New research in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science studies the impact of a ban on hospital advertising, and whether those fears are justified.

Study authors, Tongil "TI" Kim and Diwas KC both of Emory University believe the results can help guide discussions about legislation pertaining to hospital advertising in the changing landscape of healthcare delivery.

The results show that patients are positively influenced by hospital advertising. Researchers say seeing a television ad for a hospital makes a patient more likely to choose that one.

"There are differences in patient response to ads based on insurance status, medical conditions and demographic factors like age, race and gender," said Kim, a professor in the Goizueta Business School at Emory. "Older patients and those with more restrictive forms of insurance are less sensitive to ads while wealthy patients and patients who live far from a hospital are more likely to respond to advertising."

The study looked at 220,000 patient visits between September 2008 and August 2010 in Massachusetts, observing characteristics like hospital type, geographic location and advertisement dollars spent.

But, does that advertising facilitate the spread of misinformation? Is it an effective use of hospital operating funds?

"Our research found that banning hospital advertising can negatively affect population health outcomes by increasing hospital readmissions within 30 days. A blanket ban on hospital advertising can lead to an additional 1.2 hospital readmissions for every 100 hospital discharges," said Kim.

Hospital readmission rate is a measure of hospital quality, and, according to the study, high quality (low readmission) hospitals tend to advertise more. Thus, advertising allows these hospitals to draw and treat more patients, leading to overall population level quality gains. A ban on advertising would then reduce the number of patients going to those hospitals and hence lower population level health outcome.

Kim added, "In short, we found that when you inhibit a hospital's ability to attract new patients, you also negatively impact patient flow, and you contribute to an increase in hospital readmissions."

In India, children that belong to disadvantaged castes face a much higher likelihood of not living past their fifth birthday than their counterparts in non-deprived castes. IIASA researchers examined the association between castes and under-five mortality in an effort to help reduce the burden of under-five deaths in the country.

The world has made remarkable progress in terms of child survival rates over the past few decades, with a marked decline in deaths among children under five seen across the world since the mid-2000s. Although India has also seen a consistent decline in child deaths in recent years, the under-five mortality rate is still high in a few selected states and among the scheduled caste (previously referred to as "untouchables") and scheduled tribe population (communities living in tribal areas), thus representing a major public health concern. Despite continuing efforts by the Indian government to redress the effects of the caste system, it remains a significant line of social division in the country and people in disadvantaged castes continue to experience adverse circumstances such as caste-based discrimination while accessing the health care system.

In their study published in the journal PLOS ONE, IIASA researchers examined the disparities in under-five mortality in the so-called high focus states of India - designated as such due to their persistently high child mortality rates and relatively poor socioeconomic and health indicators. The study examined the association between castes and under-five mortality in these regions using the most recent data from the Indian Demographic Health Survey conducted between 2015 and 2016. In addition, the authors attempted to quantify the relative contribution of socioeconomic determinants to under-five deaths by explaining the gap between socially disadvantaged castes and non-disadvantaged castes in these regions in an effort to help reduce the absolute and relative burden of under-five deaths in the country.

"The main questions we wanted to address were whether the association between caste and under-five mortality had been fading away in recent years due to the government's health programs, particularly after the implementation of the country's National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) in 2005. We also wanted to determine which factors contribute to caste-based gaps in under-five mortality in India," explains Jayanta Bora, lead author of the study and previously a researcher with the IIASA World Population Program. "The novelty of our work lies therein that, to our knowledge, this is the first study in India that provides district-level estimates of the under-five mortality rate while systematically investigating the factors explaining under-five deaths by caste groups using nationally representative data."

The results show that in the high focus Indian states, under-five deaths between well-off and deprived caste children have declined since the NRHM was implemented, indicating the program's positive impact in terms of reducing caste-based inequalities. Despite the reduction in under-five deaths, children belonging to the scheduled caste population however still experienced higher mortality rates than children belonging to the rest of the population between 1992 and 2016. Both district level mortality rates and individual analyses showed that children belonging to scheduled castes have the highest likelihood of dying before their fifth birthday. A further analysis of the data revealed that 83% of the caste-based gap in under-five deaths is related to the level of educational attainment of women and the difference in household wealth between the scheduled casts and tribes and the rest of the population. The study also found that program indicators such as place of birth and the number of antenatal care visits that women attended over the course of their pregnancy contributed significantly to widening caste-based gaps in the under-five death rate.

According to the researchers, there is still a lot that needs to be done to improve access to health care facilities for mothers and children belonging to deprived caste groups in India and continuous efforts to raise the level of maternal education and the economic status of people belonging to these groups should be pursued simultaneously.

"We strongly believe that this study is a crucial contribution to knowledge in the Indian context with respect to the UN's Sustainable Development Goal number three, which focuses on ensuring healthy lives and promoting wellbeing for all people at all ages. The findings of this study can help to understand the factors behind the pervasive gap in the under-five mortality rate between deprived and other caste groups in India. Creating awareness around preventive health care, maternal care, nutrition, awareness about infectious diseases, the benefits of hygiene and sanitation, and subsidized maternal health care services among the scheduled caste and scheduled tribe populations, should be increased through outreach programs," Bora concludes.

Your immune system's natural killer cells recognize and attack two major kinds of danger - cells infected by viruses and cells affected by cancer. When natural killer (NK) cells see a cancer cell, they kill it (naturally...). And a major research focus has been to define how NK cells do this "seeing." One way NK cells see cancer is by recognizing bits of mutated DNA displayed on "silver platters" made by human leukocyte antigen (HLA) genes.

In fact, there are two classes of HLA genes. HLA class 1 genes do exactly this task of making proteins that display a cell's DNA for examination and evaluation. But while HLA class 1 genes help to identify bad actors among the body's own cells, HLA class 2 genes help the body mark and target invaders from outside the body, rallying antibodies against things like bacteria.

So why has recent research shown that patients whose cancer cells are marked by high counts of HLA class 2 proteins have better outcomes? Sure, HLA class 1 brings NK cells to attack tumor tissue, but it's not like HLA class 2 interacts with NK cells, right?

Wrong.

A University of Colorado Cancer Center study recently published in the journal Nature Immunology shows that NK cells do, in fact, interact with HLA class 2. The implications may help researchers better harness the immune system to fight cancer, and, on the other side of the coin, may also help to calm the immune system's attack of healthy tissues in some autoimmune conditions.

"The understanding has been that NK cells interact with HLA class 1 but not class 2. The identification of a mechanism that class 2 uses to interact with NK cells changes our perception of NK cell biology," says study co-author Paul Norman, PhD, CU Cancer Center investigator and associate professor in the CU School of Medicine Division of Personalized Medicine, and Department of Microbiology and Immunology.

Basically, collaborators at the German Center for Infection Research screened many types of proteins created by HLA class 2 genes to see if any would activate NK cells.

"This is called ligand screening - test lots of potential ligands and see what sticks. But because it was established fact that HLA class 2 didn't interact with NK, nobody looked. They were smart enough to look when nobody else did," Norman says.

Specifically, the team found that a kind of HLA class 2 called HLA-DP401 does indeed activate NK cells - and HLA-DP401 is one of the most common variations (called alleles) found in Europeans.

"The problem is that not every one of these HLA class 2 molecules is recognized by NK cells. HLA is polymorphic and different individuals have different kinds. The next step is to identify which patients have the right combinations of HLA class 2 and NK cells - like we recently published for HLA class 1 in leukemia protection - and then we could potentially learn to engineer NK cells to interact with HLA class 2 alleles they don't interact with now," Norman says.

Norman's ongoing research hopes to further define the mechanism of interaction between the proteins created by HLA class 2 genes and NK cells.

"Eventually, this could be another way to direct the immune system toward cancer and away from healthy tissues," Norman says.

For allergy sufferers, the pollination period is a tough time, whereas for plants it is the opportunity to reproduce: in addition to the wind, insects, in particular, carry the pollen from one flower to another to pollinate them. During this transport, the pollen must repeatedly attach to and detach from different surfaces. To date, the underlying adhesive mechanisms have hardly been studied so far. Now, scientists from the Zoological Institute at Kiel University have discovered that the mechanisms are far more complex than previously assumed. They differ depending on the duration of the contact and the microstructure of the surfaces. In their study presented in the current issue of the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, they found a unique pollen gripping mechanism on the receptive female part of plants for the first time. The results could provide important knowledge for the transport of medicinal substances, and also - in light of the alarming decline in insect populations - for the development of alternative strategies in agriculture and food production.

Pollen: an all-round adhesive talent

Itchy nose, red eyes, constant sneezing - materials scientist Shuto Ito suffered from a severe pollen allergy. To learn more about the process of pollen dispersal he left his hometown in Japan to study the adhesive properties of pollen under Professor Stanislav Gorb at Kiel University. Bionics researcher Gorb and his working group "Functional Morphology and Biomechanics" investigate the special abilities of plants and animals, and how these can be imitated artificially.

"If pollen is transported by insects from flower to flower, it encounters three different types of surfaces to which it must attach itself and then detach again. We want to find out which adhesive mechanisms enable this," explained Gorb. Doctoral researcher Ito investigates these mechanisms using as a model species Hypochaeris radicata, also known as common cat's-ear (or false dandelion). This species within the family of the composite plants blooms from spring to late autumn in the entire northern hemisphere. As with many other plants, the pollen on their yellow flowers is covered with an oily substance known as pollenkitt. "Until now, scientists believed that pollenkitt has a central adhesive function. But we have found out that under certain conditions it behaves in exactly the opposite way. We must consider the adhesive mechanisms in a much more differentiated manner," Ito summarised the findings thus far. Accordingly, pollen adhesion is influenced by a complex interplay of the age of the pollen, the humidity and the respective surfaces for adhesion.

Examining the starting and ending points of the pollen's journey

In their current study, the scientists concentrated on the two parts of the plant, which are most important for the pollination. They represent the starting and ending points of the pollination: on the style of a flower, the pollen grain is presented before it is rubbed off by an insect. On the upper end of the style, the incoming pollen grains land on the stigma.

With an atomic force microscope, the scientists measured how strongly the pollen adhered to both the style and the stigma in Hypochaeris radicata. They discovered that both parts of the plant have very distinct adhesive properties, which change during the course of the pollination. Thus, the pollen adhesion on the stigma increases, while that on the style is rather restrained. The adhesion force of fresh pollen on the stigmatic surfaces exhibited a dramatic increase over the contact time of 180 seconds by a factor of 11.9, while the adhesion force of fresh pollen on the stylar surfaces yielded an increase only by a factor of 2.7.

Optimal adjustment during the course of evolution

"We assume that during the course of evolution, the two parts of the plant have developed different functions, in order to optimize the pollination process," explained Ito. If the adhesion increased on the style as the starting point of pollination, then the pollen grains could not be detached. In contrast, the stigma has increased its adhesive properties and keeps hold of pollen grains once they come into contact with it. "The newly found pollen gripping mechanism on the stigma is likely to assure the reproduction of plants by anchoring pollen on the stigma until fertilization occurs" Ito continued.

The scientists suggest that the different properties of the two parts of the plant are due to their different surface structures and the presence or absence of secreted liquid on the surface, which can be seen at the resolution of an electron microscope. They examined shock frozen samples of the plants with a Cryo scanning electron microscope. In this condition, the samples retain their original structure, and even fluids such as the secreted liquid on the stigma can be observed in high-resolution images.

New insights into coating processes and transporting medicinal substances possible

"If we can discover the mechanisms by which such interactions of microparticles and surfaces could be controlled, we could potentially draw conclusions for coating and printing processes, the transport of medicinal substances, or the treatment of respiratory diseases," suspects Gorb. And maybe one day special filters for pollen allergy sufferers.

Bottom Line: The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) is broadening its recommendation on screening for potentially harmful mutations of the breast cancer susceptibility BRCA1/2 genes, which are associated with increased risk of certain cancers. The USPSTF now recommends primary care clinicians assess risk in women with a personal or family history of breast, ovarian, fallopian tube, or peritoneal (tissue lining the abdominal cavity) cancer or those who have an ancestry associated with BRCA1/2 mutations. Women with a positive result on that risk assessment should receive genetic counseling and, if indicated after counseling, genetic testing. The USPSTF recommends against routine risk assessment, genetic counseling, or genetic testing for women whose personal or family history or ancestry is not associated with BRCA1/2 mutations.

(doi:10.1001/jama.2019.10987)

Editor's Note: Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.

Note: More information about the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, its process, and its recommendations can be found on the newsroom page of its website.

Heavy cigarette smokers with at least a 20 pack-year smoking history can reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) by 39% within five years if they quit, according to a study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

But it takes at least five to 10 years, and perhaps up to 25 years after quitting, for CVD risk to become as low as that of a similar person who has never smoked.

"Previous studies have shown the association between quitting and reduced CVD risk," said lead author, Meredith Duncan, MA, who led the analyses for the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. "But the current Atherosclerotic CVD Risk Calculator, which is routinely used in clinical practice, considers former smokers' risk to be similar to that of never smokers after five years of cessation, which is not consistent with these findings."

Cigarette smoking is responsible for 20% of CVD deaths in the United States, the study notes.

Researchers used data from the Framingham Heart Study, a longitudinal study of men and women from Framingham, Massachusetts, which began enrollment in 1948 and now includes their children and grandchildren, as well as multiethnic cohorts.

The study used prospective data from 1954 through 2014 from 8,770 participants -- 3,805 from the Original cohort and 4,965 from the Offspring cohort -- to determine the effect of lifetime smoking and smoking cessation on the risk of CVD, which includes myocardial infarction, stroke, CVD death and heart failure.

"The Framingham Heart Study provides particularly robust data on lifetime smoking history," added Duncan. "Our team leveraged this unique opportunity to document what happens to CVD risk after quitting smoking relative to people who continued to smoke and to those who never smoked."

Senior author Hilary Tindle, MD, MPH, medical director of the VUMC Tobacco Treatment Service and founding director of the Vanderbilt Center for Tobacco Addiction and Lifestyle (ViTAL), urges smokers to act on these study results by putting out their cigarettes.

"The cardiovascular system begins to heal relatively quickly after quitting smoking, even for people who have smoked heavily over decades," Tindle said. "Full recovery could take years, so now is a great time to quit smoking and take other steps toward heart health."

Chinese cabbage is part of a crop family that must be exposed to cold temperatures for a particular period of time in order to flower. Scientists have succeeded in comprehensively identifying the long noncoding ribonucleic acids (IncRNAs) that are expressed when Chinese cabbage is temporarily exposed to cold temperatures for four weeks. LncRNAs that are known to be involved in responding to cold in Arabidopsis thaliana do not exist in Chinese cabbage, which suggests that Chinese cabbage has its own independent mechanism for flowering.

The research team was led by Namiko Nishida (Kobe University Graduate School of Agricultural Science) and Daniel Shea (Niigata University Graduate School of Science and Technology). The team also included Associate Professor Ryo Fujimoto (Kobe University Graduate School of Agricultural Science), Professor Keiichi Okazaki (Niigata University Graduate School of Science and Technology), Team Leader Motoaki Seki (RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science), members of Japan's National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO) and Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. The findings were published on June 26 in the online edition of Scientific Reports.

Non-coding RNAs lack the information needed to create proteins. These noncoding RNAs are classified into small RNAs (around 20 nucleotides long) and long noncoding RNAs (IncRNAs, over 200 nucleotides long). LncRNAs are expressed in most plants, with tens of thousands known to be expressed in the model plant A. thaliana.

LncRNAs have been linked to the phenomenon of vernalization: when plants need to be exposed to a period of cold treatment in order to flower. This phenomenon can be seen in many subspecies of Brassica rapa L. including the Chinese cabbage, which grows during winter to bloom in spring (Figure 1).

The research team extracted total RNAs from Chinese cabbage leaves cultivated for two weeks at 22°C and Chinese cabbage leaves cultivated at room temperature for two weeks, then at a low temperature (4°C) for a further four weeks. Using RNA-sequencing, they obtained enough information to identify the changes in the expression of IncRNAs after exposure to low temperatures.

When the team investigated the mRNAs (messenger RNAs) expression patterns induced by low temperatures whose transcription domains overlapped with incRNAs (intronic RNAs, a type of IncRNA) and NATs (natural antisense transcripts, another type of IncRNA), they found similar expression patterns but a strong association to vernalization was not found. However, they found combinations of mRNA and NATs that showed the same altered expression under low temperatures (Figure 2), suggesting that NATs are connected to changes in mRNA expression under cold treatment.

The team searched for the existence of IncRNAs whose expression is induced by cold treatment, focusing on the BrFLC loci. One NAT called BrFLC2as showed similar structure and expression patterns to COOLAIR (a key IncRNA of A. thaliana), but these similarities were not found in BrFLC1, BrFLC3 or BrFLC5 (Figure 3). In all four BrFLC types, the IncRNAs COLDAIR and COOLWRAP known to recruit the PRC2 complex in A. thaliana was not identified in Chinese cabbage. Their results suggest that for Chinese cabbage exposed to low temperatures, the PRC2 complex may be recruited to the FLC locus based on a different mechanism from A. thaliana.

From these findings we now know that IncRNA expression is not induced in Chinese cabbage from the FLC locus, suggesting that it follows a different flowering mechanism from the model in A. thaliana. The next step is to reveal how the PRC2 complex is recruited to the FLC locus under cold treatment. Revealing the full vernalization mechanism via FLC genes could contribute to selective breeding of Chinese cabbage.

Ann Arbor, August 20, 2019 - A new study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, published by Elsevier, found that the prevalence of depression, cannabis use, and alcohol abuse increased among former smokers from 2005 to 2016 in the United States. Therefore, increases in these risk factors for relapse among former smokers could threaten progress in reducing the prevalence of cigarette use.

"It's good news that as tobacco control efforts have been successful at reducing smoking, the proportion of former smokers among the US population is increasing. However, as our study demonstrates, more of them are now suffering from depression and engaging in problematic substance use," said lead investigator Renee D. Goodwin, PhD, Institute for Implementation Science in Population Health, The City University of New York; Department of Epidemiology, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University; and Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, The City University of New York, New York, NY, USA.

Conducted in 2018-9, the study investigated the prevalence of depression, cannabis use, and alcohol misuse among former smokers ages 18 and older in the US from 2005 to 2016. Data were drawn from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, an annual, nationally representative cross-sectional study. More than 67,000 individuals, aged 18 and over, participated in the study. It is the first national US study to focus on the prevalence and time trends of depression, marijuana use, and problematic alcohol use among former smokers.

During the study period, the incidence of major depression increased from 4.88 percent to 6.04 percent, cannabis use during the previous year rose from 5.35 percent to 10.09 percent, and alcohol binge drinking during the previous month went up from 17.22 percent to 22.33 percent among former smokers.

The results show that the profile of former smokers has changed over the study period. An increasing percentage of the US population who were ever smokers, no longer smoke (49.7 percent in 2016, compared to 44.4 percent in 2002). Former smokers are slightly more likely to be male than female, married, and of non-Hispanic white ethnicity. In 2016 compared to 2002, former smokers were more likely to be older than 65, never married, have some college education, and incomes over $75 thousand a year. More than half of them had also quit smoking for three years or more. Factors that may have affected the results are the increasing legalization, decreasing perception of risk associated with use, and reduced stigma of cannabis, which may sometimes be used by smokers trying to quit tobacco. However, the investigators note that when former smokers use it, they increase their likelihood of returning to tobacco.

"Because previous research has demonstrated that these factors put former smokers at greater risk of relapsing with tobacco (and relapse is a risk that lingers for decades), our study should signal an alarm for public health leaders and healthcare providers. The findings represent a looming threat to the progress that has been made in reducing the prevalence of cigarette use," Dr. Goodwin cautioned.

Dr. Goodwin noted that the findings should have bearing on ongoing tobacco control policy decisions, "Since it has been shown that depression and substance use may compromise abstinence, anyone designing community-based public information campaigns and engaged in clinical interactions with former smokers should be made aware that modifiable predictors of relapse are increasing among former smokers. As such, screening for these issues and referral to treatment should be high priorities. These are important steps for assuring growing and sustained abstinence among the US population, a trend with significant health and societal benefits."

Researchers in Umeå, Sweden, have presented a model that explains why memory deteriorates as the body ages. With age, the brain receives an increased load from the heart's beating as the body's large arteries stiffen over the years, causing damage to the smallest blood vessels in the brain.

The fact that human memory is deteriorating with increasing age is something that most people experience sooner or later, even among those who avoid diseases such as Alzheimer's. Similarly, a connection between the ageing of the brain and the body is well known. However, the exact nature of this association is not known.

"We suggest a chain of events on how the ageing of the brain and vessels are related," says Lars Nyberg, professor at Umeå University.

What Umeå researchers Lars Nyberg and Anders Wåhlin have created is an explanatory model that starts with the heartbeat, and carries through the largest arteries in the body all the way to the finest vessels in the brain. An important feature of the model is that it provides a rationale why some cognitive processes may be particularly at risk for the proposed mechanism.

As the human body ages, large arteries, such as the aorta, stiffen and lose a large portion of their ability to absorb the pressure increase generated as the heart ejects blood into the arteries. Such pressure pulsatility is instead transmitted to smaller blood vessels, for example those in the brain. The smallest blood vessels in the brain, the capillaries, are subjected to an increased stress that causes damage to cells within and surrounding the capillary walls. These cells are important in the regulation of the capillary blood flow. If the smallest blood vessels are damaged, this is detrimental to the ability to increase the blood supply to the brain when coping with demanding cognitive processes.

According to the researchers' model, the hippocampus in the brain is particularly vulnerable. The structure in that part of the brain is important for the episodic memory, that is, the ability to remember events from the past. The vulnerability of the hippocampus relates to the fact that it is located close to the large vessels and thus is exposed to the increased load early in the chain. In a young and healthy person, the pulsations are soft, but in an ageing person the pulsations can be so powerful that they affect the brain tissue and can damage the blood supply to memory processes.

The Umeå researchers' model is based on a number of previous studies from the last five years.

"We have laid the puzzle of current and verified research in different fields to a broader and more detailed picture of the course of events. It will form a starting point for future research to gain a better understanding and, in the long term, researchers may also find solutions to slow down the process," says Anders Wåhlin.

If you lose sleep over the number of likes on your Instagram account, you might want to think twice before posting that selfie.

That's the main takeaway from a new study in the Journal of Research in Personality by Washington State University psychologists.

The scientists conducted a novel experiment with hundreds of actual Instagram users to determine if there are certain types of self-image posts that cause others to make snap judgements about the user's personality.

Their work shows that individuals who post a lot of selfies are almost uniformly viewed as less likeable, less successful, more insecure and less open to new experiences than individuals who share a greater number of posed photos taken by someone else. Basically, selfie versus posie.

"Even when two feeds had similar content, such as depictions of achievement or travel, feelings about the person who posted selfies were negative and feelings about the person who posted posies were positive," said Chris Barry, WSU professor of psychology and lead author of the study. "It shows there are certain visual cues, independent of context, that elicit either a positive or negative response on social media."

Barry began researching possible links between Instagram activity and personality traits around five years ago. At the time, the idea that people who take lots of selfies are probably narcissists was front and center in the pop culture world.

Barry decided to put the popular theory to the test. He conducted two studies investigating potential links between posting lots of selfies on Instagram and a narcissistic personality.

Somewhat surprisingly, the research was inconclusive.

"We just weren't finding anything," Barry said. "That got us thinking that while posts on social media might not be indicative of the poster's personality, other people might think they are. So, we decided to design another study to investigate."

A novel experiment

Barry, along with WSU psychology students and collaborators from the University of Southern Mississippi analyzed data from two groups of students for the study. The first group consisted of 30 undergraduates from a public university in the southern United States.

The participants were asked to complete a personality questionnaire and agreed to let the researchers use their 30 most recent Instagram posts for the experiment.

The posts were coded based on whether they were selfies or posies as well as what was depicted in each image, such as physical appearance, affiliation with others, events, activities or accomplishments.

The second group of students consisted of 119 undergraduates from a university in the northwestern United States. This group was asked to rate the Instagram profiles of the first group on 13 attributes such as self-absorption, low self-esteem, extraversion and success using only the images from those profiles.

Barry's team then analyzed the data to determine if there were visual cues in the first group of students' photos that elicited consistent personality ratings from the second group.

They found that the students who posted more posies were viewed as being relatively higher in self-esteem, more adventurous, less lonely, more outgoing, more dependable, more successful and having the potential for being a good friend while the reverse was true for students with a greater number of selfies on their feed.

Personality ratings for selfies with a physical appearance theme, such as flexing in the mirror, were particularly negative, the researchers found.

Other interesting findings from the study included that students in the first group who were rated by the second group as highly self-absorbed tended to have more Instagram followers and followed more users.

The researchers also found the older the study participants in the second group were, the more they tended to rate profiles negatively in terms of success, consideration of others, openness to trying new things and likeability.

"One of the noteworthy things about this study is that none of these students knew each other or were aware of the Instagram patterns or number of followers of the people they were viewing," Barry said.

The researchers have several theories to explain their results.

The generally positive reactions to posies may be due to the fact that the photos appear more natural, similar to how the observer would see the poster in real life.

Another explanation is that selfies were far less frequently posted than posies and seeing one could signal something strange or unusual about the poster.

"While there may be a variety of motives behind why people post self-images to Instagram, how those photos are perceived appears to follow a more consistent pattern," Barry said. "While the findings of this study are just a small piece of the puzzle, they may be important to keep in mind before you make that next post."

Site-directed spin labelling (SDSL) used in combination with electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy has been a tried and trusted technique for elucidating the structure, function and dynamics of proteins and protein complexes. Nitroxide-based spin labels are among the most popular and best established ones because they are small, non-disturbing and exhibit excellent spectroscopic properties. "Ideal spin labelling procedures exhibit high reaction rates and selectivity", explains Professor Malte Drescher, Professor for Spectroscopy of Complex Systems at the University of Konstanz's Department of Chemistry and main author on the study alongside Professor Valentin Wittmann, who specializes in organic synthesis.

"Achieving high reactivity and high selectivity both at the same time can be a problem", continues Drescher. "Conventional spin labels based, for instance, on Gadolinium(III) or trityl, display either very broad spectra and low modulation depths or very narrow spectra that are unsuitable for the kinds of experiments that we want to conduct". A new study published by Drescher, Wittmann and their team of University of Konstanz chemists, which was published online in the journal ChemBioChem Communications on 14 August 2019, introduces a new approach for labelling proteins that features nitroxide-based spin labels and genetically encoded noncanonical amino acids (ncAAs) as targets for SDSL.

"Nitroxides provide ideal spectral width and access to dynamic information", says Anandi Kugele, a doctoral researcher at the Konstanz Research School Chemical Biology (KoRS-CB) and first author on the study, who received a prestigious travel grant from the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory to present the results at the 2019 Rocky Mountain Conference on Magnetic Resonance in Denver, Colorado (USA). "Traditional nitroxide-based labels have limited redox stability, which is a drawback for in-cell applications. The challenge for us was to increase nitroxide stability and thus to adapt nitroxide-based spin labels for future routine in vivo use". To that end, the researchers developed a new spin label that can be attached to proteins by means of inverse-electron-demand Diels-Alder (DAinv) cycloaddition to genetically encoded ncAAs, a method which has proven suitable to a broad range of in vitro and in vivo applications. To achieve nitroxide stability, the researchers further used a protection strategy based on photoremovable protecting groups, which are known to protect nitroxides and to release them as needed.

The new spin label - termed photoactivatable nitroxide for DAinv reaction, or PaNDA for short - is water soluble, EPR-active and deprotection-efficient as both in vitro and in lysate tests with the two model proteins green fluorescent protein (GFP) and Escherichia coli oxidoreductase thioredoxin (TRX), which is found in virtually all known organisms, suggest. "We do need to improve on the method used to deliver the PaNDA spin label to cells and to test labelling and deprotection efficiencies inside the cell, amongst other things", concludes Malte Drescher: "But our research clearly demonstrates that, in principle, the PaNDA label can be used for EPR measurements in challenging biological environments, including the inside of cells. Our tests with E. coli lysate are very promising in this respect. This will open up a whole new range of opportunities for the study of proteins by means of EPR spectroscopy".

Washington, DC - August 20, 2019 - Most types of Escherichia coli are harmless, but the ones that aren't can cause severe life-threatening diarrhea. These problematic bacteria launch infections by inducing intestinal cells to form tiny structures, called pedestals, that anchor the pathogens in place and help the colonies grow.

This week in mBio, microbiologists describe an Achilles heel for disabling pedestal formation. Lab experiments on enteropathogenic and enterohemorrhagic E. Coli (EPEC and EHEC) showed that when the pathogens were prevented from injecting a protein called EspG into intestinal hosts, the hosts were slower and less effective in producing pedestals that fixed the bacteria in place. Further investigations revealed the cellular pathways hijacked by EspG.

The findings can help reveal the mechanics of infection and suggest new avenues of treatment, said microbiologist and study co-leader Peter Hume, Ph.D, at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

"By learning how these pathways work, we think we can develop new ways of interfering with the infection process," he said.

Worldwide, more than 500,000 children die every year from diarrheal diseases, and pathogenic strains of E. Coli are among the most common causes, according to the World Health Organizations. But treating these infections can be tricky. Using antibiotics to treat a person with EHEC, for example, can trigger the bacteria to release Shiga toxin, which can lead to a life-threatening infection similar to sepsis. That means health care providers need treatments other than antimicrobials to keep these infections in check, Hume said.

Researchers have long known that pathogenic E. coli injects its host with a variety of proteins, including EspG. Until now, however, those interactions have been linked only to other biochemical functions. "People had tried to find a link to pedestals before, but they hadn't found one," said Hume, whose work focuses on how bacterial pathogens affect the cytoskeletons of host cells. The current study was carried out in the lab of Vassilis Koronakis, by Hume in collaboration with Cambridge colleagues Vikash Singh and Anthony Davidson.

Previously, the researchers studied the effects of EspG on macrophages, and those findings suggested the protein may have an overlooked role in pedestal formation with intestinal hosts.

For the current study, they infected one group of Hap1 cells with wild-type EHEC and EPEC, and infected another with the same types of E. Coli, but lacking the genes responsible for producing EspG. Using fluorescence microscopy, the researchers studied the results. The cells infected by E. Coli lacking EspG took longer to produce pedestals the those by wild-type strains, and what pedestals were produced were shorter.

Follow up experiments revealed that the EspG protein hijacks the host cell by scavenging an active enzyme called PAK. Although previous work has shown a link between EspG and PAK, the new study is the first to connect the two to the formation of pedestals.

That connection may help researchers studying other diseases, as well. PAK has been implicated in some cancers, and other studies have shown that some viruses -- including HIV -- can activate it.

"This study may well have implications with other pathogens that manipulate the same pathways," Hume said.

Cold water released from Lake Shasta into the Sacramento River to benefit endangered salmon can be detrimental to young green sturgeon, a threatened species adapted to warmer water. But scientists at UC Santa Cruz and the National Marine Fisheries Service have found a way to minimize this apparent conflict through a water management strategy that benefits both species, while also meeting the needs of agricultural water users downstream.

Releases of cold water during the spring and summer create favorable spawning conditions in the Sacramento River for the endangered winter-run chinook salmon, which were cut off from their historical spawning grounds at higher elevations by the construction of Shasta Dam. Salmon eggs require cold water temperatures to survive, but juvenile green sturgeon need the lower flows and warmer temperatures typical of the main stem of the Sacramento River to grow and thrive.

The researchers used statistical modeling to see if there is an optimal management scenario that can meet the needs of both species along with those of downstream water users. Their results, published August 20 in the Journal of Applied Ecology, show that dam releases can be managed to achieve all three objectives in all but the most severe drought years.

"It's a win-win-win here in the sense that we're not giving up anything to get an improvement for the green sturgeon," said Eric Palkovacs, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz and senior author of the paper. "Currently, the primary management objectives are keeping it cold for the salmon eggs and delivering enough water downstream. As a result, we've been refrigerating the river in regions where historically the green sturgeon have been spawning."

First author Liam Zarri conducted the study for his UCSC master's thesis, working with Palkovacs and coauthors Eric Danner and Miles Daniels at the National Marine Fisheries Service laboratory in Santa Cruz. Zarri found that discharge rates and water temperatures strongly influence the body condition of larval green sturgeon. In years with high discharges of cold water, egg survival for winter-run chinook salmon was high but the condition of juvenile green sturgeon was poor. In drought years, however, with low flows and warmer water, green sturgeon did well while salmon egg survival was low. The sturgeon larvae seem to be especially sensitive to high discharges, which affect their swimming ability and availability of prey.

The key to meeting the needs of both species, Zarri said, is that they spawn at slightly different times of the year. "We're able to suggest a management scenario which uses the differential timing of spawning in these two species. When they overlap, our model gives us the ideal temperature and flow for when both species are present," he said.

Zarri noted that the dam releases can draw either cold water from the bottom of the lake or warmer water from closer to the surface. Under the optimal management scenario proposed in the paper, low flows of warmer water can be released early in the season (April and May) when only green sturgeon are spawning and demand for water for agriculture has not yet ramped up. Late in the season (July to November), high flows of cold water can be released to benefit salmon and meet agricultural water needs.

The overlap period in June and early July, when both salmon and sturgeon are present in the part of the river most affected by the dam releases, is more complicated. That's where the statistical modeling approach, which takes into account the needs of both species, provides the ideal conditions of temperature and water flow that dam managers can aim for to ensure that the river is not too warm for salmon or too cold and fast for sturgeon.

"Under the current management, there is quite a long period of cold water releases starting very early in the season before the chinook salmon have really started showing up in earnest. We're saying that you can wait until the green sturgeon have matured and moved out of the system," Palkovacs said. "That has a side benefit in drought years, when limiting those early releases saves water for later in the year when it's more valuable, both for salmon and for downstream water demand."

Palkovacs noted that other native species in the river, including spring and fall runs of salmon, are probably also being affected by the cold water releases. At this point, however, the researchers did not have enough information about other species to include them in their analysis.

Crude oil and gas naturally escape from the seabed in many places known as "seeps". There, these hydrocarbons move up from source rocks through fractures and sediments towards the surface, where they leak out of the ground and sustain a diversity of densely populated habitats in the dark ocean. A large part of the hydrocarbons, primarily alkanes, is already degraded before it reaches the sediment surface. Even deep down in the sediment, where no oxygen exists, it provides an important energy source for subsurface microorganisms, amongst them some of the so-called archaea.

These archaea were good for many surprises in recent years. Now a study led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, and the MARUM, Centre for Marine Environmental Sciences, provides environmental information, genomes and first images of a microbe that has the potential to transform long-chain hydrocarbons to methane. Their results are published in the journal mBio.

Splitting oil into methane and carbon dioxide

This microbe, an archaeon named Methanoliparia, transforms the hydrocarbons by a process called alkane disproportionation: It splits the oil into methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2). Previously, this transformation was thought to require a complex partnership between two kinds of organisms, archaea and bacteria. Here the team from Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology and MARUM presents evidence for a different solution. "This is the first time we get to see a microbe that has the potential to degrade oil to methane all by itself", first-author Rafael Laso-Pérez explains.

During a cruise in the Gulf of Mexico, the scientists collected sediment samples from the Chapopote Knoll, an oil and gas seep, 3000 m deep in the ocean. Back in the lab in Bremen, they carried out genomic analyses that revealed that Methanoliparia is equipped with novel enzymes to use the quite unreactive oil without having oxygen at hand. "The new organism, Methanoliparia, is kind of a composite being", says Gunter Wegener, the initiator and senior author of this study. "Some of its relatives are multi-carbon hydrocarbon-degrading archaea, others are the long-known own methanogens that form methane as metabolic product." With the combined enzymatic tools of both relatives, Methanoliparia activates and degrades the oil but forms methane as final product. Moreover, the visualization of the organisms supports the proposed mechanism: "Microscopy shows that Methanoliparia cells attach to oil droplets. We did not find any hints that it requires bacteria or other archaea as partners", Wegener continues.

Very frequent and globally distributed

Methanogenic microorganisms have been important for the earth's climate through time as their metabolic product, methane, is an important greenhouse gas that is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Thus, Laso-Pérez and his colleagues where also interested to find out about how widespread this novel organism is. "We scanned DNA-libraries and found that Methanoliparia is frequently detected in oil reservoirs - and only in oil reservoirs - all over the oceans. Thus, this organism could be a key agent in the transformation of long-chain hydrocarbons to methane", says Laso-Pérez.

Thus, the scientists next want to dig deeper into the secret life of this microbe. "Now we have the genomic evidence and pictures about the wide distribution and surprising potential of Methanoliparia. But we can't yet grow them in the lab. That will be the next step to take. It will enable us to investigate many more exciting details", Wegener explains. "For example, whether it is possible to reverse the process, which would ultimately allow us to transform a greenhouse gas into fuel. "

ITHACA, N.Y. - Cornell University food scientists have created a new low-calorie 'butter' spread that consists mostly of water. A tablespoon of this low-calorie spread has 2.8 grams of fat and 25.2 calories. Butter, on the other hand, which is 84% fat and about 16% water, has about 11 grams of fat and nearly 100 calories.

They figured out a new process to emulsify a large amount of water with miniscule drops of vegetable oil and milk fat to mimic butter, at approximately one-fourth the calories of real butter and without artificial stabilizers.

"Imagine 80% water in 20% oil and we create something with the consistency of butter, with the mouth feel of butter and creaminess of butter," said food science professor and senior author Alireza Abbaspourrad.

Emulsifying water and oil is nothing new, said Abbaspourrad, but by using high-internal phase emulsions (HIPE), "we keep adding water to that oil until the final composition is 80% water and 20% oil."

The demand for low-fat, high-protein products has rapidly increased due to consumers' growing health awareness, said lead author Michelle C. Lee, a doctoral candidate in Abbaspourrad's research group.

"Since the HIPE technology features high water-to-oil ratios - while simultaneously delivering unique texture and functionality - it can play a role in providing healthier solutions for consumers," Lee said.

Abbaspourrad said food chemists can adjust for taste, preferences and health.

"We can add milk protein or plant-based protein, and since the water acts like a carrier, we can adjust for nutrition and load it with vitamins or add flavors," he said. "Essentially, we can create something that makes it feel like butter - and instead of seeing a lot of saturated fat, this has minute amounts. It's a completely different formulation."