Culture

CATONSVILLE, MD, July 29, 2019 - We've all been there... you're out to eat and in need of a refill or the check and the wait staff is nowhere to be found. It slows down business, reduces customer satisfaction and hurts the bottom line. New research in the upcoming INFORMS journal Management Science shows to counter this, restaurants should introduce tabletop technology as a demonstrated way to improve service and satisfaction.

Tabletop technology allows customers to view menu items, re-order beverages, pay for the meal, play games and browse news content. The technology is meant to assist waiters, not replace them.

The research conducted by Tom Fangyun Tan of the Cox Business School at Southern Methodist University and Serguei Netessine of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania reveals tabletop technology is likely to improve sales by 1% per check and reduce meal duration by 10%. The combination of these two effects increase the sales per minute or sales productivity by 11%.

"We estimate the 1% sales lift per check translates into $2 million in extra sales or $1 million in profit per month in the short-run," said Tan, an associate professor of information technology and operations management. "And that's a conservative estimate."

The data was collected from a restaurant chain here in the U.S. that owns 66 establishments. It looked at transaction data from 2012 to 2014 or 2.6 million transactions.

"A good, attentive waiter already does what the tabletop device does... a less attentive or forgetful waiter does not, but relies more on the device, which makes up for the lacking ability resulting in faster service," said Tan.

The data suggest that restaurants reevaluate their operations to fully reap the benefits of tabletop technology. They can gain new competitive and financial advantages in an industry that faces hyper-competition and high levels of closures in their first year of business.

Tiny gas-filled bubbles in the porous rock found around hot springs are thought to have played an important role in the origin of life. Temperature differences at the interface between liquid phases could therefore have initiated prebiotic chemical evolution.

A plethora of physicochemical processes must have created the conditions that enabled living systems to emerge on the early Earth. In other words, the era of biological evolution must have been preceded by a - presumably protracted - phase of 'prebiotic' chemical evolution, during which the first informational molecules capable of replicating themselves were assembled and selected. This scenario immediately raises another question: Under what environmental conditions could prebiotic evolution have taken place? One possible setting has long been discussed and explored - tiny pores in volcanic rocks. An international team of researchers led by Dieter Braun (Professor of Systems Biophysics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich) has now taken a closer look at the water-air interfaces in these pores. They form spontaneously at gas-filled bubbles and show an interesting combination of effects.

They found that they could have played an important part in facilitating the physicochemical interactions that contributed to the origin of life. Specifically, Braun and his colleagues asked whether such interfaces could have stimulated the kinds of chemical reactions that triggered the initial stages of prebiotic chemical evolution. Their findings appear in the leading journal Nature Chemistry.

The study strongly supports the notion that tiny gas-filled bubbles that were trapped in, and reacted with, the surfaces of pores in volcanic rocks could indeed have accelerated the formation of the chemical networks that ultimately gave rise to the first cells. Thus, the authors were able to experimentally verify and characterize the facilitating effects of air-water interfaces on the relevant chemical reactions. If there is a difference in temperature along the surface of such a bubble, water will tend to evaporate on the warmer side and condense on the cooler side, just as a raindrop that lands on a window runs down the flat surface of the glass and eventually evaporates. "In principle, this process can be repeated ad infinitum, since the water continuously cycles between the gaseous and the liquid phase," says Braun, who has characterized the mechanism and the underlying physical processes in detail, together with his doctoral student Matthias Morasch and other members of his research group. The upshot of this cyclical phenomenon is that molecules accumulate to very high concentrations on the warmer side of the bubble.

"We began by making a series of measurements of reaction rates under various conditions, in order to characterize the nature of the underlying mechanism," says Morasch. The phenomenon turned out to be surprisingly effect and robust. Even small molecules could be concentrated to high levels. "We then tested a whole range of physical and chemical processes, which must have played a central role in the origin of life - and all of them were markedly accelerated or made possible at all under the conditions prevailing at the air-water interface." The study benefitted from interactions between Braun's group of biophysicists and the specialists in disciplines such as chemistry and geology who work together with him in the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB/TRR) on the Origin of Life (which is funded by the DFG), and from cooperations with members of international teams.

For example, the LMU researchers show that physicochemical processes which promote the formation of polymers are either stimulated - or made possible in the first place - by the availability of an interface between the aqueous environment and the gas phase, which markedly enhances rates of chemical reactions and catalytic mechanisms. In fact, in such experiments, molecules could be accumulated to high concentrations within lipid membranes when the researchers added the appropriate chemical constituents. "The vesicles produced in this way are not perfect. But the finding nevertheless suggests how the first rudimentary protocells and their outer membranes might have been formed," says Morasch.

Whether or not this sort of process can take place in such vesicles "does not depend on the nature of the gas within the bubble. What is important is that, owing to differences in temperature, the water can evaporate in one location and condense in another," Braun explains. In earlier work, his group has already described a different mechanism by which temperature differences in water bodies can serve to concentrate molecules. "Our explanatory model enables both effects to be combined, which would enhance the concentrating effect and thus increase the efficiency of prebiotic processes," he adds.

LAWRENCE -- Politics have been known to put adults to sleep, but political engagement could be part of children's bedtime stories as well. Lessons about the importance of politics could be part of their early education. A new University of Kansas study analyzed political messages in the most popular picture books of the last several years to see what political messages are included and how they are presented.

Meagan Patterson, associate professor of educational psychology at KU, researches developmental psychology and has previously studied what children know about politics, presidential candidates, the political process and related topics. That research inspired the study of how kids learn about politics through picture books, one of the most popular forms of literature for children from birth to age 8. The study recently was published in the Journal of Genetic Psychology.

Disney movies have a wealth of kings, queens and princesses among their characters, but mayors and city council members rarely play the role of hero. Perhaps picture books provided a better window into politics.

"One of the things we saw in the earlier data set was a lot of variability and misconceptions in children's knowledge," Patterson said. "You'd have a kindergartner who knew a ton and an older student who had misconceptions about the difference between a president and a king. Picture books could be a good way to start conversations about those topics that can be difficult to discuss or for kids to get information on topics their parents aren't discussing."

Patterson and co-researchers analyzed the books on The New York Times' best-seller list for picture books from 2012 to 2017. They searched the 251 books for depictions of political issues, processes, leaders, symbols associated with politics or political leadership, and government employees. About half of the books had at least one instance of such content.

Researchers found a number of relevant themes:

Those that included political content contained very little information about political processes such as voting or protesting. Voting was almost always depicted in a formal setting like adults voting for president. More informal examples, such as a teacher having students vote what to name a classroom pet -- an instance that shows voting is something everyone can take part in -- were rare.

Protesting was usually depicted as past events such as the civil rights movement or the story of Rosa Parks. Those books did not, however, connect how those events are related to today, suggesting that protests were something that only happened in the past. That could provide an opportunity for parents and teachers to talk about the importance of such engagement now, Patterson said.

The analysis also showed several insights into how political leaders are portrayed. Monarchical leaders were depicted more often than democratic leaders. Among the former, they were mostly fictional characters and were most often presented as women or children. Democratic leaders tended to be historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln or George Washington, though there were a few contemporary figures such as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

"Especially for girls, those monarchical figures may give them more characters to identify with. The books with democratic leaders felt more educational, where the others seemed more for entertainment," Patterson said. "It makes me wonder if we are presenting democracy just as a thing you have to learn about, versus something exciting and important."

Democratic leaders were mostly presented at the national level, such as presidents. Mayors, city council members and government employees were rarely depicted. There were some instances of teachers, which could be expected given children's familiarity with educators, but few instances of government employees such as mail carriers, police officers or garbage collectors.

"How much do kids, or even their parents, know about who is or isn't a government employee?" Patterson said. "We included that element in the analysis because it could be a way into talking about political systems and processes and understanding who makes decisions and does the work that affects our everyday lives."

The findings suggest that picture books miss an opportunity for political socialization for young children. Patterson argues it is important to start educating children about the importance of politics and political processes, as research has shown lessons learned at a young age carry lasting effects into knowledge and attitudes adults hold on a variety of issues. Additionally, politics are an important part of life that affect individuals and those around them daily, children included. More educated, informed citizens are also more likely to grow up to be engaged adults who take part in political processes.

Like religion, politics have a long, complicated and nuanced history. When parents want a child to have a religious education, they start at a young age. Picture books could be a way to start important conversations with children about topics that can be difficult to discuss otherwise. Adults often cite literature or reading a certain book at a key time in their life as the impetus for career choices, passions, hobbies or interests.

"I think you could do the same thing for politics, in starting with literature that discusses them at a young age," Patterson said. "Literature can have a strong impact and help people think 'this is an important issue' or inform the type of person they want to be as an adult."

Building on research results published today in JAMA Neurology showing patients with larger ischemic strokes could benefit from endovascular thrombectomy, an international, multicenter Phase III clinical trial will be starting at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).

The trial, called SELECT2 (Optimizing Patient Selection for Endovascular Treatment in Acute Ischemic Stroke), is a randomized, controlled, open-label, assessor-blinded trial assessing efficacy and safety of thrombectomy procedure in patients with larger ischemic stroke.

While multiple previous clinical trials showed that endovascular thrombectomy was safe and beneficial for patients with smaller areas of damage from an ischemic stroke, potential safety and benefits for larger strokes are still unknown.

Ischemia refers to blood supply restriction to tissue. In an ischemic stroke, a clot blocks blood flow in a cerebral artery, preventing oxygen from reaching the surrounding brain tissue and resulting in cell death. That area of cell death is called an ischemic core.

In endovascular thrombectomy, a small catheter is guided through an artery, usually a femoral artery, through the body to the site of the blockage in the brain. A blood clot removal device is deployed, which captures the clot. The catheter is then retracted.

The earlier Phase II clinical trial (SELECT), which enrolled patients in nine U.S. comprehensive stroke centers, included 105 patients with large ischemic cores. It showed potential benefits: 31% of patients who were treated with endovascular thrombectomy achieved functional independence, compared to 14% of patients who received medical management only.

"It is unclear now if thrombectomy is safe and efficacious in patients with a large ischemic core stroke. Treating physicians face a dilemma on whether to intervene in these patients," said Amrou Sarraj, MD, first and corresponding author and associate professor of neurology at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth. "Our results represent very good preliminary data that thrombectomy may be safe and efficacious in this population. It's time to test those results in a randomized trial."

The results of SELECT showed reasonable safety outcomes with thrombectomy in patients with larger strokes. The risk of secondary bleeding with thrombectomy did not increase significantly compared to medical management. Mortality rate decreased with thrombectomy (29%) as compared to medical management (42%).

The Phase III trial, which begins in August, will enroll 560 patients at 30 comprehensive stroke centers in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

"If proven to be safe and effective, SELECT2 will extend thrombectomy indications to improve clinical outcomes in a large group of patients that does not have many treatment options at this point," said Sarraj, who is a member of UTHealth Institute for Stroke and Cerebrovascular Disease.

Many of the consequences of climate change are well reported in the press: rising seas, more severe storms, droughts and floods, and increasing numbers of heat-related illness and deaths. Now Ian Sue Wing, a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of earth and environment, Bas van Ruijven, a former visiting scholar at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, and Enrica De Cian, a professor at Ca' Foscari University of Venice in Italy, project another troubling outcome: a significant increase in global energy needs, largely anticipated to arise from cooling and air-conditioning usage.

In a new paper published in Nature Communications, Sue Wing, De Cian, and van Ruijven (now a scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria), warn that by 2050, even a modest warming of our climate could increase the world's energy needs by as much as 25 percent. And if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, we could demand up to 58 percent more energy than would be needed in a stable climate.

Anthony Janetos, chair of BU's Climate Action Plan Task Force and a CAS professor of earth and environment, says the findings underscore the need for rapidly deploying zero-carbon options for generating energy, so that climate change itself--and all the air-conditioning that will be used to cool a warmer world--doesn't end up accelerating the demand for more fossil fuel-generated electricity.

"We've known for a long time that energy demand would grow as a function of population growth and economic development," says Janetos, who is also director of the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. "But for the first time, this paper has given us estimates of the growth in energy demand as a function of climate change itself--a potentially disruptive positive feedback."

Sue Wing says earlier research that focused on areas like the United States suggested that a warming climate might actually reduce energy consumption. But when the research team coupled statistical models of energy demand with global temperature projections under warming scenarios (simulated by 21 independent climate models and 5 different scenarios for economic and population growth), the results showed substantial increases in energy needs.

But understanding that calculation is complicated, Sue Wing says, because the influence of climate change on an area's energy demand depends on the interaction of two uncertain drivers: how the area's population and income are projected to grow, and how its prevailing local temperature patterns are projected to change.

"In tropical areas, as the climate warms, it is simply going to get hotter," says Sue Wing. "In order for people in tropical areas to keep cool, they are going to have to use more electricity. But as you move toward the poles, things become more complicated."

That's because in temperate zones, a warming climate will increase the energy used for cooling during summer but reduce the energy used for heating during winter.

"In the tropics, we see a positive effect--energy increase--but as you move away from the tropics, we see a positive and a negative effect," he says. "When you add up the two positives and the negative, you could in principle get a negative...but what we actually see is a substantial positive"--a significant net increase in energy usage.

The researchers' calculations project that by 2050, the global demand for energy resulting from socioeconomic development will be two to three times what it is today, growing by a factor of 1.4 to 2.7 in industrialized nations, and by a factor of 2 to 4 in poorer but rapidly developing countries in the tropics. Moderate warming would increase the global baseline amount of energy demands by 11 to 17 percent, while vigorous warming would increase it by 25 to 58 percent.

Regionally, demands for energy could increase by more than 50 percent in the tropics and southern parts of the United States, while Southern Europe and China could see increases greater than 25 percent. Total energy consumption may actually decline in northern Europe, Russia, Canada, and the US Pacific Northwest, but by a much smaller amount than the increases projected for other locations.

Simply put, demand for electricity is very likely to rise across much of the world.

These findings highlight two important unanswered questions: how much of the additional demand will be satisfied by increases in energy supplies versus behavioral changes like conservation, and whether producing the needed additional energy might add to emissions of greenhouse gases, setting in motion a vicious circle that could accelerate global warming.

"At this point, we don't know," says Sue Wing, who explains that the outcome depends on the choices made today by businesses and private citizens. "To cool my house, I could buy a bigger air-conditioner and it would use more electricity," he says. "Or if higher demand makes electricity more expensive, I could choose to open my window or run a fan."

How we choose to generate the additional electricity for cooling will also have big implications for the climate. The International Energy Agency estimated that in 2018, two-thirds of global energy needs were met by oil and gas, while less than 10 percent was provided by solar and wind. Hydro and nuclear energy produced about 25 percent of global electricity.

"That is the focus of our research right now," says Sue Wing. "What happens will not just influence the climate, it will influence energy markets, and it will influence the ways we think about energy policy. It can change the economic and political relationships between countries."

By 2050, whether renewable sources can be scaled up quickly enough to make a difference--and what that might cost--is still an open question.

"We could use coal, or we could use renewable sources, and those two choices mean very different things for our future. With coal, [an increase in demand] will mean more greenhouse gas emissions. That's what keeps me up at night."

Physicists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, have devised a method to turn a non-magnetic metal into a magnet using laser light.

Magnets and their magnetic field are typically produced by circulating currents, like those found in everyday electromagnetic coils. The 'handedness' of these coils - whether they are wound in clockwise or anticlockwise fashion - determines the direction of the magnetic field produced.

The scientists theorise that when non-magnetic metallic disks are illuminated by linearly polarised light - light that does not possess any handedness of its own - circulating electric currents and hence magnetism can spontaneously emerge in the disk.

This method could in principle turn non-ferrous metals into magnets "on-demand" using laser light.

The new theory by Assistant Professor Justin Song from NTU's School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and Associate Professor Mark Rudner from Niels Bohr Institute, was published in the scientific journal Nature Physics earlier this month.

In formulating their proposal, the scientists developed a new way of thinking about the interaction between light and matter. They used a combination of pencil-and-paper calculations and numerical simulations to devise it.

Prof Song said that their scheme is an example of how novel strong light-matter interactions could be used to create material properties "on-demand". If realised experimentally, this would open up a wide variety of potential applications across a range of high quality plasmonic materials such as graphene.

Harnessing plasmonic fields

The properties of many materials are conventionally thought to be fixed, determined by the arrangement of its atoms at the nanoscale. For example, the configuration of atoms in a material dictates whether it conducts electricity easily or has insulating/non-conductive behaviour.

Song and Rudner wanted to explore how plasmons - local oscillations of charge in metals - and the intense oscillating electric fields they create, can be used to alter material properties.

Like how light consists of photons, the plasma oscillation consists of plasmons, a type of quasiparticle. Plasmons tend to oscillate and move in the same direction as the field that is driving it (for example, the light field's polarisation direction).

However, the scientists found that when the light irradiation is strong enough, the plasmons in a non-magnetic metallic disk can spontaneously rotate in either a left-handed or right-handed fashion, even when driven by linearly polarised light.

"This was a signature that the material's intrinsic properties had been altered," said Asst Prof Song. "We found that when a plasmon's strong internal fields modify a material's electronic band structure it would also transform the plasmon as well, setting up a feedback loop enabling the plasmon to spontaneously exhibit a chirality."

This chiral motion of the plasmon produced a magnetisation which then made the non-magnetic metallic disk of their scheme, magnetic.

The scientists say that the key observation in their theoretical analysis is that intense plasmonic oscillating electric fields can modify the dynamics of the electrons in the metal.

Assoc Prof Rudner said: "From the point of view of an electron within a material, an electric field is an electric field: it doesn't matter whether this oscillating field was produced from plasmons within the material itself or by a laser shining on the material."

Song and Rudner used this insight to theoretically demonstrate the conditions when feedback from the internal fields of the plasmons could trigger an instability towards spontaneous magnetisation in the system. The team expects that this theoretical approach could be realised in a range of high quality plasmonic materials such as graphene.

Emergent behaviour

The notion of using light to alter a material's properties has gained a lot of scientific attention recently. However, many of the published examples imbue a material with properties present in the light irradiation (for example, by irradiating a material with circularly polarised light, a material may acquire a chirality or handedness) or quantitatively enhance a property that was already present in the material.

Song and Rudner's research, in contrast to these approaches, has gone much further, they say.

"We found that the plasmons can acquire a kind of 'separate life' or 'emergence' with new properties that were not present in either the metal that hosts the plasmons or the light field that was driving it," Asst Prof Song added. The behaviour of the plasmon was emergent in the sense that it broke the intrinsic symmetries of both the light field and the metal.

Emergent behaviour, where the whole is more than the sum of its parts, arises when many particles interact with each other to act in a collective way. It is responsible for a range of useful phases of matter such as ferromagnets and superconductors that are typically controlled by temperature. The team's research extends this idea to plasmons and puts forward how it can be controlled by light irradiation.

"On a deeper level, there are many fundamental questions to explore about the nature of the non-equilibrium spontaneous symmetry breaking ("emergence") that we predicted," said Assoc Prof Rudner.

Asst Prof Song agreed, saying "Perhaps the most meaningful take-home message of our work is that it shows that collective modes can exhibit distinct new phases. If plasmonic magnetism is possible, what other phases of collective modes are waiting to be uncovered?"

The brain is composed of many different types of neurons, and scientists are just beginning to uncover the functional significance of this vast cellular diversity. At Baylor College of Medicine, Drs. Benjamin Arenkiel, Gary Liu and their colleagues at Baylor, the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children's Hospital and Rice University studied the functional relationships between inhibitory interneurons, a type of nerve cell, and two excitatory cell types, called tufted cells and mitral cells, in the murine olfactory bulb.

Using cell-type specific genetic tools, optogenetic mapping, electrophysiological data, live 2-photon imaging and computational modeling, the researchers discovered that when they removed the ability of inhibitory interneurons to inhibit the activity of tufted cells and mitral cells, these excitatory neurons dramatically changed the way they responded to odors. Unexpectedly, the responses changed more drastically in tufted cells than in mitral cells. The study appears today in the journal Nature Communications.

These findings provide new insights into the complex functional consequences of the vast diversity of cell types in the brain and underscore the need to better understand these relationships in order to grasp how the brain processes sensory information.

Neural activity that reflects the intention to drink alcohol is observed in the prefrontal cortex and is blunted in rats with a family history of excessive drinking, according to research from eNeuro. This insight could lead to novel treatments for alcohol use disorders.

The prefrontal cortex is a brain region involved in decision-making that becomes active before a behavior is initiated, indicating intention. David Linsenbardt, Nicholas Timme, and Christopher Lapish at Indiana University ? Purdue University Indianapolis investigated neural activity in the prefrontal cortex to determine if it encodes the intention to consume alcohol.

Linsenbardt's team compared activity before and during alcohol consumption in two types of rats. One modeled a family history of alcohol abuse, while the other lacked this family history. The prefrontal cortex was active during consumption in both types of rats, but only active pre-consumption in the rats without a family history of drinking.

These findings suggest that the prefrontal cortex directly encodes the intention to consume alcohol but less so in those with greater risk of abusing alcohol. Restoring prefrontal cortex activity in individuals with a predisposition to over-drink could be a new approach for treating alcohol use disorders.

A University of Oklahoma-led study generated improved annual maps of tropical forest cover in the Brazilian Amazon in 2000-2017 and provided better characterization on the spatio-temporal dynamics of forest area, loss and gain in this region. The Amazon basin has the largest tropical forests in the world. Rapid changes in land use, climate and other human activities have resulted in substantial deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon over the past several decades.

"Monitoring, verification and reporting of tropical forest dynamics in the Brazilian Amazon have been a critical but challenging task for the research community and society-at-large. Available maps of tropical forest cover in the region have large uncertainty. In 2015, we assembled an international team from the United States, Brazil and China to tackle the challenging problem," said Xiangming Xiao, George Lynn Cross Research Professor, Department of Microbiology and Plant Biology, OU College of Arts and Sciences.

"The international team used both optical and microwave images acquired by satellite-based sensors and advanced algorithms to improve annual maps of tropical forests in the Brazilian Amazon during 2000-2017," said Yuanwei Qin, lead author for the study and research scientist, Center for Spatial Analysis, OU College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences.

The estimates of tropical forest area in the Brazilian Amazon from this study were ~15% higher than estimates from the PRODES forest dataset that has been widely used in research communities. This study also reveals a renewed increase of tropical forest area loss after 2013, driven in part by land use change and strong El Nino in 2015/2016. The findings from the OU-led study could have significant implications for land-use policy, forest management and conservation, terrestrial carbon-cycle, hydrology and climate.

Teenagers report higher levels of stress than adults, and cite school as the highest contributing factor, according to the American Psychological Association's annual report. A summary from 2013 concluded that while stress among Americans was not new, "what's troubling is the stress outlook for teens in the United States."

In response, recently some schools have turned to mindfulness-based programs as a way to alleviate stress among their students. These programs could benefit from more research into what activities students find most useful.

In a pilot study led by the University of Washington, researchers explored art-based mindfulness activities that schools could use to reduce headaches, a common side effect of stress in adolescent girls. The test group of eight teenage girls gave feedback on which activities they preferred.

After three weeks of twice-weekly mindfulness and art therapy sessions, the girls reported experiencing significantly fewer headaches. At the beginning of the study, the girls reported 7.38 headaches, on average, within the previous two-week period. At the end of the study, that number had dropped to 4.63 -- almost a 40% decrease. This drop remained even seven weeks after the study had ended. The researchers published their findings May 22 in the journal Art Therapy.

"This study highlights one of my main research missions: We should be making interventions in cooperation with teenagers if we want these strategies to work," said corresponding author Elin Björling, a senior research scientist in the UW's human centered design and engineering department. "There's something powerful about saying 'I'm inviting you to start thinking about how you could get better. Come have a conversation with me about how we could do this.' I think that's why we saw such a strong response even in this tiny study."

The team recruited eight girls between the ages of 14 to 17 from a high school in Seattle. All of the participants reported experiencing three or more headaches not related to an injury within a two-week period, and five of the eight mentioned tension or stress as the main reason for headaches.

During the program, the students met twice a week for a 50-minute session with the research team. Each session began with an activity in which students would map where they were feeling stressed on a drawing of a body. Then the teens would participate in mindfulness and art activities before closing the session with another body map.

"After the study, we looked at all the before and after body maps side by side. It was so clear that something significant was going on," Björling said. "In the beginning everything was in pieces, and in the end everything was flowing through the whole body."

The teens tried different mindfulness techniques in each session so they could find which ones worked the best for them.

What teens liked: square breathing, a technique that encourages people to take slow breaths by concentrating and counting.

"I thought: 'No teen ever wants to do counted breathing, and they're never going to do it,'" Björling said. "But a few of them said 'That's my favorite. I do it all the time now.'"

What teens didn't like: mindful eating, a technique that asks people to focus on what and how they're eating.

"They hated it," Björling said. "This was a technique straight out of a lot of mindfulness programs for teens, but it didn't connect with them. It just annoyed them. It goes to show I need them to be experts in their own lives."

The researchers also asked the students to participate in different mindful art activities. During each session, the students tried a new art medium -- they particularly liked using oil pastels -- and different types of art therapy projects, including one where they worked together to create mandalas before and after a meditation exercise.

While the teens experienced fewer headaches after the study ended, their overall stress levels didn't change much. But the students reported feeling better in the moment, saying that they felt like they could handle whatever happened for the rest of the day.

The team was surprised to see any differences, given the small size of the group.

"It's not just about this study," Björling said. "This problem of teen mental health and headaches is so big that I'm worried about what happens if we don't take it on. Somistine Stevens, a nursing professor at UW Tacoma, and Narayan Singh, a psychology doctoral student at Seattle Pacific University, are also co-authors on this paper.e teens will want nothing to do with art mindfulness. So we need to come at this in lots of different ways. We're going to need an army of people and a cornucopia of options."

Dicyemids, microscopic parasites comprised of 30 cells, are in-between creatures. With their basic three-part body plan, they are more complex than single-celled protozoans but considerably less complex than multicellular metazoans - the animals of the kingdom Animalia. Yet the simple makeup of these so-called mesozoans does not translate to a simple life.

For example, dicyemids eliminate genes to conserve energy and change how they sexually reproduce.

Growing up in the renal sac of an octopus doesn't sound all that luxurious, but for a dicyemid, it's an all-inclusive home. In the sac they can feed on urine and reproduce asexually and sexually. When population becomes too dense in the sac, dicyemids become sexual. The larvae produced sexually vary from the larvae produced by asexual reproduction - sexual larvae leave the host in search of a new octopus to call home, and once a new host is found, the cycle continues. However, scientists are still not sure why this simple organism has such a complex lifestyle.

Researchers at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) and Osaka University have decoded the genome sequence of dicyemids, providing key insight into the parasites' not-so-simple lifestyle. The study, published in Genome Biology and Evolution, will help shed light on some of these mysteries.

Prof. Nori Satoh of the OIST Marine Genomics Unit and former PhD student Dr. Tsai-Ming Lu collaborated with renowned dicyemid researcher, Dr. Hidetaka Furuya of Osaka University to sequence the parasite.

The research began in Osaka, where the scientists went to the local fish market and purchased live octopuses. The sourced cephalopods were then brought to the lab, where the scientists collected their urine using a pipette.

They then extracted dicyemids from the urine, carefully removing octopus cells to make sure the samples were pure.

"We rinsed the cells with saltwater and separated them out," Lu said. "This was repeated several times to remove as many cells of the octopus as we could. Finally, we picked up dicyemid individuals one by one under the microscope to obtain the samples for sequencing."

Even with this cleaning step, however, obtaining a pure sample of dicyemids was a challenge.

"It is really difficult to exclude all octopus cells from dicyemid samples; however, to obtain a pure sample from the octopus is much easier, so we extracted the genomic DNA," Lu said.

This obstacle added two years of work to the study, but the researchers ultimately got a clear result: They sequenced the genomes of both organisms and - because the octopus genome has already been sequenced, they were able to extract it out to obtain the sequence of the parasite.

The team found that the dicyemid genome is highly reduced compared to other parasites. For example, these parasites have just four so-called Hox genes, which are responsible for building an organism's body-plan. These genes are groups of related genes. The groups are usually organized, but that isn't the case for dicyemids. Scientists found disorganized clusters of genes possibly due to how dicyemids can eliminate genes for energy conservation. They remove genes in their metabolic, immune, and nervous systems.

"Hox genes are important elements in building complicated animal bodies," Furuya said. "If genomes of many parasites are sequenced, that accumulated genome information can possibly reveal parasites specific gene organization."

Every animal on Earth has parasites, and while some are simple, others are not. The complete genome sequence of dicyemids not only answers some big questions in dicyemid biology but also offers insights into the evolution of parasites.

A small protein previously associated with cell dysfunction and death in fact serves a critical function in repairing breaks in DNA, according to new research led by scientists at Oregon Health & Science University.

The discovery, published today in the journal Scientific Reports, marks the first demonstration of the role that alpha-synuclein plays in preventing the death of neurons in brain diseases such as Parkinson's, which affects 1.5 million people in the United States alone.

The findings suggest that it may be possible to design new therapies to replace alpha-synuclein's function or boost it in people with Parkinson's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders.

Aggregates of alpha-synuclein, known as Lewy bodies, have long been connected to Parkinson's and other forms of dementia.

The study published today casts a new light on that process.

The findings suggest that Lewy bodies are problematic because they pull alpha-synuclein protein out of the nucleus of brain cells. The study, which examined the cells of living mice and postmortem brain tissue in humans, reveals that these proteins perform a crucial function by repairing breaks that occur along the vast strands of DNA present in the nucleus of every cell of the body.

Alpha-synuclein's role in DNA repair may be crucial in preventing cell death. This function may be lost in brain diseases such as Parkinson's, leading to the widespread death of neurons.

"It may be the loss of that function that's killing that cell," said senior author Vivek Unni, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor of neurology in the OHSU School of Medicine.

Researchers found that the alpha-synuclein protein rapidly recruited to the site of DNA damage in the neurons of mice. In addition, they found increased double-strand breaks in the DNA of human tissue and mice in which the protein was clumped together in the form of Lewy bodies in the cytoplasm surrounding the cell's nucleus. Taken together, the results suggest that alpha-synuclein plays a crucial role in binding broken strands of DNA within the cell's nucleus.

Put another way: If alpha-synuclein are workers in a factory, it's akin to all of them gathering for an extended coffee break and leaving the machinery unattended.

Unni, who also sees patients in the OHSU Parkinson Center and Movement Disorders Program, said he hopes that these findings lead to the development of methods to deliver alpha-synuclein proteins into the nucleus of cells or designing methods to replace its function.

"This is the first time that anyone has discovered one of its functions is DNA repair," Unni said. "That's critical for cell survival, and it appears to be a function that's lost in Parkinson's disease."

Study is first analysis to quantify the impact of childhood cancer in terms of years of healthy life lost to ill-health and premature death

Collectively, childhood cancers are the 6th biggest contributor to total cancer burden worldwide after adult cancers of the lung, liver, stomach, colon, and breast; and the 9th leading cause of childhood disease burden globally

India, China, Nigeria, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the USA face the largest burden of childhood cancer among countries with the highest population of children

Lack of diagnosis and access to healthcare and a younger population are responsible for disproportionately large childhood cancer burden in many of the poorest countries

While the number of new cancer cases in children and adolescents (aged 0-19 years) is relatively low at around 416,500 globally in 2017, treatment-related ill-health and disability and fatal cancer are estimated to cause around 11.5 million years of healthy life lost globally every year, according to the first Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) to assess childhood and adolescent cancer burden in 195 countries in 2017, published in The Lancet Oncology journal.

Children in the poorest countries face a disproportionately high cancer burden--contributing over 82% of the global childhood cancer burden--equivalent to almost 9.5 million years of healthy life lost in 2017. Most (97%) of this global burden is related to premature death, with around 3% due to impaired quality of life.

For the first time, researchers provide a complete picture of the global and regional burden of childhood cancer beyond incidence, mortality, and survival. The study estimates the number of years of healthy life that children and adolescents with cancer have lost due to illness, disability, and premature death--a measurement known as disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). One DALY is equivalent to one year of healthy life lost. However, disability in childhood cancer survivors was limited to the first 10 years after cancer diagnosis, rather than across the whole life course, so the global burden of DALYs associated with childhood cancer is probably underestimated, researchers say.

"By assessing the global burden of childhood cancer through the lens of disability-adjusted life-years, we can more comprehensively understand the devastating impact of cancer on children globally," says Dr Lisa Force from St Jude Children's Research Hospital in the USA, who led the research in collaboration with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. "Our findings are an important first step in establishing that childhood cancer has a role in frameworks that address global oncology and global child health." [1]

Children with cancer who live in high-income countries tend to have good survival, with around 80% surviving 5 years after diagnosis. But these improvements have not translated to most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where survival is approximately 35-40%, but some estimates suggest it could be as 20%. Around 90% of children at risk of developing cancer live in LMICs.

"Improving childhood cancer survival will require considerable planning by policy makers to ensure well-functioning health systems capable of early diagnosis and treatment," says Dr Force. "Estimating the years of healthy life children have lost due to cancer allows policy makers to compare the lifelong implications of childhood cancer with other diseases, potentially helping them determine the most effective way to spend limited resources and identify high-impact cancer-control planning decisions". [1]

In the study, global and regional estimates were analysed using socio-demographic Index (SDI), a measure based on rates of education, fertility, and income. Countries with high SDI have high levels of income and education and low fertility, whereas countries with low SDI have low levels of income and education and high fertility.

The study reveals striking inequities in childhood cancer burden between high and low SDI countries (table). High and high-middle SDI countries accounted for about 35% (147,300) of new cases of childhood cancer in 2017, but only 18% of DALYs (around 2 million years of healthy life lost), whereas low-middle and low SDI countries with 38% of global incidence (159,600 new cases) accounted for 60% of DALYs (almost 7 million years of healthy life lost).

Moreover, the research finds that childhood cancers are a major cause of global disease burden compared with both adult cancers and other childhood diseases. In 2017, childhood cancers were the sixth leading cause of years of healthy life lost out of all cancers globally (11.5 million), only lower than the burden from adult cancers of the lung (41 million), liver (21 million), stomach (19 million), colon (19 million), and breast (18 million). In low and middle SDI countries, childhood cancers were the leading cause of DALYs, higher than the burden attributable to any single adult cancer type (figure 6A).

The study puts the annual toll of childhood cancer at over 11.5 million years of healthy life lost in 2017. This compares with around 37 million years of healthy life lost globally due to malaria, and 7.6 million from tuberculosis (figure 6B). In 2017, childhood cancer was among the top four biggest contributors to the burden of general diseases of childhood in middle and high-middle SDI countries, ranking higher than malaria and HIV/AIDS.

While four of the five countries with the highest childhood cancer burden were in Asia and Oceania (India, China, Pakistan, and Indonesia), the USA had the sixth largest burden in 2017, and sub-Saharan Africa had the biggest DALY burden for more childhood cancer types than any other region. (figure 4).

Cancers of the blood (leukaemias) were the main contributors to overall DALYs, accounting for 34% of the total childhood cancer burden worldwide, followed by brain and nervous system cancers (18%). In 2017, the proportion of both leukaemia and brain cancer burden differed by almost 3 times between regions. The proportional burden of leukaemias was highest in central and Andean Latin America (49% of all childhood cancers) and the greatest absolute burden was in south Asia (954,000 DALYs).

The authors highlight the fact that mechanisms for addressing cancer burden in adults, which focus on risk-reduction strategies and screening interventions, are not as relevant to childhood cancers given that childhood cancers generally progress rapidly, are not amenable to screening programmes which aim to identify pre-cancerous growths, and are fatal without swift diagnosis and treatment. This emphasizes the crucial role early diagnosis and treatment will play in order to reduce the global burden of childhood cancer.

Despite these important findings, the methodology used to estimate childhood cancer burden has several limitations that need to be addressed, say the authors. While the study uses the best available data, predictions are constrained by a lack of high-quality cancer data, particularly in developing countries--highlighting the need to expand the quality and quantity of population-based cancer registration systems and to include data from paediatric-specific cancer registries. They also note that the current anatomical site-based system of reporting adult cancer leaves over 26% of the childhood cancer burden (3 million DALYs) linked to cancers that are uncategorised, a challenging category for policy, financial, and clinical decision making.

In an accompanying editorial, the editors of The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health journal write: "The universal language of data offers a substantial opportunity to those fighting the global burden of childhood cancer. Analysis of the DALY burden by individual country and cancer subtype shows the significant need for investment in data capture. Quality data collection and standardised reporting are crucial early strides towards better care provision for children with cancer in LMICs. Capture of national childhood cancer data can guide investments in training of specialists to ensure earlier diagnoses, providing equitable access to medicines, reducing deaths, and improving survivorship care and quality of life."

Writing in a linked Comment, Charles Stiller from Public Health England, UK, discusses what can be done to mitigate or even reduce the global burden of childhood and adolescent cancer. He writes: "Early diagnosis can bring substantial reduction in mortality and long-term morbidity. Although gains from early diagnosis should be greatest in lower-resource countries, where too many cases are diagnosed at a late stage, they should be felt even in affluent countries, notably for people with low-grade brain tumours, survivors of which bear a considerable burden of disability. For the benefits of early diagnosis to be fully realised worldwide, it must be accompanied by improved diagnostic and treatment facilities with universal access. International collaboration will be an essential component of the necessary capacity building. It is to be hoped that the present study will help to stimulate the necessary improvements, and future iterations can monitor their success."

A vast report, looking at the products and activities associated with non-fatal traumatic brain injuries for youngsters aged up to 19, in 66 US hospitals' emergency departments, has revealed that floors, beds and American football are posing some of the greatest risks.

The study, published in Brain Injury, shows that 72% of cases across all age groups were attributable to consumer products that are regulated by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

"Structural designs, such as uneven flooring, often contribute to falls, which is the leading cause of traumatic brain injury in children," says lead author Dr Bina Ali from the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation in the US.

She adds: "In most cases, infants and children are safe in bed and when playing sports outside, but our study highlights some of the risks and the priorities in different age groups for preventing serious head injuries."

Authors reviewed injury surveillance data from over four years, from (inclusive of) 2010 to 2013. They focused on children and adolescents in five age groups between 0 to 19 years and identified the products associated with their injuries. The investigation provides a comprehensive understanding of the contribution of consumer product-related traumatic brain injuries in children and adolescents.

Children and adolescents accounted for approximately one million non-fatal traumatic brain injury cases treated in emergency departments per year.

In infants under a year, a quarter were caused by falling from beds, while floors were the second leading cause at 14%.

The authors highlight bunk beds as especially risky. In children aged one to four years, 10% were caused by beds, 10% by stairs and 10% by floors.

As children became more mobile, the leading causes of head injuries moved outside the home.

At aged five to nine years, floors were still the leading cause (6%), but bicycle accidents came second at 5%.

In the final two age groups, 10-14 years and 15-19 years, American football was the leading cause of traumatic brain injury - at 14% in the younger age group and 9% in the oldest. Basketball came second at 6% and 5% respectively.

Other activities that contributed to traumatic brain injuries in the final two age groups included bicycles (5% in 10 to 14-year-olds and 3% in 15 to 19-year-olds) and soccer (5% in 10 to 14-year-olds and 4% in 15 to 19-year-olds).

"Simple measures such as removing trip hazards, using stair gates and guard rails, avoiding hard surface playgrounds and wearing helmets could help reduce the risk of injury, as well as adult education to ensure proper use of consumer products and adherence to safety guidelines" says Ali.

The authors note several limitations to the study. For example, it only included patients treated in hospital emergency departments, so it could not assess cases treated at doctors' offices and school health clinics. Due to a lack of location information, the authors were unable to investigate where injuries were sustained. They were also unable to examine how injuries varied by socioeconomic status.

The chances of patients experiencing complications after having a cardiac device implanted vary according to where they have the procedure.

A study of 174 hospitals in Australia and New Zealand published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine shows that the quality of care people receive may account for the wide variation in the rate of complications after having a cardiovascular implantable electronic device (CIED) insertion.

"The study included 81,304 patients who received a new CIED with 65,711 permanent pacemakers and 15,593 implantable cardioverter-defibrillators," says the study's lead author, University of Adelaide's Dr Isuru Ranasinghe, Senior Cardiologist, Central Adelaide Local Health Network.

"Permanent pacemakers and implantable cardioverter-defibrillators are among the most common and costly devices implanted in hospitals."

"CIED complications are common with 8.2 per cent of patients implanted with new devices having a major device-related complication within 90 days of their operation. Complications experienced by patients vary between 2- and 3-fold among hospitals, which suggests that there is significant variation in CIED care quality."

Nearly 19,000 pacemakers and more than 4000 defibrillators were implanted in Australia alone last year. Pacemakers are often fitted to elderly people who suffer from bradycardia where their heart beats too slowly. They use electrical pulses to prompt the heart to beat at a normal rate. Cardioverter-defibrillators track a person's heart rate, and if an abnormal heart rhythm is detected, the device delivers an electric shock to restore the heart rhythm to normal.

"Serious complications can cause considerable patient harm and adds to avoidable health care costs. About 60 per cent of these complications occur after leaving the hospital so many doctors and hospitals may not be fully aware of the complications experienced by patients," says Dr Ranasinghe.

Associate Professor Anand Ganesan, a study co-investigator and a Cardiac Electrophysiologist at Flinders Medical Centre says: "What this study really shows is that we should be routinely reporting hospital complication rates to make these fully visible to clinicians, hospitals and the community at large. We should also invest in strategies proven to reduce these, such as optimising procedural technique, adopting better infection control measures, and managing blood thinning drugs peri-procedure."

Dr Ranasinghe says: "Encouraging hospitals to take part in quality improvement activities such as auditing complications and engaging in clinical quality registries also reduce complications over time."